Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Nora loved her mom.

Really, she did. She didn’t always like her, but she did love her.

Though to be fair, as the only daughter of a single mother—one who’d moved them around the country four times in twelve years—she, admittedly, didn’t have much to measure against.

She was born in LA, and when she was four her mom moved them to Seattle, where her boyfriend at the time—Nora couldn’t even remember his name—was starting a new tech job. Seattle lasted for about a year, and then it was Austin, Texas, where they didn’t know anyone, but where there was sure to be less rain than the Pacific Northwest. Austin lasted a little longer, from right before Nora’s fifth birthday to shortly after her ninth, and then her mom thought Las Vegas would be fun—Nora didn’t agree—but that only lasted ten months, so they were back in LA just in time for Nora’s twelfth birthday. 

And then her mom died. 

Apparently, aneurysms can happen to anyone, at any time. Nora learned this lesson when her mom failed to show up on time to their winter concert—not the most unusual thing—and then also failed to pick her up at the end—less common, but not unheard of—and Sadie’s dad offered to drive her home. When Sadie’s dad pulled up in front of their duplex and saw the lights on and her mom’s beat-up red convertible out front, he told them to wait in the car.

Nora could tell, then, that something was wrong. Sadie couldn’t. Sadie lived with two parents and two siblings in a really big apartment near the park, and a cute beagle who ate all their food and bayed too early in the morning. Zoodles’ crimes were probably the worst things that had ever happened to Sadie—like the time he got on the counter and finished off her birthday cake. He had to get his stomach pumped, and Sadie’s parents took them all out for ice cream after. 

Sadie never came home to an empty house. She never had to pack her own lunch or scrounge together her own dinner, and she never had to wake her mom up so she wouldn’t miss a shift, and she never had to learn how to do her own laundry or forge permission slip signatures or pocket things she needed from Target. The worst-case scenario never happened to Sadie.

It wasn’t Sadie’s fault. Nora knew that—Sadie was really nice about it, too. She never asked weird questions about Nora’s mom or made fun of her for wearing sneakers with holes in them. Sadie usually asked her parents for extra cash when they went to the movies or the park, and she’d use it to buy them both snacks. Sometimes she’d ask Nora to hang on to the change and forget to ask for it back.

Nora was pretty sure she did it on purpose, but they never talked about it.

The point was, Sadie had no reason to pick up on the fact that Nora’s heartbeat was racing or that her palms were sweating, and she just kept talking on and on about some new album that Nora really couldn’t give a shit about. 

This doesn’t matter, she wanted to say. It got stuck in her head, like a mantra, as the rest of the night unfolded. This doesn’t matter, she thought, as Sadie’s dad opened the driver’s side door and said, “hey, Nora, honey—is there anyone I can call for you? I think your mom’s not feeling well.”

This doesn’t matter, Nora thought, as she told him no, there was no one, and he relayed that information to whoever was on the other end of his phone call. This doesn’t matter, she repeated, as a social worker told her that her mom was dead and no, sorry, she couldn’t stay with Sadie’s family that night because CPS was involved now.

It carried her through the following weeks, as all of the adults around Nora dealt with what they told her was ‘a lot of grown-up stuff she didn’t have to worry about.’ She very much did have to worry about it, of course—adults always thought kids were idiots. And Nora was a lot of things, but she wasn’t an idiot.

So, when they dropped her off at the overcrowded foster-home—forty minutes away from her old neighborhood in LA traffic, which meant seeing Sadie was probably never going to happen—she realized that if she wanted out of this situation, she was going to have to do something about it herself.

See, Nora already had a plan.

On her eleventh birthday, Nora had finally worked up the courage to ask her mom about the thing she’d always wondered about: her father.

Her mom didn’t like to talk about him; Nora had heard him referred to as a mistake she’d made while dating her on-again, off-again boyfriend—the one from before they moved to Seattle. Nora didn’t do very well in school, but she liked to read, and all of the books about adventures and secrets and long-lost family members seemed to agree that age eleven was the proper time for those things to kick off. So, on her eleventh birthday, she waited until her mom was home, until she had one of the cupcakes Nora smuggled home from school, and two glasses of wine—the sweet spot, when she was most likely to talk—and asked.

“Your father?” her mom said, raising her eyebrows at Nora, in a way that made her want to shrink. “You mean the sperm donor?”

“I just mean—”

“I know what you mean.” Her feet had been kicked up on the coffee table when Nora approached, but now she pulled them down, sitting up straighter on the couch. “I just don’t think he really deserves the title father. I mean, where was he during potty training? During that flu you had where you threw up in every single room? It’s not like the guy pays child support.”

“Does he know about me?”

Her mom got up, then, taking her glass with her into the kitchen. Nora wasn’t sure if she should have started this during her first glass or waited until her third.

“What’s this about, Eleanor?” Nora opened her mouth, but before she could answer, her mom continued, looking down at the drawers as she rifled through them. “You want to find him? He’s a hard guy to track down. His handle was Firehose, for Christ’s sake, Nora, I hardly think this guy is father-of-the-year material.”

“Firehose?” Nora asked.

“You’ll understand when you’re older,” her mom said. “But he was—he was thinking about going to the fire academy, or something. He didn’t even have a job. He wasn’t even thinking about getting a job. He was thinking about applying to train for a job. He went by Buck, Nora. I’m not sure what you want from me.”

“I just . . . wanted to know. About him.”

“He was hot,” her mom said. She finally located what she was looking for—a corkscrew. “He was tall. Had a birthmark,” she said, gesturing towards her eyebrow. “He was good in bed and he was gone before breakfast. There: your father.”

It wasn’t what she’d been hoping to find out, but it was more than she had before. And from her eleventh birthday on, Nora knew what she was going to be when she grew up.

A firefighter.

She read every book about them she could find in her school library, and then she read what she could find online. She had to wait until she was eighteen, but if she trained and studied enough beforehand, she could pass the exam and the CAP fitness assessment on her first go, and she could become a member of the LAFD by the time she was nineteen. Firefighters get paid to go to the academy, and the recruitment website said they also got full medical and dental benefits, which, she’d learned from her mom, was pretty important when you were a grown up.

She’d have to work long shifts and holidays, probably, but she didn’t care about any of that, and she doubted she would in a few years. Plus, first responders were strong and tough and prepared for anything. If Nora trained to be one, she’d never be caught off guard, never be out of her depth. Things would never be out of control.

And who knew—maybe one day she’d meet her father.

It had been something for her to worry about in the future, years down the line

Until it wasn’t.

Until Nora was facing her second month in the Warren’s foster home, where eight other kids lived. She never got any sleep, because Morris snored so loudly; they’d mixed up her transfer to the new school so she was in all advanced classes, and after one month, she was already failing most of them; and Mrs. Warren only ever gave Nora dresses and strappy sandals to wear, no matter how many times she asked for gym shorts and sneakers. How was she ever supposed to train for the LAFD if she couldn’t even get a pair of sneakers?

Something had to change. And Nora could only think of one adult in the whole world who might be able to help her.

Buck.

It wasn’t easy, trying to find a guy who went by a nickname and who may or may not be a firefighter. But Nora was smart—even if her teachers didn’t think so—and she made a plan.

First, she used Google Maps to figure out the address of her mom’s old apartment; she always said the best Indian food was in that neighborhood, and sometimes she’d point out the brownstone where they lived when Nora was born. Then, she drew a five-mile radius—take that, Mr. Simmons’ algebra class—and then she made a list of every firehouse in the area.

It took a lot of trial and error, but by the time she got around to the thirteenth house on her list, she had it down to a system.

During free period that day, she printed out extra sheets of her checklist and mapped directions from the school to station 118 and from station 118 back to the Warrens’ house. And then when the bell rang, she clipped them both onto her clipboard—stolen from the library while Miss Hudson wasn’t looking—and caught the bus into downtown LA.

The Warrens thought she was in chess club, which meant she had about two hours after school most days for her mission. Morris and Julia both knew that there was no chess club at their school, but she offered to shoplift candy and lip gloss and a Blu-ray copy of Terrifier for them, and that bought their silence. It would have been easier if she had a phone, but no one was going to pay for one of those, and anyway, Nora had always been good at paying attention to her surroundings. She never got lost.

The bus dropped her off two blocks away from Station 118, and she used the time on the walk to practice her intro. Hi, my name is Nora, and I’m doing a school project. Can you help me?

So far, it had worked every time. She’d had a few hiccups at the first few houses, but she learned what to say to avoid suspicious questions, and she learned to keep it short, and that always did the trick.

Station 118 was not as fancy as a few of the stations she’d been to, but it was nicer than a lot of them, brightly lit and clean. The bay doors were open as she approached, and she could see a pair of legs sticking out from under the truck, one foot tapping along to the radio, which was playing the kind of old music her mom liked. Emo, her mom called it.

Nora scanned the area, looking for someone less occupied, but when she didn’t see anyone, she said, “uhm—hello?”

The man flinched, and she heard a smack and a muffled “ouch,” a second before he slid out, his back on one of those scooters they used to give the little kids during gym class.

She studied him, the same way she studied every man she ran into at these firehouses. He had brown hair that flopped over his forehead and dark brown eyes; traits that didn’t look like her, but she’d learned about recessive genes in science last year and she wasn’t ruling anything out.

“Hey,” he said, rubbing a spot of engine grease onto his forehead, where he must have hit his head. “Hey, kid,” he added taking in the sight of her. He stayed sitting on the scooter, so Nora was looking down at him. “You need help with something?”

“Yeah,” she said, taking a deep breath. “My name is Nora and I’m doing a school project. Can you help me?”

He picked up a filthy rag from the ground next to him and began wiping his hands on it; Nora wondered if she would learn how to fix the bottom of a fire engine one day. “Sure,” he said, scanning the area behind her. “Your parents here?”

“My mom’s in the car,” Nora told him. “She said I have to learn how to do things on my own, and that she isn’t going to do my homework for me,” she said, in that precocious tone that adults always thought was cute. No one ever contradicted her pretend mom, sitting in her invisible car, wanting her child to learn grit, or whatever.

“That so?”

“Yeah,” said Nora, realizing a second too late that the open bay doors meant the man had a clear view of the street, which was currently empty of cars. “Uh, I think she went to get a coffee,” Nora added, hastily. “She’ll be back in twenty minutes though. I promise I won’t bother you for longer than that.”

The man shifted his gaze back to Nora, and then pulled himself up to his full height. Diaz, Nora saw on his name-tag.

“Not a bother at all, it’s pretty slow today,” he said, gesturing for her to follow him. “Wanna come upstairs to our kitchen? You can tell me what you need help with for this project.” Nora didn’t love the way he said project. “My name’s Eddie, by the way.”

“Thank you, firefighter Eddie, sir,” said Nora. She was really laying it on thick, now, but the guy was making her feel a little off-kilter, and she didn’t want him to start asking questions.

He just laughed at her, though. “No need for all that, Eddie’s fine,” he said, leading her up the stairs. “What grade are you in?”

“Seventh,” she answered.

“I got a kid around your age,” he told her. “Christopher. He just started his freshman year.”

She nodded. He probably wasn’t her father, but still, a part of her couldn’t help wondering—did he sign up for one of those dating apps and meet her mother, when he’d had a baby at home?

“Water?” he asked her. She nodded, because it usually made adults feel better, and anyway, she wanted something to do with her hands. He slid a glass across the table, and then put a plate of fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies in front of her. “Help yourself,” he said, grabbing one of his own.  

Nora eyed the cookies; it’d been a while since she had home-made baked goods—probably not since the last time she stayed over Sadie’s. That was almost three months ago, now.

She took one. It was still warm. It actually might have been the best cookie she’d ever had; it had chunks of chocolate that were still half-melted. She wondered how many she could get away with eating. A noise slipped out as she swallowed the second bite, and Eddie smiled at her.

“Good, right?” she nodded, feeling a little silly. For some reason, the cookie made her feel like she wanted to cry. “We’ve got a baker on the team—he adds cinnamon, I think that’s his secret ingredient. Please, have another,” he said, pushing the plate towards her. “He’s been baking way too much lately. If our station drops in response time rankings, it’ll be his fault.”

Nora looked away from his gaze then. He was throwing her off; he wasn’t like a lot of the other firefighters she’d met, who were either gruff and grizzled or young and cocky. He wasn’t like her friend’s dads, either; he seemed younger. Nicer. She wondered if his kid liked him.

“Uhm, so, the project is for social studies,” she said, trying to get back on track. She uncapped her pen and wrote Station 118 at the top of her clipboard. “It’s about team-building and, um, interpersonal dynamics, in, uh, high stress careers.”

“Wow,” said Eddie, flatly. “That’s quite a project for seventh grade.”

“It’s an advanced class,” she said, straightening up in her chair. She had to get back on track. “So, my first question is because I have this hypothesis,” she said, doing her best to channel Ms. Ellis. “That team dynamics are improved by the use of, um, nicknames. So do—does anyone on your team have a nickname?”

Eddie’s lips twisted up, like Nora had said something funny. “Yeah,” he said, after a beat. “A few of us have nicknames.”

“What—um, what are they?”

He reached out and took another cookie before answering. “Well, what kind of nicknames?”

“Any.”

He broke the cookie in half and a bit a piece off, looking thoughtful. After a painfully long pause, he said, “my name is Eddie, short for Edmundo,” he said. He stared at her for a moment before she remembered she should at least pretend to write these down. When she finished scribbling Eddie, Edmundo, he said, “and Henrietta goes by Hen. Then our captain, Howard, goes by Chimney—”

“Chimney?” Nora interrupted; it wasn’t what she was looking for, but who was called Chimney?

“Yeah,” he said, grinning at her. “Sorry kid, not sure I can share that story. And, my partner. His name’s Evan, but he goes by Buck.”

Nora froze. A part of her never actually thought she’d find him, but—Buck. A firefighter named Buck.

She found him.

Which meant it was time for Phase 2: recon.

She wouldn’t get a second chance at this. She couldn’t let herself freeze or freak out or panic. She had to stay calm and focused and act normal.

Eddie was still talking. “I guess, technically he’s Ravi’s partner now, things shifted a bit recently. I don’t think Ravi’s a nickname for anything though—”

“Buck—that’s an interesting name,” she interrupted, thinking fast. “Does he, um,” she paused, hoping Eddie would volunteer more information. “Does he . . . like hunting?”

“Hunting?” Eddie asked, furrowing his brows. “Oh, no, it’s—his last name is Buckley. Buck’s not really the hunting type. He’s the one who made the cookies.”

Nora felt a little sick. There was a bitter taste in her mouth where previously it’d only been the sweet taste of chocolate. It was just—did she eat cookies her biological father had made? Without even knowing? It felt like a betrayal; though of what, she wasn’t sure.

“He, um,” she had to keep going. Her mind was bouncing in a million different directions but she had to stay on track. “Does he, uh, like to bake?”

That wasn’t the question she needed to ask. But she didn’t know how else to ask: is he better or worse than the Warrens?

“Buck? Yeah, bit of a stress baker, really, but he’s gotten pretty good at it. Is that what you need to know for your project?”

“Yeah,” said Nora, regaining some confidence. There was a reason she’d thought out this fake project so well, and it was for this exact situation. “Any good science experiment includes case studies. Your partner, Buck, he could be a good one. Would you say that he contributes positively to the team dynamic?”

Eddie was squinting at her now, in a way that she didn’t like. But what was he going to do—guess that she was Buck’s secret kid? At most, he probably thought she was a weirdo. She stared back at him until he answered.

“Yeah,” he said, eventually. “I would say that about Buck.”

This was like pulling teeth. “How so?”

“How—?”

“How does Buck contribute positively to the team dynamic?”

“Well, he bakes,” Eddie repeated, gesturing to the plate of cookies. And, yeah, Nora got that. Buck baked. She’d love literally any other defining characteristic.

“What else?”

“He cooks, too,” Eddie offered. “Our, uh, old captain used to cook family meals, but now Buck does that.”

Family meals. It was such a foreign concept; it made her think of commercials for Olive Garden and old sitcoms, big groups of people sitting around a table, laughing like they were paid to be there. 

“Is he nice?”

The question slipped out before she could stop herself. It was too obvious, too imprecise for a science project, but she had to—she had to know.

“He’s—”

The bell rang, loud and jarring, so unexpected that Nora nearly jumped out of her seat. No, no, no—not now. Not when she was so close!

“Sorry, kid,” Eddie said, “that’s my cue.” He gestured for her to follow him, then, and even though she wished it hadn’t happened here of all places, she felt a thrill of excitement, rushing down the stairs along with the other firefighters, responding to the bell. This would be her life in a few years.

Other firefighters poured out of the back rooms, flocking to the wall lined with hooks for their turnouts and helmets. Eddie stopped at one, and Nora could see the cubby next to his was labeled BUCKLEY. Her heartbeat leapt into her throat.

She was so locked in that she didn’t even realize when a man brushed past her and reached for the coat and helmet.

Buck. 

Eddie realized she was still standing there and elbowed the man. “Buck, meet Nora,” he said, nodding his head back to where she stood, all while still pulling on his turnouts. “She liked your cookies.”

Buck turned then, and Nora got her first real look at him. 

Her father.

And he was—he had a birthmark over his eyebrow, just like his mom had said. Buck, her father, the firefighter. He was tall and broad, bulky in a way that made Nora feel good about her chances of being tall enough one day to qualify for the LAFD, even if she was one of the smallest kids in her class right now. He had bright blue eyes, just like hers, and sandy hair that curled everywhere. 

“Yeah?” he said, smiling at her. And all of the sudden, Nora felt like she might cry. He blurred in her vision, which was stupid because Nora was a big girl who didn’t cry and now, of all times, was certainly not the time to start acting like a baby. “Oh—hey, you okay?”

Buck paused in doing his suspenders to really look at her, and she felt the full weight of his gaze, like she was sinking under it. She nodded, because she didn’t think she could speak without crying, even though that was dumb.

“Hey, Chim,” Buck called out, to someone over her shoulder. Chimney. “We need a man behind?”

“Sorry, no can do,” a man called back, already heading towards the trucks. “It’s an all-hands situation—a house fire in Silver Lake.”

“Copy,” Buck said. “Sorry, kid, gotta go,” he said, staring at her for a beat. “Your parent here?”

Yes, she wanted to say. Right here. “Yeah, uh, yeah,” she said. “My uh—” she broke off, gesturing towards the street. At this point, Eddie had now turned and was fixing her with the same gaze as Buck. She felt like she was going to buckle under the combined weight of their stares.

“Buck, Eddie, any day now?” a woman called from behind them.

“Coming,” Buck shouted back.

“Come back any time, Nora,” Eddie said, patting her on the shoulder once, with his big gloved hand. “We can finish whatever you need for your project.”

“I—yeah,” she said, shakily. She nodded, too, hoping that would suffice. 

Then, both men stepped around her and boarded the truck. The engine and ladder truck pulled out onto the street, the ambulance right behind, flicking on the lights and siren as they went. 

Nora settled in to wait. 

Once she could no longer hear the sirens from the street, she trekked back up the stairs to sit in the kitchen, but then she got bored after about thirty seconds. She ventured back downstairs and decided to poke around the locker room to see if she could figure out which one belonged to Buck.

They weren’t locked, and the entire station was deserted, so she took her time opening each locker and rooting around. Most of the firefighters had left their wallets in there—weirdly trusting, she thought—so she could check their IDs; it only took eight lockers before she found his.

Several photos were taped to the inside of the door, and she studied each one, carefully.

The top one was of Buck hugging an older man with gray hair; there was something soft about it—Buck was in a gray and pink sweatshirt, and the hug was more of a cling, and they were both smiling widely.

Under that was a picture of a boy a little younger than her, who had the same curly hair as Buck. The lighting wasn’t great in the photo, because it’d been taken under the florescent lights of a school gymnasium; the glare cut across his red glasses, but you could still see the boy’s proud smile. He was standing in front of a tri-fold poster that said Coding Robots to Cook! And it had a blue ribbon pinned to the top right corner.

Under that was a photo of two other children, a little girl in a summery yellow dress beaming next to a tiny baby in a blue hat. They looked less like Buck, with dark hair and brown eyes and features that meant at least one of their biological parents was of Asian descent.

And the last one was of Buck and a brunette woman. She was wearing a belted pink dress that said Rockford Peaches on it, along with high red socks, a red cap, and a baseball bat slung over her shoulder. Buck was wearing a hot pink shirt, with shorts and a matching vest in a garish, retro mix of neon colors. He had bright yellow knee pads, wristbands, and a fanny pack.

Nora really hoped it had been Halloween.

She couldn’t gather much from it; neither of them were wearing wedding rings, and even though she wasn’t sure what either of the costumes were supposed to be, they didn’t seem matching in a couple-y way. But they were each smiling broadly in the photo, and it had to have meant a lot for Buck to hang it up.

Who were all these people?

She tried not to think about her loneliness, most days; even when her mother was around, it had always felt like it was Nora against the world. Sadie said her song was You’re On Your Own, Kid; Nora had rolled her eyes at the time, but then she’d gone home and looked it up. Sometimes, at the foster home, when she had the room to herself, she’d put it on repeat. It was stupid—most of the lyrics meant nothing to her. She didn’t care about boys noticing her and she didn’t go to the kinds of parties written about in songs. But still, when the last chorus reminded her, yeah you can face this, it always made her throat feel tight and her eyes burn.

She thought of Sadie’s dad saying is there anyone else we can call? And herself, saying no. And here was her biological father’s locker, plastered with proof of all of his loved ones. It felt supremely unfair. Why did he get to have so many people in his life, when it had always just been her and her mom? If he liked all these other kids enough to hang up pictures of them, why couldn’t she have a place up there with them?

She slammed the locker door shut without inspecting the rest of the contents.

The next few hours passed by painfully slowly; she found a crossword puzzle and filled it out, making outlandish guesses once she ran out of questions she knew. After filling in the last of the squares with random gibberish, she realized they had a gaming console, so she booted up the TV and played Mario Kart until she got tired of racing no one. Then she found a book laying around—some action thriller about an FBI agent who might be falling in love with a criminal—and read it until her eyes started crossing.

She was just drifting off on the couch, wondering how mad the Warrens were going to be at her for this, when she heard the big garage doors start to open.

They were back.

Buck was back.

Where should she wait? What should she say? For all of the months she’d spent thinking and preparing and hoping, she had no idea what to do now that she was actually in the same building as her father. The pressure of it kept her rooted to the spot.

She wished she had a phone, so she could text Sadie. So she could listen to You’re On Your Own, Kid. So she could look up best way to confront your biological parent.

In the end, she did none of that. She stood, frozen, halfway between the couch and the staircase, listening to the hum of the team returning from a shift; the rustle of uniforms being discarded, the slamming of truck doors, the clangs and clatters of other supplies being restocked or righted. The low murmur of voices was hard to differentiate, but she heard a sharp bark of laughter, and goosebumps erupted down her arms.

“I’m going to make sandwiches for everyone first,” the voice said, coming closer. After only speaking to him once, she could already pick out Buck’s voice in a crowd. And he wasn’t in a crowd—he was coming up the stairs. “Don’t want anyone passing out in the shower, do we Eddie?”

“I didn’t pass out in the shower,” Eddie griped. Nora stood, locked in position; she remembered learning that there were actually three common stress responses: fight, or flight, or freeze. She’d always wanted to be a fighter, but her body may as well have been a statue.

“Okay, sorry, I’m going to make sandwiches so no one gracefully wipes out in the—”

Buck came into view, talking to the people behind him on the stairs; but when he reached the top platform, he spotted her. She watched as he broke off, as his eyes drew together in confusion.

“Nora?” someone said. Probably Eddie.

But Nora only had eyes for Buck. Yeah, you can face this, Sadie had sung to her in her bedroom, months ago, off-key and nearly screaming with it. A fighter, she told herself.

She locked eyes with him, blue on blue, and held her stance.

“You’re my father.”

Chapter Text

In hindsight, he should have seen it coming. He’d always used protection, but he knew more than most that you could follow all the right safety protocols and still end up fucked. Burned. With a secret daughter.

The odds were that something like this would have happened, given his Buck 1.0 behavior. But as the years passed and no exes ever approached him with a pregnancy test or newborn baby, he figured he was in the clear. 

So when the girl—Nora, her name was Nora—when Nora looked him dead in the eyes and said you’re my father, Buck’s first reaction was confusion.

She had to be close to Chris’s age. He’d—he’d know, if he had a daughter. If he’d had a daughter for—what, eleven, twelve years? There’s no way—if Buck had a kid, he would—he would have been there. He would have been there for diapers and nap times and first days of school and—and he couldn’t have a kid that had already done all of that.

“But—you’re so old.”

It was the absolute wrong thing to say; he knew it as soon as it left his mouth. You’re so old. His first sentence to his daughter—holy shit, his daughter—and he was immediately turning into his own parents; making her feel bad about something that wasn’t her fault.

“I know,” she said, oddly stoic for a kid her age. Young; she was actually so, so young. “Listen, I just need a place to stay for five and a half years, okay? Just a place to sleep and maybe some, some sneakers and stuff. That’s all I want, okay?”

That . . . no, none of that was okay. What was she talking about? Buck had never thought he could miss Bobby more than he already did, but he felt a sudden, visceral ache with it. 

But Bobby wasn’t the only parent he knew. He chanced a glance away from Nora and found Eddie, Chim, and Hen all staring at him, looking as baffled as he felt.

Hen was the first to rally. “Nora—it’s Nora, right, honey?” She began ushering Nora towards the stools in front of the kitchen island. “Why don’t you sit down and Buck here will make you some hot chocolate. Can you start from the beginning?”

Buck could kiss Hen, he really could. Thank god she knew what to do; thank god she gave him a task. Buck booked it to the kitchen and started pulling out ingredients, glancing up at Nora every two seconds like a compulsion. 

“My mom was Wendy Nolan,” she said, in a small, monotonous voice. The past tense hit Buck in the solar plexus a second before her next sentence. “She died a few months ago. I’m staying with a foster family now but it’s not—I don’t—Buck is my father. So, I just thought, maybe he—”

Buck is my father. Buck is my father. The milk carton was shaking in his hand; Eddie appeared from thin air and pried it out of his grip. “Breathe, Buck,” he whispered under his breath. 

“Okay, honey,” Hen continued, in that voice that had soothed hundreds of patients. “And—we believe you, but, can you tell us why you think Buck is your father?”

“My mom said, uh, that his name was Buck. That he was going to go to the fire academy and that he had a—” she broke off, rubbing her own forehead, exactly where his skin went pink. “She said he went by Firehose.”

Buck didn’t need all of his coworkers to look at him in alarm; he was pretty sure he’d gone deadly pale. His daughter knew four things about him, and one of them was his old tinder profile handle. He felt a little like he was going to die.

“She’s got your eyes,” Eddie commented, unhelpfully.

“Right,” said Hen, the only one keeping her head straight. “Nora, do your foster parents know you’re here?”

That was such a good question. Why didn’t Buck think to ask that question? Because he had no idea how to be a parent, that’s why. Going by the look on Nora’s face, they didn’t know where she was. His daughter had been running around LA unsupervised for how many hours? For how many years? Buck felt like he was going to be sick.

“Okay,” Hen continued. “I’m going to call my friend Athena, she’s a police officer—”

“Please,” Nora interrupted, nearly a whisper. She looked from Hen to Buck, beseeching in a way that made his chest twist up tight. “Can I stay with you? I promise I won’t get in the way. I can take care of myself. I just need a place to stay for a few years—”

Buck opened his mouth to start promising her everything he could think of—that she could stay with him forever and that she’d never be in the way and that he’d always take care of her and that he lo—

“Okay honey,” Hen responded, beating him to it. “It sounds like you’ve had a lot to worry about, huh?” Nora nodded, tearing up. He reminded himself that letting out the scream he could feel bubbling up in his chest would not improve the situation in any way, shape, or form. “We’re firefighters, it’s our job to fix trouble. Why don’t you try letting us worry about this? I know it can seem scary, but we’re just going to take it one thing at a time, okay?” 

One thing at a time, Buck thought to himself. He could do that. He turned, then digging into the back of the fridge for the heavy cream he’d had left over from Monday’s Alfredo pasta sauce. Once he found it, he poured it all out into a bowl so he could beat it into whipped cream while the cocoa simmered on the stove.

What if Nora preferred marshmallows?

“I’m going to pop out to call Athena,” Hen said, looking around at Eddie, Chim, and Buck like she wasn’t sure they could be trusted to be left alone with Nora. Privately, Buck agreed.

“I’m going to go take us offline,” Chimney said, following Hen where she headed down the hall towards his office, leaving Buck and Eddie on their own. 

He silently prayed that Eddie wouldn’t abandon him either. 

“So,” said Eddie, after a moment, when the silence—save for Buck’s frantic whisking—became unbearable. “Do you actually have a social studies project? Or was that a ruse?”

Nora didn’t give him an answer, she just kind of raised her eyebrows at him like he was being an idiot. Buck was glad he wasn’t the one who’d spoken.

“Touché,” said Eddie, unfazed. He was too used to receiving the full brunt of Christopher’s teenager-hood to be thrown off by her silence. “That’s kind of genius, actually.”

“What—uh—what project?” There. He said a sentence to his daughter. And his voice barely even cracked. 

Eddie was the one who answered him, though. “She had this whole sneaky plan to find out if anyone here went by Buck,” Eddie told him, nearly bragging. To Buck. About his own daughter. Buck was going insane. “She had a clipboard and everything, you would have loved it.” Then, to Nora, who was watching him with steady eyes, he said, “never give Buck a clipboard. The power goes right to his head.”

“That’s really smart,” Buck said. He was proud of the way his voice didn’t sound too strangled and also of the way he didn’t say have you been going around LA talking to strangers all by yourself this whole time???

“A good cover story for snooping,” Eddie agreed. “You don’t need one anymore, though. Buck is an open book. And I know just about everything there is to know about him. Go ahead—ask away.”

Buck’s arm should probably be getting tired from the repetitive movement, but he was beating the heavy cream into submission like it was his own rising anxiety, and just kept going and going.

“Did you… did you know about me?”

“What? No,” Buck answered, emphatically. “No, I—I had no idea.”

She made a short humming noise, and he couldn’t tell if that meant she believed him. “Do you have other kids?”

“No. Well, kind of,” he said, backtracking. “I was a donor, for my friend. So, technically, it’s his kid. But like, biologically… I just mean, like I was—yeah. A sperm donor. On purpose. I mean—”

Nora clammed up at his godawful speech, and Buck couldn’t even blame her for it. He was trying to be as honest as possible, but his head was spinning and he couldn’t think straight. For a second, he thought, would her parents care that I just said ‘sperm donor?’ and then his brain reminded him, I am her parent. And then his head just kind of filled with white static.

“Maybe not that open, Buck,” Eddie muttered to him, a minute too late.

“Who are the pictures of the kids in your locker, then?” Nora asked, an edge to her tone. Buck wondered if he would be delusional for thinking it was a good sign—that she went through his locker because she was interested in learning about him.

“Oh, that’s Chris,” Eddie said. “My kid, the one who’s a freshman.”

“Yeah,” said Buck. “And, my niece and nephew, Jee-Yun and Robbie. My sister, Maddie—she’s in one, too? So that makes her your aunt?—she’s married to our captain, Chimney. So, I guess he’s your uncle. Huh, weird.”

Nora ignored that, and kept on with her interrogation. “Are you married?”

He felt like he was being x-rayed, and found wanting. He hadn’t been this self-conscious on the other end of a stare since the time he’d pulled a borrowed truck back into the fire station and found Bobby waiting for him.

“No, I’m, uh, single.” He glanced at Eddie, hoping, embarrassingly, for some sign that he was doing okay; that he wasn’t fucking this up irrevocably.

Eddie wasn’t looking at him, though; he’d turned towards the stove and was stirring the cocoa, like he was trying to give Buck and Nora some privacy. Buck thought he needed help much more than he needed privacy, but he guessed it was fair that Eddie didn’t exactly know how to handle this situation either.

But hadn’t Eddie always said that the most important thing about being a parent is loving your kid enough to keep trying?

Buck could do that. Buck knew it was a little insane to think, but he was pretty sure he already loved Nora.

He studied her, where she sat on the kitchen stool, twisting a pen around her fingers. Her hair was dirty blonde and wild, falling around her face in chaotic curls, ending just above her shoulders. She wore a white t-shirt under a blue jean dress; it ended at her knees, one of which, he could see, was skinned. 

Eddie was right—she did have his eyes, bright blue, framed in long blonde lashes. A smattering of freckles covered her nose, and she wore earrings; little flowers with green centers and magenta petals. Was she old enough to have her ears pierced? Her nails had black polish on them, chipped all around the edges.

It was surreal, looking at her. He recognized the feeling from when he delivered Connor and Kameron’s son, holding a small, screaming baby boy in his hands; like there was some sort of tie between them, some invisible string he could feel tugging in his gut. But he’d had a long time to get used to the idea, then; plenty of time to remind himself that biology had no business getting in the way of a happy family.

But with Nora—it hit him, full force. A daughter. His daughter. He felt a rush of fierce protectiveness, just looking at her; the way she fiddled with the pen, the way she hunched her shoulders in, the way her eyes darted around the room. He wanted to bundle her up and take her home. He wanted to travel back in time and get in the way of anything that had ever made her unhappy.

“Buck,” Eddie said, and from the way he said it, he was pretty sure it wasn’t the first time.

“Hm—what?” he said, distracted.

“I said, is that ready?” Eddie had poured the hot cocoa into a mug and was holding it out in front of him.

“Oh,” he said, realizing he was still beating the heavy cream, which had passed stiff peaks a while back and was probably closer to becoming butter. He dipped a finger in and tasted it, then stirred in another shake of powdered sugar and a dash of vanilla extract. That time, when he tasted it, he was satisfied.

He was about to dollop a spoonful on top of the mug when he paused and looked up; Nora was watching him with those curious eyes. “Do you—do you like whipped cream?” he asked, like an idiot.

She looked between him and the bowl and the mug for a few moments, before finally saying, “yeah.”

He let out a breath and dropped the whipped cream onto the mug, adding a second spoonful, even though it might overflow. “Do you have any allergies?” he asked, pushing the mug across the table to her.

“Avocado,” she said. “But it’s not that bad. I won’t, like, die.”

She said it like she was trying to prove that she wasn’t being dramatic. I can take care of myself, she’d said.

“How old are you?” he asked, even though he was supposed to be the one getting interrogated. There was so much he wanted to know.

“Twelve,” she said, matter-of-factly. She took a sip of the hot chocolate and got a spot of whipped cream on her nose. It made her look ridiculously young.

“When’s your birthday?”

“Why?” she asked, wiping her mouth and nose off on her wrist. “Trying to see if you can prove you were out of the country nine months before it?”

Buck was so taken aback, it took him a moment to understand what she was accusing him of. Did she—did she think he was—what? Trying to get out of being her father?

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Eddie trying to get his attention; but he couldn’t look away from Nora, her narrowed eyes, her tense posture. He felt, suddenly, like he was going to cry.

He wanted to call Maddie.

“Athena’s pulling in now.” Hen came out of the back hallway, Chimney in tow. Buck wondered if they had been waiting back there on purpose, trying to give Buck a moment to bond with Nora. He wondered if they could hear how badly he was fucking this up. “She’s having dispatch contact your foster parents and case worker.”

“I—”

“Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble,” Hen said. In Buck’s opinion, Nora didn’t look like she was worried about being in trouble; she looked more like she was considering bolting. “And nothing’s been decided,” Hen went on. Buck thanked his lucky stars that she and Karen had decided to become foster parents years ago—she knew all the right things to say. “It’s just important that all of the adults in charge of your care know what’s going on. These things always run smoother when you do them by the book.”

“Okay,” said Nora, her voice softening at Hen’s reassuring tone. Buck bet she wished Hen was the one who was her long-lost parent.

Just then, Athena appeared at the top of the stairs, with a younger uniformed officer in tow. “What’s this I hear about a Baby Buckaroo?” she said, raising her eyebrows at him as she strode across the kitchen. Quickly, her eyes shifted to Nora, panning over the girl, who seemed to shrink on the other end of her gaze. “Hi there,” Athena said, softening her voice when she addressed Nora. “I’m Sergeant Athena Grant. Are you Nora Nolan?”

Nora nodded, twirling the pen faster between her fingers.

“Well, it’s awfully nice to meet you, Miss Nora,” Athena said. “Hen said you have reason to believe that Evan Buckley is your father?”

Buck wasn’t used to seeing Athena like this, professional towards them. It was unsettling to hear her use his full government name.

“Yes—yes, ma’am. Sergeant,” said Nora, shades more polite than she’d been to him a few minutes ago.

“Well, there’s an easy way to solve that. We can do a DNA test, if you consent. We got approval from the Warrens, so it’s just up to you.”

Nora looked back at him, then, a challenge in her eyes. “I’ll do it,” she said; it was like she was daring him.

“Great,” said Athena. “Buck?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you consent to a DNA test?”

“I—yeah, of course,” he said; his voice sounded unnaturally high and reedy. He coughed, clearing it, and tried again. “Yes, definitely.”

“That’s settled then,” said Athena, nodding to the other officer, who pulled two DNA kits out of a bag she was carrying, and stepped forward, handing one to Nora and the other to Buck. “It’s a simple saliva test, you just have to spit in it up to the line; we should be able to have results back in a few hours.”

A few hours. It was nearing seven pm; would they have the results back that night? If not, would Nora have to go back to the foster home? He bristled at the thought, and his mouth went dry as he stared at the small tube. He had a flashback to waiting for his exam results for the fire academy, thinking, I’ll be so fucked if I don’t pass this test. That had nothing on this current feeling of overwhelming anxiety; what if the test was contaminated? What if Wendy was mistaken, and Buck wasn’t Nora’s biological dad?

Maybe he could apply to be a foster parent, if anything went wrong. Hen would help him out. It would take a lot longer, but he could still make sure Nora had a home.

This was good. He had a plan B.

Now he just had to spit in a tube.

----------

Eddie was panicking.

Buck had a daughter. Buck had a daughter.

He didn’t know why it was freaking him out so much. It wasn’t like it was his long-lost kid who came out of the woodwork.

Only, it kind of felt like it was.

Eddie had missed a good chunk of Chris’s toddler years while he was deployed; he knew, intimately, the pain of missing your kids’ milestones; the big moments, and the little ways they grow, day by day. And Buck—he’d missed twelve whole years of that.

It was kind of breaking his heart.

It was also freaking him out.

He thought he knew everything there was to know about Buck. His long and storied medical history and his allergies and his familial trauma; how he took his coffee and what topping he wanted on his pizza and his favorite recipes to make; the weirdest place he’d ever hooked up with someone and the people who had broken his heart; how he preferred documentaries about ocean creatures over land animals, and how he talked in his sleep sometimes, and how hard he was trying to claw his way back to normalcy without Bobby.

He wasn’t lying when he said Buck was an open book.

But this—this was uncharted territory. Not only did Eddie not see Nora coming, he was also, alarmingly, having trouble reading Buck.

Buck loved kids. It was yet another thing Eddie knew about him. So he was pretty sure Buck would take the whole surprise-kid-thing better than most people; but Buck was acting cagey and restrained, his expressions guarded and unreadable. It reminded him of the only other time Buck had kept something from him: when he decided to be a sperm donor.

They had never really talked about that. They’d talked around it; and they’d talked, once, memorably, about Eddie’s will. But besides that, Buck had never talked about wanting to be a father.

Intuitively, Eddie knew Buck would be great at it. He’d named him Chris’s guardian for a reason. He was probably the favorite adult of every kid in the extended 118 family, and usually on calls with kids, he was the one who stepped aside to assure them and keep them distracted. He was the first to get on the floor to help build Legos, the last one standing when piggy-back rides were requested, the only one of their group who actually understood what Roblox was.

He’d just kind of assumed Buck wanted to be a father. Which was—yeah. That was Buck’s right, of course; and whichever child was raised by Buck would be lucky. It had just always felt so theoretical; so far removed from their day-to-day life. It was just that he and Chris and Buck had always kind of felt like a family unit, and so it felt weird to think of Buck with a spouse and kids of his own.

So he didn’t think about it. In the same way he didn’t think about the fact that Buck had moved out less than a week after he got back from Texas; even though neither he nor Chris had brought it up. Buck just told them he’d found a place, two days after they decided the return to LA was permanent—so fast, Eddie didn’t even know how Buck had had time to look at listings.

At the very least, the place he’d found was nearby; walkable, if you were up for it. And unlike his loft, this one had two actual bedrooms, in case Chris ever wanted to sleep over.

That would probably be Nora’s room now.

Eddie watched as Buck and Nora each tried to discretely work up enough saliva for the tube; their matching postures practically making the test moot. It was glaringly obvious that Buck was Nora’s dad; they had the same wild, dirty blonde curls, the same electric blue eyes, the same ability to turn on the charm at will.

Now that he was looking for it, he could recognize his best friend in Nora’s mannerisms; the way she fidgeted, the way she bit her lip when she was trying to mask an emotion; the way she tried to be antagonistic but, unfortunately, only succeeded in being cute, like a puppy getting riled up—the way she’d been interrogating Buck had brought Eddie right back to their first shift together, when Buck couldn’t stop needling him.

“What happens now?” he asked Athena, since Buck and Nora were too occupied to talk.

“Well, Officer Hollis will take these back to the lab and start the testing; but it’ll be a few hours. I’ll take Nora back to the Warrens for the night, and we should know by morning.”

“But—”

“But—”

Both Buck and Nora had objected at the same time; Eddie bit his lip to hold in a smile. Buck nodded for Nora to continue speaking, but she just brought the tube back up to her mouth to continue spitting.

“It makes the most sense,” Athena went on, when neither of them spoke. “We don’t know exactly how long it’ll take, and Nora needs her sleep. If there’s going to be a change of living arrangements, we’ll have to talk to the Warrens and pack up her stuff, anyway,” she said, reasonably.

Buck and Nora both looked like they still had objections but were keeping them in; Eddie could only imagine how much Buck disliked the idea of letting Nora out of his sight.

When they both capped their test tubes, Athena said, “ready to go, Nora?”

Nora glanced at Buck, but quickly, like she wasn’t expecting much. “Y­–yeah,” she said, grabbing the strap of her backpack and heading for the stairs. “Yeah, I’m ready.”

Eddie turned back to where Buck stood, frozen, willing him to say something. But then Nora started walking down the stairs, and he was still standing there, watching the spot where she had disappeared.

He’d hate himself if he let her leave without saying something. “Buck,” he said, low enough to snap him out of his daze.

“Uh,” Buck said, blinking back to reality. His head jerked back towards the staircase, and he started rifling through the kitchen drawers, saying, “oh, fuck, fuck, fuck.”

After a moment, he found what he was looking for—a post-it pad and a pen—and scribbled something down, and then he took off down the stairs; Eddie followed him as fast as he could without tripping.

“Wait!” Buck’s voice rang out across the station. “Wait, wait—”

Athena and Nora both turned at his shout, and Nora readjusted her grip on her backpack strap as she waited for Buck to catch up.

“This is my phone number,” Buck said, holding out the note. “So you can—you can reach me. Whenever you want. Whatever you need.”

Nora reached out and took it, tucking it into her pocket, but not fast enough that Eddie couldn’t see her fingers shaking around the note. “I don’t have a phone,” she said, matter-of-factly.

“Okay,” said Buck, “okay. Well. I’ll—I’ll see you tomorrow, Nora, okay?”

“Okay.”

Eddie could tell from the way Buck was breathing—or rather, not breathing—that he was about fifteen seconds away from a full-on freakout. As soon as Nora turned away, he stepped up and clasped Buck’s shoulder. “Come on, bunkroom,” he said, pulling Buck back as he went.

“Hey,” said Ravi, passing them as he came out of the bunkroom, still toweling off his hair. “Did I her something about sandwiches?”

“Not right now, Rav,” Eddie said, clapping him on the shoulder as he pushed Buck in the opposite direction. By the time he made it through the door, he could see that his best friend was deep into a spiral.

“What the fuck, what the fuck,” he was saying, pacing back and forth between the rows of beds. Eddie leaned against a bunkbed frame and watched him, trying to figure out if it would be better to head off his breakdown or let him give in to it.

“Buck—”

“She’s twelve,” Buck interrupted. “I have a daughter, and she’s twelve? What the fuck, Eddie!”

“I know—”

“You don’t know! This is—this is a nightmare, I mean—this cannot be happening—”

“Buck, breathe, buddy.”

“I didn’t—I can’t—”

“You can, Buck,” Eddie said. Trying to catch his attention was fruitless; Buck was pacing back and forth so fast that he was making Eddie dizzy.

“I can’t, I—Jesus fucking Christ. I—this can’t be happening—”

Okay, so. Clearly letting Buck drop headfirst into a meltdown was not the best option. Eddie straightened up from where he was standing and stepped into Buck’s path.

“Buck.” He reached up with both hands this time, landing them on either of Buck’s broad shoulders. He was so tense; Eddie tried to rub small circles into his collar bones to get him to loosen up. In the silence of the moment, Eddie could hear Buck’s heavy breathing; a honk from the street; the squeak of a door in the hallway. “Buck, breathe with me, okay?”

Eddie found it weirdly difficult to be this close to Buck; to stare straight into his eyes and to take slow, deep breaths. But this wasn’t about him; this was about stopping Buck from having a panic attack. Still, it took some sort of inhuman effort on Eddie’s part to hold eye contact with Buck as his face softened from its pinched expression, and his shoulders relaxed under Eddie’s hands.

After a few minutes of breathing, he said, “you with me?”

“I—” Buck said, trailing off.

“Buck?”

“Yeah,” said Buck, though his eyes kept dropping to Eddie’s mouth, like he was trying to figure out where the sound was coming from. “Yeah, I’m . . . I’m with you.”

“Good, then I want you to listen to me,” said Eddie, squeezing his fingers in, like he could push the words under Buck’s skin. “Nora is lucky to have you as a father.”

“Eddie—”

“Shut up, Buck. Whatever mean thing your brain is telling you isn’t true,” he said, pulling one hand from Buck’s shoulder to tap him, just above his ear. For a moment, he wondered if pushing his hands through Buck’s hair would help him relax, but then he realized he was about to treat his best friend like a dog. “You would have been a great father if you’d known her since you were born, and it sucks that you didn’t. But you’ll be a great father now, okay? We’ll take it one step at a time. You know there’s no one in the world I trust with Chris more than you, right?”

“I—”

“If I can trust you with Chris, you can trust yourself with Nora.” He gave Buck a little shake, then; just enough to knock some sense into him; Buck was blinking at him, slowly, and his expression was starting to unnerve him. “Buck?”

Buck blinked faster, then, sucking in a deep breath and shaking his head, like he was psyching himself up; after a moment, he stepped backwards, so Eddie let his hands drop. They felt weirdly empty.

“Right, no, you’re . . . you’re right, thanks, man,” said Buck, turning away and running his hands through his hair and down his face. “You’re right, now’s not the time to—to—I should just focus on Nora right now.”

Well. That wasn’t exactly what Eddie meant. He didn’t mean that Buck couldn’t process his feelings; just that he couldn’t process whatever feelings were telling him that he was going to be bad at fatherhood. But before he could clarify, Buck had whipped out his phone and began typing a list.

“Okay, let’s see—she’s going to need a bed, I didn’t get one of those for the spare room yet. And like, sheets and stuff. Though she might want to pick that out. But maybe I’ll just get a basic set and she can have two?” He looked up at Eddie and then back at the screen, before he had a chance to reply. “I should ask Hen for a list of stuff that—that foster kids need. And maybe some parenting books. Oh, shit I have to call Maddie.”

“Call Maddie,” Eddie agreed. “I’ll go get a list from Hen, and then we’ll pick up Chris and go shopping, okay? One thing at a time.”

“Right,” Buck echoed, faintly. “One thing at a time.”

------

Buck would actually love to only deal with one crisis at a time; unfortunately, his brain decided that while he was questioning every decision he’d made in the last decade or so, it might as well throw in another debilitating revelation.

He might, a little bit, almost definitely, be . . . in love. With Eddie.

Sure! Why not?

He had only just started processing that he had a daughter, and then Athena was telling him she had to go spend the night at some random people’s house? And Buck was just supposed to, what, cheerfully wave her off, after he only just got her?

So, yeah, he was freaking out a little. There were just so many things to do, and so many questions, and so many variables, and, and, and then—Eddie.

Eddie was there, like he always was. Calm and cool under pressure, unflappable in the face of all the various ways Buck had fucked up his life over the years. Acting like this was no different. Acting like—almost like they were in it, together. Like Buck’s problems were his problems, and . . . oh shit. Had he been in love with Eddie this whole fucking time?

Is that why he’d freaked out so much when Eddie moved to Texas? Is that why he’d felt like he had to catapult himself out of the house on Bedford Street as soon as they got back, because otherwise he’d never leave?

Is that why he dated Tommy?

Okay. He really, really couldn’t deal with this right now. Eddie and his stupid brown eyes and gentle hands and reassuring smile was going to have to take a backseat while Buck focused on the more pressing problem.

He’d been a deadbeat dad for the last twelve years.

So, he did what he always did when he was in trouble: he called Maddie.

“Buck?” his sister answered on the fourth ring, her voice low.

“Shit, did I wake you?”

“No,” she said, nearly whispering. “I just put Jee down,” she explained. In the background, he could hear a door open and shut, and then Maddie said, “why would I be asleep? It’s like, eight o’clock.”

“It is?”

“Are you alright, Buck?”

“No,” he said, letting out a nervous laugh. “Maddie, I—fuck. I have a kid.”

“You—what?”

“I have a kid, Maddie,” he said, hearing his voice crack. He was pretty sure he was crying. “A daughter. That I didn’t know about. She’s twelve. Oh my god. Her name is Nora, and she—she came to the station today, and I—fuck, Maddie.”

“Oh. Oh, Buck,” said Maddie, her voice cracking as much as his, but softer. “You have a kid.”

She said it like it was a miracle; Buck let out a sound, somewhere between a laugh and a sob.

“Yeah,” he agreed.

“Nora?”

“Nora,” said Buck. “She’s—god, she’s perfect, Mads. She’s crazy smart and she’s cute as a button and she wants to live with me,” he said, hearing the reverence in his tone.

“What’s the deal with her mother?”

“She died,” Buck said, guilt wracking through him. “Her name was Wendy—I barely even remember her. God, I feel so—I don’t know if Wendy ever tried to find me, or what, but, I guess she told Nora enough about me . . .” He explained, then, about how Nora had shown up at the station and had been there when he got back; how Athena brought them DNA tests and took her back to the foster family; how he’d hear back in the morning, but until then, he had to go shopping.

“Do you want me to meet you?” Maddie asked. “Your shift ended at eight. Chim will be home soon and he can stay with the kids—”

“No, no, it’s okay,” he said. “Uh, Eddie’s gonna go with me.”

“Oh,” said Maddie. Her tone gave Buck a visceral flashback to being in her kitchen, months earlier. Would it be so crazy?

“We’re going to pick up Chris and go,” he added, before realizing that didn’t really give him any more plausible deniability. Oh well. One major life crisis at a time. “Because he’s fourteen and he’ll be able to help pick stuff out.”

“Right,” said Maddie. “You know, that sounds like a good plan.”

“You think? I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing here. You know me, I can barely keep myself alive most days. Feels crazy that they’re just going to send her home with me.”

“Evan.” Buck knew he’d let his hand show; let too much self-doubt some through his joke, his awe. “Don’t talk about yourself that way. You’re going to be an amazing father. I’ve always thought that.”

“You have?”

“Yes, Evan. You love kids! You’re so good with them. And not just in the fun-uncle way. You know you’re the only one who can get Jee to eat her vegetables.”

“You don’t do the fire truck sounds right.”

“Sure.”

“Nora’s twelve, Maddie. I don’t think she’s gonna fall for the same trick.”

“Buck. Breathe. You’ve been taking care of Chris for years. You know how to deal with a twelve-year-old.”

“She just met me, though,” Buck reminded her. “What if I mess this up?”

Maddie paused then, letting out a gentle sigh, like she was actually thinking about it; he appreciated it. Finally, she said, “okay. Imagine it was you.”

“Imagine—what?”

“Imagine you’re twelve,” Maddie said, walking him through it. “Maybe you only ever grew up with our mom—”

“Yikes.”

“That’s beside the point,” Maddie continued. “And then suddenly, you’re all alone in the world. No familiarity, no comfort, no control.”

“Jesus, Maddie,” Buck said, pained. “I’m already fucked up enough at this as it is.”

“I’m not trying to fuck you up, Buck,” Maddie said. “I’m just saying, actually take the time, think about where she’s coming from. Maybe she doesn’t need the best dad in the world right now, okay? Maybe she just needs to know that she has a safe space to call home. That someone is going to take care of her. That she can have some agency back. And once she starts to get comfortable, then you can worry about all the rest, okay?”

“Okay,” said Buck, half in the conversation, half distracted by the idea of Nora, being shuffled from house to house, all alone. It broke his heart. “Okay. Yeah. Thanks, Maddie.”

“Anytime, Buck.”

“This sucks,” he commented. “How are you going to give me all your parenting advice when my kid wound up older than yours?”

“Please,” said Maddie, “you’re the one who raised a teen already. I’ve been planning to ask you.”

Despite everything, Buck felt his face crack into a smile. At the thought of Chris. Of Buck being a person who helped raise him. Of people thinking he did a good job.

“We’ll get through it together,” he promised her.

“We can’t do any worse than the last generation, right?”

“I think I might be giving them a run for their money,” Buck said. “Kicked it off with twelve years of neglect.”

“Hey, that’s still what—twenty-four less years than they have,” Maddie pointed out; Buck snorted, and the laughter felt good, after the hours of tension. “You’ll make up for it, Buck. I know you. You’re going to be the best father in the world.”

Buck sniffled, scrubbing at his eyes. “I’m telling Chim you said that.”

“Said what?” Maddie asked, innocently. “You’re not talking sense, Buck. You’ve had a big shock tonight.”

“Alright, alright,” said Buck. He sensed eyes on him and turned, spotting Eddie waving to him from the doorway. He had Buck’s keys and a sheet of grocery list paper filled with items scribbled in Eddie’s elegant handwriting. “I gotta go, Eddie’s back.”

“Tell him I say hi,” Maddie said. “And call me tomorrow. And text me updates. And let me know what you need, okay?”

“Thanks, Mads,” Buck said. “Maddie says hello,” he told Eddie, when he finally hung up with his sister. As soon as the words slipped out, he felt his cheeks turn red. He sounded like a teenager; like he was saying I told my sister about you.

“Hi, Maddie,” Eddie replied, even though the phone call was already over. “Ready to go get Chris?”

“Yeah,” said Buck, grabbing Eddie’s keys out of his hand and leading the way to the car. “You sure you want him out and about this late? He has school tomorrow.”

“He’s not going to school tomorrow.” Eddie said it like it was obvious, a given, so much so that Buck actually checked on his phone to see that it was a Tuesday.

“Why not?” he asked, pulling out of the parking lot.

Eddie reached forward to fiddle with the radio station; he always tried three other channels before giving up and scrolling back to the one it was already on. “Why not? Buck. You have a daughter.”

Buck wished Eddie would be a little less supportive right now, if only because his heart couldn’t take it.

“It’s not like Chris needs to meet her right away,” Buck said. “What if he has tests or, or plans with his friends?”

“Then he’ll make them up later,” Eddie said, matter-of-factly. “This is important, Buck. Plus, this way you’ll have another kid vouching for you. She’ll probably warm up to you a lot more once Chris tells her how great you are.”

Buck was never much of a blusher, but for the second time in that drive he felt like his face was flaming. Did Eddie always say stuff like that? How did Buck normally react?

But as flattering as he was being, he was also making some good points. It probably would help Nora feel better if she knew that Buck had a hand in keeping another kid alive for the last eight years.

Buck let the warbling static of the radio fill the silence then, and before he knew it, they were stopping by the house and Chris was climbing into the backseat.

“Dad says you have a daughter?!” he said, upon spotting Buck.

Well. Guess that answers the question of how he was going to explain everything to Chris.

“Sorry,” said Eddie, wincing in the front seat. “I didn’t know how else to explain that he had to come shopping with us at this time of night.”

“I should be the one apologizing,” Buck said. “I’m like a beacon of bad parenting.”

Eddie elbowed him, knocking his arm off of where it was resting on the console between them. “Chris, tell Buck he’ll be a good dad.”

“You’ll be a good dad,” Christopher repeated. The teenager apathy had started sneaking into his voice most days, but he sounded like his younger self when he said that. The way he used to sound when Buck would recommend zoo trips. “Tell me about her, what’s she like?”

Buck recapped the day for a second time, and then fielded Chris’s questions with a distressing number of I-don’t-knows while Eddie tapped away on his phone in the passenger seat. When they parked in the handicap spot outside the store, Eddie said, “okay, got the mattress. I figure that’d be the hardest thing to get by tomorrow, and you can get those overnight delivery ones that come all squeezed up in a box.” He pulled out a pen and crossed something off of his list. “Now we just need a bed frame.”

Buck wanted to kiss him on the mouth.

Instead, he swallowed down the urge and followed Eddie’s lead, getting a second shopping cart. Together, he, Eddie, and Chris filled them up with everything they—and, more importantly, Hen—could think of: bedding and towels and an alarm clock, a flip phone that Buck could add to his phone plan tomorrow. In the toiletries section, Buck got held up in front of the toothbrushes for so long that a store employee made the mistake of asking him if she could help.

After the poor woman—Linda, her nametag said—recovered from the shock of his trauma dump in the oral hygiene aisle, she kindly helped them pick out everything from floss and toothpaste to shampoo and conditioner. And she didn’t stop there—she took them to the next aisle and picked out boxes of tampons and pads, along with a heating pad and something called Midol; Buck was seriously going to have to do some research.

Once she’d taken him through the last aisle for face-masks and nail clippers, Buck remembered that Nora’s nails had chipped paint on them; so then she helped him pick out a few polishes and remover and the cotton balls you were supposed to use for that.

“You’re going to be a good dad,” she said, patting him on the cheek. “You’re a good boy.”

“Thank you,” said Buck, earnestly; he basked in it, a little, enjoying this stranger’s perception of him, before he turned and saw Eddie and Chris, waiting at the other end of the aisle with matching, shit-eating grins.

“Doesn’t matter if I tell him he’ll be a good dad,” said Chris. “As long as Linda thinks so.”

“Yeah, guess my opinion doesn’t matter either,” said Eddie, abandoning his laden cart to walk closer to Buck, a sly look on his face. “Is it because I didn’t call you a good boy?”

Eddie must have been going for some sort of sass, with that, but unfortunately, it just went straight to Buck’s groin.

“Shut up,” he said, eloquently; and then he turned and pushed his cart towards the check-out before Eddie could say anything else. 

It took several trips to unload the car when they got home; they’d driven through a fast-food place for dinner on the way back, so Chris sat on the couch, happily munching on French fries while he watched them unpack and start assembling furniture.

Midnight had passed by the time they’d gotten it all together: one bed frame, two night-stands, and a book case; Buck figured she’d want to pick out the rest herself.  Chris fell asleep around eleven, passed out on the couch while old episodes of a ghost hunting show played across the screen.

“We could stay over,” Eddie offered, when they both finished cleaning up the cardboard and Styrofoam packaging and stood in front of the couch, watching Chris mumbling in his sleep.

“No,” Buck said, quickly. “No, I—I feel bad waking Chris up, but he can’t sleep on the couch.”

“He’s a teenage boy, Buck,” Eddie pointed out. “I caught him sleeping in his gaming chair the other day. His neck was bent in a way that would have sent me to PT.”

Buck’s brain scrambled to find something to say that wasn’t but then where would you sleep?

“Still,” Buck said. “If he doesn’t get a good night’s sleep, we’ll all be dealing with Grumpy Chris.”

Eddie had to concede that. He roused Christopher and ushered him out the door, but then lingered in the doorway. “You’re sure you don’t want us to stay?”

Of course I do, thought Buck. Stay forever.

“No, man,” he said, instead, leaning up against the doorframe and crossing his arms, so he didn’t do something stupid like reach out and grab him. “You’ve done more than enough.”

“I’m not doing this for—” Eddie broke off, sighing. “This is nothing. It’s just, what we do, right? I’ve got your back.”

“I know you do,” said Buck. It took physical effort to stop his voice from dipping low when he said it.

“You don’t have to do this alone, Buck.”

And—ugh. Eddie was doing absolutely nothing to help Buck out with the whole love revelation. He nodded, his mouth dry.

“Call me tomorrow, okay? We can come over in the morning, before—or later. Whatever works.”

Buck nodded again, not trusting his voice; but Eddie pushed for verbal confirmation. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he said, more of a whisper than anything.

Eddie reached out and clasped his shoulder, ducking his head until Buck made eye contact with him, like some sort of sadist. “You’re gonna be alright,” he said, and the skin under Buck’s shirt burned with the contact. “Dad,” Eddie added.

“Fuck,” Buck said, rubbing his shoulder where Eddie’s hands had been on him, watching him catch up with Chris on the way to their car. He was royally fucked.

Chapter Text

If Buck thought he was getting any sleep that night, it was only because of his innate, unlikely optimism, and not because of any realistic expectations. And anyway, he was sorely mistaken—he didn’t even end up trying.

There was just too much to do, to think about, to prepare for. He brought his laptop to bed and started googling. 

First, Wendy Nolan. Only a few hits came up that looked like her, defunct social media pages and a LinkedIn that hadn’t been updated in six years. Buck stared at the small thumbnail of her profile picture, willing himself to remember.

He thinks she had… pink hair? A bartender, maybe, or a patron when he’d been one. Twelve years plus nine months ago—that would be right around when he got to LA from Peru, with new roommates and a dream of applying to the LAFD. It had taken some time to get his shit together, though, to get back in shape for the tests and to study for the exam, so he’d picked up a job at a dive bar around the block from the house he was staying in. 

He thought he remembered her place; a studio in Culver City, with scarves over her lampshades and an old school beaded curtain. 

But he could be wrong. There were so many people, and it was so long ago. God, he felt like an asshole.

He clicked away from the search for Wendy and typed in what to know about the foster system and then how to help kids who have lost their mom and then he started typing in his real, rambling, painfully specific questions, hoping some poor soul on Reddit had already asked and gotten them answered:

I just found out I have a daughter and I have sole custody. What should I do?

How do you act when you meet your kid for the first time when they’re twelve?

Ways to make a kid feel comfortable after they’ve been in the foster system even though you’re their biological parent and you should have been there, you piece of shit?

Some answers were more helpful than others. Buck jotted down all of the things he thought were worth remembering in a notes app, things like don’t be afraid to set boundaries (makes kids feel safe, will get harder the longer you wait), and show interest but don’t push too much, and introduce her to everyone (good to know she has support system outside of me).

Around three am, he searched tips for raising a teenage girl and then got so overwhelmed he had to get up and get a glass of water. He forced himself to power through six different pages, occasionally going down a social media rabbit hole when an article hyperlinked to videos with captions like things my dad did right and what I wish my foster parents knew.  

When the words on the screen began to blur, and all of the tips and tricks and lessons he’d read looped through his brain, making him feel punch-drunk and overwhelmed, he closed his eyes and took a long, deep breath. And then he opened a new browser and typed in I’m in love with my straight best friend.

The webpage loaded with result after result, from queer outlets and blogs and advice columnists, suggesting videos and message boards and romance books. Buck closed the tab as fast as he could, before he could get a sense of how well that had gone for all those other people.

He closed his laptop, then and must have passed out, because the next thing he knew, his phone was ringing, shrilly in his quiet bedroom. He flinched awake and lunged for it, his brain already repeating Nora, Nora, Nora.

He had half a second to register the caller—Athena—and the time—6:45 am—before he picked up.

“Athena?”

“Congratulations, Buck. It’s a girl.”

—————

Nora would kill to call Sadie right now. Well, maybe not kill, but she would wait until everyone in the Warren house fell asleep and then creep down into the kitchen, where their ancient landline was installed—a clunky thing, with a long cord, the kind that Nora had only seen on old TV shows before she’d moved in. 

She picked up the receiver and walked with it into the pantry, settling on the ground, the long cord stretched out under the closed door. She stared at the dial pad for a minute, thinking about Buck’s number, scribbled on a post-it in her pocket, that she’d accidentally memorized on the drive back to the Warrens. But she’d see him tomorrow, probably; and anyway, what would she say?

Instead, she dialed the one other number she had memorized—that still worked, at least—and waited while it rang, and rang, and rang.

Pick up pick up pick up, she thought, scrunching her eyes closed and crossing her fingers in her lap, 

“You’ve reached Sadie! Leave—”

She hung up, hearing the dial tone loud in her ear. She really, really needed her best friend right now. She’d barely talked to Sadie since everything happened; she’d bartered Morris into letting her use his phone for two calls, but one time she’d had to leave a message, and the second time Nora had barely gotten to tell Sadie about her plan to find Buck before Sadie’s grandma arrived and she had to go. 

But—that meant the Warren's landline was an unknown number. Maybe that was why she didn’t pick up! Sadie scrubbed at her eyes and dialed again; this time, when she heard Sadie’s voicemail, she wasn’t deterred. She hung up and called a third time. Three rings in, finally—

“Hello?”

“Sadie! It’s me.”

“Nora?! Oh my god, Nor. How are you? Are you okay? Why are you calling me at two am? Do you need help?”

“I found him, Sadie,” she said, her voice came out strangled, excitement and fear and disappointment and hope all swirling around, feeling like they were going to choke her.

“You found—who?”

“Buck,” she said, trying out the words. “My, uh, dad. I found him.”

“Holy smokes,” said Sadie. She always avoided cursing, even when though there were no adults around. “Your dad? Nora! Tell me everything.”

She could hear Sadie’s sheets rustling on the other end of the phone, and she could picture her sitting up in bed. She missed sleepovers there, where the string of purple lights over her window were always lit up, and the canopy draping around her bed made it feel like they were in a secret club house. 

She told her, then, about everything—her questionnaire, and the guy Eddie who’d given her cookies and introduced her to Buck. About all of the other adults she’d met—Hen, who was her favorite, by far, and Athena, whose no-nonsense attitude was weirdly reassuring. Chimney, who she hadn’t talked to much, but who was apparently her uncle.

“Okay, but what about Buck?” Sadie said, immediately zeroing in on what Nora was avoiding. “How did he seem? What did he say? Was he nice?”

“I—I can’t really tell. I mean, it’s hard to tell. The first thing he said was, like, that I was really old.”

“What?” Sadie asked, sounding indignant. “You’re not old! And anyway, that’s his fault!”

Nora giggled, for the first time in ages—probably since that time in sixth period when Elliott laughed so hard that chocolate milk came out of his nose. 

“Right?” She agreed. “Like, sorry if my existence is inconvenient.”

“Did he say it was?”

“No,” said Nora, but she was hedging, and Sadie could tell. She didn’t want to tell her everything—maybe because she didn’t want Sadie to think badly of Buck, or maybe because if she didn’t say it, it wouldn’t seem real—but Sadie was her best friend, and if she didn’t tell her, who could she?

“He—he seems nice. I mean, he bakes cookies and he made me hot chocolate, and he had pictures up in his locker of his friend’s son and his niece and nephew, so at least I know he likes kids. He said he didn’t know about me. And he didn’t try to get out of the DNA test or anything.”

“But . . .”

“But . . . when I was leaving with Athena, I asked her if I could run back in to use the bathroom before we left and I overheard him talking to Eddie.”

“Eddie was the first guy, right? Who gave you the cookies?”

“Yeah, the one with the son—that Buck has the picture of in his locker.”

“What did you overhear?”

“He was just kind of—freaking out. He said . . . he said it was a nightmare.”

“What the fudge?”

“I mean, I get it. He’s just like, this single guy living his life and all of the sudden I show up and I’m like, hey, how would you like a shit ton of responsibility? I kind of am a nightmare.”

“You’re not a nightmare! You’re the opposite of a nightmare!”

“He found out he had a secret kid, Sades. And not even a cute little one. A whole teenager. No one likes teenagers! Not even people who have their kids on purpose!”

“Maybe you should be a nightmare. He deserves it. He’s the one who had a kid and never did anything about it. He got twelve extra years being responsibility-free and now that it’s his turn to step up he’s acting like a baby about it?”

“To be fair, I think he was telling the truth when he said he didn’t know about me.”

“I don’t care, I’m still mad at him,” said Sadie, loyally. “You should show him. Put sugar water in his bug spray. Put a lizard in his water bottle.”

“Did you guys just watch The Parent Trap?”

“Yeah, it was family movie night.”

They fell into silence, and Nora relished in it, the feeling, for the first time in months, like she wasn’t alone.

“I’m scared, Sadie,” she admitted, finally. It wasn’t until she spoke that she realized she was crying.

“I know,” Sadie said, letting her let it out. But after a few minutes, she said, “so, I have a theory.”

“A theory?”

“Yeah. You can’t be mad at me for it though.”

Nora rubbed her nose on her sleeve, tangled her fingers up in the long curly phone cord. “I don’t even know what it is yet,” she said.

“Fine,” said Sadie, sighing heavily. “Okay, so. I don’t want to—ugh, I don’t know how to say this.”

“Just say it,” Nora directed. She could feel her cheeks stretching into a smile, dried tear stains and all. 

“Your mom was really cool, in a lot of ways, and, like, I know you guys had a weird relationship but I’m not trying to insult her. I’m just saying, that you’ve said, that she wasn’t very, like, sweet, you know?”

Nora stayed quiet. She knew what Sadie meant; half of their sleepovers had been spent dissecting thing Nora’s mom had said or done; and that was just the stuff she’d told Sadie about. But she’d been whisked away to the Warrens right after she died, and aside from three bland visits with a child therapist, no one had bothered asking Nora if she wanted to talk about it. About her mom. 

They didn’t even have a funeral.

It twisted up her guts that this was the first time she was actually talking about her mom to someone who knew her, and that Sadie was focusing on the more frustrating parts of her. It would have felt weird to gloss over everything, too—to pretend that she’d been the perfect mom. But still.

The tears started leaking out again.

“Are you mad?”

“No,” Nora told her, but she was sniffling, and Sadie could hear it.

“You are,” Sadie lamented. “I made you cry.”

“No,” Nora lied again. “I just—I haven’t really talked about her much. And—I don’t know. It still doesn’t feel real some days.”

“I’m sorry,” Sadie insisted. “I didn’t mean—I mean, she was really cool. Remember when she taught us how to do fishtail braids? And she made us mocktails and let us drink them out on the fire-escape?”

Nora did remember that. It was one of the few times Sadie had slept over her house instead of the other way around, since her mom worked so many nights.

“And, remember when she came to pick you up at Field Day when you—”

“Yeah, yeah, I remember the hurdles.”

“And she yelled at Coach Greenie.”

Actually, Coach Greenie had almost not let her compete; Nora had been the one to insist that her short stature shouldn’t disqualify her from the track events. But Coach Greenie had been a real jerk about it when she wiped out, and no one liked him anyway, so the whole school was excited to hear that he’d been put in his place by Nora’s mom.

“I remember that,” Nora said, switching positions so she was leaning down further, her knees up in front of her. 

“Right, so, you know I mean like, all due respect to Miss Wendy,” Sadie. “But she wasn’t like . . . sweet.”

Nora knew what she meant. Her mom wasn’t known to cuddle up on the couch and start heart-to-hearts, or whatever the mom and daughter on Gilmore Girls did. She didn’t make soup if Nora was sick; she was more of the ‘here’s some cough syrup, call me if you need me’ types. Instead of baking birthday cakes, she gave Nora forty dollars and offered to drive her to the mall. She never said yes to pets and rarely said yes to sleepovers and didn’t go out of her way to win over Nora’s teachers or the other kids’ parents.

It was fine. It was what Nora was used to. It was why she’d been mostly fine in foster care, except that she really wanted new sneakers. That was it.

“Sure,” she said, after realizing she hadn’t replied to Sadie yet.

“But you’re sweet,” said Sadie, a teasing lilt in her voice.

“Stop. I’m not sweet.”

“You are!”

“This is slander, Sadie.”

“You made Gross Greg a birthday card last year and snuck it into his locker! I saw you.”

“Don’t call him Gross Greg,” Nora said, even though she knew Sadie would never say that where anyone else could hear her.

“Remember when we found that baby bird that had fallen out of the nest? You’re the one who got the shoebox and went all the way to the vet by yourself to drop it off.”

“That baby bird died,” she reminded her.

“But you still tried! I’ve seen you climb a tree just to get some kid's frisbee back.”

“I like climbing trees.”

“Remember when you punched Paul Tober?”

“People don’t usually say punching people makes you sweet,” Nora pointed out.

“Yeah, but you did it because he laughed at Natalie for getting her period during gym class. See? Sweet.”

“What is your point?”

“My point is,” Sadie said, pausing to yawn. “My point is, maybe—if you didn’t get that from your mom—maybe you got it from your dad.”

Nora let the thought soak in as she reflexively let out a yawn of her own. Her eyelids were getting heavier and her brain was feeling fuzzier and maybe that’s why Sadie’s idea didn’t sound too crazy.

“You said you were mad at him for calling me a nightmare.”

“He didn’t call you a nightmare,” Sadie pointed out. “He said the situation was. And anyway, I can be mad at him for that but I’m reserving judgment until I meet him. I want him to be sweet.”

“Yeah,” said Nora, and it came out like a whisper. “I do, too.”

The next morning, Mrs. Warren woke her up at the crack of dawn; Nora felt the lack of sleep catch up to her. Whatever zen state of hope she’d reached the night before in the pantry had entirely evaporated, and she was determined to be back to her usual self. Realistic. Self-sufficient. Tough.

It’s not like Sadie had been right about her being sweet, anyway. So Nora wasn’t an asshole like a lot of the kids in seventh grade; it didn’t mean anything. And hope was better saved for kids who’d had at least one thing go right in their life, like, ever.

So when Mrs. Warren told her to get up and start packing, she tamped down on the confusing jumble of feelings in her stomach. This doesn’t matter, she reminded herself, as she shoved her clothes and books into black plastic bags. 

Only, when she dragged them downstairs and spotted Buck, waiting in the Warrens’ kitchen, it kind of felt like it mattered a whole lot.

--------

Buck woke everyone up with calls as soon as he got off the phone with Athena. He called Eddie, first, then Maddie and Chim, then Hen and Karen. Everyone offered to go with him to pick up Nora, but he turned them all down. He wasn’t sure if he wanted time with her, or if he just wanted to prove to himself that he could do it on his own; but either way, it felt right. Nora had been so brave, coming all the way to the station by herself; he could return the favor.

Nora’s case worker, a no-nonsense woman named Brenda, gave him the address and told him to meet her at the Warren’s house, with strict instructions not to go inside until she arrived, so he stood on the curb, pacing, until he heard his name.

“Evan Buckley?”

He whirled around, and saw a woman was striding down the street. She was older and was wearing a pantsuit, which made Buck feel like an asshole in his t-shirt and jeans. He’d been so eager to get out of the house that he forgot he had a lot of first impressions to make.

“Yes, that’s me,” he said, reaching out for a handshake, trying to inject some of that bravado that came so easily on calls. You can trust me, he wanted to say. It’s my job to handle tricky situations.

But this wasn’t a tricky situation. This wasn’t someone getting their arm stuck in a vending machine or a car accident that needed the jaws of life. This was his daughter.

And Brenda had the power to determine if he was fit to be her parent.

She returned the handshake, firm but brief, and then asked to see his ID. “Normally we would have a meeting down at the office, but Sergeant Grant explained the situation. And we like to move fast when it comes to familial reunification.”

“Right,” said Buck. He didn’t say that he probably would have been there that morning regardless of protocol.

She pulled out a file and handed it to him; inside was the proof: documentation that Evan Buckley was Nora Nolan’s biological father.

It’d be weird to frame it, right?

“As you can see,” Brenda narrated. “The test was conclusive in proving a DNA match, which means you are currently Nora Nolan’s only living guardian. You can refuse your parental rights—”

“No,” he interrupted. “No, I’m not going to refuse, I—she’s mine. I’m her father.”

Brenda’s mouth twitched, and her gray eyes surveyed him. “Grant said you just found out about her yesterday, is that right?”

“Yeah,” he said, though it felt weird to think that. Yesterday felt like a million years ago. “Yeah, I didn’t know—I can’t believe I didn’t know.”

“It’s a big adjustment in a short time,” Brenda continued. “If you feel that you need time or resources to help with the transition—”

“No,” Buck interrupted again. He didn’t know how to explain, without sounding insane, that he already loved his daughter more than life itself. That the only thing he needed was to get his eyes on her again, to make sure she was okay. “I have a really good, uh, support system,” he said instead, thinking of his research from the night before. “My friend and his kid helped me pick out some stuff for her last night, and my other friends are foster parents so they’ve been helping fill me in, and, I spend a lot of time with kids, you know, my niece and nephew and my friends’ kids, and I’m CPR certified, and—”

“Mr. Buckley,” Brenda cut him off. “You’re her father. You don’t have to prove anything.”

“Right.”

“But there will be a few surprise home visits in your future,” she told him. “Just to make sure Nora is settling in okay.”

“Of course.”

“Do you have any other questions?”

“Can—can I go get her, now?”

Brenda smiled at him, then; the look of a public service worker who wasn’t used to seeing things go right. “Yes, we can.”

They rang the doorbell, then, and a couple opened the door. Buck’s eyes panned over them, like he would be able to tell just by looking at them if they’d been treating Nora well. They seemed perfectly pleasant, if a little bland; they were both wearing shades of beige and smiling politely. They invited him and Brenda into the kitchen for coffee, and then the woman said she would go tell Nora he’d arrived.

Buck turned the coffee down; his stomach was jittery enough, from the nerves and the double shot espresso he’d bought on the drive over, when he realized he was going to be a full hour too early.

They had some inane conversation about the weather, but Buck couldn’t pay attention to it, his eyes kept darting to the staircase. Could he just go up and get Nora himself?

But then, all of the sudden, there she was. He saw her knees first, the one still scraped up, and then the hem of her white dress, and then he looked up and met her ocean-blue eyes. She looked tired, and her hair was even wilder than the day before. She froze on the steps, like she wasn’t expecting to see him there.

“Nora,” he said. And then he realized she was dragging two black plastic bags behind her.

He darted around the kitchen island and took the stairs two at a time to where she’d stopped. “Here, let me,” he said, reaching out to grab them and gesturing for her to go down first. She ducked her head and hurried down the last few steps, tightening her hands on her backpack straps as she went. Buck lifted both black plastic bags with devastating ease; was this really everything Nora had?

“Hi Nora,” said Brenda, stepping forward to present her with a second purple file folder. “I’m sure by now the Warrens have told you that the DNA results came back positive, and Evan Buckley is your father. He’s accepted custodial rights, which means you’ll be going to live with him. After a few follow-up visits, you’ll officially be out of the foster system. Do you have any questions or concerns?”

Buck stared at Nora, who stared at Brenda. “No,” she said, quietly.

“Okay then,” said Brenda, checking her watch. “In that case, you can say your goodbyes and be off. Nora, my card is in that file, so call me if you need anything, you understand?”

“Yes,” she said, simply. “Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Warren,” she said, in that same overly polite tone she’d used when Athena showed up. Buck thought of the challenge in her voice when she said trying to prove you were out of the country?

Absurdly, he felt buoyed by it. Years ago, he’d said it to Maddie—it’s easier to lash out at the people you know will be there for you. He’d rather be met with Nora’s snark if the alternative was polite deference.

“Goodbye, dear,” said Mrs. Warren, stepping forward to wrap Nora in very short hug; Buck wasn’t sure who pulled away first. Mr. Warren reached out to ruffle her hair as she walked past, and Buck felt a useless flare of annoyance at the paternal gesture.

“Thank you, both,” Buck added, sincerely; because as much as he didn’t know them, they had kept Nora alive for the last few months, and for that he would always be grateful. “Nora, you, uh, ready?”

“Yep,” she said; she still didn’t meet his eyes, but she did march ahead, leading the way out the front door. Buck gave a quick nod of thanks to the three adults in the kitchen and hurried after her, carrying the bags.

Nora stopped on the sidewalk, squinting in the sun.

“So, this is my car,” Buck narrated, pointlessly, as he led her to the jeep. He popped the trunk and put her bags in, and then gestured for her to get in the front seat. Twelve-year-olds could sit in the passenger seat; Buck tried not to think about the fact that he had missed the entirety of her time in car seats and booster seats and backseats.

He climbed in and started the car, fiddling with the radio dial until he could hear a song playing clearly—some synth track, a pop star’s voice filling the silence. He turned the volume down and shifted in his seat so he was fully facing her. His daughter.

“Are you hungry?”

She finally looked up at him, then, eyes guarded. “Not really,” she said. “Mrs. Warren made oatmeal.”

“Okay,” said Buck. “I thought that maybe, we could go back to my place, so you can see it? And then we can go shopping, to get you anything that you need. Or want. And then, uh, my friend Eddie and his son Christopher, they could meet us for lunch? And then tonight we could set up your room and you could just, like, settle in.”

Nora nodded, but didn’t say anything else. He pulled the car out onto the road as they fell into silence, and Buck could feel the words bubbling up; the ones he’d read and practiced the night before, the ones he knew he had to say, and fast. He took the coward’s way out by saying it while they were driving, but he thought Nora would appreciate having the privacy to hear this while he wasn’t looking at her.

“I know you’ve had a lot of, uh, change, lately—”

Nora snorted, and Buck felt like an idiot, but he kept going.

“I just wanted to say—I know you only met me yesterday, but I’m so . . . I’m so glad you found me.” It felt like a ridiculous understatement; when Buck thought of how easily he could have gone on, not knowing about her existence, it made him want to throw up. “And—like Brenda said, I’m—I have full parental rights now, and I know that I haven’t really earned it, but I hope you’ll give me the chance to. But even if you don’t, and­–and no matter what you do, you’ll always have a home with me, okay? I swear.”

In the silence that followed, the song on the radio ended, and another one started; it was even more upbeat than the last, comically cheerful in the quiet between them. He resisted the urge to twist the dial and gave Nora a minute, in case she wanted to respond.

Finally, she said, “that was pretty good. Did the internet tell you to say that?”

Buck choked on a laugh, a strangled sound that slipped out before he had the chance to flick his eyes her way to confirm that she meant it as a joke. Her head was still turned away, out the window, but he thought maybe her posture had relaxed a little. He thought of Chris, the way he always found the will to sass them, no matter how dire the circumstances.

“The internet was surprisingly lacking in instructions on handling this exact scenario,” Buck admitted. “I’m hoping that maybe we can figure it out, together.”

She hummed, quietly, instead of answering. He decided not to push it.

They listened to music the rest of the way home, and Buck felt unaccountably nervous as he pulled into his parking space outside the apartment building. He was thankful that he’d moved—the loft wouldn’t be big enough for both of them, and he had no idea what he’d have done if he found out about Nora while he was still sleeping on Eddie’s couch—but the new place hadn’t even begun to feel like home to him yet. How was it supposed to feel like home to Nora?

“Full disclosure,” he said, grabbing her bags from the trunk and leading her up the walkway. “I moved recently, so it needs some work. And we got a few things set up for you last night, but you’re going to need a lot more—anyway, that’s why we can go shopping. But if you want to change anything, let me know. And it’s just a six-month lease so we can always look for a different place—”

He was rambling. He wished Eddie where there to cut off his chattering; unfortunately, his incessant need to fill the silence only grew as he got increasingly self-conscious about the apartment. It was in a pre-war building, so it had high ceilings and crown molding; noisy radiators by the windows and a big fireplace that didn’t work. It reminded him a bit of Abby’s place, which he had mixed feelings about; but at the time, it felt right to pick something that was the total opposite of the loft.

He unlocked the door and held it open for Nora, who walked in slowly, taking in the place in silence. Buck would kill to know what she was thinking. About literally anything.

“So, yeah,” he said, picking up where he left off. “This is the living room. That is the kitchen,” he gestured to a door to the left, which had a kitchen that was too small for his liking; but it had updated appliances, and they’d taken out the top half of the dividing wall so it opened up to the living room. “This is my room,” he gestured, leading her down the hallway. “And, uh, this is yours.”

Nora stopped outside of the closed door. The night before, after Chris finished his dinner and before he fell asleep on the couch, he’d dug out some of the craft supplies that had made the move—stuff Buck used to keep for when Chris visited, and now pulled out whenever Jee came by—and made a sign that said Welcome home, Nora!

Buck had gotten a little choked up at it, which Chris had made fun of him for. But then Eddie left to tape it up, and when he was gone, Chris let Buck pull him into a hug. “I meant it,” he’d said, then, painfully earnest for a teenager. “That you’ll be good. Trust me.”  

“Chris made that,” Buck confessed, even though Nora hadn’t asked. “He helped me and Eddie pick out a few of the things—you’ll see—but we can get anything else you want when we’re out—”

“Can I have a minute alone?” Nora asked.

Cool. The first thing his daughter asked him for, and it was to be left alone.

She was almost a teenager, though, and the internet did warn him about this.

“Yeah, of course,” he said, dropping her bags outside of the door. “I’ll just be—” he pointed down the hall and then made himself turnaround and keep walking until he was out of sight, in the kitchen. He pulled out his phone and found he had several messages in the extended 118 group chat.

Maddie sent how’s it going, Buck? Did everything go okay with the pick-up? Which Chimney had replied to with a gif of a starfish saying today’s the day! Hen and Karen had both sent messages that said good luck! And Eddie said, keep us posted.

Eddie had also sent him a message on the side, that said still on for lunch?

Buck replied to that one first. Yeah, I think so, he said, followed by I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing.

Then he copied that message and re-sent it to the group chat.

Go easy on yourself, Chimney replied first. Most people’s first day as a parent is just this: and then he sent through a picture of baby Robbie sleeping peacefully in his swaddle.

Today was always going to be tricky, Hen seconded. How does Nora seem?

Okay, I think, he replied. She’s pretty quiet.  

Karen laughed at the message and then sent, don’t get used to it, Buck. She’s a teenage girl with half your genes.

Maddie hearted Karen’s message and replied, Agreed. I can’t wait to meet her!

Eddie sent through a text then, but it was in the thread with just the two of them. You’re doing great. One thing at a time, right?

He stared at the message, then, wishing Eddie’s words made him feel calmer instead of anxious for a whole other reason. We’ve been in the apartment for like one minute and she asked me to leave her alone.

Chris threw a textbook at me the last time I opened his door without knocking, Eddie sent back. You’re not special.  

Buck almost laughed, feeling a small flicker of hope in his chest at Eddie’s text; but then Eddie sent through a red heart and Buck’s stomach twisted all up in knots. There went any possibility of him remaining calm.

-----

Nora stood in front of an aisle full of dressers, feeling overwhelmed. She’d been repeating her mantra, this doesn’t matter, all day, but it didn’t ring any truer in the furniture section of the Target than it did when Buck hurried up the stairs to grab her bags for her.

Not that she needed anyone to carry her bags for her; especially some guy. Nora was strong enough to lift two bags. But it just . . . it felt like something a dad would do.

So she let him. She let him lead her to his car and stumble over his little speech about how she’d always have a home now, or whatever, and she tried not to think about the way he’d said this is a nightmare the day before.

The truth was, she didn’t know what to think about any of this. She didn’t know what to make of the welcome home sign that Eddie’s son made her, or the bed frame that sat, mattress-less, between two empty night stands. She didn’t know what to make of the hallway bathroom that looked like it’d been stocked by someone who’d just learned about the concept of human bodies.

She didn’t know what to make of the fact that Buck kept pointing to items and saying, “do you want that?” and then throwing it in the cart, if she so much as shrugged in his direction. So far, he’d added two lamps, three sheet sets, a mug that looked like a cactus, a tote bag, a set of hair clips, a journal, a little green suitcase that actually held a record player, and a big, fluffy blanket that Buck had put in without even asking about.

“Do you like any of these?” he asked, following her gaze. She should probably feel more excited about this shopping spree; she was pretty sure that if she tried to put a flat screen TV in the cart, Buck wouldn’t even blink. But looking at the selection of new, cookie-cutter dressers just made her miss her old room all the more. It hadn’t been perfect, by far—most of the furniture had been scrounged from thrift stores and buy-nothing groups and items that had been left on the sidewalk—but it had been hers. And she’d had to give most of it up when she went to the Warrens. Replacing it with a square white dresser felt depressing.

Still, she needed one, she guessed. She pointed to the closest option—a low one, in some light wood color with four drawers—and said, “that one?”

Buck stepped forward to grab the corresponding box, the way he’d been doing all morning, but right before he pulled it off the shelf, he turned around to face her.

“You hate it, don’t you?”

“What?” she said, caught off guard. It was the first time Buck had said something to her in a normal tone; he always softened his voice, the way people can’t help changing their voice when they talk to babies or dogs. She’d forgotten he had another setting.

“This dresser. And like, half this stuff. You’re just yessing me, aren’t you?”

Nora’s eyes dropped to the cart, and then she looked up at Buck. He crossed his arms and looked at her, expectantly, and she thought of Mrs. Warren, helping her unpack that first night, saying, my, they let you pack a lot, didn’t they?

She thought of Sadie, saying, I’m reserving judgment.

“I like the cactus mug,” she said, finally.

He grinned then, and it might have been the first real smile she ever saw him give. It was a nice one, objectionably; his eyes crinkled at the corners, and his whole face kind of lit up.

“It’s a good mug,” he said, reaching down and pulling it out of the cart. “Anything else?”

She stepped forward, then, and picked up the one set of sheets that she actually liked—pink and white checkers, with strawberries on them—along with the record player. After a moment, she grabbed the fluffy blanket, too.

“That’s more like it,” said Buck. “Alright, let’s get out of here. You want sneakers, right? We have just enough time to grab those before we meet Chris and Eddie for lunch.”

Nora felt a little lighter with every step they took towards the check-out.

He remembered.

Chapter Text

Buck took her to one of those fancy running shoe stores, then; the kind where they make you run on a treadmill and then tell you which shoes you should buy, which she thought was probably overkill, but still. She left the store with one pair of sneakers on and another in a bag, and she dropped the strappy sandals in the garbage can on the sidewalk outside.

“Hey,” she said, right before they got back in the car. “Thanks.”

He smiled at her again; like now that he started, he couldn’t stop. She had to remind herself that it was too early to get attached. “’Course, Nora.”

Their next stop was a kitschy diner, not far from the beach. It had red vinyl booths and a sign instructing you to order at the counter. Buck said, “there they are,” as soon as they walked in, and led her to a table in the corner where Eddie sat with a teenage boy. Chris.

“Hey,” said Eddie, standing up from the booth when she got closer, though she wasn’t sure why. He exchanged some loaded eye contact with Buck and then fixed his gaze on her, and said, “Nora, it’s good to see you again. This is my son, Christopher.”

“Hey,” said Christopher, giving her a small wave. She waved back, and when no one said anything else, she scooted into the booth until she was sitting across from him.

“Buck and I will go put orders in,” Eddie said. “Chris, the usual?”

“Yep,” said Chris, watching Buck and Eddie like he found them deeply entertaining.

“Nora, what do you want?” Eddie asked her. “It’s basic diner stuff.”

“Oh, uh—maybe a grilled cheese?” she asked.

“Fries?” Buck asked, and she nodded. “Milkshake?” she nodded again. “Flavor?”

“Vanilla. Please.”

“You got it,” he said, giving her finger guns as Eddie pulled him away to the counter.

“Smooth,” she heard Eddie comment to him when he finally turned around.

“Sorry about them,” Chris said, once they were alone at the table. “They’re not very subtle.”

Nora looked at him, this boy across from her. He looked older than he did in the picture that was in Buck’s locker; it must have been from a few years ago. He had curly hair that looked like Buck’s, and dark, thick-framed glasses. Nora wondered if Buck had helped him with the experiment; if Eddie had given him the picture and he’d decided to tape it up on a whim, or if Buck had been the one to snap it and get it printed out, just to hang it up.

She was suddenly flooded with a million questions, about Buck and Chris and who they were to each other. But instead, she voiced the question that had crossed her mind after the seventh time Buck mentioned Eddie. “Are they, like, dating?”

Chris was midway through taking a sip of his iced tea and snorted, half-laughing, half-coughing. Nora grabbed some napkins and passed them over. “Am I not supposed to ask that?”

“Maybe you should ask them,” said Chris. “I’d love to see their faces.”

“Would they be weird about it?”

“Probably,” Chris ceded. “But not like, in a homophobic way. They’d invent some new repressed way to be weird about it.” Nora made a face at him, then, and Chris continued. “They’ve been like that,” he said, gesturing to where Buck and Eddie were crowded together, having a low conversation by the counter; as she watched, Eddie stuck a straw in a drink, took a sip, and then passed it to Buck. “Since I was six.”

The casual way he said it irked Nora, even though she knew she didn’t have a right to be annoyed. He just made it sound so . . . inevitable. That Buck had come into his life and stayed. Like it was a given.

“So, what? Did he bribe you to come here and tell me what a good dad he’ll be?”

“Buck’s the best,” Christopher replied, and it wasn’t until she heard the sharpness in his tone that she realized that her own voice had gotten a little hostile. But then Chris sat back, and continued, “he wouldn’t have to bribe me to do that,” as if nothing had happened.

Nora nodded her head, feeling a weird mix of chastened and appreciation and resentment. She skated past it. “So, is that what they weren’t being subtle about?” she asked, picking up a straw wrapper and twisting it into knots. “Like, that you could vouch for Buck?”

This time, her voice had none of the anger of earlier, it was all curiosity. Chris seemed to actually think about the question before he answered her. “Maybe,” he said, finally. “Or maybe they just wanted us to bond over being in Dead Moms Club.”

She sucked in a breath, totally caught off guard.

“Too soon?” Chris asked, looking genuinely concerned.

But all of the sudden, laughter bubbled up in her throat and spilled over, like a release that had been building for months and months. It was just, she really hadn’t been expecting that. Everything around the subject of her mom had been tense or sad or unspoken. And after all the stilted tip-toeing everyone kept doing around her, Chris just—said it.

He got it.

He grinned at her from across the table while she caught her breath. She felt a little hysterical with it—a giddy rush from being around someone who understood. She was struck with the urge to punch him in the shoulder, or something; but that wasn’t the kind of thing you did to a person you just met five minutes ago. “Wow,” she said, after the surprise of the moment passed. “I didn’t know there was an official club.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Chris. “I’m here as the welcoming committee. It’s very exclusive.” His expression straightened out then, and Nora knew what was coming. “I am sorry, though,” he said. “About your mom. It sucks.”

“Yeah,” Nora agreed. “Did you—when did you join? The, uh, club?”

“My mom died when I was seven,” Chris told her. “Car accident. But it was—she actually left, when I was four. So my dad raised me alone for a few years and then she came back and then—yeah.” He looked out the window, then. Nora followed his gaze and saw a mom had parked and was getting her kids out of the car, one by one. “I don’t know what the deal with your mom was, but I just—I get it. If it’s . . . weird.”

Nora sat back against the vinyl cushion, finding a tear in the seat next to her and tugging on it, making it worse. Outside the window, the mom was somehow strapping four separate kids into one stroller.

“Yeah,” she said, after a minute. “It’s weird.”

Chris nodded his head, and then nodded towards where Buck and Eddie were collecting trays from the order up counter. “Those two . . . they do alright,” he said, finally. “Don’t tell them I said that.”

Nora watched them muttering to each other, their shoulders bumping as they carried the laden trays back to the table. Her mom had had plenty of friends: people who cycled in and out of their place, showing up with wine or take-out, sometimes convincing her mom to go out with them, occasionally crashing on the couch. But even when her mom had been dating one of the few guys Nora ever met, they never did anything like this. Joint meals, just because.

“Who’s hungry?” said Eddie, sliding into the seat next to Chris and passing his son a tray.

Buck sat down next to her, then, and started pushing food her way—a grilled cheese and fries, with honey mustard, even though she hadn’t asked; a milkshake and a fountain drink and a plate of onion rings, “just in case she was still hungry.”

She stayed quiet during lunch, ignoring their attempts to draw her into the conversation. Instead, she watched Buck interact with Chris and Eddie; she thought of Chris saying Buck’s the best. Of Buck saying this is a nightmare. She watched as the man who was her biological father acted like a dad to someone else.

She watched while he interacted with Chris, doting and teasing, with old jokes and nicknames and the comfort obvious between them. And in a tiny, locked up part of her chest, she felt a pang of longing.

She ate all the onion rings.    

----------

Eddie didn’t get much sleep that night, after leaving Buck’s.

He’d told Chris on the drive home that he wouldn’t be going to school the next day. “Why?” Chris had asked, like Eddie said something insane.

“Buck’s going to pick up Nora as soon as the DNA results are back. I thought we could meet them for lunch.”

“Why wouldn’t we just go over for dinner?” Chris pressed; but then he caught himself, shaking his head and saying, “never mind, a day off sounds great.”

Chris didn’t push after that, and Eddie let the subject drop. He didn’t know how to explain to Chris that this was the equivalent of a five-alarm fire, and they needed all hands on deck.

Buck had a daughter.

A part of Eddie—the part that wasn’t too fussed about logic or appropriate trains of thought—felt a weird, itching excitement about it. For years now, Eddie had been racking up a debt where Buck was concerned, an entire ledger’s worth of favors that he could never repay. How many times, how many ways, had Buck saved his life? Christopher’s? It was incalculable.

Buck would never admit it, of course. Half the time, he acted like Eddie was doing him a favor by asking him to watch Chris. Eddie never kept track, but if he’d paid Buck for all of his help, he’d probably owe him a small fortune. But it went beyond babysitting hours—Buck helped with bake sales and science projects and he talked to Chris about grief and girls and other things that Eddie had never really gotten a handle on.

And all the while, Eddie had known that he could never be for Buck what Buck was for him. He wanted to—he did, really. He paid attention to when Buck started favoring his right leg and he triple-checked his harness and he tried to make Buck feel like he belonged in the Bedford Street house.

But it backfired more than not.

Eddie handed Buck his kid and told him to go outside and they were hit with a tsunami. Buck came out to him and Eddie suggested he call a guy who would break his heart a few months later. He knew when Buck was spiraling from Bobby’s death and Eddie’s job offer and he did what he always did when he felt helpless and backed into a corner: he snapped. He was mean. He’d tried to make it up to him by bringing Chris back, but somehow that had the unintended consequence of making Buck feel like he had to move out, and fast.

The point was, he hadn’t really known how to help Buck, all those other times. He didn’t know what it felt like to cope with what might have been a career-ending injury; to come back from being dead; to lose the closest person you had to a father. He was stumbling around in the dark those times, feeling half like he was trying to protect Buck from himself.

But this . . . he knew how to help with this. He knew exactly what it felt like to be surprised by fatherhood, to feel out of his depth, to feel crushed under the weight of the responsibility—placed squarely on one set of shoulders—to keep a small human alive.

He could make sure Buck never felt alone in it. He could be there for Nora in all the ways that Buck had been there for Chris. And he could make damn sure that no one ever told Buck that he was dragging his kid down with him.

He would never let Buck slip in the first place, anyway.   

So, yeah. Chris wasn’t going to school that day.

Sometime after Buck told him he and Nora had gone out shopping, he got a notification on his phone that Nora’s mattress was delivered. It was still an hour before they were due to meet for lunch, so Eddie hustled Chris into the car and let himself into Buck’s new apartment with the heavy box that had been left by his back door.

Chris grumbled about it, but still walked ahead, propping the doors open for him as Eddie carried it through the apartment and into Nora’s room.

If he was being totally honest, Eddie kind of hated Buck’s new apartment. It just didn’t feel like him. The kitchen was too small and the windows didn’t let enough light in, and every time Eddie walked in and saw the bare walls, he thought of Buck saying it’s not my loft anymore, and he couldn’t help feeling guilty and remorseful, even though he’d never asked Buck to move, either time.  

Still, it was probably good that he had two-bedroom place now. Nora’s room looked much like it did when Eddie and Chris left the night before, only there were now two black plastic bags lumped in the corner.

“What are those?” Chris asked, while Eddie pulled out his pocket knife and started cutting the box open.

“Probably Nora’s stuff,” Eddie said, keeping his voice even. “Here, help me with this.”

“Why is it in garbage bags?” Chris tugged the cardboard out while Eddie lifted the mattress; when he cut the plastic keeping it rolled up, it unfurled, like those weirdly hypnotizing videos Buck sent him of baked goods puffing up in the oven.

“I guess she didn’t have a suitcase,” he said. He ducked into the hallway then, to the closet housing Buck’s laundry machine; last night they’d put the bedding in the wash, and he’d swapped it to the dryer right before they left. He pulled out the sheets and carried them back into the room. “Here, make yourself useful,” he said, tossing Chris the pillow cases and gesturing to the new pillows that sat on top of Nora’s empty bookshelf.

Chris was still looking at the bags, but he did as he was told while Eddie started making Nora’s bed, tucked tight with military corners.

After a minute, Chris said, “do we have a spare suitcase we could give her?”

“What?”

Chris tossed the pillows at Eddie, one, and then the other. “We have so much stuff. And she just has those two bags? That doesn’t seem fair.”

Eddie stared at his son for a moment, feeling something burn in his chest, like pride; like all of the ways he’d tried to do right by Christopher had paid off. And all the ways he’d messed up hadn’t stopped Chris from turning out this way. He reached out and ruffled his hair, even though he hadn’t been able to get away with that in years.

“You’re a good kid, Chris,” he told him; because he deserved to hear it. “Come on, let’s go meet them for lunch.”

“But—”

“She doesn’t need a suitcase, because she’s not moving again,” Eddie explained on the way to the car. “Buck’s taking her shopping for things she needs right now. But maybe we could go through our stuff and see if there’s anything she’d want—like that jean jacket you just grew out of, or some of your old books. And if she does end up needing a suitcase for a trip, or something, we can lend her ours.” He paused, then, trying to think of a situation in which Nora and Buck would be going somewhere, and without them; he couldn’t imagine it. “Or get her her own.”

It wasn’t like Buck would be taking Nora to Hershey to meet her grandparents. And Buck didn’t really do vacations or weekend getaways; Eddie always assumed it was because he’d done so much traveling in his younger years that it had lost its allure. But maybe it would be good to plan a trip for the four of them, so that Chris and Nora could both have something fun to look forward to. Maybe that place Hen and Karen had taken Denny and Mara to over spring break, with kayaking and campfires and mountain views. Or a week at the beach—no distractions, no worrying about the traffic getting home. Buck could try surfing again, which he’d mentioned that he hadn’t done in ages, and then the two of them could lay out on their beach blankets under the hot summer sun, while the kids swam and entertained themselves.

He’d mention the idea to Buck, later.

They pulled into the parking lot fifteen minutes early and he let Chris lead the way to his favorite booth, the one in the back corner.

Chris picked up the menu to study it, even though they both knew he was going to get two chili corn dogs with the works. Eddie couldn’t stop glancing at the door and his phone, in case Buck texted him any updates.

“Why are you fidgeting so much?”

“I’m not fidgeting,” Eddie lied. “Hey, when you talk to Nora, maybe just try to avoid anything about her mom. She might be sensitive about it.”

“Okay, dad.”

“And, if you want, you could always tell her that Buck’s, like, a good person.”

“Sure. I’ll tell her about the time Buck got struck by lightning and got really good at math and did all my homework for me.”

“He didn’t—he didn’t do all your homework.”

His son gave an expression that made Eddie itch to text Buck, you didn’t help my kid cheat on his school work three years ago, did you?

“And I’ll tell him about the time Buck accidentally lost me during a tsunami—”

“You know Buck is sensitive about that—”

“And the time I got mad you were dating Ana and snuck out to Buck’s apartment—”

“Do you have any stories that don’t make us look wildly irresponsible?” Christopher smirked at him, and Eddie felt a wave of nostalgia for the way Chris used to sass him when he was younger. Most of the time his tone was just straight annoyance now that he was a teenager.

“Dad, of the two of us, who has more experience talking to middle schoolers?”

“Okay, but—”

“Dad—”

“She’s Buck’s kid, Chris,” Eddie said. “It’s a lot for both of them. I’m not joking here. I’m asking you, please, try to make her feel comfortable, okay?”

Chris stared him, for a minute. There was a chance he’d ventured into overkill territory; after the last twenty-four hours, he was pretty sure Christopher understood the gravity of the situation, the anxiety spiking through Buck and thus through Eddie. And he didn’t for a second think that Chris would be rude to Nora, or anything. He just—he wanted this to go smoothly. It felt like a lot was riding on this meeting going smoothly.

“I’ll be on my best behavior,” Chris said, after he finished x-raying Eddie with his eyes. “For Buck.”

“For—Buck,” Eddie said, catching site of them by the door. “They’re here.” He stood up from the bench, then, rising for their guests, the way his mom had instructed when she drilled manners into him as a kid. What was he standing for? It wasn’t like he was going to hug Buck hello.

“Hey,” he said, when they drew near enough. If they looked alike yesterday, the similarities were even more pronounced, today. It looked like neither had gotten a wink of sleep the night before. “Nora, it’s good to see you again. This is my son, Christopher.”

“Hey,” said Christopher. It seemed like a good sign when Nora waved back and slid into the booth across from them. Maybe now was the best time to leave them alone together; to give Nora a chance to talk to someone who wasn’t an adult.

“Buck and I will go put the orders in,” he said, making up his mind. “Chris, the usual?”

“Yep.” Chris replied. He’d been smirking at Eddie like that more and more lately, like he knew something Eddie didn’t. If Eddie was being totally honest, he was a little too afraid to ask what it was about.

He turned to Nora, instead. “Nora, what do you want? It’s basic diner stuff.”

“Oh, uh—maybe a grilled cheese?”

“Fries?” Buck asked

Nora nodded.

“Milkshake?” Buck asked

She nodded again.

“Flavor?”

“Vanilla. Please.”

“You got it,” he said, and then Eddie pulled him away, before he could continue asking her about every other item on the menu. Embarrassingly, it looked like Buck was trying to give her finger guns as a goodbye.

“Smooth,” he said.

“I have no idea what the hell I’m doing,” Buck replied, lifting one of his hands and miming a finger gun to his forehead. Eddie smacked it away before either of the kids could see.

“She seems good,” he said, once he and Buck put in both orders. Eddie had his card ready to go to pay for all four meals; Buck had enough else to be spending his money on.

Buck gave him a dirty look, but Eddie ignored it and signed the receipt, adding on a tip for the hapless teenager behind the counter.

“Does she?” Buck asked, sneaking glances over Eddie’s shoulder. “I can’t tell. We were shopping earlier and I realized she was, like, totally checked out.”

“What did you do?”

“We just left,” Buck said. Eddie let him talk while he accepted the drinks for their order; Buck had forgotten to order himself a strawberry milkshake, so Eddie had listed it with part of his order. He took a sip before passing it to Buck. “We got, like, five things. But she’d mentioned wanting sneakers so we stopped at that store on Jackson Street and got her two pairs. I swear, it was the first time she looked even a little bit happy.”

“Sounds like you did the right thing,” Eddie told him. Because it did, and also because he knew Buck needed to hear it.

“I tried to give her a little speech this morning,” Buck said, closing his eyes like the memory pained him. “It came out so stupid.”

“A speech?”

“Yeah. About how I know I have to earn being her dad, that she’ll always have a home with me, no matter what.”

“Not bad,” said Eddie, grabbing Buck’s milkshake out of his hand before he crushed it in his grip. He took another sip, and asked, “the internet tell you to say that?”

Buck’s face crumpled; an expression so pitiful Eddie almost laughed. “That’s what she said, too.”

“Teenagers can smell weakness, Buck. They have this freaky sense where they know when you’re getting stuff from parenting blogs or whatever.”

“Then what am I supposed to do?”

“Have you tried talking to her like a normal human being?”

“Have you met me?”

“Come on,” Eddie said, turning to Buck. “If you weren’t going by some new parent handbook, what would you say to her? It’s just us, bud. Try it out on me.”

Just then, a laugh came from their table. Buck’s head snapped towards the sound—a cackle that tapered off into giggles. Nora was laughing. 

Buck turned back and met Eddie’s eyes with a look of wide-eyed wonder. He didn’t even need to say it, they were both thinking it: Chris got her to laugh. It was a small miracle.

Buck’s eyes flicked to the table and back to Eddie, and Eddie wasn’t sure he’d ever seen Buck look quite like that. His blue eyes sparkling, his smile something else, a look of such pure unadulterated joy that it almost took Eddie’s breath away. 

“I love you,” Buck said to him.

And—what?

But Buck was already looking back at Nora. “That’s what I’d say to her, you know? You know me—” he snapped his fingers, as if to illustrate how quickly he’d been ready to say that. And because they’d talked about this once before, Eddie knew exactly what he meant—how Buck bonded with Blaze the dog within seconds of meeting him.

What they hadn’t talked about was how it similar it was to the way Buck went from posturing and provoking Eddie, to becoming the best friend he ever had.

He wasn’t sure how he felt about being looped in with the beagle Buck had for three days. 

Or with his daughter.

“But she’d probably think I was a psycho,” Buck continued, which was good, because Eddie was getting distracted from the matter at hand. “I’m not supposed to come on too strong. I’m supposed to be giving her space and stability. Not, like, trying to wrap her up in a blanket and smother her in love.”

“Buck, there’s no one right way to do this, you know that, right? You have to do what feels right for you and Nora.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Plus, I mean, she’s your daughter,” Eddie pointed out.

For the first time, those words didn’t jar Buck into some sort of euphoria. This time, he looked vaguely concerned. “Shit,” he said, looking back at the table thoughtfully. “You think she feels, like, starved for affection? Oh, god, what if she wants to be loved but thinks she’s too needy?”

“What? No, I—”

“Order for Eddie?”

Buck shook his head, like he could shake their conversation to the back of his mind to worry about later. He stepped forward and grabbed one of the trays. “Come on, let’s see what we missed,” he said, sounding insanely normal after . . . all that. 

Eddie grabbed the second tray and followed him, feeling a little like he’d just been hit over the head. He slid into the booth across from Buck and watched him push item after item towards Nora. Needy, he thought. Starved for affection. Wants to be loved.

Is that how Buck saw himself? 

Eddie looked from Buck to Nora and thought about what Buck said, about how he wanted to bundle her up and smother her in affection. He wondered if there was something in their genes that inspired the instinct.

She probably already loves you, too. That’s what he’d been about to say.

—————

Nora was still on the fence about Buck. But she did like Eddie and Chris. 

Chris was funny; he reminded her of Morris, who acted aloof but always looked out for the younger kids. And most of the boys she knew always had their heads buried in their phones unless they were the ones talking, but Chris actually joined the conversation, like he wanted to be hanging out with Eddie and Buck. Like it was something they did often.

Eddie had to be a good dad, for Chris to be like that. She watched him, during lunch, thinking about what Chris had said about his mom leaving and then coming back and then dying. 

Eddie kept trying to draw her into the conversation, even more than Buck. The glimpse of his normalness in the dresser aisle was gone, and he was back to acting like she was fragile, like he had to soften his voice and hedge everything he said. But Eddie wasn’t afraid to talk to her, and he didn’t try any of those stupid lines adults always used—how’s school? What are you interested in?—the kinds of questions with a million answers, and a guarantee that the person who asked didn’t actually care which one you gave. 

He had, like, dad energy. In a good way. Like those dads on TV shows who always knew the right thing to say. And a part of her was relieved to not be alone with Buck. It felt like so much pressure when it was just the two of them. She could sense that he had a lot to say but was keeping it to himself. It made her a little nervous. What did he want to say to her? And why wouldn’t he say it?

But before she knew it, lunch was over. After all their plates had been picked clean and the busboy came back to clear their table three times, Buck checked his watch and said, “guess we should be heading back to the apartment.”

“Are you guys coming over?” Nora asked.

Buck and Eddie exchanged a loaded glance, and then Eddie said, “nah, we’ll let you guys get settled in.”

She tried not to let her disappointment show, but then Chris caught her eye and said, “unless you need help setting up your room?”

From the thump under the table, she was pretty sure Eddie kicked his own son in the shins, but Chris shifted in his seat and after another, louder thump, Eddie winced. Nora bit her lip and said, “yeah, that’d be great,” feeling thankful for the reprieve.

Buck and Eddie had another silent conversation, and then it was decided that Eddie and Chris would follow them home. When they got there, Chris announced that he would help Nora set up her room and led the way down the hall. He must have given some sort of look to Buck and Eddie, because neither of them followed.

“Thanks,” she muttered, pushing the door closed as far as she could without actually closing it.

“Don’t mention it,” said Chris, sitting down on her bed which, she just now realized, actually had a mattress on it now.

“How—?”

Chris looked around at the comforter and realized what she was asking. “Oh,” he said, shrugging. “My dad and I came over and set it up before we met up with you guys.” And then before Nora could ask anything about that, he pulled out his phone and started typing.

“You’re not going to help?” Nora asked, nudging one of her black bags with her toe. She didn’t actually want his help, but the lame joke was all she could manage in the wake of his offhand thoughtfulness.

“I am helping,” said Chris, not even looking up. “I’m the reason Buck isn’t in here starting his campaign for Dad of the Year.”

Nora snorted. Chris played some music from his phone, then, and he stayed busy while she unpacked her two bags, piling her folded clothes on her bookshelf and wondering if she should have said yes to the boring dresser, if only to save herself from another outing like today.

Besides her clothes—half of which she hated, because she’d had a mini growth spurt right after arriving at the Warrens, and Mrs. Warren had taken her measurements and gone shopping without her, coming back with bags full of skirts and dresses and flowy shirts that Nora wouldn’t be caught dead in, if she had a choice—she didn’t have much else. On the second bookshelf, the one without clothes on it, she unpacked the rest: her jewelry box, a mix of earrings from Claire’s that Sadie had helped her pick out and things she’d pilfered from her mom’s room; a picture frame, covered in dried noodles and spray-painted blue, that she made at a birthday party a few years ago, which now held a picture of the lake she and her mom had loved in Austin, and a few other pictures stacked behind that one, which Nora didn’t really want to look at right now; her journal, mostly filled with her plans for finding Buck; and a small collection of paperbacks, including The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and the first and fifth Percy Jackson books and Matilda and A Wrinkle in Time and Holes.

Arranged, everything only took up one shelf. She unpacked the record player, next, and put it on the shelf below, but then she realized it was stupid to have a record player when she didn’t even have any records, so then she closed it back up and put it back in the bag, next to the cactus mug. She was just pushing the bag into the corner when she heard a knock.

Buck was leaning against the doorway, looking skeptically between her and Chris.

“Are you being helpful, Chris?” he asked; as if Chris was his kid, and Buck was reminding him to be nice to their guest.  

“I’m a consultant,” said Chris, not even looking up from his phone; Nora felt a little vindication at his sass.

“He’s a consultant,” she seconded, daring Buck to disagree.

“You’re the boss,” he said, immediately giving in and holding up his hands in surrender. “Nora, do you have any, uh, dietary restrictions? Besides avocados. Anything you like or don’t like?”

Nora had no idea how to answer that. It’s not like she and her mom had been particularly adventurous eaters; they ordered take-out so often that they had regular standing orders at at least five different restaurants. Otherwise, Nora usually made toast or cereal or spaghetti.

“Uh, no,” she said, after Buck opened his mouth to continue—probably to start listing off every food he could think of, to ask her if she did or didn’t like it. “Whatever’s fine.”

Buck’s eyes slide to Chris, then, as if he was expecting him to help, but Chris didn’t look up.

“You sure?” he said, after a moment. “No preferences, at all?”

“Nope,” she said, defiantly. She got a weird satisfaction from it, even if she couldn’t exactly say why.

But again, Buck didn’t push. “Okay,” he said, giving her one of those weird smiles he kept doing when she refused to engage. “I’m going to pull something together for dinner; Chris, your dad says you guys are going to head out after that, because you have school tomorrow.”

Chris gave a thumbs up and Buck gave another of his uncomfortable, tight smiles before disappearing back down the hallway.

“He’s actually a really good cook,” Chris said, after a minute. “You could ask him to make literally anything and he’d figure it out.”

Nora thought of it; of all of the nights they must have spent like that, Buck, Chris, and Eddie. Chris shouting out requests for dumplings or tacos or dessert pizza, Buck smiling—normally—at the challenge. She could feel it suddenly, acutely: how much of an interloper she was in Buck’s life. In his family.

She just grunted and started refolding her clothes.

After a tense dinner—or, at least, a dinner that would have been more tense, had it not been for Eddie’s commitment to filling the silence with anything from their shift the week before to updates from his abuela in Texas (Nora almost volunteered that she used to live in Texas, but she didn’t)—Chris and Eddie said their goodbyes and Nora retreated to her room as fast as humanly possible.

She expected Buck to follow her, but he managed to give her a whole twenty-three minutes before knocking on her door again.

“Hey,” he said, leaning up against her doorframe. His eyes roved over where she was laying on her bed, re-reading The Last Olympian for the seventh time, and her one sad shelf of mementos, and landed on her shelves full of clothing. “Guess we should probably find you a dresser soon, huh?”   

“Mhm,” she said, turning the page, even though she hadn’t actually finished reading the paragraph.

“Do you—um, do you want to go to school tomorrow? Your social worker put the information in the file and, you know, your school isn’t too far from here so you can keep going to that one, if you want.”

Did she want to go to school tomorrow? It was such a weird question. It felt like everything in the world had turned upside down but she still had to think about, like, brushing her teeth and stuff. Also, did parents usually ask kids if they wanted to go to school?

She didn’t, really. She couldn’t believe she’d only been out one day; going back and sitting in the back seat of advanced algebra and listening to Mr. Simmons drone on about polynomials sounded terrible. But what was the alternative? Sitting in this apartment, avoiding Buck?

“Yeah,” she said, finally.  

“Are you sure?” he asked, in that stupid soft voice, like he didn’t trust her to say what she wanted, the first time. “Chimney gave me off through Sunday, so—”

“I’ll go,” she interrupted. If the alternative was four uninterrupted days of one-on-one time, she would take algebra.

“Okay,” he said, backing off immediately, like she suspected he would. “It starts at seven-thirty, right? Maybe we can leave in the morning around seven.”

“Sure.”

“This weekend, Hen offered to host a barbecue,” he went on. “So you can meet everyone. If that sounds okay to you? I promise it’ll be really lowkey, we do it all the time, and we can leave whenever you want.”

“Sure,” she said again, turning the page a second time, just for effect.

“Right,” he said. “Oh, and, one other thing—” he stepped into the room then, pulling something out of his pocket and holding it out towards her.

It was a phone.

A bulky, light-blue flip phone, a little screen on the front showing 9:48 pm.

“I know it’s not an iPhone, or anything,” he said, putting it on the bed next to her, and producing a charging cord from his other pocket. “But a lot of studies show that kids your age shouldn’t have unfiltered access to social media and—I mean, we can talk about that later, I just—I wanted you to have this, in case you need it. I put my number and everyone else’s in there—Chris, Eddie, Hen, Chimney, Athena, and Hen’s wife, Karen, and Ravi and my sister Maddie—you’ll meet them at the barbecue—so you can call anyone if you need anything. Or text them, or whatever.”

She stared at the phone, feeling her throat tighten too much to talk. After a minute, Buck backed up until he was almost out of her room. “Okay, uh. Good night, Nora. Sweet dreams.”

By the time she looked up to reply, he’d gone.

Chapter Text

Buck was doing something wrong. He was sure of it.

“You’re not doing anything wrong,” Hen assured him. She was sitting on the weight bench, across from where Eddie was doing bicep curls, so Buck didn’t let himself turn and look in their direction. Instead, he continued taking his frustration out on the punching bag in front of him.

“Yeah, give yourself some grace,” Eddie said, which was kind of him. But also, his voice sounded kind of breathy and strained when he said it. None of it was helping him feel less like his brain was actively melting down.

“She barely talks to me,” Buck said, punctuating it with a hit so hard the structure holding the bag rocked. “She hasn’t laughed since Wednesday. She barely talked to anyone at the barbecue. She spent the rest of the weekend in her room. My daughter is miserable and it’s my fault.”

“She’s twelve,” Hen reminded him. “And her mom just died. You can’t make that better with a new pair of shoes.”

Buck knew that, of course. But he’d thought they’d made some progress with the sneakers, and he couldn’t help but feel like if he could just find another chip in her armor—one small thing, anything at all, that she’d express interest in, or ask for—then he could deliver it to her, and start proving that he was father material.

But she was giving him nothing. She didn’t ask for anything. She didn’t get excited about anything. She didn’t say she was upset over anything. He had literally nothing to go on.

So he was doing nothing.

No wonder she wasn’t warming up to him.

“Come on, remember what you said to me when I was in Texas?” Eddie asked. “You gotta dad up. Your kid’s mom is dead so it’s your job to inflict the parental damage.”

“That’s the advice you gave?” Hen asked, voice incredulous. “Lord.”

“He was right!” Eddie defended. Buck would appreciate the sentiment, if he didn’t find it so completely debilitating. He thought he’d understood how bad Eddie felt when he couldn’t get through to Chris, but being the one on the other side of his kid’s mile-high walls was proving otherwise. “He just has to—”

Eddie was cut off by the shrill ring of Buck’s phone.

That was another thing that fatherhood had changed about him—he now left his phone on loud, all the time, and answered every call that came in when Nora wasn’t in his line of sight, no matter how much his phone insisted the caller was spam. Most of the crew was ready to kill him for it, but Eddie insisted they all let him cope with the new situation however he needed.

“Hello?”

“Hi—is this Evan Buckley? Nora’s father?”

“Yes, that’s—yeah that’s me.” Hen and Eddie straightened up and were watching him. He gripped the phone tight in his hand.

“Are you available to come in for a chat with our guidance counselor? We have some concerns about Nora’s schoolwork, and she was supposed to stay for detention today but it appears as though she took the bus.”

Buck’s heartrate skyrocketed; and it had already been pretty high, because of the boxing. Concerns about Nora’s school work? Getting detention? Skipping detention?

“Uh, yeah, yeah, I can come in—when’s—when’s good?”

“Are you able to get here before four today?”

Buck sat in the waiting room of the principal’s office, feeling like—well. Feeling like he’d gotten sent to see the principal. He’d called Nora’s phone twice, but she didn’t answer, so then he’d texted please let me know you’ve gotten home ok and she still hadn’t replied, so he called Eddie and asked if he could drive by his place to check, even though Eddie was technically still on shift for another two hours, and they were already understaffed because Buck took off the second he hung up the phone.

“Mr. Buckley?”

He looked up; a woman in a pencil skirt was gesturing for him to follow her into an office that said Ms. Callahan, Guidance Counselor! on a colorful plaque outside the door.

“Please, have a seat,” she said, gesturing to the weird public school chairs Buck hadn’t been on since the 2000s. “I had a call with Nora’s social worker last week, I understand you’ve recently come into custody of her?”

“Yeah,” said Buck, feeling his palms sweat. He tried to wipe them off on his pants surreptitiously. “Yeah, just last week. I hadn’t known—” he stopped, not really knowing how he wanted to finish that sentence.

“Right,” she said, giving him a look he couldn’t quite decipher. “Well, I had been planning to call the Warrens this week anyway, so this is fortuitous. Unfortunately, Nora is not doing very well in school right now.”

“Oh?”

“Her grades in English are fine, and Social Studies is passable,” she said, looking at records on her computer screen. “But she’s in danger of failing out of advanced algebra, and her grade in advanced biology is, at best, a C-. I’m sure you can imagine why we’re concerned.”

“Oh—” said Buck. This was giving him visceral flashbacks to his own adolescence; all of the times the teachers said they were disappointed in him; all of the times they wanted to snitch to his parents. He felt a rush of sympathy for Nora.

“And then on top of that, she skipped out on her detention,” she said, her mouth tightening, like she wanted to convey the seriousness of the offense.

Buck swallowed down his first retort—so what?—because, actually, he should care that Nora had gotten a detention. Just probably not for the same reasons Ms. Callahan did. “What—uh, what did she get detention for?”

“Well, first she was caught using her phone during class,” she said, producing Nora’s flip phone from a drawer and pushing it across the desk. Shit. No wonder Nora hadn’t answered his calls. Buck picked it up and put it in his pocket, his hand itching to check his own phone to see what Eddie reported back. “We have a zero-tolerance policy, so it was confiscated. But then she was caught borrowing another student’s phone in the hallway. She was supposed to report to after school detention at the end of the day, but—”

For the second time in an hour, someone was cut off by Buck’s obnoxious ringtone. He pulled it out, expecting to see Eddie’s name, so it was jarring to instead see Athena Grant across his home screen. “Sorry,” he said to Ms. Callahan. “I have to take this—”

He stood up and stepped towards the door as he answered. “Athena?”

“Hi, Mr. Buckley,” she said, in a professional tone that immediately put him on edge. “Think I’ve got something that belongs to you.”

“Is she—?”

“She’s fine, physically,” Athena said, making his heart jackrabbit in his chest. “But she’s in a bit of trouble with the security folks here at the Target on Essex.”

“I’m on my way,” he said, continuing out of the office and out of the school. He was halfway out of the parking lot before he realized he’d never said goodbye to Ms. Callahan, but he couldn’t bring himself to care about that at the moment.

Essex was only a few streets away, but that didn’t stop him from glaring at the red light getting between him and his daughter. He was contemplating flicking on the cherry light he had in case of emergencies when Eddie called a minute later. “Buck,” he said, as soon as he picked up. “She’s not—”

“I know where she is,” Buck cut him off. “I’m on my way to get her.”

“You—uh—okay? Where is she?”

“Apparently she skipped out on detention and went straight to shoplift at Target.”

“Oh,” said Eddie, voice restrained. “Hm.”

“Is this some sort of record? How fast I became the world’s worst father? It’s barely been a full week.”

“Buck,” said Eddie, in that serious tone he used when Buck was spiraling and he was trying to stop it. Normally, the sound turned Buck’s insides to goo; but today, his stomach was too much of a writhing mess of anxiety to even touch that. “You are not the world’s worst father. You are not any kind of bad father.”

“My daughter has been living with me for eight days and she’s getting in trouble for—for truancy! And stealing!”

“Come on, think about the things you did as a teen. I’m sure they were way worse than that.”

“Yes,” Buck agreed, refusing to feel comforted by Eddie’s unaffected calm. “Because I had terrible parents.”

“What would you tell me if Chris got in trouble for either of those things?”

Buck breathed out heavily, through his nose, hating Eddie’s logic. “To talk to him,” he said, after a minute.

“Would it be my fault?”

“I don’t know,” said Buck, petulantly. “Maybe.”

“Buck.”

“Probably not,” he admitted.

“Talk to her,” Eddie repeated. “Normally. Like a human being. Not like your parenting blogs suggest, not in that weird Stepford-Dad voice you’ve been using—”

“I haven’t—”

“You have,” Eddie said. “Come on, bud. You know what to do.”

Buck’s chest ached; he wished Eddie was actually his partner, in all of the ways that mattered. He wished he could ask Eddie to meet him in the Target parking lot, so he could have back-up. He wished he could bring Nora back to Eddie’s house, which was where he always went when things felt out of control.

“She’s a hurting kid, Buck,” Eddie said, when the silence stretched on too long. “I know you know what that feels like.”

“Yeah,” said Buck, coughing to clear his throat and taking two tries to say it.

“So, you know how to be there for her,” Eddie reminded him.

He hummed, noncommittally.

“Time to dad up,” Eddie said, and Buck could hear the laughter in his voice through the phone line.

“Oh, fuck off,” said Buck. “I gotta go, I’ll call you later.”

“Good luck!” Eddie called out, right before Buck hung up.

He took two deep breaths in the parking lot, and then marched into the store. The greeter directed him towards a back hallway, and when he walked in, Athena met him at the door.

“Hey,” he said, feeling out of breath. He scanned the room behind her and—oh. There was Nora, sitting on a plastic chair. A security guard—a bigger guy, in his fifties—stood a few feet away, like he was making sure she didn’t bolt. Nora didn’t even look up when he arrived. “Hey,” he repeated. “Athena—what—?”

“This security guard has a chip on his shoulder, so if anyone asks, I don’t know you,” Athena said, voice low. “I’d rather not tempt him. They’re not pressing charges, but they have a one-strike policy, so if she tries it again, it’ll be a different story.”

“Fuck, Athena. I don’t know—” he broke off, looking at his daughter, who still hadn’t noticed him.

“Kids get into trouble,” Athena said, raising her eyebrows. “I thought you of all people would know that.”

Buck held in a groan of frustration. He didn’t know if he should be grateful or concerned that everyone was so unbothered by the fact that his daughter was dallying in crime. He made a face at Athena that she ignored, and then stepped further into the room, getting a real look at Nora.  She was hunched over in the chair, her shoulders pulled high and her head ducked down; he ached to give her a hug.

“Nora, honey.” He crossed the room and sat down on the coffee table in front of her, and waited until she looked up and met his eyes. When she did, he could see they looked red-rimmed and watery, and he felt like he might start crying. “Are you okay?”

“Is she okay?” the security guard scoffed, even though no one had been talking to him. “She was trying to steal $80 worth of merchandise.”

“Excuse you,” said Buck, feeling, for the first time since he was a teenager, like he was itching for a fight. “I’m talking to my daughter.”

“It’s all this gentle parenting crap—”

“Okay, I think that’s enough,” Athena interrupted. “Mr. Buckley, why don’t you take Nora home? As long as she understands the consequences if she does this again, we’re done here.”

“Right,” said Buck, standing up and angling himself between Nora and the stupid security guard. He started ushering her towards the door when he remembered something. “Wait—what were the, uh items?”

“You mean what did she try to steal?” the guy offered, unhelpfully. He kicked a shopping basket across the floor, stopping three feet short of where Buck was standing.

“It doesn’t matter,” Nora said, her voice painfully small, as Buck stepped closer to the basket. He saw a small pile of clothes, a birthday card, and a movie called Terrifier 2, with a scary looking clown on the cover. Buck had so many questions.

“We’ll buy it,” he said, instead.

“Oh sure,” said the security guard, who for some reason, was still talking. “Reward her terrible behavior. You know that movie’s rated R, right?”

“Yes,” snapped Buck. “And after I buy it for her, I’m taking her out for ice cream, too,” he announced, glaring at the man, practically daring him to weigh in again. He put a hand on Nora’s shoulder, guiding her to the check-out line, ignoring Athena’s smirk as he went.

Buck bypassed the self-checkout machines and found an empty line with a cashier who showed absolutely no signs of engaging with them. Perfect. He plopped the whole basket on the conveyer belt and watched as the cashier started scanning the items. The pile of clothes turned out to be two pairs of shorts, a tee-shirt, and two sports bras.

“You don’t have to—” Nora said, half-heartedly, when the cashier announced the total, but Buck ignored her and tapped his card on the reader. When the cashier handed him the bag, he passed it to Nora, and gestured for her to follow him to the car.

“Hop in,” he said. “I just have to make a call.”

Nora looked like she was going to object to that, but then she bit her lip and climbed into the passenger seat.

Buck took a deep breath and then pulled out his phone. It rang, and rang, and rang, and just about when Buck was about to give up hope, she picked up.

“Maddie,” he said, before she could get a word out. “I need your help.”

-----

Nora was having a very bad day.

It was Wednesday, which meant she had double biology, and today they were dissecting a frog in class, which was disgusting, and which was one of the many reasons Nora should never have been put in advanced biology.

It was also Sadie’s birthday.

Nora hadn’t talked to her since that night in the Warren’s pantry. Even though she knew Sadie would be desperate for an update. Even though Buck had given her her very own phone.

It was exactly what she’d been hoping for, so it made no sense whatsoever that she hadn’t used her phone to call or text her best friend.

It was just that Sadie was going to have so many questions. About Buck, and everyone else, and Nora’s new room and her new school and her whole new life. And how she was feeling about all of it.

And Nora would have no idea what to say.  

She wished she could just see her best friend without it being a thing. She wished she could go over to Sadie’s for a slumber party and they could watch old teen movies from the 2000s and paint each other’s nails and eat those fancy snack trays her mom always made. She didn’t want to have to think about how she had a new dad and how he was always acting weird around her and how he basically already had a family and Nora had no idea how she fit into any of it, and—

And that was why she hadn’t called Sadie. But today was Sadie’s birthday, and Nora might be a shit friend but she wasn’t so bad that she would ignore that. So during science class, when she was busy trying to not puke from the overwhelming smell of formaldehyde, she sent Sadie a text under the table.

Happy birthday!!!! she sent first, followed by (it’s nora, buck gave me a phone)

Unfortunately, that had led to Sadie immediately calling her, and her ring tone went off, and Mr. Phillips confiscated her phone. So then at lunch, she found Morris in the computer lab with his friends and begged until he let her borrow his phone, which she took into the hallway—right when Mr. Phillips was coming out of the faculty bathrooms.

That was when she got detention.

She spent the rest of the school day seething, outraged by the school’s strict, hypocritical phone policies, when students always saw teachers on their phones. She was mad that she couldn’t reply to Sadie. She was irritated that she’d gotten Morris in trouble. She was annoyed by the stupid twirly skirt outfit she was wearing today, because she didn’t have anything else.

And she had no idea how Buck was going to react. He was so mild about everything, but Nora knew he had to have a limit. After all, she’d heard him hit it before—this is a nightmare, this cannot be happening—and if she was going to get in trouble today for getting detention and losing her phone, then she might as well go all in and sneak out to the Target that was two blocks from her school, so she could get some normal freaking clothes and a movie to repay Morris with and something for Sadie, to make up for missing her birthday.

And then she’d gotten arrested.

Sort of. The security guard who caught her clearly wished he was an actual cop with handcuffs and everything, but he’d settled for confining her to a plastic chair in their breakroom. He was easy to hate and that kept her distracted right up until Sergeant Grant walked in, and Nora felt her stomach drop out her butt.

She hunched over, trying to avoid Sergeant Grant’s surveying eyes, trying to distract herself from the security guard’s passive aggressive comments. She thought instead about what Sadie was doing today—did she skip school and go somewhere with her mom? Was she having a birthday party? Were they making jokes about Zoodles eating her cake again?

She was so zoned out that she didn’t even realize Buck had arrived until he was sitting right in front of her. “Nora, honey,” he said, the first time he’d ever called her something like that. “Are you okay?”

Embarrassingly, she felt her bottom lip start to wobble. She didn’t know what she had been expecting, but it wasn’t that. She thought this might finally be the thing that broke his ceaseless niceness, that let her figure out what his deal really was. Where they really stood. What he was really thinking.

But here he was, being nicer than ever.

The security guard wasn’t done with her. “Is she okay? She was trying to steal $80 worth of merchandise.”

And—shit. Eighty dollars was a lot. Nora didn’t think it would all tally up to that much.

“Excuse you,” Buck replied, and for the first time since they were in the dresser aisle the week before, Nora heard his voice drop its gentle cadence. Except this time, he sounded pissed. “I’m talking to my daughter.”

My daughter.

“It’s all this gentle parenting crap—”

“Okay, I think that’s enough,” interrupted Sergeant Grant. “Mr. Buckley, why don’t you take Nora home? As long as she understands the consequences if she does this again, we’re done here.”

“Right,” said Buck, ushering her towards the door. Nora was torn; as much as she wanted to get out of that stifling backroom, she also didn’t want to be alone with Buck again. “Wait—what were the, uh items?”

Oh, no. Shit. She had sports bras in there. And Sadie’s card, and Morris’s movie. It kind of felt like a bunch of adults had ripped open her diary and were reading it out loud to each other. God, she hated being a kid.

“We’ll buy it,” he said, instead. And then he did. He even told off the security guard for her.

Nora didn’t know what to make of it. He barely said two words to her as they left the store, and then he made her wait in the car while he made a phone call.

To who? Her social worker?

Oh god—what if he was trying to give her back?

By the time Buck climbed into the car, he seemed marginally more relaxed, but that just made Nora even more anxious. Was he offloading her? Is that why he was relaxed?

She had to say something, but she couldn’t think of a single thing. Instead, she sat quietly, wishing she could undo this terrible day. Wishing she was an adult so she could be in charge of her own life, for a change. Wishing when she said this doesn’t matter, she believed it.

She was so focused on not crying that it took her a while to realize that Buck wasn’t taking her back to the apartment. Oh god—was this—

“Where—” her voice squeaked, and she hated herself for it. Buck flinched at the noise, and then clearly tried to relax himself and gestured for her to continue. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Where are you taking me?”

“Oh,” said Buck, sounding surprised at the question. “Uh, to get ice cream?”

The answer was so ridiculous that Nora forgot she was avoiding eye contact and stared at him in confusion.

“Didn’t you—I, uh, said that, at the store,” he continued.

“I thought that was a joke,” she said.

Buck shrugged, and said, “felt like we could use some ice cream today.”

“Are you sending me back?”

“Where? To Target? I think we should avoid them for a bit.”

He was being so confusing that Nora blanked on her plan to tiptoe around him and finally just gave up and asked the question that had been banging around her head. “No, to the Warrens.”

Buck’s head snapped towards her, and then his car beeped to let him know he was getting too close to the car in front of him and he slammed on the brakes. They were at a red light, so when the car came to a stop, he shifted in his seat until he was fully facing her.

His blue eyes looked just like hers.

“Nora, there’s no sending you back,” he said, speaking slowly and clearly, like he didn’t think she could hear him. “You’re my kid. I know this is all new but you have to trust me on this, okay? We’re family. You could have lit that Target on fire and I still wouldn’t try to—to give you back. Jesus, Nora, you’re not a stray pet with me on a trial basis. There’s no three-strike rule. I’m your dad, and that’s forever.”

The car behind them beeped, but Buck ignored it, his blue eyes boring into hers, like if he looked hard enough, he could see into her brain and read her thoughts. “Nora,” he repeated, ignoring the fact that the car behind him had stopped polite beeping and was now laying on the horn. “Tell me you understand that.”

Nora felt her eyes watering, felt a few drops leak out and slide down her cheeks. But Buck just kept looking at her like that, like parents did in those cheesy kid movies from the 90s. Eventually, the car behind them gave up and drove around them; and Nora said, “yeah. Yeah, okay.”

“Good,” said Buck, finally turning back ahead, just in time to catch the light turning back to red. “I mean, please don’t actually commit arson. It’s a bad look, you know, firefighter and all.”

She thought about telling him, then, that she wanted to become a firefighter, too. Or making a joke, maybe, about how he’d be the perfect one to help her cover up arson crimes, actually. But it all felt too new, too raw.

“I won’t,” she said, instead.

“Thank you,” he said. He pulled into a parking spot outside a little ice cream shop, one that had a window for ordering and picnic tables on the grass, and shut the car off; but before he got out, he pulled her phone out of his pocket and handed it over to her. “And please, please, don’t go off on your own somewhere. Especially without your phone. I was really scared when I didn’t know where you were.”

“Okay,” said Nora, her voice still feeling hoarse.

“I mean it, Nora,” Buck said. “Can I trust you?”

“Yeah,” she said, meeting his eyes. Surprised to find that she meant it.

“Good,” he said, climbing out of the car. “Now, let’s get some ice cream.”

After Nora ordered a cup of cookie dough ice cream, Buck asked for another cup of cookie dough ice cream and then a soft-swerve swirl with sprinkles. Before she could ask, he pointed towards a picnic table where Maddie—her aunt Maddie, technically—was already sitting.

“Hey Nora,” she said, cheerfully, as they approached. Buck handed over the soft serve and kept the cookie dough for himself.

“Hi.” Nora pushed her ice cream around with her spoon and tried not to let the nerves take over. Maddie had been really nice to her at the barbecue, but something about her steady brown eyes made Nora want to duck for cover.

“Heard you had a rough day,” said Maddie, not even beating around the bush.

“Jeeze, I thought we were going to ease into it,” said Buck. Nora wanted to know exactly what it was.

“Oh, like that ever worked with you,” Maddie replied, rolling her eyes. “So, Nora,” Maddie continued, her voice light and airy, like they were discussing the weather. “Failing classes, detention, and shoplifting, huh?”

Nora felt her face flame red; she sounded like a delinquent when you laid it out like that.

“Don’t worry, we’ve seen worse,” Maddie continued, undeterred. “Buck’s done worse.”

“Hey!” Buck objected, but then he snapped his mouth shut and scrunched his face up in confusion. “I actually don’t know the right thing to say, here.”

“He doesn’t want to make you feel bad, but he also doesn’t want to set a bad example,” Maddie narrated. Nora watched, in fascination, as the siblings interacted. Buck finally stopped using his stupid nice tone and talked like a normal person. And it felt like a serious conversation, but they weren’t acting very serious.

“Let’s start at the top,” said Maddie. Nora remembered that her job was to be a 9-1-1 dispatcher. “The classes—what’s up with that?”

“What’s—?” Nora started, confused by the question. She took a huge bite of ice cream and gave herself brain freeze, instead.

“Why are you failing? Does the teacher suck? Do you need a tutor?”

“I’m not supposed to be in advanced algebra and biology,” Nora said, the defensive answer slipping out faster than she could keep the words in. She imagined being on the other end of a phone call with Maddie, how easily she must get answers from the callers. Still; her cheeks burned with the admission. “They mixed up the transcripts when I moved in with the Warrens.”

Buck usually got weird when Nora mentioned the Warrens, but Maddie was unfazed. “Oh, that’s annoying,” she said, like it was no big deal. “Buck?”

“I’ll talk to the school,” Buck said. “Just tell me which classes you should be in.”

“But—”

“Don’t worry, that’s an easy fix,” said Maddie. “So, detention—what was that about?”

Nora prodded at her ice cream again, feeling a little overwhelmed. “It’s. Um. My best friend, Sadie . . . it’s her birthday today.”

“Ah, the birthday card,” Buck said. She nodded.

“So you were trying to call her?” Maddie asked. She nodded again. It felt surreal to be here, talking about Sadie with Buck and Maddie; like everything was flipped upside down. “When was the last time you saw her?”

“Um. The—uh. The day my mom died.”

“Buck!” Maddie turned an accusing glare onto her brother. “What is the matter with you? Why haven’t you taken her to see her best friend?”

“I’m sorry!” Buck’s eyes were wide. “I didn’t know!”

“Men,” said Maddie, rolling her eyes. “Actually—no,” she said, leaning towards Nora conspiratorially. “This guy has separation anxiety if he’s away from his best friend for three hours—”

“I do not,” Buck interrupted.

“He does,” Maddie said, and then looked at Buck, and added, “do you really want to go there?” Buck made a face at her and then turned his attention to his ice cream instead of replying. “The point is, he understands the sacred bond of best friendship, don’t you, Buck?”

“Yes,” Buck said, petulantly. Nora thought of Chris, making fun of Buck and Eddie; she thought of how badly she wanted to see Sadie again.

“So—” said Maddie, leading.

“Right,” said Buck, sitting up straighter. To Nora, he said, “can you send me her parents’ numbers? We can arrange something for this weekend.”

“Perfect!” said Maddie, before Nora could even reply. She sounded like they were going through a checklist. “That just leaves the shoplifting.”

Nora’s ears burned, but it felt milder than before; like, maybe nothing she said would surprise either Buck or Maddie.

“So, the card was for Sadie,” Buck tallied. “And the super scary clown movie was for . . . ?”

“Morris,” said Nora. “He—he lives with the Warrens. He let me use his phone today before I got caught.”

“Oh, thank god,” said Buck. “Because I am not watching that movie.”

“Buck’s afraid of clowns,” Maddie said.

“They make them scary on purpose,” Buck whined, and Nora was, actually, maybe, having a little . . . fun? It was nice to see Buck like this; silly and opinionated and normal.

“Mhm,” said Maddie. “Buck said the other stuff was clothes?”

“Yeah,” said Nora.

“Anything good?”

Nora bit her lip; she kind of wanted to smile at the question, but she wasn’t sure if she was supposed to. She still couldn’t really tell if she was in trouble or not. She shrugged instead.

“Do you not have enough clothes?” Maddie tried.

“Mrs. Warren bought me a bunch a few weeks after I got there,” she said.

“Oh, does she have terrible taste?” Next to her, Buck snorted. Maddie continued, “our mom used to go back-to-school shopping without me and I’d spend the first month of every school year trying to get my friends to trade me for normal clothes. It was always, like, knee-length skirts and polos.”

Nora perked up at that; both at the fact that Maddie got it and also at the reference to Buck’s parents. Her grandparents.

No one had mentioned them yet.

“Kinda,” Nora said, after a moment. “She bought all these really girlie skirts and dresses. And—” Nora felt emboldened, now, with the sugar of the ice cream on her tongue and Maddie’s teasing expression across the table. “And I just want, like, shorts and t-shirts and sneakers and stuff, you know? But she would only buy these stupid sandals and, like, I know I should be grateful, but—”

“No,” interrupted Maddie. “You’re twelve! You can pick out your own clothes.”

“She hasn’t even picked out a dresser, yet,” Buck said, totally snitching on her. But it was kind of like the way he’d teased Chris.  

“Alright then,” said Maddie, like something had been decided. “Nora, what kind of dresser do you want?”

“I don’t know,” said Nora. She tried to think about how she could explain why she liked her old piecemeal furniture. “Just something that’s like, not boring.”

“See, you have cool taste,” said Maddie. “You should totally be allowed to pick out your own clothes. Buck, you’re on dresser duty. Nora and I are going shopping.”

“Oh—” said Buck, looking back and forth between the two of them. Nora watched while he checked his watch, and said, “uh, I mean—it’s a school night.” Across the table, Maddie narrowed her eyes at him. “—which means you need clothes for school tomorrow, duh,” he finished. “Let me give you my card.”

“Keep it,” said Maddie, standing up and collecting their three empty cups. “I have missed out on twelve years of spoiling my niece. We have a lot of catching up to do.”

---------------

Eddie wouldn’t say he was pacing by his phone, waiting for Buck’s call; but he was definitely sitting on the couch with his leg shaking, checking his home screen every thirty seconds.

It was just that the last thing Buck had said was that Nora was caught shoplifting. She probably wasn’t getting arrested—not at her age—but what if something went wrong? What if the store policy was too strict or someone involved was an asshole? What if Buck tried to intervene? What if—

The point was, Buck could have texted him, to let him know when he’d seen Nora with his own two eyes.

But he didn’t. A half hour ago, Eddie gave up and texted him everything go alright? but as of the last thirty seconds, Buck had still not read it.

Chris was at a friend’s house that night, so Eddie had nothing to distract him; at least, nothing more compelling than the Astros game, which he was pretty sure was a repeat from Thursday. At the next commercial break, he checked his phone one more time—nothing—and then got up to get himself another beer. But right as he twisted the top off, he heard his ringtone from the couch.

He hurried, ignoring the fact that he was sloshing his newly opened beer all over the floor, and reached over the back of the couch to grab his phone, which showed an incoming call from Buck.

“Hey,” said Eddie, as soon as he accepted the call. He could hear himself panting and tried to school his voice into something that didn’t sound ridiculously breathy. “How is she?”

“Mostly alright, I think,” answered Buck. “Thanks to Maddie. Why are you out of breath?”

“Just heard the phone ring from another room,” Eddie answered; for some reason, it felt like a lie.

“Good, cause I need your help,” said Buck. “I have to find Nora a dresser.”

“Right now?”

“Yes, right now,” Buck said. “One thing is going to go right today, dammit, and it’s going to be that I find Nora the perfect dresser.”

“Okay,” said Eddie. He carried his beer back to the kitchen and started pouring it down the drain; it’d be flat by the time he got a chance to drink it. “What qualifies as a perfect dresser?”

“I have no fucking idea,” groaned Buck. “She just said not boring.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah.”

“I might have an idea, actually,” said Eddie. “When are you getting here?”

Buck arrived only a few minutes later; just enough time for Eddie to hang up and make two phone calls.

“Left here,” he instructed from the passenger seat. “So, how’d it go with the whole shoplifting thing?”

Buck followed his directions and recapped the day—the guidance counselor who wasn’t very helpful, the security guard who was an asshole, and Maddie, who had saved the day.

“It kind of feels like cheating,” Buck said, and Eddie clocked his grip tightening around the steering wheel—a classic sign of a Buck Spiral. “Calling in the reserves, you know? Maddie had to parent me and now I’m making her parent my kid.”

“She’s not parenting her,” Eddie pointed out. “She’s hanging out with her niece. And besides, how many times have I recruited you when I needed help with Chris?”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t count,” said Buck. “You’re, like, a real dad. And I’m just, like—”

“Do not finish that sentence, Buckley.”

Buck pressed his lips together and fixed his eyes on the road, ignoring Eddie’s glare. Normally, Eddie would say he had a pretty good understanding of how Buck’s brain worked; but every once in a while, he’d say something that took him totally by surprise.Needy. Wants to be loved. That doesn’t count. It made Eddie feel a little insane. Were they not living in the same reality? The one where Buck had practically been a parent to Christopher—arguably, better than Eddie, or at least more stable—for the last eight years?

How had Buck also lived through all of that, through the sniper and the will and skateboarding and girls and Kim, and still doubt himself?

“Where are we going, anyway?” Buck asked, changing the subject.

“Pepa’s.”

“I thought they were in Palm Springs this week?” Eddie hummed in agreement. “Are we stealing her dresser while she’s out of town?”

“Yeah,” agreed Eddie. “Thought it would be not boring. Plus, Nora’s a fan of theft, so—”

“Hey!” Buck objected, pointing at Eddie accusingly. “Too soon.”

“Eyes on the road,” Eddie countered. “When my abuela moved back to Texas, she left a bunch of her old furniture in Pepa’s basement. Cool pieces, mesquite wood, Talavera tiles, stuff like that. She thought Pepa’s kids might want it, but their places are—I don’t know, what’s that style where everything’s white and boring? Anyway, I called them both. They said Nora should have whichever pieces she wants.”

“They—they said that?”

“Yeah,” said Eddie. “Turn right at the light—they also both say congratulations. And that they can’t wait to meet her. Here, it’s that one on the corner.”

Buck didn’t reply; he was quiet while Eddie found the key under the planter on her front stoop and let them in and led Buck to the basement. He hadn’t been down there since he’d helped move everything in a few years before, and he forgot how much there was—a gorgeous round dining room table and end-tables with vibrant designs painted on them and a bunch of other things Eddie would have taken, if he and Chris had the room. Maybe one day, if they ever got a bigger house.

But he wound through all of those pieces to the back corner, where he remembered depositing the dresser; his tío had insisted on helping and nearly threw his back out on the stairs with that piece. It was just as beautiful as he remembered: heavy wood with hand-carved details above the six drawers, distressed white coloring, vintage iron pulls. It was definitely not boring.

“Think she’ll like it?” he asked, using his hand to brush off some of the dust that had gathered on top. Abuela had been thrilled to know it would be put to use again.

“Yeah,” said Buck, nearly whispering; but it was quiet in the basement, so Eddie could hear him just fine, could hear the way Buck’s breath hitched when he was overwhelmed. “Yeah, it’s perfect. It’s—Eddie—”

Eddie looked at him, then, because he’d gotten all the dust off the top; Buck’s eyes were darker in the basement light, a deep shade of blue he didn’t normally see, and they were roving over Eddie, like they didn’t know where to land, and he was breathing heavily, and he swayed forward an infinitesimal amount. For a moment, the air in the basement felt suspended in time, and Eddie felt like Buck was going to do something, like cry, maybe or, or, he didn’t even know what, but then Buck turned back to the dresser and whatever weird intensity had been in his expression faded.

“It’s perfect,” he repeated, giving Eddie a half smile. “Thanks, Eddie.”

They both took either side of the dresser, then, and navigated it back up the stairs, into the trunk of Buck’s car. And if Eddie felt a little out of breath after all that, well. It was a heavy piece of furniture, was all.

He and Buck had only just gotten the dresser into place when they heard the front door open, signaling Maddie and Nora’s return. Eddie didn’t want to be in the way, and he wanted Buck to get the credit—hopefully—for the not boring addition to Nora’s room, so when Maddie offered him a ride home, he took it.

“How’d the dresser hunt go?” Maddie asked as she pulled away from Buck’s apartment.

“Good, I hope,” said Eddie. He updated her on their errand, and then asked, “what about you? How was your night?”

“It was great,” said Maddie, smiling. “She’s a real spitfire once you get her going.”

“Yeah?” asked Eddie. He’d seen a glimpse of it, that first day, when Nora showed the gumption to approach him with that fake story, when she’d snapped at Buck; but since then, every time he’d been around her she’d been quiet and reserved. He felt an unexpected pang of jealousy, that Maddie gotten Nora to let her guard down.  

“Yeah,” Maddie went on, unbothered. “She’s really funny. And sometimes, with her mannerisms, it was like I was staring at twelve-year-old Evan again.” She let out a short laugh, oblivious to the pained feeling rolling around Eddie’s stomach. He couldn’t even pinpoint what was causing it. “And it was nice—I’ve been so nostalgic for the days when Jee was a baby, but this reminded me that the other stages are fun too, you know?”

“Yeah,” said Eddie.

“I can’t believe we missed twelve years of her life,” Maddie went on; Eddie appreciated the way she said we, even though Eddie didn’t even know Buck twelve years ago. “It breaks my heart. I get the sense that she didn’t have the happiest childhood before all this. It’s like there’s a Buckley curse.”

“Not you, too,” Eddie groaned. “It’s not a curse, it’s your parents,” he corrected, before he remembered that he and Maddie weren’t actually that close and maybe he shouldn’t rib her the same way he did Buck.

But Maddie just laughed. “Okay then, there’s Buckley generational trauma,” she said. “Happy?”

“About your family trauma? Not particularly.”

“Well, that makes two of us,” said Maddie.

They fell into an easy silence, an old song filling up the space in Maddie’s car. After a minute, Eddie broke it and said, “thank you, though. For talking to Nora, and taking her out. I know it meant a lot to Buck.”

Maddie didn’t respond for a moment, and when Eddie looked over, he could see she was pressing her lips together. For one wild moment, Eddie thought she was going to laugh; but then she just nodded and said, “yeah, of course, Eddie.”

She pulled up in front of his house a few minutes later, and he thanked her for the ride as he climbed out. But when he closed the door, she said, “hey, Eddie?”

He ducked his head back down, so he was looking in through her open passenger side window. “Yeah?”

“Thank you, too. For looking out for both of them.”

The little ball of pain that had been ricocheting around his stomach and squeezing in his chest eased; it turned into something warm, and soft. It felt good, being the one to look out for Buck and Nora. Other people knowing that that was his job.

It felt like how it should be.

Chapter Text

That Saturday fell in the middle of a three day-off stretch, and Eddie hadn’t bothered making a plan for the weekend, but now that it was here and he had nothing but uninterrupted hours ahead of him, he was starting to regret that. He’d spent most of Friday catching up on the chores and errands he needed to get done, and it was a rare Saturday that Chris didn’t have plans, and it just felt like they should do something.

Normally, when Eddie felt like this—itching to get out of the house, with no clue what to do—he’d call Buck. Buck always had something in mind; ATVing in the sand dunes, driving to Joshua Tree, trying out a restaurant with cuisine from a country Eddie hadn’t even heard of. Hell, he’d even take organizing the crypt-like storage unit under Buck’s apartment complex, which he kept insisting would be good for his bike, if he ever got rid of all the musty old boxes the previous tenant had abandoned.  

That’s how desperate he was.

But now, Buck had Nora. And Eddie was trying to give them space, since it seemed like Nora was finally starting to warm up, and also since Hen and Chimney and Ravi had started making fun of him for being such a mother hen. Not that he was—and honestly, wasn’t there something problematic in the term, anyway?—he was just making sure Buck felt supported, and that he had help and support, and that he knew Eddie was there for him if he needed.

But fine; maybe that manifested in a lot of questions and comments and suggestions. And maybe the 118 weren’t the only ones picking up on it; Chris was probably going to kill him if he knocked on his door one more time. He’d just wondered if Chris had heard from Nora or Buck. Or if Chris wanted to get out of the house. Or if he needed a snack. But apparently Chris and his friends were nearing the end of a campaign, whatever that meant, and if Eddie interrupted him one more time, his kid was probably going to seriously reconsider moving back to Texas.

It was all fine, though. Eddie was an adult, and he could entertain himself. Maybe he’d go for a run, or read a book. Maybe he’d—

Oh thank god. Chris emerged from his bedroom.

“Hey dad,” he said, casually passing him on the way through the living room, as if he hadn’t yelled ‘get out, get out, get out!’ at him a half hour ago. Eddie got up and followed him into the kitchen.

“Hey,” he said, rooting around in the fridge for a drink that wasn’t a beer, given that it was only barely noon. “How’d the campaign go?”

“Good,” Chris said. He rifiled through the snack cabinet and pulled out a granola bar. “So, I was talking to Nora—”

“You were?” Eddie interrupted; Chris gave him an unimpressed look.

“Yep,” he said, drawing the word out, like he was punishing Eddie for his over-eagerness.

“In your game?”

“No,” said Chris, like Eddie was an idiot. “We texted.”

“Oh, right. How, uh, how is she doing?”

“She said something about wanting to go to a bookstore. Didn’t Denny and Mara go to a new one last weekend?”

“Yeah,” said Eddie, excitement growing. Buck was going to be thrilled. “Hen told us about it, it’s by the Grove.”

“Should we go? We could meet Nora and Buck and then get lunch, or something.” Chris said it with the flat affectedness all teenagers develop sometime around their thirteenth year; but still, it had been Chris’s idea, and that had to count for something, right?

“Yeah,” he said, barely letting Chris get the words out. “Yeah, that sounds great. I’ll call Buck.”

A half hour later, they were pushing through the doors of a brand-new bookstore. It was huge—two stories, with a café and everything. Buck had texted a few minutes earlier, that he and Nora arrived and that he was grabbing them drinks before they browsed. As soon as they made it through the doors, Chris peeled off to check out the music section.

Eddie wound his way towards what he hoped was the café—if he didn’t catch Buck in time, he’d order him some awful, seasonally-flavored monstrosity—but then, mid-way down an aisle offering pop science and history, he heard Nora’s voice.

He paused. He wasn’t eavesdropping, per se—just making sure that Nora wasn’t getting dragged into a conversation with a creep.

“—read that one,” she was saying, to someone on the other side of the shelves. “I, uh—I actually want to be a firefighter when I grow up.” Eddie froze, statue-still.

Nora wanted to be a firefighter?

Did Buck know that?

“I know I’m pretty small right now,” Nora was saying. “But my, uh, my dad, he’s really tall so I’m hoping that by the time I’m eighteen I’ll be tall enough. He’s—he’s actually a firefighter with the LAFD.”

“Really?” the person Nora was talked to responded, and Eddie fucking knew that voice. He pivoted from where he’d stood, practically jogging to the next aisle. “What’s his name? Maybe I’ve met him—”

“Nora,” he called out, itching to step between her and the red-haired woman next to her. They both turned and looked at him as he approached.

“Oh, hi Eddie,” Nora said, cheeks pinking. “There’s, um, an author here. So, I was just . . .”

She trailed off, gesturing to the woman holding a sharpie and standing in front of a shelf with a stack of books on it, the title Close to the Flame: My Adventures with the LAFD repeating over and over and over again.

Her eyes were bouncing between Eddie and Nora with her eagle-eyed reporter gaze; Eddie hated it.

“Oh, I’m familiar,” he said; he drew himself up to his full height and crossed his arms. “Taylor Kelly.”

She swept her long red hair behind one shoulder and turned to meet him full-on. “Eddie Diaz,” she replied. Her eyes bounced between him and Nora. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought you only had the one kid.”

Eddie’s eyes flicked to Nora. He really didn’t want to be having a conversation with Taylor; and he especially didn’t want to be talking to her about their kids. But he wanted Nora talking to her even less.

“What about you—just the one book? Did you run out of material after the break-up?”

“Ah, I’d forgotten what a little guard dog you could be,” Taylor said, teasing in her voice. “Since you’re here, I’m assuming—” she broke off, then, eyes lighting up as they landed back on Nora. “Wait—”

“Taylor,” he said, warningly. “Don’t.” Nora was following their conversation like a tennis match, head swiveling to catch their interruptions and expressions. She’d already spent too much time in Taylor Kelly’s presence. Taylor opened her mouth, like she was about to do exactly what he was warning her against, so before she could say anything, he turned to Nora. “Nora, honey, I think your dad is in the café—why don’t you go find him?”

It was the kind of thing he’d say to Chris; the kind of tone he’d use when he meant do it and don’t argue and we’ll talk about it later. He wasn’t sure it would work on Nora, but after a moment she nodded, turning to give a small wave to Taylor before she left. 

Once she disappeared at the end of the aisle, Taylor pounced. “Buck has a kid? Since when?”

Eddie dragged his hand down his face, trying to figure out the lesser of two evils. He certainly didn’t want Taylor to have any information about Buck and Nora, but he was pretty sure she’d back off if she knew the basics; at least while Nora was in the vicinity. He felt like he was trying to outthink a shark.

“About twelve years,” he admitted. “But he’s only known for two weeks. So you can’t use this for some sort of exposé about how your ex lied to you.”

“I think you’re overestimating the public’s interest in my love life.”

“I think I’m underestimating what you’d do for views,” he countered. She leveled him with a stare that was impressively superior for someone who’d traded her boyfriend for a news scoop. “She’s been through a lot, Taylor. They both have. Can you not make everything more difficult than it needs to be?”

“You mean, can I leave the store before Buck realizes I’m here?”

“Yes, that.”

She sighed, and then recapped her sharpie. “Fine, but only because I’m already done.” Eddie stepped out of the way, so she could have the quickest route to the exit, but shifted on her feet and stayed where she was. “Just, tell me—how’s he doing?”

Eddie shrugged, wishing he could just tell her to fuck off, instead. Still—part of him understood why she asked. “Well, he just found out he has a daughter, so he’s, you know . . .”

“Over the moon?” she guessed.

He nodded, ceding that much.

“Well,” said Taylor, as she picked her bag up off the ground, slung it over her shoulder, and made to leave past him. “Tell him I said I’m happy for him, will you? If you’re . . . secure enough to pass on a message from an ex.”

And before Eddie could even begin to parse out what that meant, she was gone.

He let out a long breath once he was alone in the aisle. At least she was gone, and that was one less thing to worry about. He pushed her books further back on the shelf, where they’d be less visible, and then continued winding his way through the aisles until he found Buck in the café.

“Hey,” said Buck, grinning as he spotted Eddie. “I got you a butterfly pea flower iced tea lemonade.”

He held out a four-cup carrier, filled with iced drinks that were somehow three different colors all at once.

“A—what?”

“It’s a butterfly—”

“No, I heard you. What’s your aversion to a hot coffee?”

“I got ones for all of us,” said Buck, ignoring his question and leading them out of the café, back past the shelves that Eddie had just escaped from. “I like this place. The barista was saying that they try to have as many autographed copies of books as they can, so authors are always stopping by to sign them. Isn’t that cool?”

Eddie gave his best friend a side-long glance, trying to gauge his mood. Eddie was pretty sure Buck would be fine to hear Taylor Kelly’s name. He was the one who did the dumping, after all. Plus, he’d dated two people since their break-up. But still—it didn’t seem necessary to bring her up. Buck had been operating at a higher level of stress for the last week and a half, and he had enough to worry about.

And if he did tell him, then Eddie would have to relay Taylor’s message and he was annoyed with her. For trying to push with Nora and for saying if you’re secure enough, all cryptic, like being a reporter meant she knew things he didn’t.  

Eddie took a sip of his drink to avoid answering. Annoyingly, it tasted pretty good.

-------

“Tell. Me. Everything.”

Nora giggled, crossing her legs on Sadie’s bed and watching her best friend, who had tucked her hands under her chin and was staring at her like she was about to begin a presentation.

To be fair, she did have a lot to catch Sadie up on. After Buck had given her phone back on Wednesday, they’d been texting nearly non-stop; but once they agreed that Buck would drive Nora over on Saturday night for a sleepover, Sadie declared that Nora would use the time to tell her about every single thing that had happened in the last two weeks.

Even though they should have been celebrating Sadie’s birthday. But Sadie insisted they’d have time for that next weekend, which was when they had tickets for the midnight premiere of Firestarter 2. They’d made the plans months ago, before everything, and Nora still hadn’t talked to Buck about them. But that was a problem for later.

Right now, she had a lot of catching up to do.    

No sooner had Buck walked her to the door—he wanted to meet Sadie’s parents, apparently—than Nora was whisked upstairs, where Sadie had one of her mom’s fancy snack boards ready and pillows laid out, like she always did when Nora slept over.

“Okay, so, uh—I guess, the morning after we talked? Buck showed up early at the Warrens and picked me up.” She recapped everything she could remember from that day, which was a lot. The way Buck had carried her bags for her and the welcome home sign Chris made. The shopping trip that had gotten painful until Buck called it off and took her to get sneakers. The lunch and evening after, the way Chris acted more like Buck’s kid than she did, and the way he sat on her bed for hours, just to buy her some alone time.

“Wait, so, do we like Chris or do we not like Chris?” Sadie asked, like all she needed was for Nora to declare which.

“We like Chris,” Nora said, definitively.

She thought of the way he texted her that morning: hey want to make up an excuse for our dads to hang out? mine is being crazy right now followed by he does this when he gets buck withdrawal.

“Okay, cool,” agreed Sadie. “It just sounded in the beginning there like maybe Chris was going all evil-stepsister.”

“Evil stepsister?”

“Yeah,” said Sadie, using a pretzel to spread hummus evenly down the middle of a celery stick. “Like an intruder. Stealing time with your dad.”

“If anything, I’d be the intruder,” Nora pointed out. She reached out and picked a snickerdoodle. “He’s been close with Buck this whole time and then I showed up out of the blue.”

Sadie made a face at her, but she just asked, “so, it’s really like Buck’s basically his other dad?”

“Kind of,” said Nora, struggling to articulate what she observed about the little lopsided family unit, and how she felt about it. “I guess it just feels weird. Like, Buck’s been doing dad-stuff this whole time, but for Chris instead of me. It’s not anyone’s fault,” she said, shrugging, even though somewhere deep in her chest, it felt like maybe it was. “It makes me feel . . . weird.”

“Weird,” said Sadie, thoughtfully. “Yeah, weird is fair.” She took a chomp of the celery stick, and then, through a full mouth, said, “tell me more about Eddie.”

“He kind of reminds me of like—remember the sub who covered for our social studies teacher for like a month in fifth grade?”

“Oh, I loved that guy. Mr. Howard, right?”

“Yeah. But also, this thing happened earlier today—” Nora started, excited to finally have someone to debrief with.

She didn’t know how to feel about what had happened at the store, earlier. Once she and Chris decided that a bookstore and lunch would be enough to entertain their parents and also get compensated for it, book-wise, she’d been met with an embarrassing amount of enthusiasm from Buck. Maybe he’d been having Eddie-withdrawal, too.

At the store, he’d offered to grab her a lemonade “for browsing,” so she’d ducked down the nonfiction row. And not only had she seen Close to the Flame—a book about the LAFD she’d been wanting to read but could never find in the school libraries—she saw the author, too.

Taylor Kelly paused mid-signature when she noticed Nora staring at her.

“Can I help you?” she asked; Nora had heard Taylor Kelly’s voice on the news many times, so it felt surreal to have her words be directed her way.

“Oh, uh,” said Nora, feeling a little starstruck. “I really want to read your book.”

“Really?” Taylor said, raising her eyebrows at her. “You’ve heard of it?” She sounded delighted, and also a little like she didn’t believe her.

“Yeah,” Nora said, knowing her cheeks were coloring. “I’ve read a bunch of books about firefighters but I haven’t read that one. I, uh—I actually want to be a firefighter when I grow up. I know I’m pretty small right now, but my, uh, my dad,”—it still felt weird calling Buck that— “he’s really tall so I’m hoping that by the time I’m eighteen I’ll be tall enough. He’s—he’s actually a firefighter with the LAFD.”

Taylor Kelly’s face had softened while Nora was talking, so she looked less like when she interviewed politicians and more like when she was reporting about pet adoption events. “Really? What’s his name? Maybe I’ve met him—”

“Nora,” she turned, spotting Eddie hurrying down the aisle towards her. She was pretty sure her face was pink from her rambling, and at the sudden interruption, she could actually feel her ears turn red, too.

“Oh, hi Eddie,” she said. Now that she looked at him, she realized he looked . . . annoyed? Did Nora do something wrong? Or was his Buck-withdrawal really that bad? “There’s, um, an author here. So, I was just . . .”

“Oh, I’m familiar,” he said, puffing himself up and sounding huffy. “Taylor Kelly.”

For a moment, Nora was worried Taylor Kelly was going to ask her why this guy had showed up looking so pissed off—to which Nora would have zero answer—but to her surprise, Taylor met his gaze and said, “Eddie Diaz.” After a meaningful glance between Nora and Eddie, who was now standing half in front of her like some sort of bodyguard, she said, “correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought you only had the one kid.”

She wondered what Eddie thought about being mistaken for her dad. Probably nothing, actually, because he immediately retorted, “what about you—just the one book? Did you run out of material after the break-up?”

Oh—did Eddie used to date Taylor Kelly? He sounded like he’d been sitting on that one.

“Ah, I’d forgotten what a little guard dog you could be,” Taylor said, and Nora was super curious to know what the full story was there. “Since you’re here, I’m assuming—” Taylor broke off, shifting her gaze from Eddie to Nora. “Wait—”

“Taylor,” Eddie snapped. “Don’t.” And now Nora was doubly confused—why would any of their drama be about her? Taylor opened her mouth, but Eddie beat her to it. “Nora, honey, I think your dad is in the café—why don’t you go find him?”

Nora knew that tone. It was the do what I say and don’t cause a scene voice that adults used when they didn’t want to deal with you because they had their own drama going on. Nora overheard some of her best gossip after adults used that voice.

She left, then, scurrying around the next aisle until she was level with where Eddie and Taylor were standing on the other side.

“—has a kid?” Taylor was saying. “Since when?”

Eddie paused for so long that Nora wondered if he’d just walked away. But then finally, he said, “about twelve years. But he’s only known for two weeks. So you can’t use this for some sort of exposé about how your ex lied to you.”

Oh—Buck had dated Taylor Kelly. Nora had been wanting to read a book written by her dad’s ex-girlfriend? Was Buck in the book? Nora didn’t really know what to do with that.

By the time she could focus back in, she’d missed Taylor’s reply.

“I think I’m underestimating what you’d do for views,” said Eddie. He sounded awfully upset for someone who, apparently, hadn’t been the one getting broken up with. When he spoke again, his tone was softer. “She’s been through a lot, Taylor. They both have. Can you not make everything more difficult than it needs to be?”

Nora’s stomach flip-flopped. It sounded like Eddie was looking out for her. Like he was being protective.

But he’d also said more difficult.   

“You mean, can I leave the store before Buck realizes I’m here?”

“Yes, that,” said Eddie, sharpness back in his tone.

“Fine, but only because I’m already done. Just, tell me—how’s he doing?”

“Well, he just found out he has a daughter, so he’s, you know . . .” he trailed off, and Nora’s gut twisted again, churning around like she might be sick. This is a nightmare, he’d said.

But then Taylor finished the sentence with, “over the moon?”

Nora was holding her breath so nothing would interfere with her hearing, but she still couldn’t tell if Taylor’s words were said with sarcasm. She didn’t exhale, waiting for Eddie to say something, but only silence followed. Eddie didn’t reply. Why didn’t Eddie reply?

Taylor spoke again, but it was drowned out by the clamor in her skull. Over the moon? Silence. What did it mean?

She saw Taylor disappear down the end of the aisle and hurried out of her own, so that Eddie wouldn’t spot her. She beelined to the YA section where she could hide from anyone involved in what she just heard.

Halfway down the fantasy shelf, she found Chris, reading the back of a book with a swooping black and gold design on the cover. “Hey,” he said, looking up when she approached. “What’s up?”

She must look wide-eyed, and her face still felt warm; she blinked and reached back and retied her ponytail. She thought about asking him—about Taylor Kelly, and Buck, and Eddie. About over the moon—but something stopped her. She wanted to keep it to herself to a little longer. It felt too delicate to say out loud to Chris, who knew exactly where he stood with his own dad. And with Buck.   

“Nothing,” she said, grabbing a second copy of the same book Chris was reading off the shelf and turning it to read the description. “Just our dads being weird.”

“What else is new?” he asked.

Back in Sadie’s bedroom, Nora finished recounting her morning— “so, yeah. I still don’t really know exactly what they meant by that—”

“It meant we were right! He is sweet!” Sadie sat up then, doing a silly dance with a few fist-pumps. “He’s over the moon, Nor. It’s because he realized he lucked out and got the coolest person in the world as a daughter.”

“Shut up. It could have been—” Nora had rolled her eyes, but it just backfired because it meant she wasn’t looking when Sadie whammed her in the head with a pillow. “Hey!” she said, snatching the fluffy weapon out of her hands. “Watch the snacks!”

“Come on, face it,” said Sadie, “he’s sweet! He set up your room and got you two pairs of sneakers and he wanted you to meet his best friends. I knew it, the nightmare thing was a fluke.”

“Yeah, actually. . .” Nora winced, and then recapped her no-good Wednesday. Sadie was a perfect audience, aside from when she gave Nora a disappointed look when she confessed to shoplifting. She was horrified by the frog dissection and indignant about nosy Mr. Phillips and the super rude security guard, and she totally got Nora’s mortification when Sergeant Grant showed up.

When she recapped Buck’s appearance—the way he said Nora, honey and told off the security guard and bought all the items and then took her out for ice cream with aunt Maddie—Sadie was looking positively smug.

“Maddie sounds so cool,” said Sadie, wistfulness in her voice. Sadie’s parents were both only children, and she was the oldest, so she didn’t have anyone like Maddie in her family.

“She is,” said Nora. “I can’t wait til you meet her. She’s such a badass, she’s a 9-1-1 operator and nothing phases her. And she just, like, dunks on Buck, constantly. It’s really funny.”

“I love her,” Sadie announced, even though she’d been declaring her love for Buck only minutes before. “And she took you shopping?”

“Yeah, she bought me this,” Nora said, gesturing to the soft gray sweats she was wearing, along with the loose cotton jersey she had on; it was dark blue and said Angel City Football Club on the back. “And a bunch of other stuff.”

“What did you guys talk about?” Sadie reached for another cookie; it was the last one, so she broke it in half and held out a piece to Nora. Nora took it, even though, privately, she thought it wasn’t as good as Buck’s. Eddie had called him a stress-baker, and that seemed accurate—in the three weeks since Nora had been living with him, Nora had eaten her weight in cookies, brownies, blondies, scones, banana bread, and biscuits. Maybe next time, she could bring something he made to add to their fancy snack trays.

“She talked about her kids, who sound super cute,” Nora answered, chewing thoughtfully. “And she asked me about like, mom, and stuff. But just a little. Then we talked about you,” she told Sadie, but it felt too sickly sweet, so she added, “and how you’re probably driving Ms. Sussex crazy without me in homeroom and how you better not have started hanging out with Sarah P. since I’ve been gone—”

“She’s not that bad,” Sadie interrupted.

“I’ll never forgive her for what she said about your outfit on picture day,” Nora said. “She’s on my shit list! You can’t be friends with people on my shit list.”

“Shhh,” said Sadie, grabbing another celery stick. “We’re not talking about me, we’re talking about your super cool new family. Did Maddie say anything about your grandparents?”

“Kinda,” said Nora, picking up a lukewarm mozzarella stick and passing it to Sadie instead, and then taking another for herself. “I asked about it, a little. I said something about how it’d only ever been me and my mom so now it’s so different, since Buck has a bigger family. But she just talked about their other friends, like Hen and the Sergeant and stuff.”

“Mysterious,” said Sadie. “Maybe they just live far away.”

“Yeah, they’re in Hershey, Pennsylvania,” Nora told her. “I asked if they were from LA.”

“Hershey? That’s cool. Maybe you’re secretly a chocolate heiress.”

“I asked if they go back a lot to visit and she said no and was kinda weird about it.”

“Weird about it, how?”

“She just started telling me about a story from when Buck was little and got banned from Hershey Park for climbing into the cow enclosure.”

“I love your new family,” Sadie said, flopping back on the pillows. “They’re so not boring.”

“Definitely not,” Nora said. “Hey. Can we just put on a stupid movie and not talk about any of this for a bit?”

“Aye aye, captain,” said Sadie, sitting up and tossing Nora the remote for the TV her parents let her have in her room. “You pick out something good, I’ll go get Zoodles for cuddling.”

---------  

Buck didn’t mean to sound dramatic, but he might actually die.

It was just that he was sitting in the back row of a movie theater, viscerally aware of every part of his body that was touching Eddie’s, while some sort of epic teen fantasy romance played out on screen. It was a bit predictable, but Buck remembered what it was like being a teenager. He could see the appeal.

Actually, there was a chance he could see the appeal too much.

“You’ve been right beside me this whole time,” the heroine was saying on screen, staring lovingly into the eyes of a generic-looking guy with dark hair and a gaping wound in his side. “I don’t know why I never saw it before.”

Next to him, Eddie shifted his leg, so his knee pushed even further into Buck’s. Buck fought back the urge to hook his own foot around Eddie’s and pull his knees apart and—

“I have to go to the bathroom,” he whispered, not even bothering to turn towards Eddie when he said it. He just bolted up, out of the theater, like he’d suddenly remembered he had to go and it was urgent.

He was pretty sure they were nearing the end—that love confession definitely meant it was the third act—and maybe he could just hide out in the lobby until everyone cleared out of the theater. Or better yet, he could call himself an uber to go get drunk at Maddie’s. Eddie would make sure Nora and Sadie got home.

Not that he would actually do that. He didn’t want to cut into his time with Nora.

Especially after how the last week had gone.

He thought they’d made a lot of progress. Last weekend, she’d asked to go to the bookstore, and then was in high spirits when he dropped her off at Sadie’s. She was still in a good mood when he’d picked her up on Sunday, but by the time they were back at the house, she’d gotten quiet and then spent the night in her room.

Monday morning, Buck had followed her into school so he could sort out her classes with Ms. Callahan, and Nora seemed happy about that, but by Tuesday afternoon, she was back to barely speaking to him.

Everyone said it was normal. That she’d just lost her mom and was dealing with a lot of change, and that raising a teenage girl wasn’t going to be sunshine and rainbows all the time, even without all of that. And he knew that—he wasn’t expecting it to be! He just hated seeing her look miserable.

So he was secretly thrilled when she approached him Thursday night and asked if there was a chance he could take her and Sadie to the midnight premiere of Firestarter 2. Apparently, they’d gotten the tickets ages ago, for Sadie’s birthday present, and the plan had been that her parents would take them and sit in the back row. But now, Sadie’s mom had the flu.

He’d agreed right away, even though he had no idea what Firestarter 2 was, and even though his shift started at eight am the next morning. It would have all been totally fine, except then he went and told Eddie about it.

“Both her parents were going to go?” Eddie asked, eyes raised.

“Yeah,” said Buck. “I think she said her grandma’s staying with them right now, so she was just going to stay home with Sadie’s little brothers.”

“So you have an extra ticket?” asked Eddie, which Buck hadn’t anticipated being the reason he asked. “Cool, I’m free.”

“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” said Buck, waving him off and hoping his voice didn’t sound too pleading.

“You’d be doing me a favor,” Eddie insisted. “Chris is at a sleepover and I’ll be bored out of my mind. Plus, it’ll be fun. I haven’t been to one of those midnight showings since Adri and Sophia made me take them.”

And really, what could Buck say to that?  

It wasn’t like he could point out that, actually, he was trying to avoid one-on-one time with Eddie for the foreseeable future. He’d thought he had it bad enough when he had his ill-timed realization. But either he was totally clueless before, or Buck was developing some sort of pathetic kink for all the ways Eddie had been there for him since Nora showed up. 

He couldn’t help it. Eddie was relentless.

During the lunch they’d grabbed together after the bookstore, Eddie started asking Chris and Nora if they’d given any thought lately to what they wanted to be when they grew up. Chris was apparently interested in becoming a rocket scientist after getting into a long conversation with Karen during Nora’s welcome barbecue.

And then Nora said that she wanted to be a firefighter.

The words brought on such a landslide of emotion that he had to blink his eyes several times to stop himself from crying at the table. Even though Nora didn’t say much else, and even though she barely looked at any of them when she said it, it didn’t stop the rush of feelings—excitement and fear and disbelief that Nora was old enough to be thinking about having a job at all, and, overwhelmingly, pride.

Nora wanted to be a firefighter.

“She wants to be just like her dad,” Eddie murmured, later, as they were heading back to the parking lot. He stepped close enough into Buck’s space that when he elbowed him, it hit Buck in the gut; and then he looked up with his sparkling brown eyes, staring at Buck like—like—like something that felt like a second, more violent hit to his gut.

The next day, during their shift, Eddie said they should think about taking a vacation. The four of them. “It just makes sense,” he said, obliviously spraying down the locker room walls while Buck squeezed the squeegee so hard the handle actually bent in his fist. “Most places have family packages for four, and we’d only have to pay for two rooms. Plus, if either of us took our kid alone, they’d get too bored with us.”

Family package, Buck thought, popping the top clean off the squeegee, so he’d have an excuse to go get another one from the supply closet. For four.

He’d started getting desperate, then, avoiding any room Eddie was in—especially if he was alone—and darting to the bathroom every time Eddie looked like he might start talking about hotel rooms and travel dates. It got so bad that by Friday, Hen asked him if he’d been experiencing symptoms of IBS.

The next time it happened, he tried a new tactic and changed the subject to something he thought was innocuous—his plans to take Sadie and Nora to the midnight showing of some teen movie—but then Eddie went ahead and invited himself. On what was originally supposed to be a date night. For a married couple.

And now here he was, panicking in a men’s bathroom that smelled overwhelmingly of popcorn.

He pulled out his phone and did what he always did in a crisis: he texted Maddie.

im going to die, he sent his sister.

He washed his hands and splashed some water on his face, waiting for Maddie to reply.

Wednesday morning, they both had off from work, and she’d dragged him out to brunch to hear how he was coping with everything. He was pretty sure she was expecting him to crash out about Nora’s sporadic moodiness, but instead, he’d spent nearly three hours venting to her about his latent, debilitating realization: he wanted to fuck Eddie.

He wanted to do a lot more than that, actually. He wanted to hold his hand, and kiss him good morning, and make him pancakes in the shape of hearts for breakfast. He wanted to fill out HR paperwork and file for joint bank accounts.

All of which Maddie listened, to, patiently, and only managed to slip up once and say, “I told you so!” with such glee that Buck could vividly picture her at sixteen, smirking and saying the same thing.

He’d thought it would help. He’d thought when he went over there and said, “I have terrible news: I’m in love with my best friend,” that maybe it would get it out of his system. Like how complaining about something bad always made it feel better, even if it didn’t solve anything.

But it turned out, being in love with Eddie wasn’t bad; or at least, it wasn’t something he could recover from or solve. It did, in fact, make Buck feel bad, because he couldn’t be in the same room with his best friend anymore without thinking indecent thoughts, and then imagining how horrified Eddie would be if he could tell what kind of thoughts Buck had been having, and then maybe wondering if Eddie would punish him for being bad, and then that got his thinking so off track he might actually have to go through with pretending to develop IBS so he had a plausible excuse for all his sudden disappearances.

Like now.

His phone buzzed and he read Maddie’s reply. As far as I know, no one has ever died from spiraling about being in love with their best friend while hiding in the movie theater bathroom

Buck sent back an unimpressed emoji, followed by, how did u know that

Maddie’s replies came through, one after the other: 1) you and eddie had plans to sit next to each other during a midnight showing of a love story and 2) ive met you

Well. That was fair enough. Still, Buck didn’t appreciate her sass. Ur a nurse. How long can I hide in here before he thinks this is a medical emergency?

Eddie? Id give it three minutes, tops, Maddie told him, and then immediately started eating those three minutes up by taunting him.

Did he do the move where he yawns and puts his arm around you?

Did you put the arm rest up?

Did you both reach for popcorn at the same time?

He sighed, turning around to lean against the sink and type out his reply. this is psychological warfare, he sent her.

if you feel crazy, you know what could help? Maddie replied

Buck replied, a lobotomy?

Maddie’s reply came through right as he hit send: talking to eddie

She’d been on a kick about this ever since Buck’s breakdown. For some reason Buck couldn’t parse, his otherwise sane and brilliant sister had decided that right now—a few weeks into fatherhood, which Buck may or may not be blowing, and which he was well aware it was taking the full force of all his loved ones combined to keep himself from failing completely—was the best time to pull his best friend aside and say hey thanks for how much you’ve been doing for me and Nora, but it has made me realize I’m in love with you. Sorry!

Yeah. Not going to happen.

His phone buzzed again, but it wasn’t Maddie this time. You ok? Eddie texted.

Buck’s chest hurt at the sight of it. There was a specific feeling he’d been getting—a physical ache, like a sharp pang—every time Eddie did something that Buck’s stupid heart wanted to misinterpret. Like making Buck his coffee in the chipped World’s Best Dad mug, which was communally used by everyone on shift, so really, it was more of a joke than anything. Or when Eddie texted him on Wednesday morning just to ask how he and Nora were doing. Or when he started talking about how they should figure out a way that Carla could stay with both Chris and Nora when they had to work overnights.

He was being a good friend, that was all. Because that’s who Eddie was. A good person. A good, straight person. And Buck needed to remember that, or he was going to do something exceedingly stupid like try to make out with him in the back of a dark movie theater.

yeah, sry, maddie needed help with a recipe, he wrote back to Eddie, which, as far as excuses went, was barely a step above telling him his IBS symptoms were flaring.

He pocketed his phone and slipped back into the theater, just in time to see the two lead actors engage in a passionate kiss. Perfect.

The credits started rolling and the lights came up, so he just stood at the end of the row and waited for Eddie to spot him.

“You missed it,” he said, when he passed Buck, following the flow of the crowded theater as everyone moved into the lobby. “There was a whole underwater fight scene. And then the guy got to save her. Which was nice, you know? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I think it’s good that they stopped making every girl character a damsel in distress. But she saved him earlier, so it was like they both saved each other.”

They pulled off to the side to wait for Nora and Sadie, and Eddie started really getting into it, the way he did when he gossiped with Hen or when Buck caught him watching a telenovela. He got all animated about it; his dormant passion for love stories that only ever seemed to emerge when it had to do with other people.

Buck took a long sip from his soda but all that was left was the watery remains of melted ice. Personally, he would passionately love for Eddie to stop talking right now. But he wasn’t done: “and isn’t that what love is? Fighting for each other? Man, I forgot how fun movies like this were. This reminds me of when I took Adri and Sophia to see one of The Hunger Games in between deployments. It was a bribe so they’d babysit for Shannon but honestly, I kind of wanted to see it, too.”

“Mhm,” said Buck. He busied himself, aiming at the garbage can four feet away and tossing his empty cup into it.

“Nice shot,” said Eddie. “Are you ever going to come to another pick-up game with us? If Chimney’s not free, you could be on my team.”

Buck’s brain started playing a highlights reel of that disastrous day: Eddie grinning at him on the court, looking sweaty and happy, a challenging glint in his eye. Buck, feeling more and more agitated as the game went on, unable to figure out why. The split-second he had to decide whether to risk the move that would end up twisting Eddie’s ankle.

Tommy was nowhere to be found in his memories.

It was possible that Buck had been a huge fucking idiot.

“Not sure I should be allowed on the court after what happened last time,” he said, scanning the crowd for Nora and Sadie. Was it rock bottom yet, hoping for two twelve-year-olds to rescue him from his own best friend?

“That was an accident,” Eddie said; Buck didn’t correct him. “Besides, if you played for my team, I’d be safe.” Tax paperwork. The recipe he said he’d send Sadie’s mom. Checking with Ravi about the plan for Nora’s surprise. These were all things he’d be better off thinking about than whatever the hell was coming out of Eddie’s mouth. “We’d be so good together. We’d have an unfair advantage because we’ve been partners for so long. We can basically read each other’s minds.”

God, Buck prayed Eddie couldn’t actually read his mind.  

“Yeah,” he said, noncommittally. “Oh, look, there they are.” He finally spotted Nora and Sadie, who had their heads together and were talking and giggling and paying no attention to them. “Come on, let’s go,”

He resisted the urge to grab Eddie’s hand as he wound his way through the crowd.

Chapter Text

Nora couldn’t figure out why she felt like this.

She’d gotten everything she wanted: her own bedroom, two new pairs of sneakers. And even more than that—she had her own phone that she could use to text Sadie and her classes were fixed and she never had to make her own dinner. She even really loved the dresser Buck had found for her, which had apparently been Eddie’s grandmother’s, and which was definitely not boring.

She had a home that Buck told her was permanent. She could pick out her own clothes and her bookshelf had six new books on it and if she thought of anywhere she wanted to go or anything she wanted to do, the answer was always, yeah, of course, let’s go.

There was absolutely nothing to be upset about. So it made zero sense that Nora spent the whole week feeling like she wanted to cry.

What was there to cry about? Sure, she didn’t know if Buck still thought her showing up was a nightmare. But if he did, he was hiding it pretty well.

And sure, it kept randomly hitting her that she was never, ever going to see her mom again.

But her mom had been gone for almost four months. She’d been able to keep it together at the Warrens, and that was way worse than this. Why was she being such a crybaby about it now? It didn’t make any sense.

Just like it didn’t make sense that when she looked at Buck, she felt a gnawing ache in her chest.

It was just that sometimes she caught him looking at her in a certain way; or he put a glass of milk and a slice of chocolate chip banana bread down next to her while she was doing homework at the table; or he knocked on her door a little after ten and said “sweet dreams, Nora,” leaning against the doorjamb like he was a vampire who knew he wasn’t invited in. Sometimes he did all of those things and Nora could hear her mom saying I hardly think this guy is father-of-the-year material, and she felt so furious at the both of her parents that she couldn’t think straight.

Why couldn’t her mom have tried harder to find Buck? Why couldn’t Buck have been easier to find? Why couldn’t Nora have had years of this—of a dad who packed her school lunches with little notes inside, a dad who offered to help with her homework, a dad who would take her to midnight movies just because she wanted to go? And why did she have to go ahead and lose the parent she did have—a mom who understood how good it felt to roll down the car windows and scream-sing, who ruffled her hair when she walked by Nora reading in their cushy armchair, who was the one person who’d known her, her entire life?

None of it was fair. And it wasn’t fair that it was all hitting Nora now, when she should be perfectly happy. Especially not right now, because she was currently at their school’s big overnight field trip—a sleepover at the planetarium.

She didn’t even know why now, of all times, it was getting to her. She’d sat next to Morris and Julia during the show, and they reclined all way back in their seats and watched universes form and elbowed each other whenever the presenter said Uranus. She’d eaten two slices of pizza with Lexi, who Nora now sat next to in her new math class. And she’d climbed into her sleeping bag—a fancy mountain-climber-quality thing that Buck rush-ordered when he found out she was going to be sleeping on the floor—and tried to settle down when the teachers shushed everyone.

But laying in the dark, surrounded by half of her class, Nora felt some looming, awful kind of way; a loneliness that settled over her like a too-heavy blanket, that pushed down on her lungs and made it hard to breathe. It wasn’t until she tried to inhale and it came out like a squeak that she realized she was crying. She felt—she felt . . . homesick.

For what, she couldn’t even say. All of the places she was used to wishing for didn’t feel right—she couldn’t crave seeing her mom, and it was getting harder to remember exactly what her old bedroom used to look like. Not even imagining the purple glow of Sadie’s room was helping. The sadness clawed up her throat and took up all the space in her brain and she couldn’t, she couldn’t—

“Morris,” she whispered; swallowing back the lump in her throat. “Morris.”

Morris, who had slid down until he was completely hidden by his sleeping bag so he could play a game on his phone, finally poked his head up. “What?” he whispered back.

“I need to borrow your phone.” They hadn’t been allowed to bring phones on the fieldtrip, though that had never stopped Morris before.

“No way,” he said, making a face at her. “Remember what happened last time?”

“I paid you back for that,” Nora reminded him.

Morris rolled his eyes and then ducked back under his sleeping bag. He emerged a second later with the phone, screen dark, and slid it facedown across the floor between their bags. “For two minutes,” he qualified. “And you can’t get caught.”

Nora nodded, slipping it up her sweatshirt sleeve before crawling out of her bag. When a teacher spotted her, she gestured to the bathroom and then slipped inside and locked herself in the last stall.

She stared at the screen for a minute, feeling equal parts like she was going to chicken out and make the call and like she was going to chicken out and not make the call. Slowly, her fingers started pressing the screen, typing in the number she’d memorized four weeks before. She hadn’t even really decided to do it, honestly. But now the number was already typed out and she just had to hit call and oh—now the phone was ringing.

It rang once, twice, three times, and something twisted in Nora’s gut; the heavy weight was back and it was pressing on her and she—

“Hello?”

He picked up.

She was so surprised, it took her a second to reply.

“Hello?” Buck said again; he was practically shouting. She could hear a lot of noise in the background.

“Hi—” she coughed a little, trying to loosen up the choking feeling in her throat. “Hi, uh, Buck. It’s me—it’s Nora.”

“Nora,” Buck repeated, loudly; the noise in the background faded. “Are you okay? What’s wrong?”

Nora hadn’t thought about that, really—that calling Buck from an unknown number past midnight might make him think something was wrong. Nothing was wrong, of course. There wasn’t really any reason for her to be calling him.

“Nothing,” she said, quickly; feeling a hot flush of embarrassment warm her cheeks. “Nothing—everything’s fine.”

Buck didn’t reply, like he was waiting for her to go on. She cast around for something to say, something to justify this moment of stupidity.

“I, uh, forgot my toothpaste,” she said, scrunching her eyes closed as the dumbest excuse in the world slipped out.

“Oh,” said Buck. “Do you want me to come drop it off?”

“Buck, where are you?” She heard someone call in the distance. Chimney, she thought.

“I’m on the phone with Nora,” Buck shouted back, muffled through the phone; remembering that Buck was working an overnight shift right now only made her feel sillier. Buck was out there saving people’s lives and dealing with, like, medical problems and Nora had called him for—what? She couldn’t even say.

“Sorry about that,” Buck said, back into the phone.

“No, I’m sorry,” she said. “I forgot you were at work. I don’t—I don’t even need it, actually. I borrowed some from Julia. I just thought, if you saw that I’d left it, you’d think I’d need it. But I don’t. So, everything’s fine.”

“You called me to tell me you don’t need toothpaste?” Buck asked.

Nora bit her lip. “Yeah,” she said, quietly.

Buck didn’t respond for a moment; Nora sat there, listening to him breathe on the other end of the line and trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with her.

Finally, Buck spoke again. “Well, I don’t know if I agree with that.”

“What?”

“I’m not sure I feel comfortable with you spending the night without your toothpaste. I got you the specific type with fluoride, and everything.”

“I—”

“Oral hygiene is very big in our family,” Buck went on. “I think maybe I should come pick you up.”

The knot in Nora’s chest loosened, broke apart, dissolved into little jumping sparks of something, some feeling she couldn’t name.

“You don’t have to do that,” she said, without any real feeling. But Buck was at work, and she didn’t want to cause problems.

“Sorry,” said Buck, not sounding sorry at all. “I make the rules here.”

“But you’re working,” Nora pointed out.

“Don’t worry, I keep toothpaste at the station,” he replied. “We’re just finishing up a call—I should be able to get there in like—twenty minutes?”

“Um, okay,” said Nora, a giddy lightness in her stomach. Before, the rest of the night had loomed large, just Nora in her, admittedly, very comfortable sleeping bag, unable to sleep, with the sounds of all her fellow students whispering and snoring around her, feeling like she was back at the Warrens and like she really, really didn’t want to start crying in front of all of the other kids. But now . . . 

Buck was coming to get her.

“I don’t—should I, um, tell the teacher—”

“Buck, we need your help with the fender—”

A voice was barely audible in the distance, but Nora still heard it, still felt a little guilty that Buck might get in trouble at work because of her.

“Don’t worry about it,” he told her. “I’ll handle it when I get there. Twenty minutes, okay?”

“Um, okay—”

“Okay, I gotta run so we can wrap this up,” Buck said. “I promise, I’ll be there soon. Love you.” And then he hung up.

Nora leaned back against the tile wall, staring at where the phone had gone dark. Love you, he’d said. Casually, off-hand. Like he said it all the time.

Love you.

Did he mean it? Did Buck love her? It felt like an impossible thing, after only knowing her for a few weeks. But still, hearing him say the words soothed something inside her; something that had been feeling prickly and raw and defensive.

She hid the phone up her sleeve as she went back to her sleeping bag, and then slid it back to Morris when no chaperones were looking. He snatched it back and disappeared under the blanket again, and this time she grinned at the sight of it. Everything seemed a lot lighter now that she knew she was getting picked up soon.

From her spot on the floor, she could see the wall of clocks that showed multiple time zones, hanging over projections of what the night sky looked like from those regions. She watched the minutes ticking up, a bit of anxiety flaring as nineteen minutes past, and then twenty, and then twenty-one, and then twenty-two. By the time twenty-six minutes had passed, Nora was starting to spiral a little—was he not able to come for her, after all?

But right when the minute hand was ticking to show that Buck was now officially eight minutes late, Nora heard a door open and shut. In the dim hall of the planetarium, she noticed the reflective stripes first; someone in a firefighter uniform was jogging across the room.

Buck had come.

Nora watched from her spot on the floor as he slowed, stopping in front of Ms. Ellis.

“Hi,” he said, and she could hear him clearly from where she was laying. He was whispering, but the murmur of kids pretending to be asleep had quieted, like everyone who was still wake had noticed the unexpected intrusion and wanted to hear why. “Are you the chaperone in charge here?”

“Yes,” said Ms. Ellis. “Is there a problem?”

“Oh, no,” said Buck, “I’m not here on duty. I’m Evan Buckley—Nora Nolan’s dad.” He pulled out his ID and passed it to her then, and Nora watched as her normally bristly social studies teacher smiled and took it, looking way nicer than she ever looked in class. “I’m so sorry to do this, but I actually need to pick Nora up early. There was an issue with my shift and—I don’t want to bore you with the details. I hate to cut her night short, but—”

“That’s no problem,” Ms. Ellis said, tucking her hair behind her ear and passing his ID back. “I’ll go wake her.”

Nora snapped her eyes shut and pretended to be asleep, even though she had no real reason to. “Nora,” Ms. Ellis said, her voice coming from directly above her. “Nora, your dad is here to pick you up.”

Nora rolled over, looking at Ms. Ellis and then sat up so she could see where Buck was waiting by the exit. He waved at her, as if she couldn’t spot him in his reflective turnouts.

She waved back, and climbed out of her sleeping bag and turned around to roll it up. While she was trying to shove it back in the travel bag, Lexi whispered to her, “that’s your dad?”

“Yeah,” said Nora.

“He’s a firefighter? That’s so cool,” Lexi said.

“Yeah,” Nora repeated. Something funny was happening in her chest.  

“Sucks you have to get picked up early, though,” Lexi commiserated.

“Seriously,” Nora said; it felt less like a lie and more of a secret. One just between her and Buck. “See you Monday,” she added, picking up her bag and tiptoeing through the maze of seventh graders.

Buck moved towards the exit to meet her; he waved to Ms. Ellis and held the door open, gesturing for Nora to go through first. The heavy door closed behind them, and then suddenly they were alone in the dark planetarium lobby. Images of universes and constellations cast everything in a calm, blue light, and the two of them made their way out, side-by-side, their footsteps echoing loudly against the tile.

Halfway to the door, Buck’s footsteps stopped. “Hey,” he said. His voice was soft, but it wasn’t that stupid Nora-voice he used to use every time he talked to her. She paused, feeling wary as she turned to face him. “I’m sorry I’m late.”

“Oh—it’s okay—” she trailed off, shrugging, making eye contact with the big dipper behind him. It’s not like she was going to admit that she nearly started crying when twenty-five minutes passed. She wasn’t a baby. In fact, now that Buck had gone through all the trouble to come get her, she was realizing how silly she’d been. How overdramatic—

“I’m really glad you called me,” Buck said.

She actually looked at him, then. He sounded so earnest, so pleased, like she’d done him some sort of favor by calling him. And she didn’t understand that at all, because he was at work and she was being a wimp about an overnight field trip for no reason. But still—she could feel it. How happy he was to be there, picking her up, at one in the morning.

And without thinking about it, she lunged forward and hugged him.

He made a small oomph-sound as she collided with his torso, reaching her hands around him as far as she could go and burying her face in his chest. He smelled like smoke, woodsy and warm, and she hadn’t even realized how chilly she’d gotten in the planetarium, but Buck was like a furnace, even though he was only wearing a t-shirt with his turnout pants.

He hugged her back immediately, like he’d been waiting for it. His whole body curled around her, and he cupped the back of her head with one hand and wrapped the other around her back, pulling her in completely, like he could tuck her inside his chest. It was a really, really good hug.

“I love you, Nora,” Buck said, after a moment. His voice was whisper-quiet in the lobby, but it echoed in Nora’s ears. It wasn’t a mistake the first time he’d said it, then. “I love you, so much,” he added, squeezing his arms around her extra tight.

Nora didn’t know how long they stood like that, but by the time they broke apart, there was a wet spot on Buck’s shirt from her tears. But Buck was wiping his eyes, too, so she didn’t feel too bad.

“Alright, let’s get you out of here,” Buck said, dropping his arm around her shoulder and leading her towards the door. “Just wait til you see your ride.”

-------

Buck was acting weird, and Eddie couldn’t figure out why.

It seemed like a stupid observation to make about a man who just found out he’d had a daughter for twelve years and was now her sole guardian. But Eddie understood Buck being weird about that. He understood the anxious texts and the overthinking and the occasional bout of depressed regret he fell into when he thought of another one of Nora’s milestone’s that he missed, like when he’d teared up after realizing that she’d already lost all her baby teeth.

That stuff, Eddie expected. But Buck was being weird to him, which didn’t make any sense. He’d started ducking out to use the bathroom so frequently that Eddie asked Hen if she thought Buck might be showing signs of IBS. But also, every time Eddie brought up making plans, Buck acted weird and evasive about it. He’d understand if Buck was hesitant to spend time away from Nora, but Eddie always offered plans that included her. She and Chris seemed to hit it off, so Eddie had no idea what Buck’s problem was.

Sure, things were different from when Buck could just swing by whenever; but Eddie had no idea what was stopping him from doing that with Nora. If he was being totally honest, he missed it. He missed when Buck assumed he was following Eddie home, or when they carpooled and Buck would head straight to his kitchen, whipping up something for whatever meal they were due when they clocked out. He missed the nights when Chris being out at a sleepover meant he and Buck were doing beer and pizza and an action movie. Now, it just meant the house was extra quiet.

Everything felt a little thrown off. When it was just him and Chris home, the house felt too big; which was weird, because it’d never felt that way when Chris was little. And on the few nights Buck and Nora had come over for dinner and game nights, it just felt right. Like it made sense for all four of them to be under one roof. Even if that actually made the house feel a little small.

The realization had started the germ of an idea in the back of his head. Buck still hated his tiny apartment kitchen. And he’d only signed a six-month lease, anyway. And they’d yet to figure out a good plan for when they’d have to work overnight shifts—Eddie felt that he should cede Carla to Buck, since he’d already gotten years and years of her relying on her to watch Chris. And anyway, it was easy enough for Chris to arrange a sleepover, and he was almost old enough to stay overnight by himself. But Buck knew Eddie only felt comfortable when Carla was there, and he insisted he’d figure something else out for Nora for the next time they were scheduled an overnight shift.

But what if Carla could stay with both of the kids?

What if they found a new place with four bedrooms, and moved in together?

It was a bit nontraditional, he guessed; being roommates with your best friend and his kid. But it made so much more sense now that there were two kids involved. Living together meant they could combine forces—half the number of meals to cook, half the chores, half the bills. There would be another adult around to help with homework or act as chauffeur if the kids needed. And he and Buck wouldn’t have to pass on plans because one of the kids had a test the next day, or cut out mid-movie because of bedtimes.

It was, kind of, a perfect solution. He’d even started scrolling listings during downtime.

Sometimes, he remembered the way Buck’s face dropped the day he’d picked up Eddie’s iPad and saw the realtor site he’d been hiding, and he felt a little guilty for keeping another secret. But this was different—he just wanted to have every variable accounted for when he suggested the idea to Buck. Mostly so that Buck knew he was taking this seriously, but also because Eddie had the sneaking suspicion that Buck would be resistant to the idea.

It was a confusing feeling. Never in the eight years of knowing him, did Eddie think Buck didn’t want to hang out with him. Even if Buck had other plans, with Maddie or any of the people he’d dated, he either invited Eddie along or offered to cancel. Or at least seemed sorry to say no. But lately Buck had been hedging every time Eddie suggested they do something. He’d started taking longer to reply to texts and sometimes, Eddie had the sneaking suspicion that he was using Nora as an excuse.

It was driving him a little crazy.

Like, the weekend before. Buck told him he had two tickets to the midnight movie Nora and her friend Sadie wanted to go to, and when Eddie assumed the second one was for him, Buck kept saying that Eddie didn’t have to, and that he probably wanted to get his sleep, as if they didn’t have the exact same fucked up first-responder sleeping habits.

And then during the movie, Buck disappeared for the last twenty minutes and acted cagey on the drive home, not joining in the discussion Eddie had with the girls about what he’d missed in the first Firestarter movie and what they thought would happen in the next one. And when they’d got back to Buck’s apartment, he’d dropped Eddie off at his car, as if he wanted to make sure Eddie didn’t try to follow them upstairs.

He had no idea why Buck was acting like this. He barely had any guesses. Was Buck feeling weird about accepting help from Eddie? He’d made some strange, pained expression when Eddie stopped by to drop off some of Chris’s things they thought Nora might like, and Eddie practically had to bully Buck into letting him pick Nora up from school when the half-shift he’d picked up for someone on B team ran over.

Was Buck seeing someone? Is that why he was always reluctant to make plans? It wasn’t like Buck to keep something like that to himself, and Eddie would be surprised if Buck chose right now to jump back into the dating pool, but he had no other ideas for why Buck had suddenly become so secretive and evasive.

At least, on shift, Buck couldn’t disappear on him. Technically, he and Buck weren’t partners anymore—since Chim was in the captain’s seat, he was working on getting his EMT certification with Hen, and Buck and Ravi were paired up for most rescues.

Eddie had to admit, he didn’t love it. It felt wrong to hear Buck and Ravi. It felt wrong to see Buck harness up and not be the one on the other end of the line. But if a situation were especially dicey—if there was a real chance of danger, and Chim thought everyone needed to be on their absolute A game—then he subbed Eddie back in, just like old times.

“Sorry, Rav,” Chim had said, the first time he benched him in favor of Eddie. “You guys work great together, but this is risky enough. And those two have their freaky mind-meld thing going on.”

Eddie had to admit, he felt a thrill of pride at that; it was nice knowing he wasn’t fully replaceable.

But he hadn’t felt much like he could read Buck’s mind in recent weeks. And it was probably getting a little pathetic, actually, how hard he was trying to figure out what was going on in Buck’s head.

He’d started waiting until Buck was in the middle of something—cooking dinner, a workout, latrine duty—before approaching, so that Buck couldn’t claim he had somewhere else to be.

Most of the time, the strategy worked: Eddie could grab a knife and start chopping, or a barbell and start lifting, or a spray bottle and start cleaning, and it almost felt like things were back to normal.

And for a little, he could convince himself that it was all in his head, and that things were normal. But then, something would happen that he couldn’t deny.

Like tonight. They were almost finished at the scene of a car accident on the freeway. The 115 arrived shortly after midnight and their ambulance had taken one of the victims to the hospital, and Hen was checking out the other—a mild case of whiplash—so Eddie was free to help Buck and Ravi with clean-up.

“—amazing, you gotta go,” Ravi was saying, as he used the industrial-grade broom to clear the broken glass off the road. In the bright lights of their emergency vehicles, the glass glittered in the dark like tiny constellations.

He wondered how Nora was liking the planetarium.   

“It sounds great,” Buck said; he was lifting a car door, like it was nothing, and carrying it to the side of the road. “But I don’t think now’s the time for a blind date,” he said, only the slightest bit of strain detectable in his voice, “no matter how good the food is.”

“A blind date?” Eddie asked, inserting himself into the conversation as he picked up what looked like the crushed remains of a side mirror and added it to the pile Buck started on the shoulder.

“My friend’s cousin is a chef at Koso,” Ravi answered. “It’s this cool Korean place that just got its first Michelin star. Her sister’s been wanting to go and Buck loves fancy food,” he said, as if those things were the foundation of a relationship. “But he won’t take me up on it.”

Was Buck resistant to the idea of a blind date because he was too busy with Nora, or because he was already secretly dating someone? “It does seem like a weird time to start dating,” Eddie pointed out, either way.

“Come on,” Ravi said to Buck, totally ignoring Eddie. “You’d love their tasting menu.”

“Maybe I can take Nora,” Buck said, instead. “She’s been a good sport about eating what I make. Though it might be a bit much for a twelve-year-old’s palate.”

And, what—did he forget Eddie existed? Did he think the food would be too sophisticated for his palate, too?

“I’ll go with you,” he offered. Hopefully, no one else could detect the weird edge of a challenge he heard in his own voice.

“Oh,” said Buck, exchanging a look with Ravi. Why did it look like he and Ravi were having a silent conversation? That was their thing. “Uh . . .”

“Maybe,” Ravi jumped in, sounding uncertain. “I think she said they were booked up through the month. But I can ask.”

Eddie opened his mouth to point out that Ravi had just said he had an in, but the shrill, increasingly-familiar sound of Buck’s phone going off interrupted him.

“Hello?” Buck said, covering his ear and stepping away. “Hello?”

“Dude, what the hell?” he asked Ravi, once Buck was out of earshot.

“What?” asked Ravi, intently sweeping a part of the road that had no debris on it.    

“Why were you guys being weird?”

“We weren’t being weird,” Ravi said, quickly.

“Do you not want me to go to your friend’s restaurant?” Eddie didn’t know why he was pushing this; he felt like a petulant teenager who heard their friends were hanging out without them. “Am I not cool enough?”

“Yeah, that’s it,” said Ravi, his tone dipping into sarcasm. “Sorry, old man.”

“Buck is three months older than me,” said Eddie.

“Yeah, but he’s bi,” Ravi countered.

“What does that have to do with anything?” Eddie asked, eyeing the last big piece of debris that needed clearing—a fender that had been so thoroughly smashed that he could barely find a place to grab hold. He bent down and tried to feel around for a good place to grip, seeing if he could lift the bulky hunk of metal.  

Ravi sighed so loudly Eddie could hear it across the road. He glanced up in time to see Ravi standing a tire up on its end and rolling it towards the pile. “It’s just . . . the kind of place you bring a date,” Ravi said, and Eddie’s tenuous grip on the fender slipped right out of his hands.

He’d only managed to lift it about two feet, but that was still two feet it had to fall—directly onto his foot. “Fuck,” he swore. He was thankful for their LAFD-issue boots, but he wouldn’t be surprised if he’d broken a toe.

“Buck,” Ravi shouted in the direction Buck had disappeared off to. “We need your help with the fender—”

Eddie didn’t know why Ravi felt the need to call Buck when he was standing right there, but Buck appeared a moment later and they were able to lift and move the wreckage seamlessly, like always. When he looked up from placing the fender down—not on his foot, this time—he realized that Buck was beaming. Glowing. Bouncing on the balls of his feet, like a kid in a candy shop.

“Nora called me,” he said, before Eddie could even ask.

“Isn’t she at the sleepover? Is everything okay?”

“Yeah,” said Buck, picking up the last few scattered car pieces and chucking them towards the shoulder. “She called to tell me she forgot to pack toothpaste.” Eddie cocked his head, confused by Buck’s grin. Buck went on, “she wanted me to come pick her up. I think she didn’t really want to say that. But she did! She called me, Eddie. She called me. She wants me to come get her. I just asked Chim and he said we can stop by on the way back to the station.”

Eddie forgot all about the weirdness of before as they hustled to wrap up the scene. The team actually resisted teasing Buck, even as he hassled Chim to get on the road and bounced his leg up and down anxiously in the backseat. It was too sweet a moment to sour: the first time that Buck’s daughter asked for him.

When they pulled up at the planetarium, Buck jumped out of the engine before they’d even rolled to a complete stop. Instinctually, Eddie unbuckled himself and stood up to follow.

“Where you going, there, Romeo?” Hen asked.

Eddie froze, his hand on the door handle. He used it to pull the door closed instead and sat back down. “Nowhere.”

“Mhm. So,” said Hen, fixing him with that same piercing look she’d given him when he asked if stress could trigger IBS. “How are Chris and Nora getting along?”

“Good,” Eddie answered, happy to have the distraction, even if he couldn’t stop his eyes from sliding to the front doors, waiting for Buck and Nora to reappear. “They text,” he said, trying to keep his eyes on Hen and failing. “And then they keep asking us to do stuff, you know, the four of us.”

Hopefully, Nora was just homesick and nothing else had bothered her.

“Is that so?” Chim asked, turning around in the captain’s chair to raise his eyebrows at Eddie.

“Yeah,” said Eddie. He wondered what was taking them so long.

“Well, isn’t that convenient,” said Hen.

“Yeah, it is,” he agreed.

“How are the vacation plans coming?” Chimney asked. “Did you get Buck to agree to that week in April yet?”

“No,” said Eddie, rolling his eyes. “He’s dragging his feet. Chris and Nora even have the same week off for spring break, and that place Hen suggested has rooms open. I even offered to cover it because he’s had to buy so much lately, but he won’t commit. I don’t know what’s so hard about it.”

“Yeah, man, if only you knew what was hard—” Ravi said, but then Hen elbowed him, none-too-gently, and he snapped his mouth shut.

Eddie was just about to ask what he was talking about when his eyes snagged on movement by the doors of the planetarium. There they were—Buck led Nora out the front doors with one arm wrapped around her; in the washed-out lighting of the planetarium entry path, she looked exactly like a miniature Buck.  

He got up again and threw the side door open as they approached the truck. “Hey, Nora,” he called. “Want a ride?”

Nora and Buck gave him matching grins. He sat back in his seat, leaving room for Nora to climb up, Buck following behind her.

“Hey—hey guys,” she said, her eyes wide as she took in the interior of the engine cab. “Thanks for, uh, picking me up.”

“Any time,” Chim called from the front seat. “Rescues are our specialty.”  

Hen passed Nora a pair of headphones when she buckled herself in the middle seat, next to Buck and across from Eddie. “Here,” she said. “Put these on to protect your ears.”

He had a visceral flashback to the time when he had to bring Chris to the station, right after he started. He’d been so panicked that day, so sure that he was going to wind up in hot water with his new team after only a few shifts.

But instead, they’d welcomed them both with open arms. He could still remember the flush of relief that hit him when Bobby told him Buck already cleared it with him that he’d brought Chris to the station. It had been a feeling he’d only had flashes of, before Buck—that someone was on his side. That someone had his back.

He wanted to make sure Buck and Nora felt like he and Chris had, that day. Like the 118 had their backs. So when Nora slipped the headphones over her ears, he said, “she better get used to it—Nora’s going to be a firefighter when she’s older.”

That announcement kept everyone occupied for the drive back to the station. Nora came out of her shell under the attention, admitting that she’d read a book called Smokejumper and another called The Fireline and another called Playing with Fire that she realized pretty quickly was actually a fictional romance book and returned to the library.

They were all in stitches by the time they got back, teasing Buck for having taken so long to figure out what he wanted to do with his life, while his daughter already had a five-year plan, and Buck admitting that he’d never thought he’d be any help to anyone, nepotism-wise, but look at him now.

At the station, everyone retired to the bunkroom, hoping to get a few hours of sleep in while it was still, technically, the middle of the night. Eddie could fall asleep quickly, anywhere—a skill engrained in him from the army—but the flipside was that he was an extremely light sleeper. So, when he heard someone moving around, he peeked his eyes open just in time to spot Nora’s small figure heading out into the hallway.

Eddie gave it a minute and then climbed out of bed himself, slipping his shoes back on and poking around, looking for where Nora might have gone.

He finally found her upstairs, in the kitchen. She was sitting at the island, exactly where she had been four weeks ago, when she pretended to interview him for her fake assignment.

Eddie made sure his steps were extra loud when he reached the top of the stairs, so he didn’t startle her. She flinched, glancing around, but she relaxed at the sight of him, which made him feel a certain kind of way. “Hey, Eddie,” she said, her eyes tracking him as he passed her on the way to the kitchen.

The oven clock read 5:16 am, so Eddie started putting on a fresh pot of coffee. “Couldn’t sleep?” he asked.

She shrugged.

“Want some hot chocolate? Can’t promise it’ll be as good as Buck’s.”

Nora nodded, and he rooted around in the cabinet for the powdered mixes. Buck wouldn’t approve, but he wasn’t risking curdling milk on the stove again, like he did the last time he tried to use Buck’s recipe to make hot chocolate for Chris. She didn’t say anything while he found a mug and filled it up with milk, so as he was stirring the powder in, he said, “what’s on your mind, kid?”

Nora was quiet for so long that Eddie thought she wasn’t going to respond; he’d never mixed a cup of hot chocolate so thoroughly before. Finally, staring intently at the pile of napkins on the counter, she said, “Buck said he loves me.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah,” agreed Nora.

“Can’t believe he held out that long,” Eddie said, putting the mug in the microwave and punching buttons extra hard, because the machine was ancient and wouldn’t work otherwise.

He turned back around to find Nora fixing him with a baffled expression. “Don’t you think it’s like . . . like he just met me.”

“It’s been a month,” Eddie corrected. “And anyway, that doesn’t matter. He loved you the moment he laid eyes on you. Trust me, I know. It’s a dad thing.”

Nora’s eyes darted around and she shifted in her seat—telltale signs of a kid trying to decide whether to say what they were really thinking. He waited her out. Eventually, she said, “I don’t think so.”

“Why not?” Eddie asked, confused. Buck wore his heart on his sleeve; he showed his devotion constantly. It wasn’t like he was hard to read.

“He, uh,” Nora said, pausing for so long that the microwave beeped. Eddie pulled it out and stirred it a few more times; he didn’t have fresh-made whipped cream, but he was pretty sure they had a can of the store-bought brand in the fridge. He opened it to look, giving Nora time to gather the courage to say what was on her mind. Right when he found it, Nora continued, “I heard you guys. That day. After I left with Sergeant Grant I went back in to use the bathroom and, uh. Buck said . . . he said it was a nightmare.”

Eddie slammed the fridge door shut, turning around in alarm. Nora had—Nora had heard that? He could barely remember what Buck had said in that moment, they were both so in shock. But if Nora had taken it out of context, that meant she’d spent the last four weeks thinking Buck was—thinking he was—

“Nora,” he said, resting his elbows on the counter and ducking his head until she met his eyes. “He didn’t mean it like that.”

“It’s okay,” Nora said, shrugging. She leaned forward and pulled the hot chocolate towards herself, before Eddie had a chance to add the whipped cream. “I know it was really sudden, and like, out of the blue. And it kinda messed up his whole life.”

“No,” Eddie said, firmly. He wanted to run downstairs and drag Buck up here, so he could clear this all up. “You didn’t mess up his life, kiddo. Tell me you haven’t been thinking that?”

Nora sniffed, then, and lifted the mug for a drink, like she could hide her face behind it. She couldn’t—Eddie could see a few tears leak out; he felt the painful ache of frustration he got when the world hurt Christopher and he couldn’t stop it.

“I swear, Nora. He was just upset about—about everything. About what you’d been through. How you had to do all that work to find him, and that he didn’t know you existed.”

She shrugged, blinking and not meeting his eyes.

“He loves you so, so much Nora,” Eddie told her. She was still looking down into her mug. He tried to figure it out—what he could say to her to convince her she was wrong. What he could say to get her to stop looking like that.

“I’m not sure it’s my place to tell you this,” he said, after a minute. “But . . .” he trailed off, aware that Nora had finally looked up at him. Apparently, the allure of gossip was too tempting for her to ignore, even in her distress. He noted that information for later, and then went back to figuring out how he wanted to word this.

“Buck didn’t have the best childhood,” he landed on, eventually. “Your aunt Maddie practically raised him. Their parents—well, it’s a long story, but they weren’t very good parents to Buck.”

Nora’s eyes widened, taking in this new information.

“Which is crazy,” Eddie continued. “I mean, you’ve probably realized by now that no one’s mentioned introducing them to you.” Nora bit her lip and nodded. “It’s not because of you,” Eddie assured her. “They’re just—they—the point is, you’re not missing anything. And they don’t deserve to meet you.”

Nora huffed out a small laugh at that, like she thought he was being silly. But he meant every word.

“I’m serious, Nora. I mean, I’m sure you’ll meet them at some point, but—but my point is—I mean, you know Buck. He’s the most lovable guy in the world. Being raised like that could have made him an asshole, but instead, he just loves, really, really hard. He doesn’t take anyone for granted. Family means everything to him. You mean everything to him. Of course he loves you.”

I love you, too. It almost slipped out; though Eddie bit the words back. If she was weirded out by Buck’s declaration, he didn’t want to know how she’d react hearing the same assurance from her dad’s best friend. It was just that he did love her. She was a lovable kid, just like her dad. Her watchful eyes and her rare giggles; sometimes when he looked at her, he could imagine Buck at that age, and he wanted to bundle her up and protect her from the world.

It wasn’t fair that she’d lost her mom, just like it wasn’t fair that Christopher had lost Shannon. But he and Buck made a pretty good team. And he knew Buck loved Christopher. It was fair play that Eddie felt the same about Buck’s kid.

“You should talk to him about it,” Eddie said, getting his own mug of coffee, and giving Nora a break from his eye contact. “He’d want to know you heard that.”

“Are­­–are you going to . . .” Nora trailed off.

“Tell him?” Eddie finished. He scrunched up his face in apology, and admitted, “yeah, probably. Sorry—it’s like a code, between parents. You have to tell the other stuff like this. Especially if it’s making you feel bad.”

“It’s not—” she broke off, quieting at Eddie’s raised eyebrows. “I’m just—I’m not trying to be dramatic about it.”

“Well, that would be the half of your genes that didn’t come from Buck, then.”

“I’m serious,” Nora said. “He doesn’t have to worry about me.”

“That ship has sailed, kiddo. He’s going to worry about you every day of his life. The joys of parenthood.” He leaned back against the counter, looking at her over his coffee mug. “That means you can take a break from worrying, you know.”

“I’m not,” Nora said, like a reflex.

“Please,” Eddie said. “I haven’t seen a twelve-year-old as stressed as you since my own thirteenth birthday.” Nora grimaced, and Eddie grinned at her. “I’m just saying. Buck’s not in the habit of letting people down. Maybe you can relax a little. You should have seen how excited he was when you called him tonight.”

Nora blinked her big blue eyes, looking the same way Buck did when he got a little shellshocked in the face of affection. That look always twisted up Eddie’s heart, a bittersweet mix of sadness and satisfaction.

“Want to help me with breakfast?” he said, letting the mood shift, giving her a break from the heart-to-heart. “I can usually manage eggs and pancakes but I’m sure I could use the help. If you’re anything like your dad, you’ll be a natural in the kitchen.”

“Yeah,” said Nora, putting her mug down and rounding the island to help him pull ingredients out of the fridge. “Maybe I am.”

Chapter Text

Buck was going to die. Cause of death: Eddie Diaz. A fatal case of unrequited love for his ridiculously supportive, handsome, best friend. It’d probably be the first recorded case. They could name the condition after him.

The morning after Buck picked Nora up from the planetarium, he’d come up from the bunkroom to find her and Eddie doubled over in laughter, both of them nearly in tears at Eddie’s attempt to make a pancake in the shape of a firefighter helmet.

He was glad to see they were having a good time, because personally, he felt like someone had ripped his heart out of his chest and started taunting him with it. But still—it was good to see Nora looking so relaxed. Good to see Eddie having fun. Good to see them bonding. Make sure she knows she has a support system, his notes said. Check.

Later, Eddie pulled him aside and said, in a low whisper, “I have to talk to you.” Buck followed him into the men’s room and tried to squash down the delusional part of his brain that perked up when Eddie locked the door behind him. But then Eddie said, “Nora overheard you panicking that first day, in the bunkroom.”

It took Buck a full twenty seconds to parse through the whiplash and figure out what the hell Eddie was talking about. By the time the horror of what he was saying sunk in, Eddie was talking again. “I guess she heard you saying it was a nightmare and has been worried about that. I explained to her that you were talking about missing all of that time with her, but—”

“Fuck me,” Buck said, reaching up to tug on his hair. “This whole time—she’d been thinking—oh, fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“Deep breaths, bud,” Eddie said, trying to land both his hands on Buck’s shoulders; but that proximity was the last thing Buck’s heart rate needed right now. He ducked out of the way and started pacing up and down the length of the bathroom.

“I’m such a fuck up. I am the worst father in the world,” Buck said, talking out loud to the bathroom.

“That is not true,” Eddie said; he didn’t even have the decency to act surprised at Buck’s declarations. “For reference: both of our fathers.”

“My father never told me I was a nightmare,” Buck argued. “Actually—no, wait, he did! I’m repeating the cycle. I’m becoming him—”

“Buck,” Eddie interrupted, sounding a little more alarmed that time. “You are not becoming your father.”

“Neglect,” Buck counted on his fingers. “Totally fucking up her childhood. Ignoring her. Calling her a nightmare—”

“Buck,” Eddie repeated, louder that time. “You have not done any of those things.”

“Yes, I—”

“You didn’t know she existed,” Eddie reminded him. “You were taking in life-changing news, and she heard something out of context. This’ll all be fine once you talk to her. You know, like I said—like a normal person?”

Miraculously, the last hour of shift passed without any further calls, and without Buck bursting into tears. Nora was quiet on the drive home, nodding off in the passenger side, and Buck thought about letting her crash when they got back to the apartment. But as soon as he’d closed the door behind them, he knew he couldn’t let her go on for another minute without clearing this up.

She’d beelined to her bedroom, so he followed, knocking softly on the door frame.

“Hey,” he said, finding her crawling under the covers. “Can I come in? I want to talk to you for a sec.”

She shifted, sitting with one leg folded under her and the other bent; she wrapped her arms around that leg and rested her chin on her knee. “Yeah,” she said, her eyes tracking him as he came into her room for the first time since he’d shown her the new dresser.

“Eddie told me about what you overheard,” Buck said, perching on the foot of her bed and feeling like the world’s biggest asshole as he pictured it: his daughter, on one of the most emotionally traumatizing days of her life, hearing him say this is a nightmare.

“It’s fine,” she said, looking past him, at the bookshelf on the wall behind him. “He said you didn’t mean it.”

“Oh, I meant it,” said Buck, a small, incredulous laugh slipping out. “Nora, it’s a nightmare that I missed twelve years of you. It’s a nightmare that I didn’t get to see you when you were a tiny newborn, and that I didn’t get to hold you as a baby, and that I wasn’t there when you were learning to eat or walk or talk. God,” he said, feeling the tears leaking out of his eyes as it flashed by—all the things he missed, all the things he’d never get to see. He coughed and rubbed harshly at his eyes, but it was too late now, the tears were coming. It was healthy to express emotions in front of kids, right? That’s what Maddie had told him when he sobbed in front of Christopher that one time.

“It kills me,” he went on, trying to blink his eyes clear so he could look at her. His daughter. He scooted further onto the bed, tucking one leg up and turning so he was fully facing her. “It kills me that I missed so much of it, Nora. I would have been there, I swear. I wish I had been there.”

Nora’s bottom lip was wobbling, now, and it did nothing to help stem his flow of tears. “I miss my mom,” Nora said, and Buck swallowed back a noise that might have been a sob. Nora went on, “I miss her. And I feel bad. But sometimes—sometimes I get so . . . mad at her. That she never found you.”

And really, what chance did Buck have at that? His shoulders were shaking and he could barely see through his watery eyes, but he could make it out when Nora sprung forward from her spot on the bed. She threw herself into his arms and he caught her—two hugs in one day, he couldn’t believe it—and she clung on to him, crying just as hard.

“I love you, Nora,” he repeated; now that he’d said it out loud once, he couldn’t stop; he felt a little like he was trying to make up for all the times he would have said it, if he’d had her all along. She was still so little in his arms. He kept his arms wrapped around her—her bony shoulders and her face, still rounded with baby fat, and her hair full of wayward curls—and as he did, he rocked her gently, like you might when soothing a baby, only he was twelve years too late. “I love you so much, baby,” he said into the top of her head, his voice thick with tears. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

The tears tapered off after a while—after Buck used his own sleeve to blow his nose, and Nora’s sobs turned into watery laughter at him. She sat back, leaning into his side, resting her head on his shoulder, and Buck pushed aside all the thoughts of two-year-old Nora and five-year-old Nora and nine-year-old Nora and focused on this: his twelve-year-old daughter, healthy and safe and here.

“Oh,” said Nora, detaching herself after a few more minutes. “I can—I can show you something, if you want—”

She unfolded herself from his side, crossed over to her bookshelf, and grabbed the framed picture of a lake that he’d been curious about. She sat back down sideways on the bed, mirroring him, and undid the tabs on the back of the frame. She took the easel backing off and pulled out a small pile of photographs, cradling them to her chest.

“I have some pictures—” she started, and he nodded, hungrily.

Buck’s hand shook as he held it out, reaching to take the first photo she offered. He flipped it over and his breath hitched as he saw—Nora, as a baby. She had a full head of hair, dirty blonde, and a squishy face, her legs and arms all folded up tight. She was in a car seat, in a onesie covered in bows. Buck’s arms ached with the need to hold her.

The next picture showed Nora as a toddler, two or three, maybe, in a Christmas dress; it was red and green plaid, with white snowflakes all over it. Her hair was in lopsided pigtails and she had a toothy grin on her face as she clutched the tail of a stuffed animal.

Buck felt a messy jumble of feelings, happy, and awestruck, and devastated, and mournful, and so, so lucky.

He used his sleeve to wipe his face again as Nora handed him another. In this one, she must have been five or six, and Wendy was in it, too. Buck had been right, she did have pink hair, though it was just a streak among the blonde. They were on the beach, but it didn’t look like the view of the Pacific from LA; there were mountains visible in the distance, beyond the water. Seattle, then, probably. His baby girl had lived in Seattle. What else didn’t he know?

Nora had three more photos—one of her wearing a kid’s cowboy hat and riding a horse; she looked seven or eight, and she had a jack-o-lantern smile with several teeth missing. Her little hands gripped the reins and he could see a chocolate stain dripping down the front of her Mulan t-shirt. Wendy was alone in the next one; her hair was red that time, and she was posing in front of a fountain; if he wasn’t mistaken, he was pretty sure that was the Vegas Strip behind her.

He looked at Wendy, in her black dress and jean jacket, her closed lip smile, and thought about how strange it was that their lives were so entangled after what would have been, at most, a few lost hours together. He had no idea what he’d say to her, if he’d had the chance. I’m sorry, maybe. Or, I kind of hate you, even though that wasn’t fair. Thank you for the best thing in my life.

The last photo was of just Nora. She was in the passenger seat of a car, looking out the window as a dusty landscape blurred by. Nora’s hair was blowing in the wind, and he could see a stack of beaded friendship bracelets on her arm, resting along where the window was rolled down. It was the kind of picture you take of someone you really, really love. Wendy must have snapped it while Nora wasn’t looking.

He held them all in his hands, all these versions of his daughter he’d never get to know, and his heart ached. “Will you tell me?” he asked Nora. “Everything?”

And, over the next few hours, she did.

She told him about Seattle, which she barely remembered except for the smell of the woods, because her mom’s boyfriend at the time was a big hiker. And about Austin, where her mom worked at an outdoor music venue, and, if Nora behaved and wore her headphones, she could sit on one of the barstools all night and the kitchen staff would bring her snacks. About the time she dropped her beloved stuffed lizard into the Colorado River to see if it could swim and her mom wouldn’t let her go get it out, and about her friend Shane whose parents threw him a rodeo-themed birthday and who cried when she told him she was moving.

She told him about Las Vegas, where everything was too crowded and too bright. About how her mom kept leaving her with their neighbor, an older woman named Sansa, and about how Sansa didn’t seem to like Nora very much, and her apartment always smelled like mothballs and patchouli, so Nora started lying and pretending her mom got home early so she could sneak back home to spend nights alone. How when her mom finally discovered what she’d been doing, she wasn’t mad. She just said it was good that Nora was past needing a babysitter.  

She told him about coming back to LA, then. How her mom’s friend had gotten her a job at a fancy restaurant where a lot of celebrities ate, and how she used to eavesdrop on her mom’s friends gossiping about which actors tipped a lot and which singers were jerks. How she met Sadie because she could see in the school library records that she was the one who’d taken the third Firestarter book out and was four weeks late returning it, and when Nora found her to ask her to return her library book, already, please, Sadie had handed it right to her and asked if she wanted to go see the first movie that weekend.   

By that point, Buck and Nora were both lying flat on their backs, sideways across her bed. And as the morning sky tracked into golden afternoon sunlight, casting soft light over the flowery bedspread and the father and daughter’s matching, tear-stained faces, Nora’s voice going hoarse from talking, she told him about the night of the winter concert.

How Nora had a solo—not because she was good, just because they were randomly assigned—and how no one met her in the lobby, after. How Sadie found her and dragged her over to where her younger brothers were getting in trouble for messing with the refreshments table, and how Sadie’s dad had his car there, too, since he’d come straight from work, so he offered to drive her home.

About the first, long night sleeping at the Warren’s house, and how Julia snuck her a handful of tissues and told her that everyone cries on their first night. About how she was too used to the quiet from all the nights her mom worked, and hearing the other kids sleeping in the same room made it hard to fall asleep. About how, the third time Mrs. Warren promised to get her sneakers and then forgot, Nora decided to get serious about her plan to find Buck.

And after Nora had talked herself out, Buck pulled her in for another hug—three in one day, it was some sort of miracle—and marveled at this little person in his arms, his daughter who was so much braver than him, who had navigated a complicated childhood without a Maddie, who finally, finally seemed to relax the tension she’d been carrying in her shoulders since the first day he saw her.

“Thank you for telling me,” he said, running his hands through his daughter’s messy, dirty blonde curls, wishing he could keep her tucked into his arms, safe like that, forever. “Thank you for finding me.” It wasn’t enough; it wasn’t nearly enough. But his voice broke when he said it, and she squeezed him a little tighter, and he thought that maybe she actually was starting to understand, now. How he would always, always be there for her. How he loved her in a way that felt like reverence. Like a lifelong condition he hadn’t known was in his blood until the day she showed up at the fire house.

For the first time in weeks, Buck felt like he was finding solid footing again. After their long, long talk, Buck got her the biggest glass of ice water he could find, and then ordered so much take out their leftovers would last the week. The piled every blanket Buck owned on the couch, and Nora put on the first Firestarter movie, and they ate Chinese food right out of the cartons while Buck peppered her with questions about the characters on screen, and, even though she had already talked all day, she answered every single one of them.  

Unlike the last time he thought they’d made progress, this time, things changed for real. She didn’t just disappear into her room whenever she got home. She started asking for things—snacks and dinner requests and game nights at Eddie’s and a new record that Sadie recommended, the first in her collection. She’d even started asking him questions, about his childhood and his family and his time in LA; about the man he was hugging in the photograph hanging in his locker.

He tried to answer as honestly as he could, without dumping on her. He glossed over a lot of his childhood, referencing Daniel in passing but not explaining the way he found out, and focused mostly on the way Maddie was always there for him with a pinky promise. And it felt good to talk about Bobby, even as he felt a new wave of regret every time he realized that Bobby would never get to meet Nora; would never see Buck try to live up to the standard Bobby set for him.  

“So, it’s kind of like we both lost a parent this year,” Nora said to him, after he’d explained, in vaguest terms possible, how Bobby died. And though Buck wouldn’t have said it that way, he didn’t have it in him to disagree.

“It sucks,” he said, instead.

“Yeah,” she agreed. And then she held out her pinky to him, and said, “at least we have each other, yeah?”

And Buck had burst into tears again.

He really needed to stop doing that to her. Though that point, Nora had seen him crying so many times that she was unfazed. Still, Buck was determined to be better about keeping it together; and he was especially glad he’d planned her surprise for the following weekend.

Eddie picked them up bright and early on Saturday morning. Chris was at a friend’s video game tournament, which was apparently a thing now, so Eddie invited himself along and offered to drive, and he showed up in his workout shorts and a loose tank top, because the universe refused to let Buck catch a fucking break.

Nora sat in the backseat, bouncing with excitement while he and Eddie teased her for not knowing the destination.

“Can’t believe this kid’s that excited to go to math tutoring,” said Eddie, gesturing at Nora in the backseat with his thumb and nudging Buck in the arm. It definitely didn’t give Buck goosebumps.

“No, math tutoring’s next weekend,” Buck said. “Today we signed her up for the vegetable-eating competition.”

“Oh, I thought today was Birdwatching for Teens.”

“Hey,” objected Buck. “I was thinking about taking up birdwatching.”

“Of course you were.”

Nora rolled her eyes at the two of them, and Buck tried not to feel like they were a family unit, just missing one son. It was a good distraction when Eddie pulled into the driveway of a building bearing the name LAFD TRAINING ACADEMY and Nora squealed in excitement.

“You don’t even know what we’re doing here yet,” Buck pointed out. He pulled out his phone to text Ravi as they made their way across the parking lot.

“I know I get to go inside,” Nora replied, nearly skipping. Ravi met them at the door, holding it open and fist-bumping Nora as she passed by.

“Follow me,” he said. Buck and Eddie already knew the way, of course, but they hung back as Ravi led Nora through the building, past the classrooms and laboratories and specialized areas, to the huge gymnasium that housed all of the equipment and obstacle courses that made up the CPAT test.

Nora whipped around to look at him when she realized where they were. He’d made sure she wore her sneakers that morning, and brought her water bottle and some protein-rich snacks.

“What do you think?” he asked. He’d worn his sneakers, too. “Wanna see what you’re made of?”

It ended up being, at first, one of his best weekends, ever. They spent a few hours on the course: Nora used a ten-pound sledgehammer to knock down a door, and Buck and Eddie raced each other, seeing who could go farther carrying the 165-lb mannequin. Eventually, they timed each other doing the full test again, just to see if they still could.

After years of Buck bragging about his CPAT recertification score, Eddie beat him by thirty-five seconds. Then Ravi got dragged into it and beat them both by a full minute. But Nora showed them all—after a few modifications for her size, she finished the course in fourteen minutes, flat.

Eddie decided they should pick up pizza on the way home, and then followed them into the apartment instead of dropping them off. Over dinner, he proposed that they pick Chris up in the morning and all go to the planetarium, so that Nora could see anything she might have missed from her field trip.

Buck tried to make sure his face stayed normal while Nora enthusiastically agreed. “I’ll text Chris,” she said, pulling out her phone as she abandoned the table for her bedroom.

“Invite Sadie, too,” Eddie called after her. And—even though Eddie had planned a thoughtful outing for his daughter, and he’d remembered Buck’s daughter’s best friend’s name, and he looked sinfully disheveled after an afternoon spent flexing his muscles and grunting and sweating—Buck couldn’t kiss him.

It was a goddamn shame.

So, when Eddie turned to him with his big, brown, doe-eyes, Buck blurted out, “I have to go to the bathroom.”

After hiding in his own bathroom for twenty minutes, like a coward—or, like a person with IBS—he emerged to find that Eddie had done his dishes and packed away the pizza. Who did Buck ever piss off to deserve this?

He had to get him out. “You didn’t have to do that,” he said, and without waiting for Eddie to reply, he continued, “you must be wiped after today. I know I am.”

“Yeah,” said Eddie, stretching his arm across his chest, and then up over his head. His shirt rode up, and Buck’s eyes registered the glimpse of hair, trailing down past Eddie’s waistband. “Mind if I crash? Since we’re just going together tomorrow, anyway?”

“Oh,” said Buck, alarm bells going off in his brain. It would be inexcusably rude to say, no, right?

Right. Dammit.

“Yeah. Yeah, of course.”

“Thanks,” Eddie said. “Though I really need to shower after today. Can I borrow some clothes?”

“Yup.” Buck didn’t mind that at all. He didn’t even care a little bit. It barely registered.

“Dibs on the bathroom,” Eddie said, passing Buck where he stood, silently crashing out against the doorjamb.

As soon as Eddie was out, dressed in Buck’s sweatpants and LAFD t-shirt and, heaven help him, Buck’s boxers, Buck slipped by him, anxious to take the coldest shower he could manage without yelping. He opened his door just long enough to say, “night,” and closed himself inside, even though it wasn’t late at all. But Buck was in no shape to be alone on a dark couch with a freshly showered, sleepy-eyed Eddie Diaz.

The morning went smoothly, though Buck couldn’t help wishing he had more space, like they did in the Diaz house. But still, the three of them managed to pile out the door in time, and Eddie picked Chris up, and they all got to the planetarium by ten.

“Maybe we should buy family passes,” Eddie said, while they waited in line to buy tickets; Chris and Nora were perched on the edge of the water fountain nearby, waiting for them.

“Huh?” said Buck, looking at where Eddie was pointing. There was a poster offering annual family passes to the planetarium, as well as scaled-up packages that included the zoo, the aquarium, and the arboretum.  His eyes kept snagging on the burst that said ‘perfect for a family of four!’

“I feel like we’d definitely make use of that,” Eddie continued, undeterred by Buck’s glitching next to him. “Think about it—that’s the cost of like, three outings.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Buck said. He didn’t know how to articulate that Eddie was psychologically torturing him. The man was even wearing Buck’s clothes today. How was he supposed to deal with that? “The kids might be too old for that.”

“For the zoo? The aquarium? No way. Plus, we haven’t been to all those places with Nora.”

Buck felt a lump in his throat; swallowed around it. “Why don’t we just wait—”

“For what?” Eddie said. “That’s the whole point of the deal. Hi,” Eddie said, stepping up to the cashier when they were summoned forward. “Can I get the annual family pass? The full package one?”

Buck watched in horror as Eddie paid for all four, jotting answers down on a form as if they only had one set of contact information to share. Eddie took the four passes and said, “I’ll just hang on to them, to be safe,” as he waved for Chris and Nora to come join them, not even noticing that Buck’s face had to be reflecting some of the feral need he felt simmering under his skin.

Little by little, it started pushing him to his limit. Eddie, asking Nora to explain the posters in atrium. Eddie snapping photos on his phone of Chris and Nora as they walked ahead. Eddie, hanging back, close enough to bump his shoulder, saying, “see? This family pass is going to be totally worth it.”

It all meant that Buck was very, very close to his breaking point by the time they hit the cafeteria. Chris and Nora staked out a table while Buck and Eddie each loaded up bright blue cafeteria trays with sandwiches and chips and apples, pushing them along the railing as they got closer to the checkout.

“So,” Eddie started, picking up an orange and tossing it back and forth. “I’ve been thinking.”

“Never a good sign,” Buck said, eyeing the orange as Eddie played with it.

“This might sound a little crazy, but . . . what if we moved in together?”

Buck’s brain went offline as he pushed his tray forward, moving Eddie’s as it went. It was crazy—it sounded like Eddie just suggested they live together.

“What?” he said, the only possible response.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” Eddie continued. “We’d save on all our expenses, and this way Carla can stay with both the kids, if needed. Plus, we’d just get to hang out all the time.”

“I—”

“Sir?” Buck was saved from replying by the woman working at the register. “Together or separate?”

“Together,” Eddie said.

“Separate,” Buck said, at the same time.

“He’s being stupid,” Eddie continued, waving him off and smiling charmingly at the woman. She blinked, indifferently, and took his card. “Together, please.”

Buck was going to explode.

“Here you go,” Eddie said as they approached the table. He pushed one of the trays in front of Nora and Chris, who were deep in discussion about a TV show Buck had never heard of.

Eddie pulled the other tray Buck was holding towards himself and sat down, digging into the plastic wrap around the sandwich. “So, what do you think?”

“What do I think about what?” Buck asked, in case he had hallucinated the entire conversation.

“Moving in together.”

“Eddie—why? Why would we move in together?” His voice cracked. It was just a little bit, but it was still enough for Buck to feel completely pathetic.

“I mean, think about it. You don’t really like your apartment, and there’s not enough room for you both at ours. I bet together, we could afford a nice place,” Eddie offered. “We could take turns—getting the kids to school and making meals and carpooling. I mean, you’ve stayed with us, I already know how useful you are to have around,” Eddie said, chuckling. “And this way I could be helpful too, while you get used to all the dad stuff.”

Buck closed his eyes and let out a controlled sigh. Unfortunately, when he opened his eyes, he was still in the planetarium cafeteria, on the receiving end of Eddie’s big, dumb, beautiful eyes.

He took a deep breath, and said, “I don’t . . . I don’t think that’s a good idea, Eddie.”

“What? Why?”

“I—” am in love with you, his brain threatened. He scrambled around for literally any other answer to give. “—think I need to learn how to stand on my own two feet. Just me and Nora.”

“Why?” Eddie demanded, like it was a personal insult. “You’ve never said that to me about Christopher.”

“It’s different,” Buck insisted, and he was so distracted that he didn’t realize his voice had gotten louder, or that Chris and Nora had quieted next to them. He was too busy thinking about how Eddie had just described the exact scenario Buck’s masochistic mind dreamt up, night after night. Except in Buck’s mind, the biggest appeal was getting to be around the love of his life, and in Eddie’s, it was saving on grocery bills.

“How?” Eddie pushed. He seemed upset, in a way Buck hadn’t seen in years. Like Buck was the one being difficult, even though Eddie was sitting there with his big brown eyes and floppy hair and his arms bulging in the sleeves of Buck’s shirt, for Christ’s sake. “How is it any different?”

“Because!” Buck said, nearly shouting now. “I’m in love with you!”

The moment the words slipped out, Buck froze. God—god, he wished he could shove them back inside.

Was it possible at all, to salvage this? Could he come up with any excuse? Any lie?

He couldn’t think of anything. He could only watch the slow-motion car-wreck of understanding collide in Eddie’s brain. He could only stare as Eddie’s face blinked from annoyance to confusion to shock—and he wasn’t eager to see what followed that.

The time for damage control had passed. It was time to flee.

“Nora,” he said, his voice strangled. “Come on, we gotta go.”

“Yep,” said Nora, jumping up from the table.

“Sorry, I—Chris, love you, kid. I’ll see you later,” Buck said, reaching across the table to squeeze Chris’s arm. And then he was nearly sprinting out the door, Nora keeping pace beside him, all the way to the car. Thank god Buck had insisted they take separate ones.

Once they were both buckled in, Buck gripped the steering wheel and with both hands. “I don’t—” he blinked, then turned to her. “I’m not sure what to do right now.”

Nora glanced at her phone, which was buzzing in her lap, and then back up to Buck. “Aunt Maddie?” she suggested.

Buck nodded, once, and then a few times in a row. “Yeah,” he said, agreeing. “Aunt Maddie.”

--------

Only Sadie knew how deeply invested in Buck and Eddie’s love life Nora had gotten.

She would never have voiced it to any of the adults. Chris knew, of course, and they talked about it—how weird they acted and how codependent they got and how much better moods they’d both be in if they just got together, already. But Nora always felt compelled to keep in some of her excitement, in case it came on too strong. We’d be siblings! she thought about saying. Eddie would be my other dad!

But she didn’t want to weird Chris out, in case he actually did resent her for stealing Buck, and now thought she was coming for the rest of his family.

She kind of was. But either way, even if she’d shown Chris her true excitement, he probably wouldn’t want to gossip with her about the romance of it all. Chris thought they were in love, and he thought it made sense for them to get married. He thought if they did, they’d calm down and stop, as he put it, “making the weirdest romantic decisions any two people had ever made.”

But Nora and Sadie had been dissecting it, with Nora piecing all the bits of their history together from clues and questions. She was surprised at how much she wanted it, for Buck. How much she wanted him to get his happily ever after. Buck was always looking after everyone, and Nora wanted someone to take care of him the way he took care of her; thoughtfully, instinctively. With love.

And another part of her really wanted it to be Eddie. She’d had enough adults coming in and out of her life. If Buck stayed single, there was a chance some other new person would eventually start coming around, and who knew what they’d be like? But Nora liked Eddie. She liked how he treated her like an adult and remembered the things she said and always took her side when there were game night disputes. And Chris—Chris would be her brother. She’d have an actual, real-life sibling.

There was a lot at stake, so of course, Sadie knew every detail. She updated her via text during the week – Buck just made an entire tray of lasagna that wasn’t even for us, she told her. It’s just so eddie can eat it at the station. Sadie had written back why is your dad kind of dreamy, which Nora had thumbs downed, followed by four more thumbs down emojis.

Eddie told me to invite you to the planetarium, she texted her, the Saturday night after they spent the day at the LAFD academy. Between catching her up about the field trip, the night at the firehouse, and the talk with Buck, she’d almost forgotten to send the invite.

Ugh, came Nora’s reply. We’re going to the racetrack for my grandma’s birthday. And then she texted, I’m so mad, I need to observe these interactions!!! I wasn’t paying enough attention last time.

I’ll keep you posted, Nora promised. And boy, was she going to have an update.

“I’m not convinced you need to watch all of them to get it,” Chris said, looking at a list on his phone of all the Marvel TV shows. “But you’ll probably like it better if you watch season one.”

“I think Sadie watched season one,” she said, and before she could continue, they both heard the tail-end of Buck’s breathless, firm sentence. “—stand on my own two feet, just me and Nora.”

She and Chris locked eyes, and they both froze, while Eddie fired back, “Why? You’ve never said that to me about Christopher.”

“It’s different,” said Buck. There was an unfamiliar note of pain in his voice. Until that moment, Nora hadn’t been sure if Buck knew he was in love with Eddie. She was pretty sure he did, but sometimes she couldn’t tell; she’d kind of hoped they were both clueless.

“How?” Eddie pushed, and Nora and Chris both abandoned any pretenses and turned to watch their dads. “How is it any different?” Eddie goaded, nearly antagonistic. Nora really, really hoped he didn’t know about the whole Buck-being-in-love-with-him thing.  

But then a second later, she found herself wishing he did. Because when Buck yelled, “because, I’m in love with you!” then maybe Eddie would know how to reply.

He didn’t. Instead, the table—actually, the whole cafeteria, now that Nora was looking around—had gone quiet. She wasn’t even totally sure if Eddie was breathing.

Part of her was rooting for either of them to snap and fill the silence; but a bigger part of her was feeling very protective of her dad and just wanted to get them out.  

“Nora,” Buck said, after another beat of silence. “Come on, we gotta go.”

“Yep,” said Nora, sparing a glance at Eddie as Buck said goodbye to Chris and sped-walked to the doors. She couldn’t make out his expression.

Once they were in the car on the way to aunt Maddie’s house, Nora finally looked at her phone. She had five messages from Chris:

holy shit, I cant believe that happened

never in a million years did I guess a planetarium would push them over the edge

hows buck?

my dad is buffering

god im gonna have to talk him down aren’t i

As she read through, another text came in, and then another:

I don’t get paid enough for this

tell buck I love him pls

Nora tried not to read anything fatalistic into that last one. Her new life had only been feeling stable for a week and a half or so, and now everything felt topsy turvy. What would happen if this drove a wedge between Buck and Eddie? Would Nora stop seeing them? Would Buck want to get a new job?

“Chris—” said Nora, staying calm when Buck flinched, “Chris says to tell you he loves you.”

Buck barked out a laugh, a bittersweet edge to it. “God, that kid,” he said, shaking his head.

And even though she was mostly totally over any weird jealousy she might have felt about Buck and Chris, that wasn’t her motivation at all when she said, “I love you, too.”

“Oh, man,” said Buck, rubbing his hand down face before smiling over at her. “I gotta tell ya, Nor. Feels like a real pity move to say that right now.”

Nora grinned at him across the center console. “Feels like you need some pity,” she said, reaching over to pat him a few times on his shoulder. He groaned. “I do love you, though,” she added. “Dad.”

Buck swore under his breath, wiping tears as they flooded down his cheeks yet again. She thought it was sweet that her dad was such a big crier. “Are you trying to kill me?” Buck asked her, then. “Are you literally trying to make my heart explode?”

Nora felt bad that she wasn’t really helping his freakout. But it felt good, finally saying it.

A few minutes later, they pulled up outside aunt Maddie’s house. She followed Buck as he exited the car and walked up the steps on autopilot, coming to a stop on the front stoop. He made no moves to knock.

“Okay,” Nora said after a minute, and she leaned forward to press the doorbell. By the time Maddie pulled it open, Buck still hadn’t found his voice.

“Hey!” Maddie said, holding the door open and ushering them in. “I didn’t know you guys were coming. But great timing—Jee and—what’s wrong?”

Nora watched as Buck stood inside the door of Maddie’s house, continuously opening and closing his mouth, like he was malfunctioning.

“Uh—Buck told Eddie he loved him,” Nora filled in.

“Oh my god,” Maddie breathed. “Oh my god, code red, code red.” She stepped forward and put her hand on Buck’s shoulder, guiding him towards the couch, while her other hand pulled out her phone and started typing furiously.

“Nora, honey, can you go grab a water bottle from the fridge?”

Nora knew a cue when she got it. She ducked into the kitchen and pulled out three water bottles before pulling out her phone. She needed to text Sadie about this; but first, she had two more texts from Chris.

you guys should have taken me with you

where are you?

She replied Maddie’s! how’s eddie? And then switched over to her thread with Sadie and started recapping everything as fast as she could.

By the time she got back out into the living room, Buck was talking again.

“—actual worst-case scenario,” Buck was saying, which wasn’t super promising.

“It’s not,” Maddie countered. “Never in a million years is Eddie going to ban you from seeing Chris and/or stop working for the 118 because of this.”

“Those are both very viable scenarios,” Buck insisted.

Maddie made them all coffees—Nora’s was about eighty percent milk and ten percent sugar—and they took turns naming all the reasons what happened that afternoon hadn’t been that bad. Around three, Robbie started stirring from his afternoon nap, and Buck announced it was time for them to go.

“Are you sure you don’t want to stay and hang out? Babies are great for morale,” Maddie offered.

“Next time,” Buck insisted. “Right now, I need to go home and drink a—” his eyes slid to Nora, and then back to Maddie, “—totally normal amount of alcohol.”

“Right,” said Maddie. “Nora, call me if you need me, yeah? Buck, don’t be an idiot.” She watched as Buck gave a silly little salute and then turned to lead her down the front walkway, back towards the car. An unusual rain storm had settled over LA, making the sky cloudy gray and dark, raindrops pelting down with excessive force. They ended up running the last few steps to the car, and then Buck drove home so slowly, she almost teased him for it. She would have, if he didn’t already look so miserable.

They parked in their usual spot, and they both got caught in the downpour of rain again as Nora used her key to unlock the outside door and then the apartment door. Buck was a few feet behind her, so she was the first one to spot them.

Eddie and Chris were sitting on their couch.

Chapter Text

Eddie didn’t mean to upend their lives in the cafeteria of the planetarium.

It was just that—Eddie had been having a really nice day. And he’d put a lot of thought and research into the roommates plan, and he didn’t appreciate the way Buck was refusing to even entertain the idea. And it felt like a double whammy, when, after Buck shot down his idea—which had a lot of upsides that he hadn’t even bothered to consider—he’d then said, “I think I need to learn how to stand on my own two feet, just me and Nora.”

Stand on his own two feet? Who did he think he was—Eddie’s father? After years and years of Buck demanding Eddie lean on him, let him in, now Buck thought they should each be—what? White-knuckling their way through single-parenthood, pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and forgetting that they’re supposed to have each other’s backs?

“Why?” Eddie pressed. “You’ve never said that to me about Christopher.” How little do you think of me? he wanted to snap. Why am I not allowed to be the one helping you?

“It’s different,” Buck insisted, infuriatingly.

But Eddie was at his limit. He was tired of Buck being so weird, Buck dodging him and ignoring him and placating him with answers that felt like lies. “How?” he demanded. “How is it any different?”

“Because,” said Buck, his fists balling at his sides. And then, with anger and frustration and exhaustion in his voice, his best friend said to him: “I’m in love with you.”

He let it drop like an ace in the hole, like a magic trick. Like a gauntlet, thrown down at Eddie’s feet in a last, final, gasp. Good luck following that up. Buck was breathing heavily, and Eddie saw everything about him in slow-motion. He’d gone pale, so all of his features stood out even more—pink lips and pink birthmark and bright blue eyes framed in dark lashes.

While Eddie was studying his face, the words started seeping in. I’m in love with you. I’m in love with you. I’m in love—

But how could that be true? How could Buck be in love with him?

Dating Buck was for other people. Lucky people. People who liked men.

How could Buck be in love with him, then?

It didn’t make any sense.

“Dad,” came Chris’s voice, sounding deeper and less little kid like every day. It also sounded like that wasn’t the first time he’d called him. Eddie turned to look at his son. “Want to get out of here?” Chris asked, jerking his head backwards; only then did Eddie realize that Buck and Nora were gone. And that they’d gained an audience.

He nodded, absently, and trailed behind Chris as they made their way to the car. His brain should be working a mile a minute, but instead it felt blank, like someone had knocked an antenna loose and the only thing coming through was loud white static.

“So . . .” Chris said, dragging the word out, once they were both sitting in the car that Eddie hadn’t bothered turning on. He honestly wasn’t sure if he should be operating heavy machinery at the moment. “You wanna talk about it?”

“I—uh—”

“Take your time,” Chris said, shifting in his seat and pulling out his phone. “I’ll be here.”

Eddie sat for a minute, both hands gripping the steering wheel, willing something to cut through all the static in his brain. But the only thing he could think to say was, “why aren’t you freaking out right now?”

Chris looked up from where he was typing and Eddie studied his son, who was looking thoroughly unfazed. “Huh?”

“Buck just—he said—why are you, like, sitting there?”

“Where else am I supposed to be?” Chris countered. He went back to typing on his phone, muttering under his breath, something Eddie couldn’t make out over the clamoring in his skull.

“You’re not supposed to be anywhere,” Eddie said. “But I just—how are you so calm about this?”

“About what?”

“Buck—about Buck!”

“Buck . . .” Chris started, as if he actually expected Eddie to finish that sentence. Out loud. He stared at his son, incredulous, but Chris just ignored him and looked down at his phone again. “Talking about it makes it less scary, dad.”

“I’m not scared,” Eddie said, and only once the words slipped out of his mouth did he realize they were a lie. He was scared. He was fucking terrified.

What Buck just said—what he did—they couldn’t pretend that didn’t happen. This wasn’t a fight they had to get over, something one of them could apologize for. This wasn’t a joke or a misunderstanding or one of them being stupid. This was—this was—

“How’s it going over there?”

Eddie looked at the clock and realized he’d been sitting in the car for nearly a half hour. “Sorry,” he said, automatically. He turned the key and started the car up, but made no move to pull out of the parking spot. The windshield wipers sprung to life, clearing the deluge of rain that had come on fast. “Sorry,” he repeated. Chris’s idea of a Sunday outing probably wasn’t sitting in a car for hours, watching his dad mess up another relationship in real time.

“Are you—how are you feeling about all this?” He was suddenly struck with the need to know if this was going to trigger painful memories of any of the other times Eddie had fucked up his love life and it had become his son’s problem.

He was being remarkably calm, though. Almost too calm, if Eddie was being honest.

“How are you feeling?” Chris asked, instead. “Kinda feels like that’s the most important part here.”

“No,” Eddie insisted. “Your feelings are important, Chris.”

“Sure,” Chris ceded, easily. “But I’m not the one who’s gonna date Buck.”

“I’m not gonna date Buck,” he said, reflexively. Because—because—that was—

“Oh,” said Chris, looking, for the first time since Buck flipped Eddie’s life upside down in the cafeteria, like he was grasping the gravity of the situation. “You’re not?”

“Do you want me to date Buck?” Eddie asked, feeling like this conversation was rapidly getting out of hand.

“Oh, no way,” Chris backtracked. “My therapist said you’re not allowed to use me to justify any of your weird dating choices anymore.”

“So you think it’d be weird,” Eddie seized on it, trying to wring out Chris’s honest opinion. “If I dated Buck.”

“Oh my god, do you even hear yourself?” Chris asked. He went back to his phone, ignoring Eddie before he could even formulate a response to that.

Eventually he had to start driving. And really, there was only one place to go.

They pulled up outside of Buck’s apartment forty minutes later. It didn’t actually take forty minutes to get to Buck’s from the planetarium, but Eddie took some creative liberties with the GPS’s suggestions and managed to add a solid fifteen minutes to the drive. Even though it was usually a nightmare to find parking near Buck’s, a spot had opened only half a block away, right as Eddie pulled up to it, as if the universe was daring him to stall any longer. If Eddie put stock in that kind of thing.

Still, he gave it his best shot; taking several minutes to make sure he was parked fully parallel to the curb and then making sure he had all of his things.

“Buck’s not even here,” Chris said, after the fourth time Eddie checked his pocket for his phone.

“What?”

“They’re at Maddie’s,” Chris said, as if Eddie should already know that.

If he’d been able to think a coherent thought besides what the fuck is happening, he might have hazarded that as a guess.

“Well,” said Eddie, climbing out of the car with more confidence now. “Let’s wait inside for them, yeah?”

Two hours later, Eddie had barely moved from his spot on the couch. Chris was happy enough to entertain himself on his phone, so Eddie was free to have his internal freakout in peace. Inside, his brain felt like it was having a five-alarm fire—panic and warning bells, low visibility, obstructed breathing, thoughts darting in every direction like wayward victims who couldn’t figure out where they were supposed to go—but on the outside, he was sitting so still that once or twice Chris had poked him in the arm, just to get a reaction out of him.

He'd been in this place before, this torturous, uncertain waiting. This hellish limbo when he knew his life was about to change, but he didn’t know how much yet.

When it came to tactical situations, his brain new what to do, just fine. He could assess structural integrity and exit strategies, prioritize victims and keep his head on a swivel for unexpected dangers. But this—situations involving people he cared about—his brain never worked that way, then. It never played out possible scenarios or cycled through plans of action. It just kind of went into suspension, like a computer screen glitching on a looped audio of what the fuck.

So he sat, and he waited, and he didn’t think.

And then, eventually, Buck and Nora returned.

He sat up at the noise of the front door opening, and the sudden appearance of Nora. She narrowed her eyes at him and he stood up, like he could avoid her probing eyes at his full height.

“Hey, uh, Buck?” she said, still not taking her eyes off them. “We have visitors.”

“We—wha—oh.” Buck appeared. Eddie studied him, trying to see if anything had changed since Eddie saw him a few hours earlier. Had he been crying? Was he mad? Had he gotten over Eddie?    

“Hi,” Chris said, when the silence stretched on. “Hey, Nora, did you, uh, want to show me that thing?”

“Oh,” said Nora, glancing between Buck and Chris, before nodding. “Yeah. Uh, the thing. In my room. Should we—?” The two of them scampered down the hallway, and then it was just Eddie and Buck. Alone.

“Why are you here, Eddie?”

Buck sounded tired. Defeated, in a way that made Eddie grind his teeth. But still, he couldn’t come up with a better answer than, “I don’t . . . I don’t know.”

Buck nodded once, twice, and disappeared into his kitchen.

He didn’t appear again, so after a moment, Eddie followed him. He was leaning against the far counter, drinking a beer; another one sat on the counter next to the fridge, unopened.

Eddie twisted it off and took a large gulp, and then leaned over and rested his arms on the top of one of the two chairs in Buck’s kitchen. It was such a small room, and they were only about three feet away from each other, but the divide felt miles wide.

Eventually, Buck said, “listen, I’m—I’m sorry, okay? I’ll get over it. I promise. It’s not your problem. I’m dealing with it.”

“Jesus, Buck,” Eddie replied, consciously loosening the death grip he had on the bottleneck of his beer; broken glass was the last thing they needed right now. “You sound like you got a diagnosis.”

Buck shrugged, but didn’t contradict him. So, Buck thought having feelings for Eddie was akin to a serious illness. Great.    

Eddie tried to think of something to say, but every question that popped into his mind was more stupid than the last. Finally, he blurted out, “how did you—when—?”

Buck sighed, then and said, “Eddie, can we not do this? If you want to kick me out—”

“We’re at your place,” Eddie pointed out.

“If you’re gonna be mad—”

“I’m not mad,” Eddie corrected. He was having trouble identifying a lot of the feelings swirling around in his gut, but he was positive anger wasn’t one of them.

Buck still looked unconvinced.

“Buck, I’m not, okay? Why would I be mad?”

“Historically, queer guys falling in love with their straight best friends hasn’t gone over super well,” Buck said, running his hand over his face and then through his hair. Eddie was realizing it, now—how stressed Buck had been. How the underlying tension between them had been brewing, not because of Nora, but because of this. How long had Buck been worried about having feelings for Eddie? How long had that realization been making him feel bad?

Suddenly, the thought of it sickened Eddie. Buck had such a big heart, and he loved with everything he had. And he’d been told over and over again, by his parents, and Abby, and Taylor and Tommy and every other asshole who didn’t deserve him, that he wasn’t worth loving back. And now he was convinced that he’d done something wrong by loving Eddie? That Eddie would—what, reject him?

“Come on, Buck,” he said, wishing he could say the right combination of words to make Buck stop hurting. “You’re my best friend. Nothing’s gonna change that.”

Buck made a noise, then, quick and pained and reflexive, like it slipped out against his will. It took Eddie a beat to realize that his words sounded less like a promise and more like a dismissal. “I just mean—” Eddie paused, picking at the label on his beer bottle. He wasn’t exactly sure what he meant. “Come on,” he tried again. “Talk to me. Not as the guy you—” he couldn’t make his lips form the word love, so he just paused instead. “Just—how we usually would. You clearly need to get it off your chest; I’ll feel better once I understand. It’ll be like, cathartic.”

“Cathartic,” Buck repeated, flatly.

But then his shoulders slumped and Eddie got the sense that he was wearing him down.

“Yeah,” Eddie said, feeling more confident. “It’s just us. If you can’t talk about this stuff with your best friend, who can you?” The moment it left his mouth, he realized there were quite a few obvious answers. Maddie, for one. Hen and Karen. A therapist. Hell, even Chimney would probably be a decent sounding board.

But he didn’t want him to talk to any of them about this. This was between Buck and Eddie.

“You . . . really want to hear about it?” Buck asked, part incredulous and part something else.

“Yeah,” said Eddie, pulling out the chair he was leaning on and sitting on it. He took a swig of beer and settled in, gesturing for Buck to sit across from him.

He didn’t; he stayed where he was, in the farthest corner of the kitchen, leaning back against the counter. “Fine,” he said, twisting the bottle around his long fingers. But then he still didn’t start talking. 

“So . . .” Eddie prodded. Something was wrong with him; he felt like he was vibrating out of his skin. He felt perversely excited to hear what Buck had to say. “There’s this guy . . .”

“Fuck off,” said Buck, with no real heat behind it.

“Talking about it makes it less scary, bud,” Eddie said, cribbing his own words back from his son, as if he had any right to talk about bravery. As if he wasn’t fully aware that he was the biggest coward in the apartment.

“I don’t know—how long,” Buck started. “Probably . . . there’s no point in going there, anyway.” Eddie disagreed. Eddie wanted an FBI-level forensics report of the entire thing, laid out in facts and figures. “I mean, of course I love you. So, it’s hard to know when that changed into, you know. Being in love.”

“But it did,” Eddie prompted. Because he didn’t want to leave Buck hanging. And because he really, really didn’t want him to stop talking.

“Yeah,” Buck said. “Do you remember a few weeks back, when I was having my freakout? The one Nora overheard?” Eddie nodded. “It was then.”

That’s when Buck realized? Eddie didn’t know what he was expecting. Maybe something more dramatic—the moment when Eddie showed up on the rooftop during the building collapse after Bobby’s funeral. When Eddie was pulling away in his U-Haul, leaving for Texas. When Eddie told Buck he’d get custody of Chris if anything happened to him.

Eddie putting his hands on Buck’s shoulders and telling him to calm down felt a bit . . . anticlimactic. It felt like Eddie could do better.

“Oh,” he said, finally, when he realized Buck was waiting for a reaction. “That’s . . . recent.”

Buck snorted and then took another drink from his beer. “Yeah, well, turns out I’m not great at picking up context clues. Even when other people spell it out for me.”

“Other people have—what? Who?”

“Oh,” said Buck, sheepishly. “Maddie, mostly. She’s made some comments over the years . . . and then when you were in Texas, both she and Tommy laid it on pretty thick—”

“Tommy?” Eddie asked, feeling a rock drop in his stomach. Buck had seen Tommy? After all of Eddie’s efforts to stop him from calling his ex?

“Oh,” Buck said again, heat rising in his cheeks. “Yeah.” He just shrugged; but if he thought Eddie was going to drop it, he was delusional. 

“You saw him again?”

“Yeah, I ran into him at a bar and we—” he trailed off, gesturing vaguely. We what? Why was Buck being so fucking cryptic? “—and then, the morning after, he offered to get back together.”

The morning after. The morning after. 

“So, I asked, you know, what changed? And he basically implied that he’d have, like, my full attention now that you were out of the state.”

“What a fucking asshole,” Eddie said, vehemently. Just in case Buck didn’t realize that made Tommy a fucking asshole. “What did you say?”

Buck squinted up at him, then, like Eddie was being weird. “No, obviously.”

Right. Eddie would definitely know if Buck was dating Tommy again.

“Smart,” Eddie said. “You deserve better.”

“Yeah,” said Buck, huffing out a sad little laugh. “I guess eventually I realized better was right in front of me.”

It took Eddie an embarrassing beat to catch up. “Wait—me?”

“No.” Buck rolled his eyes. “Ravi. Yes, you.”

“I just—” Eddie trailed off, not sure what to do with this. He felt like Buck put something large and precious and breakable in his arms and was trying to sneak out the backdoor. 

“Eddie. You’re my best friend. You’re the first person I want to call, always. Like, when I got the news that Robbie was born. But also when I found out the grocery store carries jackfruit. When we’re at your house, I never want to leave. I want to look after you and Chris when you need it and still be there when you don’t.”

“Buck, that’s—that’s just being a best friend—”

“No,” Buck snapped. He put his beer down and tugged his hands through his curls, making them stand on end. “When—right before I asked Tommy to move in with me, I went to talk to Maddie, and Josh asked me these questions about our relationship.”

Fucking Josh. It figured that he gave such bad advice that Buck ended up getting dumped.

Though maybe Josh was onto something, there.

“He asked me, are his problems my problems? Did I think about him when he wasn’t around? Did I see a future there?” 

Buck had said yes? To all of those? About Tommy? 

“And,” Buck continued. “That’s what I’ve been thinking, these past few weeks. How I need to be there for you and Chris when something is wrong. How you’re the one I need when I have a problem. How I think about you, all the time. And, before Nora, I never really thought about future stuff, but the only thing that I was ever sure about was that you’d be there. I mean, god—no wonder I went psychotic when you said you were moving.”

Eddie didn’t think that was exactly fair. It wasn’t like Eddie had handled the move all that well, either.  He’d known the moment he called the realtor to make an appointment that it was weird of him to keep it a secret. And as much as Buck wanted to be there for Eddie when he had a problem, it wasn’t as much as Eddie knew he needed Buck when things went wrong. He literally wouldn’t have survived without him. In a million ways.

And of course Eddie thought about Buck when he wasn’t around. He wasn’t a goldfish who forgot about people when they weren’t right in front of him. So many things reminded him of Buck, anyway—weird kombucha drinks and landmarks where they’d responded to calls and certain Bruce Springsteen songs and the Knicks.

And yeah, Eddie didn’t exactly have a five-year plan, but he always assumed—especially since he’d gotten back from Texas—that Buck would be in his life for the long haul. If Buck had stuck by him through his street fighting and his PTSD breakdown and Kim, then Eddie prayed he’d never find out what Buck would consider his final straw. And it wasn’t like Eddie was ever going to cut Buck out.

“Buck—” he started again, trying to figure out if he could explain that Buck was just confused. That he was overthinking everything Eddie found perfectly normal. Instead, what came out was, “Josh doesn’t know shit.”

Buck laughed then, a sharp bark, the kind of exhausted sound a parent makes when a kid has the audacity to ask for dessert again and again after being told no. “I just—I think maybe we need to . . . to take a step back. Maybe if you can just, like, give me some space, then I can sort myself out. And eventually we can just pretend this never happened.”

“That’s bullshit,” Eddie said, feeling irrationally annoyed. “You don’t have to sort yourself out. That’s just—that’s just how we are! Just because Josh doesn’t understand basic friendship—”

“Eddie,” Buck said. He put his beer down and planted his hands firmly on the counter behind him, each fist gripping the marble, and he looked Eddie right in the eye when he said, “I want to kiss you.”

“What?”

“Yeah,” said Buck, like he was really saying, sorry. “I think you’re stupid hot. I can’t look at you in the gym anymore. I lose my train of thought when you smile at me—”

At the mention of his smile, Eddie tried to assess what his own face was doing, but he had no idea. 

“—I’ve been having wet dreams like a fucking teenager.”

Eddie was. . .  he was . . .  he was . . .

“If our kids weren’t in the other room and you wanted it, I’d drop to my knees, right now. So, yeah,” said Buck, finally. “There it is. That clear things up for you?”

Eddie might be shaking. He felt supremely unsteady, like he was dropping, free fall, on a roller coaster. Like his stomach was flipping round and round, and his legs might give out and he couldn’t even suck in a full breath. 

“Fuck,” he heard, barely audible over the roaring in his ears. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to—”  

Eddie blinked until his vision cleared and he could see Buck. He must have taken a step forward and then stopped, because he was frozen in the middle of the kitchen; his face was red and his eyes were glossy and he was eyeing Eddie like he’d just found a tiger in his apartment and yanked on its tail.

“I’m sorry,” Buck said again. “I shouldn’t have—that was inappropriate. It’s just—I can’t pretend this is, like, platonic. This is why I need some space, okay? To deal with this.” He gestured to his whole body, then. “This was a bad idea. I shouldn’t have—can you say something, please? Do you want me to get Chris so you guys can go?”

Eddie needed to say something, he knew that. Buck looked like he was on the verge of a panic attack, and Eddie hated seeing him so distressed. 

But he just—needed a second. Because he’d been right there with Buck every step of the way, every example of their, arguably, overly-dependent relationship. Even when it sounded like they were more partners than best friends. After all, what did Josh know?

They were them, and they didn’t have to explain that to anyone. 

But then Buck had said . . . He’d said . . . 

I want to kiss you. 

Shannon had said something like that to him, once. Eddie was well aware he was out of his league with her, and he’d ignored his friends who told him to make the first move. And then after weeks and weeks of hanging out, she’d sat across from him and announced that she was going to kiss him. And Eddie had thought, oh thank god. 

That wasn’t how he felt, now. He felt a tugging in his gut, like a compulsion. A pull so strong he ached with it. Buck could have asked him for anything, and he would have given it. But all he’d asked for was . . .

I want to kiss you.

Buck could have demanded an organ, and Eddie would have wrenched it out and handed it over. Eddie had given Buck the key to his house. Custody of his son. His trust and his abuela’s tamale recipe and a front row seat to the worst moments in his life. Nora’s dresser.

Because giving to Buck never felt like he was giving something away; it felt like he was taking it home.

And Buck—generous, big-hearted Buck, hadn’t even asked for anything. He’d only asked to be the one giving. What he wanted was . . . to kiss Eddie.

To drop to his knees. 

Why would Eddie say no to that? Eddie might never have thought very much about being with a man. But this was Buck. 

His eyes roamed over his best friend, then, reassessing it in this new light. He’d always admired Buck’s body, sturdy and bulging and strong, his height all in his legs.

Eddie wielded his own strength like a weapon—sharp and honed, coiled tight, ready to strike if needed. But Buck used his physicality for better reasons. They flashed through his mind: Buck, running alongside him in the park, golden in the sunlight, pushing Chris on his skateboard. Buck throwing himself onto a bike to chase after the drunk driver who drove off with Chimney in the car. Buck, holding him tight for a hug, next to a U-Haul under a gray sky.

And then, unbidden, came images Eddie had never seen firsthand: Buck, holding himself up as he hovered over Taylor. Buck, unbuckling his belt for Tommy. Buck, giving and giving and giving, to a parade of nameless, faceless strangers, in beds and backseats and bar bathrooms. 

But Buck didn’t want that anymore. He wanted Eddie. 

And Eddie, well. He’d never really thought about it before. But if anyone should have their hands on his best friend’s body, shouldn’t it be him? If anyone was going to be trusted with Buck’s heart and his vulnerable underbelly, shouldn’t it be Eddie? He already knew every weak spot, every trigger point, every scar that hadn’t healed properly. Was he really going to leave Buck to find some new, random person to clumsily learn the landscape of his body, his life?

“Eddie, I’m begging you, you gotta say something.”

Eddie blinked once, twice, and realized that Buck had backed up against the counter again. Tear tracks were on his cheeks and he looked thoroughly wrecked.

It tore Eddie up; he probably would have agreed to kiss Buck if only to get that look off his face; but he was surprised to learn that he actually really, really wanted to. He wanted to step into Buck’s space and run his hands up and down his sides to soothe him, and he wanted to lean in and—

“Just—hold on a sec,” he said. His voice was gravelly and strained. 

Buck didn’t look placated, but Eddie’s brain had started functioning again and now it was off like a shot, flipping through the possibilities and rearranging everything he knew about Buck, his best friend, to fit Buck, who was in love with him.

Buck—who Eddie just might be in love with, too.

“I think we can make this work,” he said, finally. And—yeah. This was good. It was going to take some figuring out but—

“What?”

“This,” Eddie said, gesturing between himself and Buck. “Us.”

“You—Eddie, what the fuck are you talking about?”

Eddie wasn’t sure what Buck was so confused about. He was the one who’d changed everything; Eddie was just trying to catch up.

“You want—all that. We can . . . do that,” he said, shrugging. Distantly, he realized he should probably be able to specifically say what, exactly, it was. If you can’t talk about sex, you shouldn’t be having it, that was what all his useless health teachers used to say. But he thought he was allowed some leeway, seeing as he was currently in the middle of a best friend-induced sexuality crisis.

“Eddie—”

A banging noise sounded out through the apartment. It took Eddie an embarrassingly long time to realize that someone was knocking on Buck’s apartment door.

Buck shot him an alarmed look and scrubbed his hands over his face, and then he darted past Eddie, skirting wide around where he was sitting, as if he was afraid Eddie was going to reach out and grab him as he went. Eddie ran a hand through his hair and breathed out heavily before getting up to follow him.

He stepped into the living room right as Buck pulled the door open and revealed a woman with dark hair and a blazer, smiling warmly.

“Brenda,” Buck said. His voice was croaking and his face flamed red, and for a second, Eddie remembered his suspicion that Buck was dating again.

But no—Buck was in love with him. He’d said so, and everything.

“Hi, Mr. Buckley,” Brenda said. “Is now a bad time?”

Yeah, Eddie wanted to answer. We were kind of in the middle of something.

“No,” Buck said, instead. “Uh—” he turned halfway. “Brenda is Nora’s social worker,” he told the wall behind Eddie’s head, and then faced Brenda again. “This is—Eddie. He and his son Chris are visiting but they’re uh—they were just about to leave.”

Oh, they were, were they? Eddie didn’t like the sound of that. If the social worker was here to assess Nora’s new life, then shouldn’t Eddie and Chris be there for it?

But then Buck turned towards him again and actually met his eyes that time, giving Eddie such a look of desperation that he caved immediately.

“Yeah,” he said, doing his best to smile at Brenda, like they were just two normal friends having a normal conversation, and it didn’t matter at all that they were interrupted. “We were just leaving. I’ll go grab Chris.”

He headed down the hallway, hearing Buck offer Brenda a drink behind him. Nora’s door was closed, so he knocked on it twice before pushing it open.

Chris was sprawled across Nora’s bed, his head down by the foot, near where Nora was sitting on the floor, leaning up against it. Her knees were bent and she was balancing Chris’s phone sideways across them. They both turned to him, wide-eyed, when he opened the door.

“Was that a knock?”

Eddie recognized Sadie’s tinny voice a second before he realized she was on a FaceTime call. Great.

“Yeah,” whispered Nora, not looking at her phone. “Uh—hi, Eddie.”

“Are you guys engaged yet?” Chris asked.

And Eddie—he really couldn’t even start with that. “We’re leaving,” he said, instead.

Nora and Chris exchanged a panicked glance. “Sadie, I’ll call you back,” Nora said.

“Wait, wait—” Sadie said, before Nora grimaced and ended the call.

“Wait, dad, seriously?” Chris said, sitting up on the bed. “Are you guys—”

“Nora’s social worker is here,” Eddie answered. “She and Buck and Nora have some things to talk about.”

“But what about—”

“It’s important,” Eddie interrupted. “We’re going to head out, okay bud?” He stepped into Nora’s room and grabbed Chris’s crutches, handing them to him as he climbed off the bed. “I’ll see you soon, okay Nora? Love you,” he said, reaching out to ruffle her hair as he passed.

“Dad—”

“Chris, please,” Eddie said, and his desperation must have bled through, because, after a long glance at Nora, Chris nodded and grabbed the crutches and led the way out of the apartment.

-------

Buck was, possibly, going insane.

Scratch that. Definitely.

Turns out he’d only been flirting with insanity when he blurted out that he was in love with Eddie in the planetarium cafeteria. And then he’d dabbled a little further when he stood across from him in his kitchen and offered, essentially, to give his best friend a blow job.

And then he barreled right past insanity into delusion territory when he heard Eddie say, we can do that.

Somehow, miraculously—likely due only to the depths of his paternal love for Nora—he pulled himself together enough to have a passably coherent conversation with Brenda. He just locked up everything that had happened into a titanium vault and threw it to the back of his brain, and then sat across from his daughter’s social worker and manually fixed his face into some semblance of a normal expression.

It was totally fine.

It did, at least, seem to be going well. Though that was entirely due to Nora, who had rallied so impressively that Buck made a mental note to ask his daughter if she wanted to sign up for acting lessons.

“How are you both doing with the adjustment?” Brenda asked. He was pretty sure Brenda was going easy on them because Nora plopped on the couch next to Buck and rested her head on his shoulder, like she was posing for a Norman Rockwell painting of a father-daughter relationship. He wondered what sort of questions Brenda would be asking them if she knew Nora had spent the afternoon talking him down about his disaster of a love life.

“It’s been really good,” said Nora, in that polite tone he hadn’t heard her use since the morning he picked her up from the Warrens. She turned and smiled at Buck, really selling it. “Buck is a great dad. He helps me with my school work and cooks really good dinners. And last weekend he planned this surprise—”

She talked and talked, about the obstacle course, and about family barbecues, about trips to the bookstore and seeing Sadie and hanging out with Maddie. And even though Buck’s brain was half-filled with static, and even though he was sure that Nora was laying it on thick to help him out, he felt a flush of pride that his daughter sounded like she genuinely meant it when she said, “I’m really happy here.”

“That’s great,” Brenda said, beaming at both of them. “Mr. Buckley, can I ask you to step into another room so I can have a few minutes alone with Nora?”

He closed himself in his bedroom and ignored the beeps and buzzes coming from his phone. When they were done and he walked Brenda out, she told him Nora had given him a glowing review. “I wish every one of my cases went as easily as you two,” she said, handing Buck a signed piece of paper that documented her visit. “You’re doing a great job, Mr. Buckley.”

When Buck came back into the apartment, Nora was grinning at him, holding up her hand for a high-five. “Crushed it,” she said, slapping his hand with a surprising amount of force.

He laughed, because even though the alarm bells continued blaring in the back of his head, the moment—which he couldn’t have even dreamed of, the last time he’d interacted with Brenda—was still kind of a miracle.

“You crushed it,” Buck corrected. “What are you doing, angling for another pair of sneakers?”

“Wouldn’t say no,” said Nora as she walked over to the shoe rack.

“Well, I think—what—why are you putting your shoes on?”

Nora looked up from where she was balanced on one foot, a hot pink sneaker in her hand. “Aren’t we going to Chris and Eddie’s?”

“Ah—no,” said Buck, wincing. But he wasn’t scheduled for another shift until Tuesday, and there was no way he was speeding up that trainwreck and facing Eddie before he absolutely had to.

“Why not?” said Nora, straightening up and putting her hands on her waist. “Did you guys break up?”

The titanium box in his brain may as well have been wrapped in chains and barbed wire, for all Buck was refusing to touch that.

“What if we just—have a night in?”

Nora made a face at him, like she didn’t think he was doing a very good job with decision making.

She’d be right.

But he must have looked especially tragic, because she kicked her shoe back off and said, “okay. I know what we need: a girl’s night.”

“A girl’s—”

“You get comfy clothes on,” Nora said, pushing him down the hallway towards his bedroom. “I’ll handle the rest.”

And, well. Buck had yet to deny his daughter anything she wanted, and he wasn’t about to start now.

Ten minutes later, Buck emerged wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt—if it was an old one of Eddie’s, no one had to know that—and found his living room transformed. Nora had taken the string of purple lights he’d gotten her for her bedroom and plugged them in behind the couch, draping them in front of the windows so the room was lit with a cheerful glow. The big fluffy blanket that usually stayed on Nora’s bed was laid across the couch, and on the coffee table was a bowl of popcorn and a stack of the face masks that Linda had put in his shopping cart weeks before.

“Hi,” said Nora, coming out of the kitchen, holding two mugs with spoons sticking out of them. “You can use my cactus mug,” she said. When she passed it to him, he could see it was full of cookie dough ice cream. “But only for girl’s night.”

“Only for—got it,” said Buck, accepting the mug and letting Nora shove him towards the couch. “I will not get used to my cactus mug privileges.”

“Good,” said Nora. She sat cross legged next to him and picked up the remote. “Have you ever seen She’s the Man?”

Two hours later, Buck pried himself off the couch cushion. He maneuvered his way around the tangle of blankets, face mask wrappers, and dirty dishes as best he could in the dim light of the rolling credits, making his way to where his daughter was snoring lightly on the other end of the couch. Nora had only just nodded off during the final soccer game, so he tried to be extra careful not to rouse her as he lifted her up and carried her into her bedroom.

After all of the rescues and LAFD training he’d done, she was painfully easy to pick up; but still, he could feel the weight of her in his arms like some newly discovered sense of gravity, a force so strong he’d be forever caught in her orbit.

“Sweet dreams,” he whispered. She didn’t stir as he tucked her under her covers and kissed her on the forehead. “Love you, baby.”

He cleaned up the living room then, leaving the dishes in the sink to deal with after he dropped Nora off at school tomorrow. He brushed his teeth and climbed into bed, and it wasn’t until he went to plug his phone in that he finally looked at the screen.

He had thirty-eight messages—he couldn’t bring himself to look at any of those—and twelve missed calls, all from Eddie. As he stared at the notifications, his phone screen changed to a picture of Eddie in his bee-keeping outfit, alerting him to a thirteenth call.

Buck watched it ring out, staring at the photo and wondering what the hell he was supposed to do with that. A minute later, his phone started ringing again. He watched that ring out, too. But when Eddie called him a fifteenth time, he finally picked up.

“Buck?”

“Hey, Eddie,” Buck said, putting on his best, fakest, most casual voice. “What’s up?”

On the other end of the line, Eddie let out a shaky laugh. “Oh,” Eddie answered, mirroring his tone. “Not much.”

“Yeah,” said Buck. “Same, here.”

They fell into silence after that, and Buck felt torn in two, stuck in a limbo. Half hope, half heartbreak.

“You, uh. You called?” he said, finally; a comic understatement.

“Yeah. Yeah, uh,” he took a deep breath, and said, “so, there’s this guy—”

“Eddie,” Buck interrupted, and he was embarrassed to hear the pained note in his voice, bordering on a whine. It was deeply pathetic of him. But he just had no idea what the fuck Eddie was doing.

“Hey,” Eddie interrupted. “You had your turn earlier. I need my best friend right now.”

“Yeah?” Buck was pretty sure all the air had left his lungs.

“Yeah,” said Eddie. “See, there’s this guy. And I’d never thought about—you know. Men.”

“Right,” said Buck.

“But you know, I don’t exactly have the best track record with women,” Eddie replied.

Buck was flat on his back, staring up at his ceiling in the dark room. His face still felt tingly from the sheet mask Nora taught him how to use. He didn’t say anything.

“Chris implied there might be a correlation,” Eddie said, after a minute.

“That’s, uh,” he broke off, trying to figure out how to reply to that. Finally, he said, “that’s nice of Chris to be so supportive. But maybe that’s not something he can decide for you.”

“No,” Eddie agreed. “His therapist says I’m not allowed to base any of my dating decisions off of him anymore, anyway.”

Despite everything, Buck snorted, a small burst of laughter sneaking out in the dark quiet. “Probably for the best.”

“So,” said Eddie. “I did some research, on the internet.”

“A famously reliable place.”

“The consensus seems to be that I should date someone who I want to spend a lot of time with,” Eddie said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Eddie went on. “Someone I know will be there for me. Who’ll be a good partner, funnily enough.”

“Eddie—”

“Someone who I feel comfortable with, and trust. Bonus points if they get along with my family.”

“That’s a dicey one,” Buck offered.

“Yeah, it doesn’t really apply here,” Eddie said. “Seeing as he is my family.”

“Eddie.”

“Evan.”

“Eddie, I’m serious,” Buck said. “I’ll—I’ll always be here for you guys, okay? No matter what. You don’t have to—to fool yourself into—”

“Into what?” Eddie interrupted. “We’re basically raising our kids together. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about everything you said—”

“I shouldn’t have said—”

“Yes, you should have.” Buck held his breath, not daring to breathe while Eddie spoke. “I’m glad you did. I . . . Can I take you out?” Eddie asked. “On a date?”

“Eddie—”

“Don’t say no because you think this isn’t something I want.”

“Of course that’s—Eddie, I’m not going to, like, strong-arm you into going out with me.”

“You’re not,” Eddie protested. “When have I ever done anything I didn’t want to do?”

“Uh, all the time?” said Buck. “It’s literally your M.O. When have you ever done anything you did want to do?”

“Right now,” Eddie countered. He said it like a dare, but Buck could hear the undercurrent of vulnerability in his voice; an entirely needless show of insecurity. “When I called my best friend and asked him out.”

It was getting increasingly hard for Buck to find ways or reasons to say no. But this was Eddie’s heart on the line, so he gave it one more shot. “You don’t have to—”

“I know I don’t,” Eddie said. “Buck. I know. And I know it’s not just us,” he said. Buck thought of Chris and Nora, sitting next to each other in the back seat of his car, giggling and teaming up to bully Eddie into changing whatever music was on the radio. “I wouldn’t risk it,” Eddie promised.

But it was a risk, wasn’t it?

He exhaled a deep breath, and Buck wondered if he was laying in his bed, too. If he was on the left side, while Buck was on the right.

“Give me a chance. One date.”

“I—”

“You got there first, Buck,” Eddie said, a plaintive note in his voice that was driving Buck insane. “You gotta . . . you gotta give me a second to catch up.”

Buck let out a shaky breath, feeling so worked over that he might as well have just had a building dropped on him.   

And finally, his heart in his throat, he told his best friend, “yeah, okay. One date.”

Even though it felt like he was agreeing to a hell of a lot more.

Chapter Text

Nora woke to the buzzing of her phone, vibrating across the top of her nightstand. Blearily, she reached out to silence it. After several attempts, it registered that she was back in her bed, even though the last thing she remembered was Buck pointing out plot-holes in the movie, and then stretching out so she could kick him on the other side of the couch

She yawned and pulled herself up, reaching out and, with this new vantage point, catching her phone. It was after midnight; she saw Chris flash across the front and flipped her phone open.

“He—ey,” she said, still in the middle of a very long yawn. “—ssup, Chris?”

“We need a plan.”

“What?” Nora said, and then remembered she should probably be keeping her voice down, in case she woke Buck. “A plan for what?” she asked, whispering.

“I think they blew it,” Chris said. “My dad’s been so weird all night. He went to bed at like, seven-thirty.”

“Yeah,” agreed Nora, and then she told him about how she’d been so ready to drive right to their house, before her dad looked at her like she was crazy.

“I cannot believe they’re doing this,” Chris griped, and from the angst in his voice, Nora could feel that this disappointment was a long time coming. “How hard is it to kiss each other? It’s literally the only thing stopping them from being a normal married couple.”

Nora snorted a laugh; but she was struck with a very real pang of longing at the picture he painted—Buck and Eddie, getting married and moving them all in together and making it official. The idea of it, the little four-person unit, felt . . . sturdy. Permanent. Like an actual, real-life, normal family.

“I kinda feel like this is your dad’s fault,” Nora said. She didn’t mean to sound so accusatory; it was just—Buck put his heart on the line. What had Eddie done?

But Chris just said, “almost definitely, yeah,” and agreed with her. “But I don’t think he wanted to leave when Brenda came. He had his sad cow-eyes.”

Nora thought back to the way Eddie looked when he said we’re heading out. The way he flinched when Chris said are you engaged yet?

She also thought about the way he’d said, love you to her on the way out the door. 

It reminded her of the first time Buck let the words slip out. A casual, reassuring thing, like they were trying to say It’ll be okay, but they knew that wasn’t something they could promise. But they could say that: love you.

She knew Eddie loved Buck, in some kind of way—she and Sadie had discussed the evidence, in depth. And if he really did mean to say it—if he really did love her, Buck’s daughter—and he didn’t actually want to leave when he did, then maybe all hope wasn’t lost. Maybe they would have made progress if Brenda hadn’t showed up when she did. 

“Okay so . . .” She said, trailing off while she thought through their options. “Maybe they just need more time. Maybe we just have to make sure that next time they talk, neither of them get interrupted.”

“You mean like, steal their phones?” Chris asked.

“Kind of,” said Nora. And then she told Chris about her idea.

-----------

Eddie was having a weird morning. After hanging up the phone, he’d tossed and turned all night. And then he’d woken up midway through defiling his own pillow, Buck’s name on his lips, and he’d come so hard in his pajama pants that he’d had to take a shower before getting dressed.

And then, things got worse. It was like, ever since he took the top off the box in his brain, he couldn’t stop thinking extremely non-platonic thoughts about his best friend.

He’d stepped out of the bathroom while brushing his teeth and got distracted by one of the pictures hanging up in the hallway—a photo from a few years ago, of Buck, shirtless on the beach next to Chris, each of them leaning on surfboards.

Buck looked leaner than he had in recent years, but more filled out since the time Eddie first met him. His smile was practically glinting in the sunlight, and his chest was dripping, and—had Eddie really snapped this photo and printed it out and hung it up without noticing all of that?

It wasn’t until he felt toothpaste landing on his foot that he realized he’d become locked in a staring contest with a framed photograph. Was this what Buck had been dealing with for the last few weeks? It was downright debilitating.

He quickly ducked back into the bathroom, rinsing his mouth and then splashing water on his face, too. But then he went to text Buck and his contact photo showed up: Buck, his t-shirt sleeves barely fitting, a blue apron tied tight, hair curly, holding a spoon and gesturing off screen.

Eddie hadn’t even taken it himself. Maddie had sent it to the group chat when Eddie was in Texas, with a caption, anyone need baked goods? Buck’s on a tear, and he’d immediately saved it and updated his contact photo. 

Something he’d thought, at the time, was very normal behavior.

But in light of recent events, he was starting to think that maybe a lot of things about his and Buck’s relationship were not quite as normal as he’d always told himself.

Like how, when Buck’s clothes wound up in his laundry, he usually just folded them and put them away in his drawers, instead of bringing them to the station to return them to their rightful owner.

Or how he’d adjusted his house listing search for places with three bedrooms, just to see if there were any nicer options they could afford at that size, even though he hadn’t really thought through what that meant for sleeping arrangements.

Or how he’d never felt like this before a date. Excited and eager and anxious. Like he might throw up, but in a good way. Like he wanted the whole nine yards—flowers at the door and candles on the table and a kiss good night. Like he actually wished time would speed up, so it would be—

Oh shit. He had to plan the date. 

Monday was their last day off until the end of the week, and, though neither of them said it, he was pretty sure they were both wary of spending that much time together—and with the rest of the 118—before they had a chance to figure out this new thing between them. So, Buck agreed to go out that night. Which meant Eddie had approximately ten hours to pull together the best date of Buck’s life.

First, he called Hen.

“Hey,” she answered, sounding sleepy even though it was past eight. “Why are you waking me up on my day off?”

“Don’t you have kids that go to school?”

“Ah, yeah,” Hen said, pausing for a yawn. “The beauty of marrying a morning person. You should try it some time.”

“I’m working on it.”

It slipped out before Eddie had a chance to really think it through. And he was pretty sure it came out several shades too sincere.

“You—what?”

And, well, in for a penny— “I’m working on it,” Eddie repeated. “That’s why I need your help.”

“Okay, listen, I haven’t had my coffee yet, so if you’re trying to tell me something—”

“What are the chances that Chris could hang out at yours for dinner tonight? And—uh—and Nora, too?”

“Edmundo Diaz. Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

“See—” he could hear that his voice sounded weird, and he realized it was because he couldn’t stop smiling. “Buck and I have plans tonight.”

“Are you—”

“We’re going on a date.”

And then Eddie had to hold the phone away from his ear because Hen started making an alarming screeching noise. 

After nearly twenty more minutes of Hen prying him for details, and Eddie rehashing their entire, melodramatic Sunday, he finally got off the phone, ear drums mostly intact.

He called Ravi next.

“Eddie? Everything okay?” Ravi answered, which was fair enough, because Eddie had called him three times in a row.

“Yeah, it’s great,” he said. “I need a favor.”

“Ah,” said Ravi. “I’m at the gym right now.”

“This will only take a minute,” Eddie said. “Did you still have an in with your neighbor’s girlfriend at Kovo?”

“My friend’s cousin’s, at Koso?”

“Yes—that.”

“Gotta be honest Eddie, I’m not sure you’d hit it off with his sister—”

“I need a reservation for two,” Eddie interrupted, fully aware of the desperation in his voice. “For tonight.”

“For—”

“For me and Buck.”

“Holy shit,” said Ravi. “Are you serious?”

“As a heart attack,” Eddie said, because that was what it felt like he was having. “Please? Help me out here. It has to be perfect.”

“I would literally bet my life it doesn’t have to be perfect,” Ravi said. “You could probably share spaghetti in an alleyway and Buck would die of happiness.”

“Oh, sure, I’ll just take Buck to some rat-infested dump for our first date,” Eddie griped. “Can you help me or not?”

“You’re like, really bad at asking for favors, you know that right?”

Eddie let out an impatient sigh; it would have been a longer one, but he didn’t have time for that. “Fine, I’ll cover a shift for you.”

“We work all the same shifts,” Ravi pointed out. But then he went on; possibly sensing that Eddie was not appreciating the back and forth. “You’ll owe me a favor,” he said diplomatically. “Let me ask her—I’ll text you the details.”

Eddie thanked him and then stared at his phone for fifteen minutes until a text came through: Reservation for 2 under diaz, 8 pm. And then you better leave a big tip.

Eddie thumbs-upped both texts and then sent another thank you text. And then he sent wait what am I supposed to wear to this place?

Ravi ignored him.

By the time Chris got home from school, Eddie had stress cleaned the kitchen, vacuumed the entire house, changed the oil in his car, read several lengthy Reddit threads about having sexuality crises in your thirties, and was no closer to figuring out his outfit for that night. He’d actually thought about giving in and asking his son for advice, but he wasn’t sure he could handle telling him about the date before—before.

Everything would be different, after tonight. He might as well wait for when it was all . . . settled.

After all, by tomorrow morning, Buck could be Eddie’s—what? His boyfriend? His partner? The thought sent a thrill down Eddie’s spine, a hot, possessive rush of hunger. It was like he just realized that he’d been thinking of Buck as his this whole time, but he’d forgotten to make sure everyone else knew.

But that would all be fixed tonight.

Assuming it went well.

Which—it would. It had to. Buck might be a little gun-shy of Eddie’s recent about-face on the whole heterosexuality thing, but still, Buck was the one who’d already said I love you. The biggest hurdle was done; it was just about Eddie sticking the landing, now.

He was so close he could picture it: the four of them in a cozy, three-bedroom ranch, with a yard and plenty of windows to let sunlight in. A kitchen big enough for Buck and a dining room big enough for abuela’s table. Family meals and game nights, spring break vacations and birthday parties and knowing the kids were safe and sound under one roof. And Buck, by his side for all of it.  

He tried not to overthink it when he messaged Buck, but it was nearly impossible.

Hey, Ill pick you up at 7:30. Dress nice, was what he landed on, after an embarrassing amount of rewording.

Yeah, Buck sent through, followed by but also u still have an out if u changed ur mind, and then, insanely, no hard feelings.

Eddie rolled his eyes as he typed back a message hit send. Oh okay, in that case never mind.

But then Buck’s replies came in a rushed sequence, one after the other:

no worries

totally fine man

we can jst frget this ever happned

Eddie squinted at his phone—Buck usually got his dry humor, so it took him a few seconds to comprehend that Buck was replying as though he was sincerely trying to call off their plans.

That was a joke you dumbass, he sent back, while bubbles were showing that Buck was still typing; Eddie didn’t even want to know what he had been going to say. He added, be ready at 7:30 and then went back to examining his closet.

It was only three, so he had plenty of time. Chris was doing homework in the kitchen and he was just contemplating calling Hen back for fashion advice when his phone started ringing.

He kept the volume on silent except for a few select numbers, so he assumed it was Buck when he reached for it, but the name on the screen showed Nora.

“Nora?” he answered, concern creeping into his voice; she had never called him before.

“Hi, Eddie,” she said, “I’m really sorry to bother you, but I think I need your help—”

“Of course,” he said. “What do you need?”

“I feel like such an idiot,” she said. “But I went into the storage locker in our apartment basement, because I thought, you know, maybe I could clear it out as a surprise for Buck. But then the thing I was using to prop the door open closed and I got locked in here, and now Buck’s not answering his phone.”

Buck wasn’t answering his phone? Eddie couldn’t imagine what would stop Buck from answering when Nora called.

He started stepping into his shoes and looking for his keys while he replied. “I’m on my way,” he said. Chris appeared and gave Eddie a questioning look. “Nora got stuck in their storage locker, I’m going to let her out,” Eddie told his son.

“Cool,” said Chris. He already had his shoes on and backpack ready, since Eddie told him he’d be going to the Wilson’s later. “I’ll come.”

That would work out well, actually. He could pick Nora up and drop them both off with Hen and Karen, and then double back for Buck.

“It’s weird that Buck’s not answering his phone,” Eddie said to Nora as he and Chris made their way to the car. “When was the last time you saw him? Did he seem okay?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Nora. “I think maybe he’s just taking a really, really long shower. I’m sorry for calling, it’s just, it’s really dark down here, and it was kind of freaking me out—”

“No, no, I’m glad you called me,” Eddie said. “I’ll be there soon, okay?”

“Thanks, Eddie!” she said, sounding chipper for a poor kid who was stuck in a dank, dusty basement. She was such a good sport.

“Do you want to stay on the line? We should be there in a few minutes.”

“No, I’m good, thanks,” said Nora. “You know where it is, right?”

“Yeah, I’ve got a key.”

“Great, see you soon,” she said, and then she hung up.

The drive between their places was only a few minutes, but Eddie still tried to speed a little, picturing Nora in the basement and Buck nowhere to be found.

“It’s weird, right?” he asked Chris.

But Chris was too busy typing something on his phone to pay attention. “Huh?” he said, after a moment.

“I said,” Eddie went on, side-eying his son, “it’s weird. That Buck didn’t pick up when Nora called him. That’s not like him.”

“He’s probably just in the shower,” Chris guessed too.

But the week before, Buck’s awful shrill ringtone had gone off while he was showering at the station, and he still answered it that time. Eddie knew, because he had been sitting on the bench right next to Buck’s phone, waiting his turn; which meant that when Buck dove out of his stall to get his phone—the shower curtain barely covering anything of importance, Buck’s hair dark and extra curly, rivulets of steamy water rolling down his chest—Eddie had a front row seat.

And when Buck said, “spam call” and smiled sheepishly as he hung up, the weird tension Eddie felt in his chest probably wasn’t annoyance or impatience or smoke inhalation, or whatever else he’d dismissed it as at the time.

Now, the memory made his mouth go dry.

He thought about pushing, but Chris seemed pretty involved in whatever he was texting, so Eddie just focused on driving the familiar route and did his best to stop thinking about Buck in the shower.

When he parked on the street—double parked, but his flashers were on, so he’d probably be fine—he grabbed his travel tool kit. “Go on without me,” Chris waved. “I’ll meet you guys in the apartment.”

And he felt bad for leaving Chris, but he was more concerned about how long Nora had been stuck downstairs, so he went ahead and trusted that Chris could use his own key to let himself in.

He bypassed the elevator and jogged down the stairwell to the basement, hurrying through the dark, disorganized space, crammed with overflowing units and abandoned boxes and bins and some concerning exposed wiring, until he found the unit matching Buck’s apartment number. The lockers were decently sized, probably 10x10, with those industrial grade garage doors like they had at storage rental units, except everything looked far dimmer and dingier than you would ever find in one of those places.

“Nora?” he called, grabbing the garage door handle and yanking it upwards. The rolling door opened easily, but then got wedged halfway up, somewhere around Eddie’s waist. He ducked under as he stepped in, pulling out his phone to use his flashlight. “Nora?”

From what he could see in the weak beam of light, he understood why Buck had described the unit as a “scary hoarder’s nest.” Moldy cardboard boxes lined the walls, and random old broken pieces of furniture and ancient electronics turned the inside into something of a maze. Why wasn’t Nora answering him? He poked further into the room, just in case she was there, but the space felt too quiet to have anyone else in it.

Weird.

He unlocked his phone to call her back, but his screen showed the little SOS text right next to the battery percentage; being underground in the basement must have been interfering with the service.

But if he didn’t have service to call Nora from the storage unit, how did Nora have enough service to call him?

Before he could think about that any more, he heard footsteps coming. He was pretty sure he recognized the sound of them, right before he heard, “Nora?”

And then Buck was ducking under the storage unit door, panting like he’d been sprinting. Eddie stared in confusion while Buck pulled out his own phone light and turned it on, panning it towards him. “Eddie?”

And then, behind Buck, the half-opened garage door slammed down, banging shut. Absurdly, it sounded like someone was locking them in.

He and Buck glanced at each other in alarm. Who would—

“Is it locked?”

“Yeah, I think that should work.”

Was that—Chris and Nora? Whispering?

“Chris? Nora?” he called, stepping around Buck and reaching down to tug on the door handle. It didn’t budge.  

“Should we say something?”

“Maybe just so they don’t think a murderer locked them in?”

“Yeah, this basement is really creepy. What should we say?”

“Guys, we can hear you,” Buck said.

“Oh shit,” said Nora. “Let’s go.”

“We’ll be upstairs!” Chris shouted, sounding alarmingly far away from the storage unit. “We’ll let you guys out in a few hours!”

“Chris! Nora!” Buck tried again, but there was no response. He banged on the door two more times, but it was only met with silence. “Did our kids just . . . lock us in here?” he asked, his voice incredulous.

“It would appear that way.” Eddie tugged on the storage door again, uselessly. “The question is—why?”

“Oh my god,” said Buck. “They’re Parent Trapping us.”

“Parent Trapping?”

“Yeah,” said Buck. “You know the movie, with the red-heads? Who try to get their parents back together?”

Eddie vaguely remembered it from when he was young. As far as he knew, Chris had never seen it—it was one of those movies you didn’t show your kid if you were a single parent and didn’t want to encourage any ideas.

“Nora and Sadie were watching it the other day to learn the secret handshake.”

“I didn’t think they literally trapped the parents anywhere in that movie,” said Eddie, scrunching up his face in thought. “But—why? Also do they not realize that we’re firefighters? It’s our job to get in and out of places like this.”

“Well, I’m pretty sure the point is, you know. Getting the parents. Together.”

At that, Eddie turned to face Buck. And he realized that this was the first time they were alone together since Buck said I want to kiss you. 

Buck moved forward, taking several steps in Eddie’s direction, and he thought about I want to kiss you and tried to figure out how he should prepare to kiss Buck, like, where his hands should go and what he should do with his face. But then Buck stopped two feet away and yanked on a pull chain in the middle of the room, dousing them in a warm yellow glow from a lightbulb Eddie hadn’t noticed. 

In the dim light, he could see that Buck was only half-dressed, with sweatpants on and a button-down shirt over it—a blue and white striped one, that brought out his eyes—and the slippers he wore around the house. His curly hair looked wild and untamed, and it was all really tugging on Eddie’s heartstrings.

As his eyes roamed, each part of Buck’s body caused a burst of feeling in his own. Looking at Buck’s pinkish lips cause his lips to tingle, and gazing at Buck’s broad shoulders made his hands ache with the need to touch, and the glimpse of his abdomen—only visible because Buck’s button down was disheveled and his sweats were slung so low—heated up a feral hunger in Eddie’s own stomach.

“So Chris doesn’t know?”

Eddie was so busy drooling over his best friend that it took him a second to realize what he’d said.

“Know what? That they can’t literally trap us—”

“Chris doesn’t know about the date.”

And—oh. Buck sounded the same way he did the night before; like he was begging Eddie to put him out of his misery. And Eddie was trying to, he swore. But he’d yet to say something he thought actually got through to Buck. He’d yet to find the right words to convince him that Eddie was serious. 

He’d have to find another way. 

---------------

This was a mistake. Buck knew it. He should never have said yes.

Eddie’s entire life had been shaped by his misguided sense of duty, his need to be who other people wanted him to be. 

And then Buck, his so called-best friend of eight fucking years, decided to be selfish and tell Eddie that he wished they could be together. And what had Eddie said?

Essentially, sure. 

You want all that, were his actual words. We can do that. As if it were as easy as Buck insisting he was in the mood for Chinese food when it was Eddie’s night to pick the takeout.

And yeah, Eddie said a lot of things on the phone last night. And he hadn’t taken any of the outs Buck had offered him today.

But still—he hadn’t told Christopher. That was really all Buck needed to know.

“Come on, let’s get out of here,” he said, tucking his useless phone in his back pocket and rooting around the gross, mildewed boxes. Surely in all that mess, there must be a toolbox, right?

“Wait,” said Eddie, stepping in his way as he moved onto the next precarious pile of stuff. “Just—hold on a second. I didn’t tell Chris that we had a date tonight—yet. I figured we’d just talk to both the kids after we had a chance to talk.”

A scoff slipped out, and Buck felt bad about it immediately. But Eddie had sworn to be open with Chris ever since he got back from Texas, and Buck knew he took that promise seriously. So if he didn’t tell Chris, then he didn’t actually think it was worth talking about. 

“Does Nora know?” Eddie countered. “You can’t be mad that I didn’t tell Chris if you didn’t tell Nora.”

Sure, he could—Buck had been cycling through so many feelings in the last 24 hours that there were almost no new variants he wouldn’t toss in there. Hypocritical frustration might as well join the mix. 

“She’s had to deal with enough,” Buck said, sidestepping around Eddie to a new stack of boxes. So far, he was mostly finding old copies of National Geographic. “I didn’t think she needed a blow-by-blow of whatever this is,” he said, gesturing between himself and the general direction of Eddie.  

“Buck.”

Buck really needed to get out of that fucking storage locker. Maybe he could just yank the door open, if he pulled hard enough? It didn’t look very sturdy. 

“Can you just—look for a screwdriver or something?”

“No,” Eddie said, crossing his arms and getting in Buck’s way. “Maybe the kids were onto something. Why won’t you talk to me?”

“Talk? All I do is talk,” Buck griped. “Did you miss the whole thing yesterday where I laid out every pathetic thought I’ve had in the last month? And look how well that went.”

“Yeah,” said Eddie, exasperation bleeding into his voice. “We have a date tonight.”

“That I bullied you into going on!”

“You didn’t!” Eddie insisted. “I’m the one who asked you!” Eddie was running his hand through his hair, looking like he was at his limit. 

Good. If Eddie was going to get sick of his shit, better that it happen now, before Buck’s traitorous heart got any more ideas. He turned around and found a box Eddie wasn’t blocking to root through.

“Why are you being like this?” said Eddie, his voice strained. “I thought you were supposed to be in love with me.” 

Buck felt something in him snap at that, at the casual way Eddie referenced the thing Buck had been killing himself to hide, for weeks and weeks. “Of course I’m in love with you,” he said, nearly growling with it. “That’s why I can’t. Do. This.”

“That makes no fucking sense, Buck!” Eddie was pacing back and forth, though there was barely any room to move. They were both breathing heavily; the temperature in the storage unit had skyrocketed. “You love me so you can’t date me?”

“I can’t do this,” Buck said, gesturing between the two of them. “I can’t lose you, Eddie. I won’t survive it. And I can’t start this if you’re not all the way in it with me, I can’t—”

And then Buck stopped talking, because Eddie stepped forward and crushed his mouth to his.

He moved so fast that it took Buck several seconds to realize what was happening. By the time his brain caught up, his body was already ahead of him—he wrapped one hand around Eddie’s back, tugging him in close, and used the other to cradle Eddie’s jaw, his five o’clock shadow rough against his thumb, his pulse jumping under his palm.

And Eddie was giving back just as good—he had one hand on the back of Buck’s head, pulling him in again and again as he pressed hot, open-mouthed kisses, pushing his tongue into Buck’s, changing the angle again and again like he was trying to find a way to get closer, closer, closer.

Holy shit. Holy fucking shit.

Eddie was kissing him.

Buck had kissed a lot of people in his life; enough to feel confident that he could tell when a kiss wasn’t very good. When a kiss was half-assed or a distraction or a mistake someone was making on purpose.  

This wasn’t any of those. Buck was pretty sure he didn’t even have a scale to measure how fucking good this kiss was. Eddie, Buck’s hungry brain thought, Eddie, Eddie, Eddie.

Eddie’s other hand was moving, then, grasping Buck’s side and squeezing in a way that made Buck inhale sharply into the kiss, and then a noise slipped out that he might have been embarrassed by if he had any room left in his brain to care about that kind of thing, but he didn’t. And anyway, the noise just spurred Eddie on further, using his hand to steer Buck, to twist him so his back was against something, and then his hand was moving, splaying over Buck’s stomach, rucking up his shirt until Buck could feel the scrape of his long fingers and calloused palms against his skin. Goosebumps erupted everywhere he touched, and Buck’s his breath hitched, his stomach was jumping at the sensation, and then Eddie’s fingers reached the no-man’s-land between his button down and his sweatpants and—

Buck moaned again, louder this time, and Eddie reacted, using his hand to push Buck flatter against the wall, so he could press his whole body against him, only, Buck wasn’t actually leaning against a wall, and the extra movement caused an avalanche of musty, deteriorating boxes to topple over.

The sound barely registered, but the redistribution of stuff in the small space was making it very hard to continue; Buck was already unsteady on his feet, and the loss of the pillar he was leaning against made him lose his balance for a second.

His lips detached from Eddie as he found his footing again, and in the split-second air got to his brain, he thought oh my god. But then Eddie was there again, steering Buck’s mouth back towards his own.

This time, Eddie’s kisses slowed, turning gentle, more languid than frantic, and his fingers were scratching soothingly on his skin, and Buck couldn’t help thinking that none of his day dreams or wet dreams or fantasies held a candle to the real thing.

Eventually, Eddie pulled back—not far, though—and Buck watched as Eddie’s eyes roved over him, wanton hunger naked in his expression.

“So,” Eddie said, after a moment, his fingers still tracing patterns into the back of Buck’s scalp. “That clear things up for you?”

Buck let out a shaky laugh. He felt euphoric with it, with the revelation that Eddie was just as desperate, just as hungry for him as he was. That kind of heat couldn’t be faked.

He wasn’t alone in this.

He should have known; Eddie had never left him hanging.

“A little,” he said, his voice rough. “Have you thought about—”

“Buck, I swear, if you’re about to ask if I’ve thought this through—”

“No,” said Buck, knowing his face was flushed, his heart rate jackhammering so loud he could hear it in his ears. He felt a little like he did when he was a teenager, fumbling and nervous and excited. So excited, in fact, that his mouth was watering. “I was going to say,” his voice dropped, low and husky, barely a rasp, when he said, “have you thought about what I offered, in the kitchen?”

Eddie gulped, audibly. “What you . . .”

“The kids aren’t here.” Buck leaned closer and pressed his lips softly to Eddie’s neck. “So the only question is—do you want it?”

“Do I—”

Buck’s hand found Eddie’s belt buckle, then. And neither of them had a coherent thought after that for a good long while.

Forty-five minutes later, Buck and Eddie were sitting next to each other, side-by-side against a small patch of free wall space. They were both equally disheveled, and though all their buttons and zippers had been redone right—just in case their kids decided to spring them early—Buck couldn’t help clocking the little signs that he’d just thoroughly debauched Eddie: his hair was messy, more strands than usual falling over his forehead, and his neck was peppered with marks—light, but Buck knew where to look—and his shirt was still rucked up, and he could still taste Eddie on his tongue.

While they were both catching their breath, Eddie slid his hand across the disgusting basement floor until his fingers brushed over Buck’s, and then he picked up his whole hand and pulled it onto his lap, cradling it in both of his. Buck had never felt such a raw mixture of lust and tenderness and total disbelief.

“I love you too, you know,” Eddie said, after a moment. “In case that wasn’t clear, with, you know—” he said gesturing between them. “All that.”

“Yeah?” Buck meant to say it like a joke—like, yeah, I got that. But it came out a shade too incredulous, and Eddie tightened his grip on Buck’s hand.

“Why do you do that?” Eddie asked, his voice quiet in the locker, nothing but the sound of a few magazines sliding off a pile onto the ground. “Why did you think I didn’t mean it?”

Buck sighed, feeling a little silly about it all, in light of everything. But he did have an answer; and Eddie deserved to hear it.

After a long moment, Buck fixed his eyes on the pile of boxes in front of him, and told them, “you scare me.” He huffed out a breath; next to him, Eddie stayed quiet, rubbing soothing circles on the back of his hand. “We—this, it can’t be another one of my failed relationships. I wouldn’t survive it. And the kids. Nora and Chris are involved, too. And I don’t want to—but, I mean, not like—I’m not saying that you can’t ever break up with me, I’m just saying—”

“Buck,” Eddie interrupted, his voice so stern that he turned to look at him.

Eddie raised his eyebrows and his lips tugged up into something that was more smirk than smile, and Buck had a visceral flashback to that night in the parking lot, after the grenade, when he said that stupid thing about Eddie having his back, and instead of calling him on all the bullshit he deserved to be called on, Eddie grinned and took his hand and became his favorite person. “Why would I ever break up with you?”

“I’m sure a lot of my exes could provide some ideas.”

“I don’t think we really want to go there with who has fucked up previous relationships worse,” Eddie pointed out. “But besides, most of them probably didn’t work out because of us.”

“Yeah, we don’t really have the best track record—”

“No,” Eddie interrupted. “Because of us.” He gestured between them, using both his hand and Buck’s. “Come on, you think—what, it was going to work out with Natalia? I spent half my relationship with Marisol hiding from her. With you.”

“And the other half—”

“Let’s not go there,” Eddie said, lifting Buck’s hand to his mouth and nipping lightly on the skin. Buck felt his canine teeth press into the sensitive flesh on the back of his fingers and went a little more insane. “The point is,” Eddie replaced his teeth with his lips, pressing a few soft kisses over the indents his teeth left behind, and it didn’t help Buck feel any less crazed. “We just won’t break up.”

“Works for me.” Buck was so breathless that his voice was barely audible.

“And,” said Eddie, “you have to reconsider my house plan.”

“Oh, I see. This was all a tactic, huh? You really want to save on utilities.”

“I just want to have a live-in cook,” Eddie corrected.

“I bet you do,” said Buck.

“You always get up early and make coffee just the way I like it.”

“Good foundations for a relationship.”

“The blow jobs are pretty good, too, from what I’ve seen.”

“You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Eddie hummed, a sound so close to a moan that Buck felt it zip through his body. “Plus, there’s strength in numbers. We’re going to need it for those two.”

“God, yeah. They’ve only known each other for a month and they’re already overpowering us. I can’t believe we’re still in this disgusting locker,” Buck said, glancing around again. The place had only gotten messier since they were in it. “Do you think we’ll ever find a screwdriver?”

“Oh,” said Eddie, letting out a surprise bark of laughter. “I have my tool kit.”

“You what?” Buck looked at him, incredulous. “You’ve had that this whole time?”

“Yeah,” said Eddie, laughing more now, his shoulders shaking with it. “Nora called me and told me she got trapped in here.”

“Those little shits,” Buck said. “Chris called me and told me Nora texted him that she was going to check out the storage unit and then stopped responding. I thought she was in her room. I nearly had a fucking heart attack—” he broke off. “We really aren’t going to survive their teenage years, are we?”

“Probably not,” Eddie said. They’d have to get up soon, and find the tool kit, and get themselves out of that fucking storage unit. But he thought, feeling remarkably content with the weight of Buck’s hand in his, that could wait another minute or two. “At least we’ll have each other.”

Chapter Text

Chris had never really, truly gotten in trouble before. Sure, there was the time his dad found out he’d been lying about science club, and when he’d been caught gaming while he was grounded. But his dad never got, like, mad, mad.

Which was, honestly, a little surprising. At least, it was to Chris, now that he had a better idea of the way his dad grew up. It had been weird to see, in Texas. Sometimes his grandma and abuelo’s sniping or passive aggressive comments made Chris want to scream; and those were hardly ever even directed at him.

Now that he was fourteen, he could pick up on things they said that sounded like one thing, but really meant another. Like the way a lot of the things they said to his dad actually sounded like they were saying are you sure that’s a good decision?

And sure, Chris wasn’t the biggest fan of all of his dad’s choices—there were a few obvious standouts—but on the whole, Chris thought he usually did a pretty good job. After all, it was because of his dad that they lived in LA, and that they had Carla, and their 118 family. And Buck.

But now it was critically important that his dad not make one of his Bad Decisions and ruin everything. He didn’t want to act like his grandparents are started lecturing him; but he did think an intervention was needed.

So, when he called Nora and said “we need a plan,” and she’d suggested locking them both in Buck’s storage unit, he knew it was the right move. And he really wasn’t very concerned about getting into trouble for it.

Nora, on the other hand, was starting to get nervous.

Their dads had only been down there for an hour and he could tell she was already starting to crack.

“Do you think they’ll be mad?” she asked.

“Nah,” he said. He leaned forward on the couch, where they’d sprawled out in front of a superhero movie Nora hadn’t seen before, and grabbed a handful of the home-made Chex Mix he’d found in Buck’s kitchen.

“It’s just—it’s really gross down there,” Nora said, after a minute.

She was right; Chris did not envy them right now. “They’ve both been way grosser places. Like . . . septic tanks. They’re fine.”

“But isn’t it kind of a fire hazard?” she asked. Chris thought about telling her that this was actually a pretty important part of the movie, plot-wise; but when he looked at her—her leg bouncing up and down, her fingers fidgeting with her bracelets—he decided against it.

“If there’s a fire, we’ll go let them out.”

“I just—I just don’t want them to be mad. At . . . me.”

Maybe it was because of how close he was with Buck, but ever since he met Nora, Chris kind of felt like she’d been around forever. Like, it made total sense that she was there, sassing Buck in a way that Chris could get behind. She had pretty good taste in music, for a twelve-year-old, and she got really funny during game nights, and she immediately understood how weird Buck and his dad were, in a way that made Chris feel like he finally had an ally, after all these years.

The point was—sometimes Chris forgot that Nora hadn’t actually been there for very long. And even though he’d seen her relax way more over the last few weeks, he guessed it made sense that she might be nervous about, like, intentionally pissing their dads off.

“They won’t be mad,” he said, easily. “They know what they did.” Because it did kind of feel like they put their dads in a time-out. A well-deserved one. “And anyway, if they get mad at anyone it’ll be me, not you.”

“That’s not fair,” said Nora, readjusting her seat on the couch and sounding disgruntled. “It was my idea.” Sometimes she reminded him of Felix’s family dog, some miniature thing that was always posturing, like she it barked enough, you might not notice that she only weighs ten pounds. It was kind of hilarious watching her do that to their dads sometimes; she had no idea that they were already tripping over themselves to make her happy.

Felix asked him if he cared; if it was annoying that she showed up and was taking up everyone’s attention. But Chris didn’t mind. After all, he was fourteen—parental attention wasn’t exactly his top priority at the moment.

And he and Denny had talked about it—how it was kind of cool to be an older brother. How, even though it was a really big responsibility to look out for a younger sister, it felt pretty good, too, having such an important job. Like his parents trusted him with it.

And, yeah, he did kind of take that trust and use it to trap them in a disgusting storage locker.

But they really, really deserved it.

Especially his dad. Chris still couldn’t believe the way he just immediately bought Nora’s story; probably because he was always looking for an excuse to go over to Buck’s anyway. Chris hadn’t been sure it would work, but he’d thought of the idea when he remembered Buck talking about the storage locker at the last family barbecue.

He’d just gotten a second hamburger and was going to retreat to Denny’s room, where they had Mario Kart set up, but Buck flagged him down and gestured for Chris to sit with him and aunt Maddie, instead. Which wasn’t quite as fun as destroying Harry on the Rainbow Road, but he didn’t mind.

“How ya been, kid?” Buck asked him, as if they hadn’t spent four hours playing Wingspan the night before.

But still—Buck asked, so Chris updated him and Maddie on the latest drama with Felix and Samara-from-summer-camp. Maddie didn’t know all the backstory, but Buck helped fill her in, and she was a good audience; she got the same glint in her eye that his dad did when he sensed someone was about to spill the chisme.

After he finished recapping everything that had happened at Elliot’s birthday party, he remembered something else. “Hey, you know it’s almost Nora’s birthday, right?”

It’d come up the first time Sadie was over, when the three of them were killing time, hanging out on the couch while their dads argued in the kitchen over the proper settings on the new air fryer. Dinner was supposed to be ready twenty minutes ago and he was really hungry, which was the only reason he’d paused his game and ventured out of his room. He was going to go pick up where he’d left off—at least shooting zombies would distract him from the way his stomach was eating itself—when Sadie demanded he sit down so she could read his horoscope.

“You’re a Libra?” she asked, scrolling on her phone.

“If you say so,” Chris said. It sounded vaguely familiar; he thought they did a school project on zodiac signs, at some point.

“It says you love social settings, so you should hang out with us,” Sadie announced. Chris, personally, was still adjusting from being an only kid to having, essentially, two younger sisters, but Sadie went on without waiting for his input. “It also says you’re good at diplomacy and that you’re opinionated and also ethical. Oh, keep an eye out for exciting career developments,” she quoted.

Chris made a face at that. “I don’t want a job.”

Sadie ignored him. “Oh, and you could make a friend, someone who’ll be around for a long time. Maybe it’s me!”

Chris squinted at her. This was probably the first actual conversation he’d had with her, aside from when she showed up and immediately tried to hug him, insisting that she’d heard so much about him and felt like they knew each other already, and Chris had returned the hug, confused, while Buck stood behind her and laughed at him.

“I’ll start working on a friendship bracelet for you,” she said, before going back to scrolling on her phone. “Nora’s a Gemini, which means her birthday is coming! Chris, you have to make sure Buck knows when her birthday is, okay? Nora’s such a weirdo about it.”

“I’m not a weirdo,” Nora said. “You’re a weirdo.”

Sadie frowned at her phone. “Huh, that’s odd, says here Geminis are supposed to be clever. And yet—”

And even though Chris had been getting more than a little hangry, he couldn’t help laughing at them, especially when Nora launched a pillow at her. Their dads had come in, soon after that, to tell them food was ready; but Sadie still didn’t let it go. After dinner when he retreated back to his room, he heard a light knock right as he was about to put his headphones back on.

He wasn’t expecting Sadie to be the one poking her head in, but when she said, “it’s May 25^th—Nora’s birthday. Will you make sure Buck knows?” he actually wasn’t surprised at all.

“I know,” Buck told him when he brought it up at the barbecue. “It was in her file. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do for it. She hasn’t said anything.”

Chris thought about the way the way Sadie said Nora’s such a weirdo about it. He thought about the first Christmas after his mom died, the way it felt like everything had to be perfect but also that everything was all wrong.

“What are you going to get her?” Maddie asked.

And Buck had launched into his plan for cleaning out the storage unit so he could fit his bike down there and also buy one for Nora, because she’d mentioned that she never learned how to ride one.

“I thought I could teach her. I know it’s a little harder to learn when you’re older, but it sounded like something she wanted to do and—I don’t know. Is that a stupid gift for a thirteenth birthday?” Buck asked.

Maddie assured him it wasn’t, but Chris could tell they were both waiting for him, as the resident teenager, to declare whether it was or wasn’t stupid. At first, he thought about telling Buck that all the thirteen-year-olds he knew wanted gift cards or iPhones or retro digital cameras. But then he remembered that day in the park, years ago, when all he’d wanted to do was learn how to ride a skateboard, and Buck had made it happen.

Nora deserved a day like that.

“It’s not stupid,” he said, shrugging.

Buck beamed at him, then, and started talking about how he had no idea how he was going to clean out that storage unit, and maybe he could pay Chris and his friends to do it, at which point Chris remembered that they were probably looking for him in Denny’s room and scampered off.  

Hopefully Buck didn’t remember that thought if he and Eddie came out of the storage unit looking for revenge. Chris was not spending any more time in that disgusting basement than was strictly necessary for their plan.

“Maybe we should go check on them,” Nora suggested.

“Let’s give them another hour,” he said, instead. Either it hadn’t worked yet, or it had—either way, he didn’t need to hear it.

“I just—”

Nora was cut off by the apartment door flinging open.

His dad and Buck marched in, looking a little like they did when they came home straight after a long shift—disheveled, with random bits of grime and grease stains—except for instead of looking relieved, they looked a little pissed.

“Uh, hey dad,” he said. “Hey, Buck.” He wasn’t really worried. But just in case, it would be better to keep their attention off Nora.

“Hey, Chris,” said his dad in a deceptively light tone. “The weirdest thing just happened to me and Buck in the basement.”

Next to him, Buck pressed his lips together; a clear tell that he was holding in a laugh. Chris relaxed and grinned back at his dad.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” his dad replied.

“We’re sorry!” Nora squeaked on the couch next to him, folding immediately. She didn’t have much experience with his dad and Buck’s ‘trying to be stern’ routine—he had a lot to teach her.

Buck broke next. Like father, like daughter: absolutely no poker face. “It’s okay—”

“Oh, you’ll be sorry,” his dad interrupted. “Come on, get your things, the both of you. You’re going to the Wilson’s.”

Still? Chris thought his dad was shuffling him off to hang out with Denny so that he could be all pathetic and cry into his ice cream in peace.

“We are?”

“Yes,” his dad said, checking his watch. “And you’ll be lucky if we ever pick you back up.”

“We’ll definitely pick you up,” Buck corrected. “Nora, he’s just joking. We’ll come get you by ten, okay?”

“Ten?” Eddie said, making a face. “Our reservation only starts at eight.”

“It’s a school night,” Buck pointed out.

His dad shrugged, conceding.

“Wait, reservation?” Chris asked.

“Yeah,” said Buck, sliding his eyes over to his dad and looking especially shifty. “We have a date tonight.”

His dad smiled then, in a way that was so ridiculously sappy that Chris was already starting to regret this whole thing.

But still, when Nora started cheering, he joined in. Just a little.  

----------

“We are not dressed well enough for this place,” Buck murmured to Eddie as they followed their hostess to their table.

All around them, couples who wouldn’t look out of place at a black-tie wedding occupied intimate tables-for-two, dotted with low-burning candles and small vases of flowers and complicated dishes—three-tiered cake stands and steaming baskets and something that looked like dry ice.

Beside them, he and Eddie looked like—well, they looked a little bit like they’d just engaged in sexually explicit activities in a dirty basement. Other men there had stylish pocket-squares tucked neatly into the breast pocket of their jackets; Buck had Eddie’s parking ticket folded, in his.

Eddie scoffed. “Our money’s just as good as theirs.”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t,” said Buck, keeping his voice low and smiling at the hostess as she gestured for them to sit down. The chairs were surprisingly comfortable, and their table already had a domed plate in the middle. “I just think maybe they would have appreciated it if we’d showered before we came.”

“There was no time,” Eddie pointed out. “Ravi would have killed me if we were no-shows. Besides, it wasn’t our fault we were locked in a basement when we were supposed to be getting ready.”

“It’s like, ninety percent our fault we were locked in the basement,” Buck countered. “Oh my god. The team can never know about that.”

Across the table, Eddie grimaced. “We probably should have dropped our kids off somewhere besides Hen’s if we wanted to keep that cat in the bag.”

“They’re going to be merciless.”

“Yep.”

“They’ll probably keep locking us in places, as a joke.”

“That joke would be on them,” said Eddie, waggling his eyebrows. “I certainly don’t mind being stuck with you.”

Buck felt his insides turn to goo. He still wasn’t completely convinced that he hadn’t sustained a head injury and was living out another coma fantasy. Though if he’d been dreaming everything up, he probably wouldn’t have included being trapped in the most disgusting place he’d been in since they were called to a landfill a few months back. 

He didn’t want to tell Eddie, but he was pretty sure he’d seen a rat when he’d turned the light on.

“Good,” was all he said, instead. “’Cause you are.”

“Yeah?” 

“Yeah,” said Buck. He’d been keyed up all day—and then keyed up in an entirely different way, that afternoon—and this was the first time he could really just stop and take everything in. He and Eddie were doing this; they were on a date. And they weren’t going to break up. Buck was going to request off the last week in April for the vacation Eddie was planning, and he going to abandon any pretense of cleaning out the storage unit because they’d be looking for a new house soon, anyway.

And right now, Eddie was sitting across from him at the table, his eyes downright sparkling in the candlelight.

“Welcome to Koso.” A waiter appeared at their table, and they both started at his interruption. He was wearing a white button-down and a skinny black tie, and he looked more put together than the both of them combined. Buck appreciated that he didn’t give them any dirty looks about it, even though they probably deserved it. “Mr. Diaz, Mr. Buckley, we’re delighted that you’re celebrating your big occasion with us.”

He and Eddie exchanged confused glances. “Occasion?” Eddie asked.

“Yes,” the waiter said. “Your eighth anniversary, isn’t that right?”

Oh, Buck was going to kill Ravi for this. The waiter removed the dome on the table to reveal a plate with an elaborately designed 8 on it, carved out of cucumber, like someone had made an eighth birthday cake out of oi muchim.

He glanced at Eddie, expecting to see his exasperated expression; but Eddie’s lips just quirked up a little to one side, and his face looked ridiculously soft as he thanked the waiter. “Yeah,” he said, moving his foot under the table so that it was pressing against Buck’s. “Eight years and still going strong.”

----------

Eddie wasn’t panicking.

There was nothing to panic about, anyway—that’s what Buck kept insisting. Even though Buck was also the one who thought it would be a good idea to host Nora’s birthday party at their new house, three days after moving in, and that he should handle all of the food himself.

Since it was Nora’s birthday, and since nothing short of blackmail would get Chris to do any extra unpacking than he’d already had to do, that meant it was up to Eddie to get the rest of their house in shape, clean, hang up the decorations, wrap Nora’s birthday present—how the hell were you supposed to wrap a bike, anyway?—and stuff the rest of the boxes somewhere out of the way.

So, obviously, he’d recruited the team.

“Well, that’s the rest of the living room unpacked,” Hen said. She and Chim found him setting up the drink and food stations around the edge of abuela’s table, which now sat in the middle of their freshly-painted dining room. “Ooh, are those home-made mozzarella sticks?”

“No snacking!” Buck shouted from the kitchen. The half-wall dividing the two rooms meant that Eddie had a clear view of Buck in his element, moving non-stop around the kitchen in his World’s Second Best Dad apron. Chris and Nora found it at a gift shop on their spring break trip, and Eddie spotted them the cash to buy it for Buck. He’d made a real show of being offended at it, but it was the only apron he’d worn since he got it.

“You volunteered to live with that man?” Chim asked, surreptitiously waiting for Buck to turn his back before grabbing mozzarella sticks for both himself and Hen.

Eddie let it slide; they’d been there since the morning, moving furniture and blowing up balloons and barely kicking up a fuss when Buck pulled out his clipboard.

“What can I say? He’s really good in bed.” It was totally worth getting booed when Buck looked up from the cutting board and winked at him.

“Okay, we’re going to make sure the backyard is ready,” Hen said, bumping Chim’s arm and gesturing for him to follow her. “Call me when you two learn how to act right.”

Eddie waited until they’d closed the sliding glass door to the patio before abandoning the dining room table and going to bother Buck.

He leaned back against the kitchen island; he was still workshopping the best place to loiter while Buck was cooking. The trick was finding a spot that was out of the way enough that Buck wouldn’t get mad at him, but close enough that he could be recruited for taste-testing. So far, he’d ruled out the other side of the island, because it was too far away, and the countertop next to the fridge, because Buck stopped to kiss him every time he needed to get a new ingredient, and they ended up making out for so long that Buck burned his chicken cordon bleu.

“Good in bed, huh?” Buck said, not even looking at Eddie as he checked something off his godforsaken clipboard. Eddie was going to have to hide it as soon as the party was over.

Or take it into their bedroom—that was an idea.

“Hmm,” said Eddie, tempted to hop back onto the counter and see if Buck would risk ruining another meal. But the food was for Nora’s birthday, so he resisted. “And the shower. And backseat of the jeep, and the front hall, and the kitchen—”

They’d had a lot of fun after signing the paperwork and before the movers arrived; there were now several ordinary corners of the house that Eddie was remarkably fond of.

“Keep it in your pants, Diaz,” Buck said, stirring something on the stove and then checking on another dish in the oven; the menu for the day was ‘Nora’s favorite foods,’ which Nora told Eddie she’d never actually provided a list of; he was pretty sure Buck kept a running note on his phone tracking meals he’d made and how much he thought the kids liked them. “Maddie texted that they’re on their way back.”

Maddie was on distraction duty—she’d taken Nora and Sadie out for brunch and manicures and a few other stops that she rattled off when she showed up at nine to whisk Nora away from the pre-party chaos.   

Everything was going according to schedule—the decorations were up, the house looked passably clean. Athena, Harry, and May would be there soon, and so would Ravi. Karen had been on babysitting duty, so when she got there, she’d bring Denny, Mara, Jee, and baby Robbie. Abuela was in town, so she and Pepa were coming, and a few of Nora’s friends were invited, too—Morris, Julia, and Lexi were the only names Eddie could remember, but he was pretty sure there were a few more. With Chris and Felix, they would have quite the full house.

And Buck was pulling out all the stops. Aside from cooking enough to feed an entire fire station several meals over, he’d baked her a cake in the shape of a record player, complete with a record spinning on top. He’d specifically bought a chocolate mold and food-safe rotating platform for it, and he’d watched so many baking tutorials that Eddie had to ban Buck’s phone from their bedroom.  

He’d also spent a small fortune on the decorations—a confusing mash-up of records, disco balls, and firefighting paraphernalia—and Nora’s presents—a bike, helmet, every pad he could find in the sporting goods store, a new pair of sneakers, and a tiny cactus plant, a gift card to the bookstore, and a retro digital camera that looked alarmingly similar to the ones Eddie’s friends had when he’d been her age.

But he understood why Buck was going all out; they’d missed twelve birthdays, after all. So instead of ragging on him, he just said, “okay, what can I do?”

Buck looked up, wide-eyed, from where he was crouched down, elbow deep in one of their very disorganized cabinets. “What?” he asked.

“Help—that’s what I’m here for. What else has to get done?”

“Oh,” Buck said, standing up and reviewing his checklist. “I mean—it’s mostly making sure nothing burns, at this point. The sauce needs to simmer, and the stuff in the oven has to move to the warming drawer—”

“I can do that,” Eddie said. “You, go get dressed.”

“I can’t—”

“You can’t host your daughter’s birthday party in your sweats.”

“But—”

“I know I’m no you in the kitchen, but I promise not to ruin anything in the five minutes you take to get dressed. Go.”

“I—”

“Buck. Go.”

“Right,” said Buck, untying his apron and dropping it over Eddie’s head. “Okay—thanks.”

“Don’t mention it,” Eddie said, trying not to get distracted by how close Buck was.

“No,” said Buck, looking a little too earnest for Eddie’s liking. About half the time anything to do with Nora’s birthday came up, Buck was liable to start crying. “Thank you, really. I wouldn’t—I wouldn’t want to do this with anyone else, you know?”

“I know,” said Eddie, leaning up to kiss him on the cheek. “Our baby is officially a teenager.”

Buck’s eyes watered immediately. “Oh my god, why would you say that right now?”

“Oh, so you’re the only one who’s allowed to get emotional about it?”

“One of us has to keep it together,” Buck accused.

“Well, that’s what we have Chris for,” said Eddie.

Buck snorted at that, and then leaned in even closer. “Eddie . . .” he whispered, teasingly. And Eddie had to remember that every single one of their loved ones was about to descend upon the house, and they absolutely did not have time for a repeat of what they’d done to the kitchen island the week before.

Even after two months, he still got breathless when Buck got that close. “Yeah?”

“You blew it,” Buck said, stepping back towards the stove. “The sauce is burning! I knew it, I can’t trust you—”

“Oh my god,” complained Eddie. He reached out and turned the burner off and then started maneuvering Buck down the hallway.“I’m going to have to wrestle you into your clothing—”

“Good luck, you can only do the opposite—”

“Am I going to have to supervise you instead of the oven?”

“No,” grumbled Buck, once Eddie finally frog-marched him all the way to their bedroom. “Go, go, I’m getting dressed.”

“Good.”

“If you burn anything, I’m leaving you,” Buck called, as Eddie closed the door on him.

He wasn’t bothered. He knew an empty threat when he heard it.  

----------

Nora didn’t mean to get super cheesy about it, but she was kind of having the best birthday ever.

She woke up in her new bedroom, which still smelled like fresh paint, since she and Buck painted it teal the day before.

And when she ventured out into the kitchen, it was just in time for a chocolate chip pancake breakfast. Eddie made her a coffee the way aunt Maddie taught him to—eighty percent milk, ten percent sugar—and tousled her hair when he dropped it off in front of her, and then she and Chris competed to see who could put away the most pancakes.

Once they were done—a tie, that both of them regretted—Eddie started cleaning up, and her aunt Maddie arrived. It was a Friday, and apparently she and Buck arranged for both Nora and Sadie to play hooky that day. They got breakfast and then they got manicures and then Maddie drove them to the mall—the same one her mom had dropped her and Sadie off at for her twelfth birthday.

She’d told Maddie about that a few weeks ago. It was getting easier to talk about her mom, a little bit. She usually just tried to mention the good stuff; but sometimes some of the not-so-good stuff came up, too. Like when everyone showed up for her spring concert—even though she didn’t even have a solo or anything—and the sight of so many people waiting for her in the lobby made her tear up in a way that felt happy and heartsick.

Or when, for some reason, she had a week’s worth of nightmares about her mom and everyone else she loved, suddenly dropping dead. The fifth night in a row that she woke up, sweaty and tangled in her sheets, she’d stumbled into the kitchen looking for a glass of water.

They were in Buck’s old apartment then, but Chris was at a sleepover, so when Eddie had come for dinner he also stayed the night. Still, Nora was a little surprised when he was the one who found her in the kitchen.

The last time he’d found her in a kitchen in the middle of the night, it was at the station, and she just assumed he was an early riser. But it was only two in the morning at that point, so she must have been the reason he was up.

“Sorry,” she said, keeping her voice a whisper in the dim kitchen. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“You didn’t,” Eddie said, though that was clearly a lie. He leaned against the doorway into the kitchen and cocked his head, assessing her. “Bad dreams?”

She nodded.

“You wanna talk about it?”

She shrugged.

“You know,” said Eddie, stepping into the kitchen to get himself a glass of water, too. “A few years ago, I had a pretty rough breakdown due to PTSD. I was in the military before I joined the LAFD, so it was that, and a few other things.”

Nora stared at him. She couldn’t really picture Eddie in the military. Or Eddie having a PTSD breakdown.

“I never used to want to talk about it,” he went on. “Because I didn’t want other people to have to deal with what was going on up here.” He gestured to his head. “But can I tell you a secret I learned?”

“What?”

“The things that weigh us down—they’re never that heavy to other people. I know that it feels big and scary when it’s just you dealing with all that, and maybe you want to protect us from the bad stuff. But talking about it helps, I promise.” He took a step forward and put his hand on her shoulder, ducking down to meet her eyes; she could feel her throat tightening, her eyes welling up. “You can’t scare me.”

Something in her broke at that, and she descended into ugly, wrenching, painful sobs, crying for her mom in a way that she hadn’t this whole time. She had cried before, of course—the first few nights at the Warrens, and the therapeutic cry when she finally told Buck everything. But she hadn’t cried like this, wailing and pathetic and unable to catch her breath.

And Eddie was right—she didn’t scare him off. He stepped forward and caught her, holding on tight while she let it all out: the pitiful I want my mom cries she’d been keeping in for months, and the way she felt guilty for how happy she was, now, and the pit the bad dreams had left in her stomach, night after night.

Eddie just stood there in the kitchen with her, letting her cry into his sweatshirt and ruffling her hair—a little like the way her mom had, sometimes—and murmuring comforting words, “I know, Nora, honey,” he said. “Let it out, it’s okay. You’re okay.”

Eventually, she started to believe him. After she finally cried herself out and he made her drink an entire glass of water so she wouldn’t get a dehydration headache, Eddie followed her to her room and tucked her back in. But instead of leaving, he took one of her books off the shelf—Matilda—and read to her until she fell asleep.

He wasn’t even weird about it in the morning. Though Buck did talk to her about going to see a therapist after breakfast.

Between Eddie and Buck and Dr. Amy, her new therapist, she’d been talking about her mom a lot more; like when a song came on that reminded her of one of their road trips, or when someone mentioned a celebrity that her mom had gossip about from the restaurant.

Buck asked Athena to help locate her mom’s ashes, and he took her to the beach, so she could spread them into the Pacific. It felt right: the place where her mom had kept returning to. The ocean would always be there; and it was big and vast enough to carry the weight of it, of every messy thing Nora felt about it all.

And by the time aunt Maddie asked her about birthday plans, she didn’t feel weird about telling her about her usual mall tradition; how she kind of liked it but also kind of hated it, the way her mom used to wonder off to look for her own clothes, or to find a place where she could sit and scroll her phone in peace. Last year, her mom had just told Nora and Sadie to meet her at the food court when she was done.

Maddie seemed to get it, Nora thought, the way you how you feel about your mom can be all jumbled up and confusing. Maddie decided the mall would go on the itinerary for the day, though this time she and Sadie would stick to Nora like glue, and they could leave any time they wanted.

They only lasted for about an hour, and then they played a round of mini golf, and then Maddie took them out to get ice cream, on the condition that they swore not to tell Buck.  

When they got back to the house, Nora could see why: her dad had gone all out. Their entire big round dining table—the one that Chris said was too big for the four of them, until Eddie said, “is this your subtle way of asking for more siblings, Chris? We can make that happen,” and that shut him up real fast—was laden with every food Nora could think of; Sadie elbowed her over and over again, pointing, speechlessly, at her birthday cake.

It was nothing like the birthday parties she’d been to—the ones where everyone did a craft at some fancy party place, or where all the girls were shunted to the basement for a sleepover. At her first-ever birthday party, everyone in her life mingled together in their new backyard: Morris got into a discussion about gaming with Chris, and Lexi and Mara teamed up to beat Chim and Hen at cornhole, and Sadie became deeply obsessed with Sergeant Athena’s daughter, May.

Nora’s heart was already so full, and that was before she started opening presents. Sadie gave her a scrapbook, half-way filled and with plenty of space for more pictures. Ravi got her an LAFD sweatshirt. Hen gave her a set of starter weights and said she’d help Nora with a training plan to build some muscle.

Her dad and Eddie and Chris gave her a gift the week before they moved—a new light green suitcase, with a hard shell she could cover in stickers; Eddie said it was Chris’s idea—so she wasn’t expecting it when Eddie passed her three more gift bags and then Buck wheeled out a brand-new bike.

But the most surprising gift came from Sergeant Athena, who passed her a small box with a black watch inside. It wasn’t the kind of thing most people would pick out for a thirteen-year-old girl: it had a digital face surrounded by various tactical buttons, and it was big and bulky and had obvious wear-and-tear. From the way every adult in the yard went quiet at the sight of it, Nora knew it was something special.

“That was Bobby’s watch,” Athena told Nora, as she pried it out of the box, feeling the weight of in her small hands. “Since I hear you’re going to be a firefighter one day, I thought you could use something durable.” And then Athena looked at Buck when she said, “I know he’d want you to have it.”

Buck was fully crying again, at that point, but when she glanced around the yard, she saw that about half of their guests were, too.

That was the last of the gifts, so Maddie clapped her hands and declared it cake time.

After she blew out her candles and survived everyone singing to her, Nora found Athena, to thank her and to swear to take good care of the watch, Athena smiled warmly and said, “I’m sorry you never got to meet him. But I know he’s looking out for you.”

May came to pull Athena away after that, which Nora was grateful for, because she really didn’t know what to say; and Sadie appeared next to her a moment later, holding two plates of cake. “May is so cool,” she said, holding out one of the plates for Nora. “Did you know she was a 9-1-1 dispatcher like Maddie? Are all the coolest people 9-1-1 dispatchers? Maybe I should become one, and then I can be like ‘cchhh— Nora, a building is on fire, hurry!’”

“I don’t think that’s how dispatchers call in emergencies.”

“It would be so cool though, right?”

“Yeah,” admitted Nora, grinning as she pictured it: Sadie’s voice coming over the radio of the fire engine while Nora sat in the back seat, in her turnouts. “It would be.”

When the party was winding down, she found her dad in the kitchen, packing food away and getting started on the dishes. “Hey, Nor,” he said, wiping his hands on a dish towel and turning to face her. “Are you having a good birthday?”

She shrugged, indifferently. “It’s fine, I guess.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah,” she said, trying to keep her face straight. “It’s . . . like, whatever.”

“Oh god, it’s only been—” he checked his watch. “—twenty hours, and already the teenager apathy has set in.”

“Yeah,” she said, like, what can you do? “You’re not the boss of me. I want a nose ring.”

“That would look pretty cool.”

“Ugh, dad, how am I supposed to rebel if you say stuff like that?”

“Oh, sweet Nora,” said her dad, wrapping his arms around her and resting his chin on the top of her head. It wasn’t until he was holding her that she realized how exhausted she was; but the good kind. “One day, I’ll tell you all about my misspent youth. And then you’ll know what real rebelling looks like.”

“Did you have a nose ring?”

“I said one day,” he said, squeezing her extra tight around the middle. “I’m not giving you any ideas right now.”

“Fine. I’ll just get aunt Maddie to tell me.”

“Are you guys being sappy?”

They turned at the interruption to see Chris had entered the kitchen, carrying his plate and eyeing them warily.

“So sappy,” said Buck. “Get over here. Family hug.”

Chris skirted wide around them, avoiding Buck’s reach while he dropped his plate in the sink. “Actually, dad’s got you beat—he sent me in here to get you guys for a family photo outside.”

Nora felt like laughing at Chris’s annoyed face, the exact opposite of Buck’s wide smile at the idea. “Yes! Eddie’s so smart. Why didn’t I think of that? Come on, come on, let’s go,” he said, shuffling both of them out of the kitchen into the backyard.

“Fine,” Nora said, dragging the word out and letting herself be pushed along. Part of it was for effect, and the other part was because she felt dead on her feet.

“Maddie said the best spot is over there, by the strings of lights.” Eddie met them on the patio and was pointing to the far corner of the yard. His eyes fell on her, where she was slouching, and he said, “is the birthday girl tired? Come on, I’ll give you a lift.”

Eddie gave her a piggy-back ride so she didn’t have to walk twenty more feet; and then he let her stay up there while Buck posed, leaning in next to them and wrapping his arms around Christopher. Maddie told them all to say cheese, and held up her phone up to snap a photo. And—with her aching feet finally getting a break; with her belly full of ice cream and her favorite foods and a slice of the record-playing birthday cake; with her new, old watch strapped on her wrist; with the thought of the conversation she’d had with Eddie right before they moved, where he asked permission to propose to her dad; and with all of her favorite people in sight, milling around in the cheerful glow of the string lights in the yard of her new home—Nora smiled.