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The cheers of the crowd subside, and reality crawls back in. No amount of successful teamwork or trophies could patch whatever tore between the two of them somewhere along the way. Not the easy jokes, not the half-conversations with other stations, not the midnight drinks in the hotel lobby, or the practiced smile and, “No, no. Not together, just – friends.” Always with a pause, with that heartbeat of hesitation – half-hope, half-hurt in between.
Buck carries both their bags to the truck parked by the entrance because, apparently, their flight, along with a handful of others, has been canceled. Buck didn’t offer to elaborate, and Eddie didn’t press. Might be weather conditions, might be strikes – add that to the fact that Buck knows that Eddie knows that Buck doesn’t like to fly, calling a rental service was the only logical next step.
So Buck stuffs bags in the trunk outside while Eddie wraps things up at reception.
“On a scale of one to five, how was your stay?”
“Everything was perfect.”
Blatant lie, but not entirely untrue – just a step to the left of honest. Breakfast was good, and the room was clean, and there were even those complimentary chocolates on the pillows, which had managed to pull a smile out of Buck when they first walked in. The city welcomed them with warm wind, a trophy at the end of the day, and just enough small emergencies to keep boredom at bay – being off work, after all.
He had his best friend with him, and that’s exactly the thing he’d fallen asleep praying for every night in El Paso.
But something is definitely amiss, and once the audience is gone, so is Buck’s easy smile. His shoulders curl inward instantly, like there’s physical weight pressing him down.
Eddie gives the receptionist the key to their room, she gives him a customer service smile, and he’s out the door. Buck slams the trunk closed and just hovers by it, as if hesitating which side of the truck he’s supposed to go to.
They do that a lot lately – wait for the other to take the lead, to make the first move, to shoulder the burden of a decision made. Eddie yanks the keys out of Buck’s hand and doesn’t, even for a second, think about the zap of electricity he feels where their fingers touch.
The fight is bubbling under their skin, Eddie can feel it. Right under the surface, all-consuming and ugly, explosive once it reaches air. They have an argument about music, another argument about the road they should take, yet another one about how often they should change – Eddie’s sure he can do seven hours at the wheel, Buck not so much. They end up pulling into the parking lot of a deserted gas station after five under the pretence of having to go to the bathroom again, even though they both know Eddie doesn’t need to.
“Coffee?”
Buck doesn’t look up, just gives him a nod. His eyes are on the screen of his phone, a map app open.
“There’s this motel just outside –”
“We’re not spending the night,” Eddie throws over his shoulder as he steps out of the car.
To his chagrin, there’s no line, so it all goes too quickly for him to reset or rest. Still, he gets to stretch his limbs and look at something that isn’t the taillights of another truck for the whole of five minutes.
He comes back with two coffees and a bunch of protein bars, and finds Buck already in the driver’s seat. They don’t talk about it. They don’t talk at all – once the engine roars back to life, Buck flips the radio on and turns the volume all the way up.
They drive, and the world flies by in a smear of green and blue, then yellow and pink, then purple and black. Between nodding off, texting Chris, and staring through the side window, Eddie finds himself thinking about what his life has become. Little pockets of time where everything is normal, when he and Buck can look one another in the eyes and have a conversation – usually surrounded by other people, though, so those conversations never get a chance to dip into something serious, something that matters. Always with a buffer, a witness, chaperoned in their inability to exist in the shared space without actively breaking something.
Now, forced into a hundred and thirty cubic feet of space for a thirty-hour drive – that normalcy is gone. It’s hard to act for an audience of one.
Buck’s jaw is set as his eyes stare ahead, his face illuminated briefly once in a while by streetlights fleeting by and headlights of cars rushing in the opposite direction.
They change twice before neither of them can stay in the lane anymore, and Eddie has to begrudgingly admit that they do have to stop for the night.
It’s his turn at the wheel, so Buck’s hands are free to hunt down the nearest place with a decent price range and sheets that won’t leave you itching till the next moon.
Eddie waits in the car while Buck disappears into reception, green and blue neon drifting across the dashboard, the hood of the truck, his face, softening everything into a dreamlike haze. He shouldn’t be this tired, and yet he is, each second dragging slow as molasses.
His phone buzzes with an incoming call, and Eddie picks it up from the console.
“Chim.” He doesn’t bother to hide the surprise in his voice, just does his best for it not to come out as irritation.
“Eddie?” There’s rustling on the other side of the line, like Chimney is getting up from the couch where he was definitely pressed into Maddie’s side. There are footsteps. “Finally. Where are you guys?”
Eddie glances toward the door Buck went through.
“Middle of nowhere. We had to pull off – couldn’t keep going. Buck’s grabbing us a room.”
There’s a beat of silence, then, “Wait, pull off? Weren’t you guys supposed to fly back?”
Eddie huffs out a humorless laugh. “Yeah, well. Flight got canceled.”
Another silence, some soft tapping on the screen on Chim’s side of the line. “That’s weird. I’ve got alerts set up for your flight – got a notification like three hours ago that it landed.”
Eddie frowns at his phone, as if the name and the face on the screen could explain the words he’s hearing that are absolutely not sinking in.
Before he can piece it all together, though, the doors of the reception fling open and Buck steps out, raising his hand with the keys dangling from his palm.
Eddie can hear his heartbeat in his ears, loud, speeding up, and feels his throat tightening. Before it closes completely, he chokes out, “I gotta go, Chim. I’ll call you first thing tomorrow.”
Buck leads the way, and Eddie follows, their long shadows trailing behind them as they walk. The place is secluded, quiet; it feels like the world has been paused here, with the desert outside the walls stretched out under an endless star-dotted dome of sky, bathed in pale moonlight.
Eddie’s skin buzzes with the storm brewing inside him as the realization sinks in. He just hopes he somehow manages to get all the way to the room before it breaks loose.
Buck unlocks the door and lets Eddie in, following in his step. The room is nothing fancy, just a room. A table tucked in the corner, a fridge, a bed –
Eddie freezes midstep. Buck halts next to him, eyes searching for what Eddie saw, and then he lets out a tiny oh.
“We can share, I don’t mind,” Eddie says as flatly as he can muster, dropping his bag on the floor. “Or I can sleep in the car, whatever works for you.”
“Why would I want you to sleep in the car?”
Eddie hums, walking around the bed to the right side. He drops his phone and his watch on the nightstand, and before Buck can utter a single word, announces, “I’m taking a shower.”
There’s a delayed sigh in his wake, and the sound of the second bag hitting the floor. He closes the door behind himself and turns the lock.
Then he just stands under the hot spray for a while, pretending it can do anything for his twinging nerves or his aching lower back. It doesn’t fix either, but at least provides him with some distraction and a chance for the fight in him to maybe not exactly go dormant, but at least put its head on its paws and take a rest for now.
As an afterthought, he quickly lathers himself with flowery soap and finally washes the day off.
The towel is soft, but it still feels rough against his skin as he wraps it around his hips.
As he walks out, Buck is standing by the window, arms crossed over his chest. He’s staring outside, pointedly not turning to look when the door clicks shut behind Eddie’s back.
His stuff is piled on the left side of the bed, the one he usually prefers, Eddie realizes; it’s like they were always destined to share. They seem to fit in all the wrong places like that.
“So.”
Buck startles at the sound of his voice, finally turning around. He looks like a dog that knows its damage to the couch is about to be found out.
Eddie doesn’t look directly at him, his fists clenching and unclenching at his sides, like he needs to hold onto the moment with both hands to stop it from slipping out.
Buck’s eyes briefly fall to his hands, then go back up to his face. He squares his shoulders in a futile attempt to look fearless – fear is still bright in his eyes.
“So,” he repeats like an echo.
The word hangs in the air between them, weightless. Eddie finds himself wanting to catch it and break it in half.
“Chimney called,” he says simply, because there’s no reason to pretend it’s not where this conversation is headed. “Asked how our flight went. Told him it got canceled, but –” Eddie clicks his tongue.
Buck just keeps looking at him, unblinking, jaw working from side to side.
Eddie feels compelled to throw a punch just to make it stop.
Instead, he rasps, “What the hell, Buck?”
Buck winces at it and finally blinks.
“You didn’t want to fly? Fine. You could’ve just told me that.”
They stare each other down for a moment, the clock above the table ticking softly, counting breaths. Both recognize Eddie’s words for what they are – a lifebuoy thrown overboard. Take it, Eddie thinks. Take what I’m offering, because I’m not so sure we’re gonna survive this one otherwise.
Buck audibly swallows, stumbles a step back to create some distance between them, like distance ever did them any good in the past. Eddie tracks his every movement, his bare skin prickling at the contact with cold air moving along with Buck.
Buck can’t meet his eyes when he says, “I wasn’t – I don’t know why, okay? I just did it.”
“You just did it?” Eddie can feel bitter, dangerous laughter stir up deep down, coming for air. “Buck, you lied to my face. You looked me in the eye and—”
“I know what I did!” Buck sucks in a breath, moving through the room like he expects the floor to give way at any moment under his feet. “I just – I didn’t want to go home yet.”
Eddie watches him, strong-arming his breathing into something steadier.
Buck lowers himself at the edge of the bed, and it’s like the contact rattles something loose – he drops his face into his palms and mutters, “We were good again, Eddie. Actually good for once. I just – I wasn’t ready for it to be over. I had to do something.”
Buck glances up at him, and it hits Eddie then just how tired he looks. Not a day into a road trip kind of tired, but something heavier, older. Like life hasn’t been gentle to him in a while.
It hasn’t, Eddie realizes. To either of them.
And usually they’d have each other to help carry the weight, but since Bobby’s death, everything was too much, both their plates always full – every attempt to reach out this futile game of pain changing hands, nothing healing about it.
“So you trapped us in a car for thirty hours? What was your plan here, bud?”
Buck runs a hand over the side of his face, and it comes off as self-soothing.
“I didn’t have a plan, okay?” The palm moves from his cheek to rub at the back of his neck. “I just knew that the second we got on that plane, the second we landed, it would all go back to –”
He lets his hand fall onto his lap.
And maybe it’s exhaustion from hours upon hours on the road, and patchwork sleep that never got deep enough to even matter, or too much shitty coffee and gas station food. Or maybe it’s the fact that they didn’t bother to turn on the lights when they walked in, and the shadows are always kinder, combined with Buck sounding so earnest, and maybe a little bit heartbroken. But no matter the reason, Eddie can feel his anger draw back slowly, like the ocean pulled by the tide.
“I know, okay?” Buck breaks the silence again, cutting Eddie off before he can open his mouth. “I know it’s stupid. We had a good time, we had fun, that’s – that’s all it was supposed to be, right? A getaway. I know this last year changed things. We can’t just go back. I–I–I know that. It’s just sometimes I –”
His voice breaks. Eddie can almost picture the fragments of it hitting the floor.
“Sometimes I’m wondering if I still even have a best friend or –”
Eddie winces. “Of course you still – Jesus Christ, Buck.”
Buck’s mouth snaps shut. His eyes search Eddie’s face, and Eddie so desperately wants him to find whatever he’s looking for. Silence stretches between them, hollow, and for a while, it’s just two sets of slow, steadying breaths disturbing the air in the room.
Eddie’s suddenly aware of how cold he is. He never really got to putting his clothes on after the shower, and now he’s kind of regretting it, because his skin is crawling with goosebumps, but doing it now won’t serve this conversation. It’s long overdue, and Eddie knows that it would take them another eight years to get back to this point if they stop now.
“I’m tired, Buck.”
Buck tenses all over, and then shoots to his feet, eyes on anything but Eddie. “Yeah. Yeah, no, I – I get it. Sorry. I’ll just –”
He tries to step around Eddie to get to his side of the bed, but Eddie catches him by the elbow.
“Buck.” He forces eye contact between them and repeats pointedly, “I’m tired.”
Tired of fighting, of bubblewrapping the corners, of biting my tongue, Eddie doesn’t add, but the words seem to land right regardless, because Buck is nodding, and doesn’t try to wiggle out of Eddie’s grasp.
“I can’t do this anymore,” Eddie says, shaking his head slightly, hoping the motion hides his chin trembling. “I don’t – I don’t know what happened or when it stopped being easy, but we can’t keep blaming it on me leaving. I came back. And we can’t blame it on losing Bobby, because that’s not – that just means there’s nothing we can do about it, and I refuse to accept that.”
They’re close enough for him to hear the moment a held-out breath finally dislodges where it got stuck in Buck’s throat. He’s still not moving, aside from his eyebrows slowly pulling together, which makes Eddie’s heart stutter. Buck looks hopeful, and that hope feels so fragile in Eddie’s hands; he can’t stop imagining it slipping out from his careless fingers and dropping to the floor, shattering into a million pieces.
“We will talk. And we will figure the shit out,” he promises and allows himself a smirk. “Making me drive for thirty hours is still a fucked-up thing to do, but – maybe that’s what we needed.”
Buck nods again, and for the first time since they woke up back in Tennessee this morning, there’s a resemblance of a smile on his face. Eddie relishes the warmth spreading through his chest, right beneath his sternum. He doesn’t usually feel the need to fill in the silence, not the way Buck does, but he would never stop talking if it meant Buck would just keep smiling at him like that.
His hand goes from Buck’s elbow to rest on his shoulder instead, his thumb making a home in the hollow of his collarbone, the rest of his fingers digging into the muscle on the back of Buck’s shoulder.
“We’ll be okay.”
“How do you know?”
Eddie huffs with fond exasperation. Of course, Buck would ask.
“I just know, okay? And you gotta trust me on this one.”
“How can I trust you if you don’t –”
“Buck.” It comes out way more stern than Eddie intends it to.
Buck’s cheeks get noticeably brighter even in the poor light, and he drops his chin to his chest with a breathy laugh that he hides into his palm. “Okay, okay. Sorry.”
“We’ll be okay,” Eddie repeats just because it bears repeating. And maybe he can later blame it on the soft darkness around them, or on bone-deep exhaustion, but he suddenly feels brave enough to say, “And I really need you to stop trying to make me meet someone. You gotta trust me when I say I’m not interested.”
Buck’s hand still hovers over his mouth, his eyes wide and clear as they stare at Eddie. It’s comical, really, how the whole process of him assigning the words meaning is visible on his face.
“I just don’t want you to be alone,” he says quietly.
“I’m not.”
“You know what I mean. With us, it’s different.”
“Maybe it’s not. Or, at least,” Eddie hesitates; decides, “maybe it shouldn’t be.”
Eddie’s thumb caresses Buck’s skin where they connect, and he’s not entirely sure whom the gesture is meant to soothe. He’s looking at his hand holding onto Buck, the image of it so natural it doesn’t really register as something either of them would normally pay attention to. He’s held Buck like this plenty of times, and there was always this shadow of a thought, something he has never allowed himself to entertain before. He does now, seeing clearly in his mind how easy it would be to just pull Buck in, closer and closer, before it’s just an inch separating their faces, and all it would take to close that distance is a shallow tip of his chin forward.
“Eddie,” Buck’s voice comes in between them, trembling slightly. “You don’t want this –”
“You don’t get to decide what I want, Buck. You don’t.” Eddie is still staring at the place his hand rests on Buck’s shoulder. The next words come through his teeth, the sound of them dying off almost completely at the sentence’s end. “I am done with people around me pretending like they know better.”
It’s definitely not the brightest idea Eddie has ever had, if you weigh in the prospect of them having to still spend the night in the same room, in the same bed, if he’s read Buck wrong in any of the plethora of possible ways, but Eddie’s tired, so fucking tired, so sue him for not wanting to wait for the strike of genius until the sun comes up.
He doesn’t pull him in, just slightly nudges Buck forward. And there’s a fraction of a second where he doesn’t seem to move, and it’s enough to send Eddie’s heart in a frenzy in its attempt to climb up and out of his throat, his mind running a million and one scenarios of how he just fucked it all up for good – dealt the final blow to this thing between them that’s been already limping and barely breathing for a while.
But eventually Buck seems to catch on, and he falls forward with a puff of air escaping his lungs that hits Eddie’s chin before his lips land on Eddie’s lips, and suddenly everything is right with the world.
Buck’s hand comes up to Eddie’s chest, but his fingers keep moving around, barely touching, never landing anywhere for long, like Buck is still not sure if he’s allowed.
Eddie steps forward then, pressing his bare chest into Buck’s palm, feeling its warmth against his sternum. That warmth spreads through him like ripples on a pond, reaching the back of his head and his toes at the same time. It’s such a simple feeling – the one he’s been searching for, chasing, for the entirety of his life – and of course it’s in Buck’s hands that he finds it.
With one hand still on Buck’s shoulder, he uses the other one to grip his hip in order to maneuver them to the foot of the bed. Buck is shivering under his touch, those tiny, sweet tremors running through his body. He kisses hungrily, like he’s been deprived of it for too long, barely alive from it.
He stumbles, and Eddie’s hand catches him.
“Careful,” he whispers into Buck’s mouth.
They rest their foreheads together while trying to catch their breaths.
Buck’s skin doesn’t smell like Buck, Eddie realizes suddenly. It smells of warm plastic from the truck’s interior, the light sourness of sweat, and mustard from the hot dog Buck had during their last stop that ended up all over his hands and face that wet wipes had not been very helpful against. It’s not that Eddie minds any of that, but he also knows they won’t be able to stop later, so he pulls away far enough to properly look at Buck’s face.
“I’m not changing my mind,” he says with a smile hiding in the corners of his mouth. “I’m not stopping because of that. But you should really shower first.”
Buck barks out a laugh. “Gee, thanks for the hint.”
Eddie rolls his eyes and presses another quick light kiss to Buck’s lips. “You know that’s not what I meant. It’s been a long day, and you will hate yourself if you fall asleep before washing the road off of you.”
Buck groans, frustrated with having to break contact for even a second, but aware that Eddie is right. He pulls away reluctantly and grabs his toiletry bag from the bed.
“Don’t go anywhere,” he jokes, pointing a finger at Eddie before making his way to the bathroom.
“No other place I’d rather be,” Eddie mutters to his back, no lie in it.