Archive of Our Own ^beta

Eddie doesn't do this. He doesn't do any of this — the self-care, the relaxation, the lying horizontal in a room that smells like someone's very expensive idea of a forest while a stranger touches him for money. 

He doesn't get massages. 

He uses three-in-one body wash and considers it efficient. The closest he's come to a spa day is falling asleep in the bathtub once after a seventy-two-hour shift and waking up pruned and disoriented with Christopher knocking on the door asking if he was dead.

He'd turned around twice in the parking lot, almost drove home after the first time, nearly called Hen after the second, came inside on the third attempt because Hen and Karen spent real American dollars on this gift and they would ask how it went and Eddie refuses to be the kind of person who wastes a birthday present, even if that birthday present requires him to pretend he knows what a singing bowl does and trying to relax while having the very insistent urge to flee.

So here he is. 

In a storefront on Melrose that smells like somebody distilled a eucalyptus tree into a candle and then lit that candle inside another, bigger candle, preparing to strip down and let a stranger named Briana touch his naked body for an hour.

He can do this.

The place is aggressively zen. Crystals everywhere — not, like, a singular crystal. Crystals, plural, in bowls and on shelves and built into the reception desk like they're load-bearing. Structural quartz. As if the whole operation would collapse without the healing energy of rose quartz holding it together. 

There's a salt lamp shaped like a lotus. A water feature trickling behind the counter. The air has layers to it — eucalyptus, lavender, something earthy underneath, maybe sage, maybe the collective spiritual energy of a hundred people who've cried on these massage tables before him. The ambient music might be a harp. Might be a whale song. Might be the plumbing. 

Eddie genuinely cannot tell.

The woman at the front desk has a nose ring and an aura of preternatural calm, like she's never once experienced road rage or burnt toast or a single moment of existential dread. She smiles at him like he's already healing just by being here. 

He is not healing. He is planning his escape.

"Welcome!” The woman says, beaming. “Can I get you anything while you wait? We've got a chamomile and passionflower tea today, infused with rose quartz energy."

Eddie processes the words delivered in the aggressively overjoyous tone. Specifically the phrase rose quartz energy, which contains three real words and one concept he's pretty sure was invented to sell rocks to people with disposable income.

"Just water's great. Thanks,” he says with every ounce of politeness he can muster, which is considerable, because what he wants to say is that's a rock and rocks don't go in tea and I'm leaving.

She brings him water in a glass that, to his dismay, has a crystal at the bottom. A small smooth stone sitting in his drinking water like they just scooped it out of a river out back. 

Eddie looks at the rock making a home in his drink, then looks back at the woman. She's already floated away, serene, unbothered. He drinks around it. Fine. He's consumed worse. He can drink rock water.

He has a seat in one of the chairs lining the waiting room walls. It’s too soft, one of those deep-cushion, no-structure situations that's trying to swallow Eddie whole. A chair that whispers let go while Eddie's entire body screams absolutely not. He perches on the edge to avoid sinking into it.

There's a chalkboard sign on the wall listing the healing properties of various stones. Amethyst for anxiety. Citrine for confidence. Tiger's eye for courage. Black tourmaline for "energetic protection", which sounds made up, because it is made up, because they're rocks. 

Eddie reads the whole thing because he's got nothing else to do. The magazines on the side table are exclusively about chakras and breathwork and something called "somatic release" that he's absolutely not going to google later. 

He picks one up anyway, flipping to a random page. There's a diagram of a human body with seven glowing dots and a paragraph about "root energy" and "sacral alignment" that he retains none of. 

There's a quote in cursive that says Your body knows what your mind refuses to hear. 

Eddie puts the magazine down and picks up his crystal water and puts that down too and checks the time and it's been four minutes.

Four minutes. He's been here four minutes. This is going to be an eternity.

He almost texts Hen. Types out this place has a chakra chart on the wall and then deletes it because Hen would respond with something knowing and warm and possibly an emoji that implies she expected this reaction and this was all a trap. 

Eddie’s massage therapist is Briana. 

He confirmed this six times: twice on the website, once during a phone call he made from his truck in the grocery store parking lot like it was a covert operation, three more times in the confirmation email. Briana felt manageable. Clinical, even. Like a doctor's appointment with better lighting. An hour on a table, some muscle work, drive home, text Hen it was really nice thanks so much, and never think of it again. Done. Survivable.

"Eddie?"

He looks up.

That is not Briana.

The guy standing in the hallway entrance is tall — taller than Eddie, which is already annoying — and built like someone whose job description wildly undersold the physical reality. His hair can’t seem to decide whether it’s brown or blond, artfully disheveled with curls dancing every which way, something that took either forty-five minutes or zero, no middle ground. There's a birthmark above his eye that shouldn't work but does, way too much, and his scrubs fit him well. They — okay. They fit him obscenely well, actually.

They’re a size too small, or he’s a size too big, or whatever happened between this man and his shirt did not end in a truce because the fabric is pulling across his chest and the short sleeves are stretched tight around his biceps and Eddie is doing everything in his power to keep his hands at his sides. 

His arms. God, his arms. They're just arms. Everyone has arms. Eddie has arms. The woman at the front desk has arms. Arms are standard equipment on a human being and do not warrant this level of attention except these arms are demanding it. Every time the man moves even slightly the muscle shifts under his skin and the sleeve slides up a little more and Eddie is suddenly, involuntarily, thinking about what it would feel like to have those arms braced on either side of him. Or around him. Or holding him down.

Which is not a thought he's ever had about a man's arms before. He's pretty sure. He's almost sure. He's going to move on from this.

He is going to stop looking at the arms.

Any second now.

The man is smiling. Open, easy, the kind of smile that takes up his whole face and rearranges the energy of the room around it.

Eddie's brain takes a photograph, stamps it classified, and tucks it away for a rainy day.

"That's me," Eddie says, standing up too fast and having no clue what to do with his hands. He puts them in his pockets. Takes them out. Crosses his arms. Uncrosses them. Thirty-three years old and he's forgotten where hands go.

"Hey, nice to meet you! I'm Buck." He sticks out his hand and Eddie shakes it and Buck's grip is warm and sure and his palm is smooth — the oil, probably, occupational hazard — and his fingers wrap around Eddie's hand and Eddie feels like he’s floating. It's a handshake. He has shaken ten thousand hands. These hands are no different, even if they are connected to… all of that. "So, tiny hiccup. Briana had a family emergency, nothing serious, she's totally fine, but she couldn't make it in today."

Eddie's stomach lurches. A quiet oh no behind his ribs.

"Oh. Uh, I hope she's okay."

"She's great, yeah, all good. But I wasn't gonna cancel on you at the last minute. I would've felt terrible." Buck's grin widens and it’s… a lot. Big and bright and genuine, his eyes doing something with it. Eddie doesn't know what his eyes do. He's not looking at Buck's eyes. He's looking at a fixed point over Buck's left shoulder like a marine at parade rest. "So I'm stepping in. If you're cool with that."

"Yeah, no, that's—" Eddie's brain ransacks itself for a word. Any word. A word that isn't terrifying or please or what happened to Briana. "Fine. That's fine. Totally fine."

Three fines. Incredible. 

"Awesome. And hey, just so you know, I've been doing this for five years, fully certified, highest rated therapist here." He drops his voice a notch, conspiratorial. "Don't tell Briana I said that. She thinks we're tied but I've got like a point-two edge on Yelp."

Eddie huffs, almost a laugh, smothered at the last second, but Buck catches it. Something sparkles behind his eyes, warm and pleased, and Eddie looks down, blushing.

"So you're in good hands." Buck holds up his palms, wiggling his fingers. "Literally. That's the whole pitch. I'll take really good care of you, promise."

I'll take really good care of you. Normal sentence. Professional courtesy. Words that mean exactly what they mean and nothing else except the little voice in Eddie’s head keeps whispering hey, but what if they did mean something else?

He shoves the thought aside and moves on.

"Yeah," Eddie says. "Sounds good."

Buck turns to lead him down the hall and Eddie follows. Eddie's mouth, which seems to have a suicidal disregard for Eddie's dignity, opens and says:

"As long as it comes with a happy ending, right?"

The hallway goes quiet.

There's a delay. Half a second, maybe less. The words exist in the air between them and Eddie's brain hasn't caught up yet, still processing, but when it finally does, all he feels is pure, undiluted horror.

His face ignites, the heat starts at his collar and climbs his throat, flooding his cheeks and there is nothing he can do to stop it, nothing at all, he is a man on fire in a hallway that smells like lemongrass because he just proposed a happy fucking ending to his massage therapist within the first ninety seconds of meeting him.

"I didn't— that came out—" He's stammering, words tripping over each other like they're all trying to flee his mouth at once. "I meant the massage. Just— having a good experience. Leaving relaxed. That’s all I was saying. I wasn't— I don't want— that's not what I—"

Buck has stopped walking.

Buck has turned around.

And the expression on his face is — God. It's delight. Pure, undisguised, barely contained delight. His mouth is pressed together, fighting something, the corners twitching with the effort of not erupting into what Eddie suspects would be an extremely loud and extremely justified laugh.

He lets Eddie spiral for exactly long enough to be cruel about it. Three seconds. Maybe four. An eternity, measured in heartbeats.

Then, low and warm: "Noted." A beat. Buck’s eyes are bright. Sultry. Terrible. "I'll make sure you leave happy."

He holds Eddie's gaze for one beat longer than necessary — his eyes bright, dancing with something Eddie can't name and doesn't want to — and then turns and keeps walking, a casual destruction.

Eddie stands in the hallway. Face on fire. Dignity in ruins. Somewhere behind him, the water feature trickles on, indifferent to his suffering.

He follows Buck down the hall in silence because he is never speaking again. He's done. He'll communicate exclusively through nods and hand signals. He'll learn sign language. He'll become a monk. A silent monk in a monastery where no one has arms or a birthmark or a smile that could—

Stop. Just walk. Just walk and don’t say words anymore.

The room has more crystals, and Eddie is learning you can never have too many crystals, apparently.

There's a selenite wand on a shelf — Eddie doesn't know it's called a selenite wand, just sees a fancy translucent stick that looks like a frozen lightning bolt and has a little title card that says “selenite wand” next to it and figures hey, that must be a selenite wand.

There's a singing bowl on a side table. A plant in the corner that might be real or fake, Eddie can't tell and it’s bothering him more than it should. And on the wall, tastefully framed, hangs a poster diagramming the seven chakras with detailed text about energy flow and spiritual alignment, and Eddie's pretty sure all seven of his are blocked because he feels like he might be having a heart attack.

His root chakra is apparently located at the base of his spine and governs "security, stability, and basic needs." His basic need right now is to survive the next fifty-five minutes without saying anything else that could be interpreted as a sexual proposition. He doesn't think the poster covers that.

Eddie sits in one of the chairs as Buck closes the door behind them. He's got a clipboard and he's clicking a pen — a nervous habit, maybe, or just a habit, Eddie doesn't know him well enough yet to know the difference — and he looks ready to ask normal questions that Eddie is sure he’s going to find extremely difficult. 

"Alright. Before we start, any injuries? Surgeries, chronic stuff, anything I should work around?"

"My right shoulder. Old injury, gets tight."

"How old are we talking?"

"Couple years. Work thing."

Buck's eyebrows go up. "Yeah? What do you do?"

"Firefighter."

Something moves across Buck's face. Quick, there and gone, his eyes doing a thing, a flick, almost involuntary, and Eddie doesn't have time to wonder what it was before Buck's already writing on the clipboard. "That explains a lot, actually. Anywhere else?"

"Lower back. It's just kind of..." Say a word. Say any word that isn't a disaster. "Tight. Everything's tight."

"Tight," Buck repeats. He's not smiling, his mouth perfectly neutral. His eyes though, his eyes are absolutely smiling. "Okay. Tight I can definitely work with."

Something about the way he says definitely makes Eddie look at the chakra poster again. The chakra poster offers nothing. Useless.

"Pressure preference? One to ten. One's barely a suggestion, ten's basically me standing on you."

Eddie's brain, unbidden, produces an image of Buck standing on him. Eddie did not request this image. Eddie deletes the image, empties the trash, and reformats the entire drive.

"Medium? Maybe a bit more? I don't really have a... I've never done this before."

Buck looks up from the clipboard fully, pen lowered. "Wait, never? Like, never never?"

"Never never."

"Seriously? Not even like a chair massage at the airport or one of those mall kiosk things?"

"I don't... no. I don't— I didn’t even know those were a thing still."

Buck sets the clipboard down. He looks genuinely excited by this information, lit up with it, like Eddie just told him he's never tried pizza or seen the ocean. 

"Okay, that's actually great. I love first-timers. No bad habits, no weird expectations from some terrible Groupon massage that traumatized you. I just get to—" he waves a hand, expansive "—show you what it's supposed to feel like."

Show you what it's supposed to feel like. Eddie nods like a person whose internal temperature is normal and not climbing by the second.

"So. Balinese." Buck leans against the counter. Casual, loose, taking up space with an ease Eddie envies and also finds deeply destabilizing. "It's not what most people think of when they hear 'massage.' I'm not just gonna dig into knots for an hour. It's more..." He tilts his head, searching for the word. "Holistic? Everything connects. Long strokes, continuous contact, my hands basically don't leave your skin the whole time. Your body is one system and I'm talking to all of it."

He talks with his hands while he says this. Gestures, illustrates, mimes lengthy flowing strokes through the air with fingers that are — long. His fingers are long. This is a neutral observation with no additional significance.

"Most clients say it's almost meditative. Your brain just kinda... shuts off, and your body does its thing." He looks at Eddie. That half-smile, warmer now, a little conspiratorial. "You seem like someone whose brain could use a break."

"Wow. Thanks."

"Hey, I mean it as a compliment." Buck's grin spreads. "You've been clenching your jaw since you walked in. And your hands— you're gripping that chair like it said something about your mother."

Eddie looks down. He is, in fact, strangling the armrest. He lets go and stands, his fingers leaving dents in the upholstery.

"See? That's what I'm talking about. One more thing before we start.” Buck opens a cabinet by the door and pulls out a robe. White, cotton, folded crisply. He holds it out. “You'll change into this first. We start with a foot ritual before the table work, warm water, some pressure work on the feet. Gets you grounded. So you'll be in the robe for that part."

Eddie takes the robe. It's soft. Unreasonably soft. Soft with a thread count and a superiority complex.

"Everything off underneath," Buck adds, breezy. "I'll give you a few minutes."

He grins. 

“And Eddie?”

“Yeah?”

Buck opens the door, pauses, and looks back. "I know it’s a lot to ask of you," the corner of his mouth twitches. “But try to relax.”

The door clicks shut behind him. Eddie stands alone holding a stranger's bathrobe and stares at the selenite wand and whispers "what am I doing here" to the empty room, which does not answer, because it's a room.

He looks at the robe. Looks at his clothes. Looks at the robe.

Everything off underneath.

So — naked. Naked in a robe. One belt and a prayer between him and complete exposure, in a room full of healing minerals, while a man named Buck waits on the other side of the door to wash his feet. 

His feet. Like scripture. Like Eddie took a wrong turn in the parking lot and ended up in the New Testament and nobody thought to redirect him.

He undresses. Folds his jeans neatly, shirt on top, squared at the corners. Socks tucked into shoes. His underwear gives him half a second of hesitation before he adds them to the pile, because Buck said everything and Eddie is, above all else, a man who follows instructions. It's a military thing. Also possibly, in this specific context, a problem.

He ties the robe at the waist, covers what needs covering, and technically nothing is wrong except Eddie can feel air in places air has no business being and every shift of his weight sends the fabric sliding against bare skin with a frictionless intimacy that makes the nothing underneath it impossible to ignore. 

He's wearing a garment that’s no more than a suggestion, really. One aggressive exhale and it's over.

He catches his reflection in the mirror. Barefoot. White robe. Stricken expression. Surrounded by crystals. He looks like he's about to be inducted into a cult.

He tightens the belt. Loosens it — too tight screams I am not okay. Tightens it again — too loose and the whole thing falls open mid-foot-wash and he has to fake his own death and start a new life in a landlocked state under an assumed name. He decides on a knot somewhere in the middle and takes a breath.

This is fine. People wear robes. This is a spa. You go to a spa, you take off your clothes, you put on their robe, you sit in a chair while a devastatingly attractive man kneels at your feet and washes them with flower water. That's just what spas are. 

Eddie wouldn't know. 

He uses three-in-one body wash. He's out of his depth in a building that sells rocks for forty dollars but he can wear a robe. He can absolutely wear a robe.

Two knocks and Buck's voice carries through the door. "You decent? Well— indecent, technically. That's the goal."

Eddie tightens the belt one last time and says, "Yeah" and Buck opens the door, leaning against the frame, letting his eyes do a pass. Quick, professional, head to toe and back, but thorough enough that Eddie feels it burn through the cotton.

Buck smirks. "Look at you. Almost relaxed."

"I'm not."

"No, I can tell. You tied that belt tighter than anyone I’ve ever seen." He pushes off the frame and nods toward the chair. "Come on. Let's get you started."

There's a basin on the floor by the chair. Copper, wide, filled with warm water that's been infused with — Eddie leans closer — flower petals. Actual flower petals, white and pink, drifting on the surface like an offering, and Eddie is absolutely certain that thirty minutes ago those petals were minding their own business on a perfectly good flower before someone plucked them off and drowned them for ambiance.

"Go ahead and have a seat," Buck says, pulling a low stool from the corner and positioning it in front of the chair, dropping onto it with an ease that suggests this is routine for him, muscle memory, just another day of kneeling at a stranger's feet in a room full of crystals. "Feet in whenever you're ready."

Eddie sits. 

The chair tries to swallow him again and he lets it this time, because fighting the furniture and fighting his own nervous system simultaneously feels like overextending his forces, tactically unwise, a two-front war he cannot win. 

He looks down at the basin, then at Buck, then at Buck’s arms settling near his feet, the tendons, the shift of muscle under tanned skin, his hands, dipping in the water to test the temperature. He tells himself that it's practical, it's necessary for the task at hand, it is a completely unremarkable action performed by millions of people daily and none of those millions of people have ever made it look this… erotic.

Eddie puts his feet in the water. 

It's warm, bordering on hot, and whatever's in it — the petals, or some oil, or the accumulated spiritual energy haunting the entire building — makes it silky against his skin, frictionless and soft. He exhales without meaning to, a puff of air escaping him.

"Good temperature?" Buck asks. 

Eddie nods, because this is a question he can handle, a question with a clear factual answer. Yes, the water is a good temperature, he could be questioned about water temperature all day and provide easy answers. Water temperature is the one welcome topic in this room.

Then Buck reaches into the basin and picks up Eddie's left foot.

One hand cradling his heel and the other wrapping around his arch, water streaming between Buck's fingers and dripping back into the basin. 

Eddie watches it happen with the distinct sensation of having left his own body, because a man is holding his foot and Eddie doesn't know what to do with his face or his hands or the rest of himself and he's been looking at the top of Buck's head for four seconds without blinking.

Buck settles Eddie's foot on his thigh.

On. His. Thigh.

His actual, ridiculously muscular thigh. Eddie's bare foot, wet and dripping, pressed against the solid warmth of Buck's quadricep through thin scrub fabric that is doing absolutely nothing, contributing nothing, a purely decorative barrier that broadcasts every shift of muscle underneath in high-definition.

Buck just keeps going, doesn't pause or acknowledge that he's invited Eddie's foot to rest on his body like this is a normal place for Eddie's foot to be, which, in this room, in this profession, it probably is. 

This is the job. 

The job involves thighs. 

Eddie did not read the fine print and he is suffering for it.

He’s distantly aware that he wouldn’t have reacted to Briana’s thighs like this, no matter how muscular. 

Buck's thumbs press into the arch of his foot and Eddie grabs both armrests like he’s bracing for turbulence.

"You okay up there?" 

Buck's not looking at him, his attention focused entirely on Eddie's foot, professional and methodical, his thumbs working slow firm circles into the arch that send sparks traveling up Eddie's calf, past his ankle, through his knee, into his thigh, and then continuing upward into regions Eddie cannot focus too much on or it will become a problem.

"Great," Eddie says, half an octave above his usual register. "Totally great."

"You're gripping the chair again."

"I'm aware."

Buck laughs — quiet, mostly air, a breath with a smile in it — and presses harder into the arch. Eddie feels a pop, a joint releasing or a tension point surrendering, and the relief cascades up his entire leg, hip flexor unlocking, a sound falling out of his mouth before he has any say in the matter. Small and involuntary, caught between a gasp and a groan, punched out of him by pure physical release.

Buck's hands still. His fingers tighten around Eddie's foot, fractional, a grip that intensifies for half a heartbeat before he catches himself, then his hands are moving again, smooth and controlled, but his jaw shifts. 

Eddie sees it, the tiny clench and release, composure reassembling itself as quickly as it collapsed.

"Lot of tension in your feet," Buck says, his voice steady and professional, but carrying a new roughness that wasn't there sixty seconds ago. "You on your feet all shift?"

"Twenty-four hours sometimes."

"And you've never had anyone work on them."

"Not— no."

Buck shakes his head, slow, almost mournful, as though Eddie's neglected feet constitute a personal tragedy he's going to need time to process. 

"Criminal. These feet carry you into burning buildings and nobody's ever touched them." His thumb traces the tendon along the top of Eddie's foot, following it from ankle to toe in one long pull, and Eddie's breath catches audibly. "That's gonna change."

He works methodically after that. Heel, arch, ball, and then each toe — individually, because apparently every one of Eddie's toes warrants its own dedicated attention, its own specific pressure and rotation and careful stretch — and Eddie stares at the ceiling and tries to think about property taxes, filing deadlines, the specific tedium of Schedule C deductions, the quarterly estimated payments he always files late, anything, literally any thought that doesn't involve Buck's fingers sliding between his toes with slow, merciless precision.

"Other foot."

Buck lowers Eddie's left foot into the basin, gentle, and lifts the right. Same grip, same cradle, heel held, arch supported, foot settled onto his thigh like it was always meant to be there, like Buck's thigh is a designated resting surface for Eddie's extremities, municipally zoned and structurally permitted.

This time Eddie doesn't grab the armrest — progress, he thinks, until he realizes his hands have simply migrated to the bathrobe fabric over his lap instead, fisted in the terry cloth, white-knuckled, a lateral transfer of panic rather than any genuine improvement.

Buck works a knot out of the ball of his foot and Eddie groans, louder this time, a low sound that escapes before he can swallow it, and Buck's thigh flexes under his foot. A full contraction, the muscle tightening against Eddie's sole obviously. Buck breathes out through his nose, very carefully controlled, and doesn't look up.

"Sorry," Eddie manages. "I don't usually—"

"Don't apologize." Quiet and firm, brooking no argument. Buck's thumb presses into the spot again and Eddie's toes curl against Buck's leg, his foot arching into the pressure. "That's your body releasing. Means it's working. Just let it happen."

Let it happen. As if Eddie has a choice. As if there is a single cell in his body that isn't already letting it happen with reckless, wholehearted, enthusiastic abandon.

Buck dries his feet with a towel afterward. Warm and soft, wrapped around each foot and pressed between each toe and Eddie watches Buck's hands tending to each one with a patience that borders on reverence. 

Eddie has the sudden, lunatic thought that no one has ever touched him this tenderly for this long. Not a doctor, not a partner, possibly not even his mother, and the thought is so large and so unexpected that he has to look away.

"Alright." Buck pats his foot, setting it down and looking up. 

His cheeks are flushed, barely, a dusting of pink across his cheekbones, and Eddie notices immediately. "Ready for the table?"

Eddie nods because he doesn’t trust his own voice. He's not sure he trusts his legs either, standing on feet that have been thoroughly and devastatingly attended to by a man who's still on a stool, looking up at him with those blue, blue eyes.

He makes it to the table and does not think about Buck kneeling at his feet. He does not think about the warmth of Buck's thigh under his arch. He does not think about the hitch of Buck's breath when Eddie groaned.

He thinks about all of it. Constantly. Immediately. For the rest of his life, probably.

He undresses and gets on the table, face-down, sheet pulled up to his waist. The face cradle smells like cotton and tea tree oil and he presses his forehead into it and commands his body to relax, which works about as well as yelling at water to boil. He is tense about being tense. Russian nesting dolls of rigidity, each one smaller and more clenched than the last.

He adjusts his arms. Folds them under his head, unfolds them, puts them at his sides (too stiff), moves them back up (too casual), is having a mild panic attack about arm placement when he hears the knocks on the door.

Two knocks, and Buck comes back in. Eddie hears his footsteps, soft, barefoot or close to it, and then the click of a bottle cap, the warm slick sound of oil between palms. A pause. A slow breath. And then something Eddie can't quite identify: a murmur, low and brief, maybe a word, maybe just an exhale directed at the crystals or the air itself. Some sort of centering ritual. Energy clearing. Spiritual preparation.

If this man tries to align his chakras, Eddie is walking out. He'll get dressed and leave and tell Hen he had a bad reaction to the decorative minerals. That's where his line is.

Buck's hands touch his back.

Eddie forgets where his line is. Eddie forgets there was a line. Eddie forgets what lines are.

The first stroke runs the full length of his spine, slow and warm and firm. Two palms pressing through oil-slicked skin, dragging heat from the base of his neck all the way down to his lower back in one long, unbroken pull, and Eddie's entire body does something it has never once done in thirty-three years of existence.

It lets go.

Just a release, deep and structural, like load-bearing walls giving up their hold all at once. Muscles he didn't know he was clenching suddenly aren't clenched anymore and the relief is so sharp it almost hurts, like blood rushing back to a limb that's been numb for so long he forgot it was there.

His exhale comes out shaky, embarrassingly shaky, and he covers it by pressing his face harder into the cradle.

Buck does it again. Same stroke, same pressure, same devastating continuity, his hands never lifting, never breaking contact, one movement pouring into the next, and Eddie understands suddenly what Buck meant by holistic because this isn't clinical and it isn't segmented, it's one long unbroken conversation between Buck's hands and Eddie's body, and Eddie's body is responding with a lot of enthusiasm.

His brain starts to unspool. The running commentary stutters, loses its edges, goes soft and formless at the margins.

This is fine. Professional. Basically physical therapy. He's had physical therapy. This is—

Buck's thumb finds a knot below his left scapula, digs in, and holds.

Eddie moans.

Not a groan, not a hum, a moan — low and involuntary, pulled from somewhere primal, from the absolute basement of his chest, a sound he's never heard himself make and didn't know he was capable of making. It comes out before he can catch it, fills the room, and Eddie freezes so completely he might actually be dead.

Buck's hands still.

It's brief, barely there, a fraction of a second where Buck's palms press flat and don't move and his fingers tense against Eddie's skin, but it's real, Eddie felt it, something in Buck's composure flickering before his hands start moving again, smooth and even and professional but different now. More deliberate, careful. Like Eddie's body just said something Buck heard loud and clear and is choosing not to address out loud.

Eddie presses his burning face into the cradle and contemplates whether it's possible to spontaneously evaporate because he just moaned, on a massage table, loudly, and Buck reacted. Buck's hands stuttered, and they're both going to pretend nothing happened now which is somehow worse than if either of them acknowledged it because now it's just going to live in the room with them. That sound and Buck's reaction to it, unspoken and enormous, while Buck's thumbs press into the knot with renewed focus and Eddie's body wants desperately to make that sound again.

He bites his tongue so hard his eyes water.

"You had a lot hiding in there," Buck says after a moment, his voice easy and casual and maybe, maybe, a fraction lower than before, though that could be Eddie's imagination. "This is what happens when firefighters just... bulldoze through everything for years. All that tension's gotta live somewhere."

"Mm," Eddie manages. One consonant. Maximum capacity.

"When's the last time anybody worked on these shoulders?"

"Define 'worked on'." Muffled, strained, coming from somewhere inside the face cradle.

Buck laughs, low and warm and close, and Eddie feels it travel down his spine like a current. "Fair enough. I meant professionally, but honestly I feel like the answer to both is never."

It is never, both answers are solidly never, but Eddie doesn't say this because Buck is moving to his lower back now with his thumbs tracking along the muscles on either side of his spine and Eddie's ability to form sentences is degrading in real time. Every coherent thought dissolves the second Buck's hands reach it, like his IQ is oil-soluble, each stroke pulling more of it out through his skin until there's nothing left but sensation and the fading awareness that he used to be smarter than this.

"You can breathe, you know." Buck says, amused. "I can literally feel you holding your breath."

Eddie breathes and it comes out wrong, too deep and ragged, and he overcorrects into something shallow and that's worse and now he's thinking about breathing which means he's forgotten how to breathe which means he’s doing the opposite of what Buck just asked of him, and yet.

"There you go." It’s warm, encouraging, as if Eddie just accomplished something way more impressive than breathing. "Just like that. Stay with it."

Eddie has been praised for many things in his life. Marksmanship. Bravery under fire. His abuela's arroz con pollo recipe that he can make from memory. None of it — none of it — has ever hit the way quite like Buck murmuring there you go while pressing his thumbs into the small of his back does.

Eddie’s brain tries to reroute this thought. Reclassify it. He's good at his job. That's all. You'd react this way to anyone competent. Briana would've—

Except he wouldn't have moaned for Briana. He knows that with a sudden, uncomfortable certainty. He would've been fine with Briana. 

Wherever Briana is, he hopes she’s doing better than he is.

Time stops making sense at some point.

Eddie doesn't know how long Buck works on his back — fifteen minutes or an hour or the full lifespan of a small star. Everything turns syrupy. The Balinese rhythm lulls his brain into something close to silence, which is remarkable because Eddie's brain has not been silent since, well, ever. Long strokes, continuous contact, warmth layered on warmth. Buck's hands never pause, never lift, just migrate from one area to the next without a break, and Eddie's thoughts come apart like wet paper.

Fragments surface and sink. His hands are so warm and then nothing. How are they so warm, is that a crystal thing, did the crystals— and then nothing. Just the music and the oil and Buck's breathing, steady and even, and the specific sound of palms gliding over skin.

He's floating. He does not float. He has never in his life floated. He once downloaded a meditation app and got so frustrated with the woman telling him to "release his thoughts" that he cracked his phone screen from gripping it too hard. Bobby made him do a breathing exercise at the station once and Eddie got mad at the concept of breathing. But whatever Buck is doing has gotten him somewhere close, his thoughts still technically there but distant and formless, background noise that can't quite reach him through the warm steady pressure of Buck's hands.

Then Buck takes his hand.

His left hand. Lifts it gently off the table and cradles it in both of his, just holds it for a second, adjusting his grip. The contact is so different from everything else, smaller and more specific, Buck's fingers wrapping around his, it makes Eddie blink awake behind the face cradle.

Oh. Hand massage. Sure. People get hand massages. This is normal. Hen gets these. Karen definitely—

Buck presses his thumbs into the center of Eddie's palm and every thought in his head scatters.

He didn't know his hands were tense. He didn't know hands could be this tense. But Buck's thumbs are working into the meat of his palm in slow firm circles and something is unraveling, something deep and knotted and old that's been building for years, every hose he's hauled and every ladder rung and every fist he's made in his sleep. Every callus has a knot underneath it. Every tendon is holding on to something. Buck finds them all.

"God, your hands," Buck says, almost to himself, pressing harder. "What are you doing to these?"

Eddie doesn't trust himself to respond so he makes a noise that's meant to be casual and comes out closer to a whimper and he would very much like to stop being alive now, please.

Buck works each finger individually. Pressing, pulling, stretching gently. Thorough and methodical and Eddie's brain is clinging to a clinical narration of the technique like a man clinging to driftwood — this is a therapeutic technique, standard curriculum, probably chapter twelve of some textbook — but then Buck slides his fingers between Eddie's.

Slowly.

One at a time. Pressing into the webbing between each knuckle. Stretching the spaces with deliberate, patient, excruciating attention to detail.

It's a technique. It is clearly, obviously, unambiguously a technique. Eddie can recognize a technique when he's on the receiving end of one and this is one.

His body does not care even a little bit.

Heat blooms up his wrist, his forearm, and pools behind his sternum like something catching fire. His fingers twitch, barely anything, just the start of a curl, his hand trying to close around Buck's on pure brainless instinct, acting on that impulse before his conscious mind can catch up.

"Hey." Buck's voice, low and close enough that Eddie can feel his breath on his forearm. "You're gripping again. Try to let go for me."

Let go for me. He's going to hear that sentence in his sleep. He's going to hear it at work while holding a charged hose line, he's going to fumble something critical at the worst possible moment. 

He forces his fingers to unclench. It takes a direct, conscious command from whatever's left of his executive functioning. His hand opens. Buck resumes.

"You know," Buck says, conversational, thumbs still working, "your hands tell me a lot about you." His fingers trace the topography of Eddie's palm, the ridges and calluses and rough patches. "These are serious hands. I could tell before you even said firefighter."

"How?"

"Callus patterns. Grip strength. And don't take this the wrong way but your hand is, like, almost fighting me right now. Instinct, right? You grab things for a living, your hands don't know how to be held." A pause, his thumb settling on a ridge of scar tissue near the base of Eddie's index finger. Eddie's breath snags in his chest. "This one's not from cooking."

"Structure fire. Couple years back. Glove tore on a nail."

"Mm." Buck traces the scar, light enough to tickle, firm enough not to, right on the boundary between the two, which is worse than either. "Does it still bother you?"

"Nah. It's nothing."

"Liar." Buck presses into the scar tissue, and Eddie hisses through his teeth because there it is, a deep buried ache radiating out from the healed skin, something he hasn't felt in months because he stopped noticing it or told himself he stopped noticing it. "This has been messing with your grip for years and you just decided to tough it out?"

"It's not that bad."

"Eddie. Your hand is literally compensating around this scar. Every time you grip something, you're routing around damage instead of through it." His thumb circles the tissue, patient, persistent. "Sound like anyone you know?"

Eddie splutters. "Did you just use my scar tissue as a metaphor?"

"I absolutely did. Was it too much?"

"Little bit."

"Good, ‘s what I was going for." Buck sounds delighted with himself. Something loosens under his thumb and Eddie's hand suddenly has range of motion it hasn't had since the fire. His eyes sting, briefly, stupidly, and he blinks it away fast.

"You should moisturize more," Buck murmurs.

"I'll add it to the list."

"Seriously, though. These hands are…" Buck does something with his thumb along the inside of Eddie's wrist, right over the vein, and Eddie's vision whites out for a full second. "You take care of everyone else. Somebody should be taking care of these." A pause, then quieter, barely a whisper, “Of you.”

Eddie says nothing because his throat won't cooperate, too tight and too thick and too full of emotion, of being read so clearly by someone who he met less than an hour ago but already seems to know him better than most. 

Buck gives his hand one final stretch. Fingers spread wide, gentle pressure, a squeeze at the end that lingers — one beat past clinical, two beats past friendly — before he sets it down.

"Other side."

Eddie has to do this again. The entire thing. The fingers, the sliding, the devastating web-stretching intimacy of it. Because God, in His infinite wisdom, gave humans two hands. And Eddie has to survive Buck holding both of them.

Buck takes his right hand and Eddie braces himself and it doesn't help because bracing doesn't work when the thing you're bracing against is someone being gentle with you. Buck laces their fingers together — routine, standard, chapter twelve — and Eddie's brain skips like a scratched record. 

He white-knuckles edge of the bed with his free hand. Buck says "let go" again, just those two words, soft, almost a murmur, and Eddie does. 

Eddie doesn't want to think about that. About how easy it is for Buck to get him to do things, because Eddie is the most stubborn person he knows and everyone who's ever met him would agree. 

But when Buck talks, he just listens, and that is something he is going to need to sit with for a very long time but not right now. Right now all he can focus on is Buck, holding his hand.

Buck's been working on his hands for what might be minutes or centuries when he disappears.

There’s a pause. Brief, loaded, a held breath in the room itself. Eddie hears Buck shift behind him, fabric adjusting, and he's about to wonder what's happening when—

Buck's thighs settle on either side of his hips.

No announcement. No hey, I'm going to climb on top of you now. Just weight. Solid, encompassing weight sinking onto him as Buck straddles his lower back and presses him into the table with steady certainty, and Eddie's brain blue-screens. 

Buck is on top of him, Buck is sitting on him, Buck's thighs are bracketing his hips and his weight is pinning Eddie flat and the sheet between them is thin enough to be purely theoretical, a polite fiction, a suggestion of a barrier that communicates every degree of warmth and every shift of muscle with merciless clarity.

Buck's hands press flat against his upper spine and slide upward, the full force of his body behind them, and the groan Eddie lets loose could be described as pained, but the correct term would probably be closer to animalistic, pulled from the depths of his chest.

Buck's hands falter.

His thumbs dig in harder. Not gradual, immediate, a spike in pressure that follows Eddie's groan like a response, an answer, his thumbs grinding into a knot at the base of Eddie's neck. Eddie arches into it before he can stop himself, his spine curving up, pressing back against Buck's weight, and Buck's thighs clamp tighter around his hips, a reflexive squeeze that neither of them acknowledges.

The room is very quiet. The ambient maybe-harp continues its gentle indifference. Eddie's breathing has become ragged, too fast, every exhale teetering dangerously close to another moan. And he's fighting it, jaw locked, teeth pressed together, because if he makes that sound again he doesn't know what follows. Eddie doesn't know what Buck will do. He doesn't know what he will do.

Buck runs both hands down the full length of his spine and back up, his body rocking forward with the stroke, hips shifting against Eddie’s ass, and Eddie's vision dissolves to static.

"You're gripping again." Buck's voice is lower than before, rough and warm at the same time. "Your whole back just locked up."

"I'm fine."

"You're not. Let go, Eddie."

Eddie tries, unclenching his jaw, breathing deeper. 

Just then, Buck finds another knot buried deep in the trapezius, leaning his full weight into it and Eddie groans — open, helpless, unmistakable. A sound with no alibi.

Buck squeezes. Both hands on Eddie’s shoulders, a full-grip compression that pushes Eddie deeper into the table. Buck's fingers are trembling. Barely, a fine vibration against Eddie's skin that could be effort or could be exertion or could be neither and both of them know it, because technique doesn't tremble, technique is steady and controlled and Buck's hands are the opposite of those things right now.

"You—" Buck starts and stops, clearing his throat. When he speaks again, his voice is even and Eddie can hear the cost of that evenness, can hear the effort holding it level. "You hold everything right here. These traps. Like you're bracing against a load you never put down."

"I'm a firefighter. I carry heavy things."

"That's not what I mean and you know it."

Eddie does know it. He presses his face into the cradle and says nothing.

Buck leans forward, sliding his hands down Eddie's arms, and his fingers lace between Eddie's. Both hands, simultaneously, pressing Eddie's hands flat to the table with their fingers intertwined. 

It's a stretch, a shoulder opener, it is absolutely a technique with a name and a chapter number in a textbook Eddie will never read, and none of that knowledge does a single thing to mitigate the reality that Buck is holding both of his hands and his chest is close enough to Eddie's back that Eddie can feel the heat radiating off him, and when Buck breathes his exhale ghosts across the back of Eddie's neck, and Eddie's brain — Loss-of-composure-Eddie's brain, the one that stopped listening to Rational-Eddie roughly twenty minutes ago — supplies a very clear, very detailed image of what this would feel like in a bed. 

This exact position. Buck's chest pressed to his back and Buck's fingers laced through his and Buck's hips flush against him and Buck's mouth exactly where it is now, right against his ear, except horizontal and under sheets and with significantly less professionalism and zero witnesses and Eddie would be making every sound he's currently suppressing and Buck wouldn't be whispering breathe, Buck would be whispering other things, and Eddie shuts this entire line of thinking down so hard he nearly gives himself a concussion from the inside.

Eddie shivers. Head to toe, visible, involuntary, a tremor that passes through him like a current.

Buck holds the position. Holds Eddie's hands. Holds him pinned, really, pressed flat and spread open against the table with their fingers interlocked. Buck's thumbs begin moving against Eddie's palms — small, slow circles, tender and exact, and the touch is doing two things at once, soothing him and dismantling him simultaneously with devastating efficiency, and Eddie, who hasn’t learned his lesson and apparently never will, thinks of a follow-up image to the bed scenario. This time Buck's thumbs are doing the same circles but on Eddie's hipbones, while the rest of Buck is—

No. Absolutely not. Eddie locks that thought in a vault and welds the vault shut and drops the vault into the ocean.

"Breathe," Buck murmurs, his mouth close enough to Eddie's ear that the word lands on his skin.

Eddie breathes and it comes out shattered, a ragged exhale that fractures into a desperate, strangled sound at the end, and Buck's fingers tighten between his. A full squeeze, encompassing, that lasts one beat past necessary, two beats past professional, lingering in a territory that has no name and no chapter number and no justification.

"There you go." Barely a whisper, barely anything, Buck's lips so close Eddie can feel the shape of the words on his neck. "Good."

One syllable. Four letters. A word Eddie has heard ten thousand times in his life and never once like this — never poured into his ear by a voice gone rough and low and intimate while hands hold his and weight presses him down and his whole body hums with the praise like a tuning fork struck at exactly the right frequency, resonating, resonating, still resonating.

Eddie's brain, helpful as ever, points out that if Buck said good like that in the bed scenario, Eddie would actually die, just flatline on the spot, and they'd have to call the paramedics, except Eddie is a medic, but he can't exactly run his own code while Buck is—

He is going to stop thinking. He is going to achieve the empty mind that every meditation app has ever promised him. He is going to become a blank, thoughtless void, starting now.

Everything stops.

The monologue, the panic, the constant churning machinery of Eddie's brain — the rationalizing and the rerouting and the endless exhausting effort of keeping himself in check — all of it just goes quiet.

Full, ringing quiet, like the moment after an explosion when the world hasn't caught up to the damage yet.

Just this: Buck's weight on him. Buck's hands threaded through his. Buck's breathing against his neck. Eddie's own heart, enormous and obvious, hammering through his chest into the table so hard the vibration must reach Buck's knees, his palms, every place their bodies are connected, which is everywhere. 

They are connected everywhere.

And deeper than that. Underneath the sensation, underneath the warmth and pressure and oil and the ambient maybe-harp. Somewhere behind his ribs, in a place he's spent decades building walls around — brick by careful brick, year by year, since before he had words for what he was bricking over or why — a foundation settles. Shifts. A door painted shut so long the paint became part of the frame cracks open, letting in light and air and the terrifying undeniable truth of what's been on the other side this whole time.

Oh.

Not a thought. A feeling. Full-body and seismic. Every nerve ending firing at once with a single unified message.

...oh.

Buck unlaces their fingers, sits back, his weight settling on Eddie's hips again, and his thumbs dig into the base of Eddie's neck and Eddie's breath leaves him all at once and his eyes burn and he knows. 

He knows. 

A remembering, an unearthing, a thing he buried so long ago he convinced himself it was never there, clawing back to the surface because Buck's hands gave it permission and his body said finally.

Okay.

And then the panic sets in.

Full force, all at once, like a dam breaking in his skull and every thought he's ever suppressed comes flooding through at once because he is lying face-down on a massage table in a crystal palace while a man sits on top of him and Eddie has just realized — not suspected, not considered late at night and smothered by morning, not excused as everybody thinks that sometimes — realized, with the full-spectrum, cannot-be-unseen, flashbang-at-point-blank-range clarity of absolute certainty, that he is attracted to men.

Not in a way he can reclassify as admiration or curiosity or an enthusiastic appreciation for someone's professional credentials. Attracted. To men. 

This man. 

Men in general, maybe. 

The entire sweeping, terrifying, Buck-shaped category.

His brain goes through the five stages of grief so fast it should require clearance from the FAA:

It's the oil. The oil has something in it. The crystals are emitting a frequency. I drank the rock water, I drank Rose Quartz Tea, and it's rewiring my entire—

Hen. HEN. She knew. She absolutely knew. She handed me this gift card with those eyes, those omniscient, all-seeing, I-know-something-you-don't eyes and she said "you deserve to treat yourself, Eddie" and I thought she meant my SHOULDERS—

Okay but maybe it's just him though. One guy. An outlier. A fluke. Everyone finds one person attractive, that's not— that's human— that doesn't have to mean—

Buck shifts his weight, rocking forward, his thighs tightening against Eddie's hips and his hands pressing into the knotted muscle along Eddie's thoracic spine with a pressure that's almost unbearable and absolutely perfect and Eddie's hips press into the table involuntarily and—

Not a fluke. Not an outlier. The data is in and the results are conclusive and the sample size is my entire body.

I said happy ending. I SAID HAPPY ENDING. I looked this man in his beautiful face and said the words "happy ending" out loud with my mouth and now he is SITTING ON ME—

I am so gay. Oh my God. I am so irreversibly, tectonically gay. I am gay in a room full of healing crystals. I am gay on a massage table. My root chakra is absolutely unblocked right now. My sacral energy is FULLY aligned. I owe Hen a fruit basket and a confession and possibly a kidney and I feel like I need to call a priest except there is a man sitting on me, which is the PROBLEM.

"You're finally relaxing," Buck says, right above him, his hands still moving, still pressing, still systematically destroying whatever's left of Eddie's capacity for denial. "Like, actually relaxing. I can feel the difference."

A pause. Eddie can hear him smile.

"See? Told you. Happy ending."

Eddie bites the inside of his cheek so hard he tastes copper. Every muscle in his body locks to keep from making a sound, any sound, because the sounds he wants to make right now are not appropriate for this setting or any setting or possibly any plane of existence.

He makes a noise anyway. He means it to be affirmative and controlled and it comes out strangled and wrecked and about two octaves lower than his normal speaking voice and Buck's hands pause again — that same tiny stutter from before, that split-second freeze — and this time Eddie feels Buck's thighs tense around him before the rhythm picks back up.

Oh, cool. So. That's mutual, then. Whatever this is. Whatever just happened.

Eddie presses his face into the cradle and screams internally at a pitch that would shatter the goddamn singing bowl if it were audible, and processes the fact that his entire sexual identity just did a one-eighty because a man named Buck — of all things — sat on top of him.

The magazine was right. Your body knows what your mind refuses to hear. He's going to burn that magazine. He's going to buy it first and then burn it.

Hen is never going to let him live this down.

He's never going to let himself live this down.

"Alright." Buck's weight lifts, his thighs releasing Eddie's hips, and Eddie's body feels the loss with a pang so immediate and visceral it's almost grief, a mourning of warmth and pressure and contact that his muscles had already learned to need in the span of however long Buck was up there. "Time to flip. On your back."

On your back. 

Two words, one instruction, and Eddie's brain — which just underwent a full tectonic sexual identity shift and should by all rights be in recovery mode, resting, convalescing, taking it easy — instead immediately produces a detailed visualization of all the other contexts in which Buck could say on your back to him, and Eddie would very much like to file a complaint against his own thoughts, because this is harassment and he shouldn't have to work in these conditions.

The sheet lifts above him, tented, a cotton partition between himself and the light and Buck's eyes, and Buck has turned his head, conspicuously studying the far wall, giving Eddie the full unobserved privacy of the moment even though his hands are the only barrier between Eddie's naked body and the open air, and that small deliberate courtesy is doing more damage to Eddie's composure than anything that came before it.

Eddie turns, settling on his back. The sheet drapes over him again, pooling at his waist, and the ceiling is there, and the crystals are there, and Buck is there, and this is a very different experience than face-down.

Face-down was a bunker, a foxhole, his last fortification where he could groan and flinch and have entire psychological reckonings with his face buried in a padded hole and no witnesses. 

Face-up his entire face becomes a live broadcast of everything happening inside him, and Buck is going to be right there watching, and Eddie is going to be watching back, and there is nowhere to hide.

"Before we start this part," Buck says, "I'm going to put this on you."

Silk settles over his eyes. Weighted, cool, blocking out the light instantly and dropping him into total darkness, and the sudden loss of vision makes everything else amplify, Buck's breathing acquiring a texture and rhythm Eddie couldn't hear before, his own heartbeat becoming enormous and ungovernable, pounding in his temples and the thin skin of his wrists. 

Being blindfolded on a massage table is fine. Being blindfolded on a massage table by Buck specifically, after everything that just happened, is an experience that belongs in a very different kind of establishment.

"Helps you stay in your body instead of your head." Buck adjusts the mask, his fingertips brushing Eddie's temples, featherlight, brief. "Most clients find it easier to let go when they can't see."

Let go. Again. 

Buck keeps asking him to let go and Eddie keeps obeying, immediately and completely, and how quickly Eddie yields every time Buck asks is a thread he's going to have to pull on eventually, but not now — not while he's blind on a table and Buck's fingers are leaving his temples and Eddie is thinking about how Buck could ask him to do just about anything in that voice and Eddie would do it, and then thinking about the specific things Buck could ask him to do in that voice, and then forcibly thinking about absolutely anything else.

"Okay," Eddie says to the darkness.

"Okay," Buck echoes, softer.

It's worse. God, it is so much worse like this.

Without sight, Eddie's entire existence collapses to a single channel — touch — and everything else amplifies to compensate, and Buck's hands become the only input, the only signal, the only real and solid thing in a world gone dark and formless. 

When Buck's palms settle on his shoulders, Eddie flinches. Not from pain but from the sheer concentrated intensity of being touched blind, his body receiving it before his mind can sense it.

"Easy." Buck's voice, close, grounding. "It's just me."

Just you is the entire problem, Eddie thinks, clenching his jaw and saying nothing.

Buck works his shoulders from the front, thumbs pressing into the deltoids, tracing the line of his clavicle. Eddie lies there blind and pinned and slowly coming undone, trying to keep his breathing even, failing at it spectacularly, every exhale stuttering and every inhale catching. He can hear himself, knows Buck can hear him, and the mask means he can't see Buck's face, can't read his expression, can only feel his hands and listen to his breathing and try to decode what's happening between them from touch and sound alone. 

He thinks about how this is essentially a trust exercise and Eddie is passing it with flying colors, meaning he trusts a man he met an hour ago more than he trusts most people he's known for years. His brain would like him to sit with that, really think about what that means. 

Eddie would like his brain to shut the fuck up.

This is the most intimate experience of Eddie's life, and he is including experiences that are specifically designed to be intimate, experiences with that explicit purpose and goal. 

This — blind, oiled, laid open on a table while a near-stranger maps the topography of his chest and shoulders with hands that know more about his body after one hour than Eddie has learned in the years of living in it — outranks everything. Eddie doesn't know what to do with himself except survive it one breath at a time.

Buck moves to his right arm. Eddie feels the sheet draw aside, uncovering the limb from shoulder to fingertips, cool air meeting oil-warmed skin and raising goosebumps from his deltoid to his wrist. Buck lifts his arm, cradles it, and begins at the shoulder, long strokes, firm and flowing, his palms wrapping around Eddie's bicep and sliding all the way down to his wrist in one unbroken pull that leaves heat trailing behind it like a comet tail.

Eddie's hand twitches when Buck reaches his wrist. His fingers curl, involuntary, reaching — reaching for Buck's hand, reaching to hold on — and he hears Buck's breath catch. A small hitch, barely there, but in the dark it's deafening.

Buck works down to his hand. Slower now, more precise. The same devastating thumb-in-palm technique from before, except without vision to anchor him every sensation doubles, triples, becomes overwhelming. Buck's thumbs tracing circles in his palm, Buck's fingers lacing between his, the stretch and pull and slide of it. 

Eddie is adrift in the dark with only Buck's hands to orient him, which is like using the storm itself as a compass. 

His brain, once again, ever industrious, ever completely uninterested in Eddie's wellbeing, notes that Buck is holding his hand in the dark and this is objectively romantic, like, if Eddie described this exact scenario to Hen without the word massage in it, Hen would think he was on a date, and Eddie is starting to wonder if Hen somehow knew this would happen. If this was the plan all along, if Hen is sitting at home right now with Karen drinking wine and waiting for exactly the phone call Eddie is increasingly certain he's going to make.

Buck sets his right hand down and moves to the left arm. Same long strokes from shoulder to wrist, same thoroughness, same systematic tenderness that takes Eddie apart muscle by muscle and does not apologize for it. When Buck reaches his palm and finds the scar again — traces it with his thumb, presses into the tissue — Eddie moans brokenly. 

"Eddie," Buck breathes his name, stripped down, all the professional veneer worn through to raw grain underneath. His thumb stills on the scar and Eddie can hear him breathing, can hear the effort in it, the labor of staying professional when whatever is happening between them keeps pulling in a different direction. "You gotta stop doing that."

"Doing what?"

A beat. Long enough to matter.

Long enough that Eddie can hear Buck's breathing change, can hear him choosing words and discarding them, can feel his thumb still pressed to the scar and trembling, and Eddie waits in the dark and his whole body waits with him.

"Sounding like that." It’s rough and honest. The mask over Eddie's eyes has made Buck braver, Eddie can hear it, like it's easier to say things when the person you're saying them to can't look at you while you say them. "You keep making these sounds and I keep— I'm trying to be professional here, I am trying, but you're lying here letting me touch you and every time I find something that hurts you just open up and make that sound and I—"

He stops, his thumb pressing harder into the scar, almost involuntary, and Eddie's breath hitches and Buck must hear it because his hand tightens around Eddie's.

"I'm bisexual." 

It comes out fast, like he's ripping a bandage. "I probably should have mentioned that before I started touching you, and I swear it's never been an issue before, I've been doing this for five years and I have never once had a problem keeping it professional, but you, specifically you, are making it really hard, and I need you to know that so you can tell me to stop if this is— if I'm making you uncomfortable.”

He swallows. "You are not an unattractive person, Eddie. At all. You're actually— honestly, you're kind of insanely attractive and I've been dealing with that since you walked in and I thought I was handling it fine but then you started making sounds and I am not handling it fine. I am handling it the opposite of fine."

Eddie lies there in the dark and feels every word land on his skin like a brand, settling into him. He wants to see Buck's face so badly it's almost unbearable, wants to rip the mask off and look at him, to know what Buck looks like when he's being this honest, but he doesn't move because Buck gave him the mask for a reason and maybe the reason is this, maybe the mask is what's letting Buck say these things, and Eddie is not going to take that away from him.

"It's a lot, Eddie,” Buck continues. “You are a lot. And I need you to either stop making those sounds or accept that I am a human person with a finite amount of willpower and I am running out of it very fast."

"I don’t think I can stop," Eddie says quietly. "I've been trying to stop since you first touched my back and I can't, my body just does it, I don't have any say in it anymore, and if it helps at all I am also having a very hard time with this entire situation and I think you should know that whatever willpower crisis you're experiencing right now I am experiencing it worse because at least you knew you were bisexual before today."

The silence that follows is so complete Eddie can hear the crystals on their shelf doing absolutely nothing, which is all they've ever done, which is all they will ever do.

"Wait." Buck's hand goes very still around his. "Before today?"

"Can we not do this right now? You're holding my hand and I'm blindfolded and I'm having a lot of feelings and I would like to not have my sexual awakening debrief while I'm naked on a table in a room that smells like eucalyptus."

"Eddie, did you figure out you're into guys today? Like. Today today? On my table?"

"I said can we not."

"On my table," Buck repeats, and there's wonder in his voice, genuine wonder, like Eddie just told him he witnessed a miracle and not that he had a sexuality crisis during a spa treatment. "While I was. Oh my God. The straddling. That's when it happened, wasn't it? I was sitting on you and you just—”

"Buck."

"I sat on you and you realized you were gay."

"I am going to need you to stop talking."

"This is the greatest thing that's ever happened to me."

"It is not."

"It's top five. It's definitely top five. Maybe top three. I sat on a man and he discovered he was gay. That's my legacy."

"I am leaving. I'm getting up and leaving right now."

"You're not, though." Buck's voice softens, and his thumb moves against Eddie's scar again, gentle now, tracing it with a tenderness that makes Eddie's throat close. "You're not going anywhere."

Eddie is not going anywhere. Eddie is lying in the dark holding Buck's hand and he is not going anywhere, not now, not ever.

"No," Eddie says quietly. "I'm not."

Buck squeezes his hand, holds it, doesn't let go for a long time. Longer than any technique requires or any chapter in any textbook would recommend, and Eddie lies there blind and wrecked and newly, catastrophically gay, and files this entire conversation in the scrapbook his subconscious has been building all hour, the one with the washi tape and the heart stickers, and adds a new label that reads the day everything changed.

He feels rejuvenated, and only a little pathetic. Maybe there’s more to this whole crystal energy, aligning your chakras stuff after all.

"Okay," Buck says eventually. "I really do need to finish this massage."

"Okay."

"And you really are going to keep… sounding like that."

"Probably."

"And I'm really going to lose my mind."

"Probably."

"Cool. Great. This is fine." Buck sets Eddie's hand down, gently, and Eddie hears him take a long steadying breath. "I'm uncovering your right leg now.” he says, and his voice has found its footing again, a tightrope walk Eddie can hear him performing in real time with the net very, very far below.

The sheet moves, Eddie feels it slide off his right leg, the fabric folding inward, gathering, pooling at the crease of his hip — covering the essentials, barely, a rumpled cotton border draped across his groin. The air meets his thigh, his knee, his shin, the full bare length of his leg exposed from hip to ankle, and he is acutely, excruciatingly aware that there is almost nothing between Buck's hands and the rest of him, and if Buck's hands deviated from their current trajectory by about three inches to the left, Eddie's life would change in ways that are incompatible with this being a professional establishment and also incompatible with Eddie ever making eye contact with another human being again.

Buck's hands start at his ankle, wrapping around it and sliding up — over the shin, the knee, the quad, one long continuous stroke from ankle to hip, his palms pressing flat against the inside of Eddie's thigh and dragging upward, closer to the sheet, closer to the boundary — and Eddie's hand shoots out and seizes the edge of the table.

"Breathe," Buck says.

"I am breathing."

"You're really not."

Eddie breathes and it comes out as a shudder that travels his entire body.

Buck works the quadricep with both hands, overlapping strokes, his thumbs pressing into the muscle belly and pulling down, and every stroke crests near the top of Eddie's thigh, approaches the sheet, brushes the boundary, and then reverses — up, down, up, down — a rhythm that Eddie's body is interpreting with alarming and increasingly unignorable enthusiasm. 

Eddie is suddenly very grateful for the eye mask because his eyes are open and he's staring into blackness and his face is doing things he cannot control, things he doesn't even want to know about, his mouth open and his brow furrowed.

Eddie shifts his hips, tries to be subtle about it, fails.

Buck's hands skip to the calf.

Eddie has never been more grateful for a retreat in his entire life.

When Buck moves to the left leg, Eddie braces himself, and it doesn't help, because the first leg did not build tolerance. The first leg built anticipation. 

The sheet slides away, pools at his hip, and Buck's hands wrap around his ankle, and Eddie's body knows the map now — the long stroke up the inner thigh, the press of palms near the sheet, the maddening retreat — and it is waiting, taut and electric, every nerve between his ankle and his hip lighting up in sequence as Buck's hands climb.

Eddie's brain has given up on the vault entirely and is now openly, shamelessly running scenarios, just producing them in bulk like a factory with no quality control. 

Buck's hands on his thighs but without the sheet, Buck's hands on his thighs in the bed from the earlier fantasy, Buck's mouth following the same path his hands are taking right now. Eddie bites his lip so hard he's going to have a mark tomorrow and he does not care because the alternative is making a sound that would possibly make that happy ending a reality—

Buck's thumbs press deep into the adductor, close to the sheet, dangerously, recklessly close, and Eddie loses the battle.

He moans. Loud. Louder than any sound he's made today, louder than the one that started all of this, a full open wrecked sound that pours out of him and fills the dark behind his mask and fills the room and hangs between them.

Buck's hands clamp down. A full squeeze, both palms, fingers digging into the muscle of Eddie's thigh, holding, and Eddie hears it.

"Fuck."

Bitten off. Almost silent. Buck's hands don't move for a full second, pressing hard into Eddie's thigh, gripping, and Eddie can feel the tension in his fingers, professionalism and whatever else is happening inside Buck fighting each other to a standstill. Finally, his hands loosen as he exhales shakily, regaining control.

Neither of them says a word. The maybe-harp plays on. The crystals observe from their shelves. The singing bowl holds its silence.

Eddie lies there in the dark, blind and wrecked and incandescent, numb from the pleasure.

Buck's hand brushes his jaw. Fingertips against the hinge of it, light, before lifting the edge of the mask.

"Keep your eyes closed," Buck says gently. "Light's gonna be a lot."

Eddie keeps them closed, feeling the mask lift, the air cool on his eyelids, the subtle return of light filtering through.

"Okay. Slow."

Eddie opens his eyes.

Buck is right there. Closer than expected, leaning over him, his face flushed, pupils wide in the dim golden light, and he is looking at Eddie with an expression Eddie recognizes because it is the same expression Eddie is wearing — the stunned, specific wonder of stumbling into an enormity in the middle of an ordinary Saturday afternoon. 

They look at each other. Two seconds, three, five. Too long for massage therapist and client. Exactly long enough for whatever they actually are, which neither of them has named yet but both of them can feel pressing against the walls of this room, undeniable.

Buck blinks first, stepping back and clearing his throat.

"Take your time getting up." Professional voice reassembled, a little threadbare at the seams. "Drink a ton of water tonight. You were carrying years of tension in there. Your shoulders alone had a decade's worth." Then, softer: "Be gentle with yourself, okay? You earned it."

The door opens and closes and Eddie lies there.

He sits up. Slowly. His body is — God. God. Liquid. Poured. Oil-slicked and wrung out and buzzing wherever Buck's hands were, which was everywhere, which means his entire body is humming. His skin feels new. His muscles feel new. Everything feels rearranged, not just physically but structurally, foundationally, like someone picked up the house and put it down facing a different direction.

And he's — yeah. Hard. Not aggressively, just enough that his jeans are going to be a situation, just enough to confirm, as if the previous thirty minutes of psychosexual revelation weren't evidence enough, that every part of him has fully committed to the new program. No dissenting votes.

He stares at the face cradle. He and the face cradle have been through something together today. They're bonded now. The face cradle is the only witness to the most significant personal revelation of Eddie Diaz's adult life and it will carry that secret to its grave, which is more than Eddie can say for himself because he's absolutely going to tell Hen within the hour.

He catches his reflection in the mirror by the door. Same face. Same jaw, same stubble, same tired brown eyes. He looks exactly like he did an hour ago and the injustice of this is staggering because he should look different, he is different. There should be a glow. A shimmer. A neon sign scrolling across his forehead: EDDIE DIAZ, RECENTLY GAY, CURRENTLY PROCESSING, PLEASE STAND BY. 

But nothing. 

Same guy.

He gets dressed and buttons his shirt wrong and does it again and catches the rose quartz on the shelf by the door — small, smooth, pink, sitting on a little wooden stand like it matters. He stares at it. Considers, for one truly unhinged moment, pocketing it. A souvenir. A commemorative mineral for the most destabilizing hour of his life.

He doesn't. Because, public servant and integrity and all that. 

Also he has a semi and a shattered worldview and stealing feels like a bridge too far even by today's standards.

Out to the lobby. The water feature is still going. The structural crystals are still structural. The nose-ring woman radiates calm at him as he passes. He walks through it all like a man returning from somewhere very far away, which he is, except the distance was internal and the journey was about twelve inches — the space between his brain and whatever it is that lives behind his ribs.

Buck is at the front desk. He's got a glass of water and he takes a sip and Eddie watches his throat move when he swallows and thinks, with absolute clarity: yep. Confirmed. Absolutely devastating. No need to retest the theory.

Eddie wonders, how. How is this man drinking water right now? How is he standing behind a counter with a glass in his hand like a person who just completed a normal shift at his normal job when twenty minutes ago he was confessing his attraction to a client while holding that client's hand in the dark and learning he'd catalyzed that client's entire sexual awakening and laughing about it. 

How does a person metabolize all of that and then just drink water? Eddie can barely stand. Eddie buttoned his shirt wrong twice. Eddie considered stealing a rock. And Buck is over here hydrating, looking relaxed and put-together and only slightly flushed, like the last hour was a mild cardio session and not a mutual unraveling that Eddie is going to be processing for the next several years.

"Hey, welcome back." Buck grins, and Eddie searches his face for evidence of fracture, for some sign that Buck is also falling apart internally, and finds almost nothing, just a brightness in his eyes and a warmth in his smile that could mean anything or everything, and Eddie doesn't know if Buck is genuinely this composed or if Buck is just better at hiding it, and either option is maddening. "How are we feeling?"

"Good." One syllable carrying the weight of roughly forty unspoken sentences, none of which are appropriate for a spa lobby.

"Good like actually good, or good like you're being polite and you're about to destroy my Yelp rating?"

"Actually good."

"Yeah?" He's studying Eddie now, tilting his head, looking amused and curious and almost fond. Eddie wants to grab him by the shoulders and say how are you doing this? How are you acting normal? What is wrong with you? Are you even human? "You seem a little..."

"Relaxed," Eddie says too fast, failing to meet Buck’s eye. "Very relaxed. Incredibly relaxed."

"I was gonna say shell-shocked, but sure, relaxed works." Buck's mouth twitches. "You've got a, uh..." He gestures vaguely at his own face. "A whole thing happening. Behind the eyes."

"That's just my face."

"Is it? Because earlier your face was different. More... clenched."

"My face was clenched."

"Your everything was clenched. And now you look like," Buck pauses and considers, his grin coming back, just as deadly as before, "like a guy who just had a religious experience on my massage table."

There it is. 

Just a flicker, barely perceptible, but Eddie catches it because Eddie has been replaying the vision of this man's face in his head for the last hour. 

Buck's grin is wide and easy but his eyes do a thing, a quick dip, dropping to Eddie's mouth and back up in the space of a blink, and his fingers tap the counter twice, rapid, a nervous habit Eddie recognizes from the clipboard, and Eddie thinks: oh, you're not composed at all, you're just performing composed. You're standing behind that counter because the counter is a barrier. You're drinking water because you need something to do with your hands. You're making jokes because if you stop making jokes you'll have to be honest again.

Eddie's heart stops, restarts, skips a beat, trips, falls, dies. "That's a bold claim."

"Am I wrong?"

Eddie looks at him. Buck looks back. The water feature trickles between them, unbothered.

"...no," Eddie says. "You're not wrong."

Buck's grin goes wide and warm and something else underneath, something softer, surprised maybe, pleased in a way that reaches deeper than professional satisfaction. He holds Eddie's gaze and Eddie holds it back and this is the longest he's voluntarily made eye contact with anyone in recent memory and he is not going to be the one who looks away.

Buck looks away first, clears his throat, and taps the counter. "Well. Let's get you settled up."

The gift card covers the session. It does not cover the tip.

Eddie stares at the receipt with his pen hovering. What is the appropriate gratuity for a man who straddled you until your sexuality reconfigured? Twenty percent says thanks for the massage. Thirty says I will be thinking about this every night for the foreseeable future. Fifty says please marry me, also I'm in crisis.

He decides on thirty percent, writing THANK YOU in capitals so aggressive he has to slide the receipt across the counter without looking at it because if he looks at it he'll crumple it up and start over and he'll be here all day.

"Thanks," he says. "For… all of that."

"Anytime, Eddie."

And the way he says it, anytime — it's not a professional sign-off. It's a promise. They both hear it, but neither of them acknowledges it because they're in a lobby and the nose-ring woman is right there and there are limits to what two people can confess to each other in a room with a salt lamp.

He turns and walks to the door and does not look back because his track record for speaking in Buck's presence has been catastrophic and he has used up every reserve of composure he possesses and if he turns around now he'll say something unhinged, something true, something he's not ready for.

The door chimes behind him as he walks out, the sun beating down on his back holding no contest to the heat of Buck’s presence.

He sits in the driver's seat with his hands at ten and two and the engine off.

He smells like eucalyptus and massage oil and underneath both, warm and clean and faintly herbal, something that's just Buck. On his skin, his shirt, his hands. His car is going to smell like this for days and he's going to drive to work tomorrow carrying Buck's scent on him like a secret and nobody will know but Eddie will know and every time he catches a whiff of it he's going to think about Buck's thighs and Buck's hands and the sound Buck made, that tiny catch, that stutter, when Eddie moaned underneath him—

He shifts in his seat. It doesn't help.

He picks up his phone and stares at it. His lock screen is a photo of Christopher and normally it grounds him but right now it just makes him think I have to figure this out, and I have to tell Chris, and he’s moments away from another spiral so he shoves that aside and calls Hen.

She picks up on the second ring. "Hey! How was it?"

"Good."

"Eddie. Come on. I paid actual money for that."

"It was good, Hen. Really."

"Good like actually good or good like you're being polite because you hated it?"

"Why does everyone keep asking me that?"

"Because you're the kind of person who'd say a root canal was 'fine.' Give me details. Did you like it? Did you relax? Karen wants to know, too.”

"Tell Karen it was great."

"Eddie Diaz. I didn't spend seventy-five dollars for great. I want adjectives. I want a full review. What kind of massage was it?"

"Balinese."

"Ooh, that's the one Karen said to get! And? How do you feel?"

"Loose." The truest and least informative word available to him. He is loose in ways Hen cannot imagine and does not need to know about, some of which are muscular and some of which are emotional and one of which — where loose may not be the correct word — is actively happening in his jeans.

"I told you. I told you. You carry all your stress in your shoulders and your back and honestly Eddie your whole body is just— you're a stress ball shaped like a man. You needed this. Was Briana good?"

"Briana wasn't there."

"What? Why?"

"Family emergency. They had a replacement."

"Oh. Were they good?"

Eddie opens his mouth.

Someone knocks on his window.

He whips his head to the left and there's Buck, outside his car, in the parking lot, flushed and slightly breathless like he jogged across the asphalt, grinning with his whole entire face, backlit by the afternoon sun. 

Eddie's first thought is not oh no or why is he here but there you are, immediate and warm and achingly familiar for a man he's known for no more than ninety minutes. 

His second thought is that Buck changed his shirt, the too-tight scrub top replaced with a soft grey t-shirt that fits him differently but no less devastatingly. 

His third thought is that Buck came outside, Buck left the building and crossed the parking lot to find him, and that means Buck was thinking about him after, means Buck couldn't just let him leave, which makes Eddie so giddy he has to look away for a second before he can roll the window down.

"Hen, hold on."

He rolls the window down. Buck leans on the door frame, close, closer than the lobby, his forearm resting on the edge and his face right there and he smells like warmth and oil and himself and Eddie's hindbrain goes oh, hello, this is the man who changed everything, would you like to do something stupid?

"Hey!" Buck's catching his breath, still grinning. "Glad I caught you. You left before I could—" He holds up a business card between two fingers. "Wanted you to have this."

Eddie takes it. Their fingers brush and his hand, the hand Buck held, the hand Buck slid his fingers between, the hand that tried to grip back on instinct and didn't and wanted to, does a full sensory replay so vivid his vision tunnels for a second.

The card is simple. Buck's name. A phone number. The spa's logo.

"Just in case you want to come back." Buck's leaning on the car like this is something they do, casual and easy, and his eyes are very blue, aggressively blue, and Eddie is looking right at them and Buck is looking right back and neither of them is pretending otherwise. "I work weekends."

Eddie looks at the card. Looks at Buck. Card. Buck.

"That's your personal number," Eddie says, because he's looked at enough business cards in his life to know that the spa's number is printed at the bottom and the number Buck wrote in pen along the top margin is not the spa's number.

Buck's grin widens. He doesn't deny it. "Just in case you want to come back," he repeats, the emphasis landing differently the second time, both of them knowing he's not talking about the spa.

"Yeah." His voice comes out rough. "Yeah, I'll call."

"You better." Buck's smile shifts, still warm, but braided with mischief. He taps the card in Eddie's hand. "Gotta take care of those hands. That's not a metaphor this time." A beat. "Actually no, it's still a little bit of a metaphor."

Eddie huffs a laugh. It sounds raw even to him. "Do you ever stop?"

"Not usually, no." Buck tilts his head, studying Eddie, making his pulse kick. "You know, you look different out here. In natural light."

"Different how?"

"I don't know. Less clenched. More..." Buck waves a hand vaguely, searching, and then gives up and just says it, plainly, without the shield of humor. "Really good, Eddie. You look really good."

Eddie's ears go hot. "You said that already. In there."

"I said you were devastatingly attractive in there. This is different. This is just." Buck shrugs, easy, fond. "You look happy. It's a good look on you."

Eddie doesn't know what to say to that. No one has ever told him he looks happy before, not like this, not with this much awe behind it. 

He wants to say that's because of you but it's too much, too soon, so he just holds Buck's gaze and lets his face do the talking for once instead of fighting it, and whatever Buck sees there makes his expression go soft, the same expression from when the mask came off, the real Buck, the one who can't quite believe this is happening either.

"Take care of yourself, Eddie. Seriously. Drink water. Moisturize. Come back Saturday."

Saturday. Nobody said Saturday. It just appeared, fully formed, hanging between them like a promise neither of them made but both of them heard.

"Saturday," Eddie repeats.

Buck’s grin is wicked. “I’ll even give you a discount.”

Then, he fucking winks.

Buck taps the roof of the car twice, fond and familiar, like they've known each other longer than an hour, like they'll know each other much longer than that. Stepping back, he turns toward the building. Eddie watches him go and does not pretend he isn't because he can't and he won't and he is done pretending.

Buck reaches the door and stops, looking back over his shoulder, and catches Eddie still looking, his grin going wide and knowing. He shakes his head once, small, like Eddie is a problem he's going to enjoy solving, and disappears inside.

The parking lot goes quiet. The sun is warm through the windshield. Eddie sits there breathing heavily, holding a business card that smells like oil and possibility.

From the cupholder, tinny and escalating, "Eddie? Eddie?? What just happened? Who was that? Was that the replacement? Eddie, I swear to—"

He picks up the phone and presses it to his ear, closing his eyes.

"Oh my God, Hen." He breathes, a little awed. "I am so gay."

Eddie goes back Saturday. And the Saturday after that.

Buck starts warming his oil before Eddie arrives. Starts keeping a glass of water at the front desk, no crystal, and saving the last appointment slot so they don't have to rush.

Eddie buys the rose quartz. The small one by the door, smooth and pink. Asks the nose-ring woman, Debbie, to wrap it and everything. Keeps it on his nightstand and doesn't tell anyone what it means.

And sometimes, late at night, with the quartz on his nightstand and Buck's number saved in his phone and the faint ghost of massage oil still somehow in the grain of his palms, he thinks about that chalkboard sign in the lobby.

Amethyst for anxiety. Citrine for confidence. Black tourmaline for energetic protection. 

He thinks about the chakra poster and the root energy and the sacral alignment and that magazine with its cursive quote, your body knows what your mind refuses to hear, and he wonders, not for the first time and probably not for the last, whether maybe some of it actually works. 

Because something in that building unblocked something in him that had been stuck for a very long time. And he can blame Buck's hands or the Balinese technique or the simple reality of someone touching him with patience for the first time in years, and all of that is probably true. But there's a small, quiet, irrational part of him that looks at the rose quartz on his nightstand and wonders if maybe the crystals helped.

He will never say that out loud. He will die first.

But he owns three of them now. So.

Hen doesn't ask. She already knows.