Archive of Our Own

Edmundo Diaz is eight years old.

It’s summer in the sun city of El Paso, Texas; the sun blazes hot and relentless high overhead in a cloudless bright sky and the horizon ahead of the road stretches so far that everything goes blurry, even the light where it refracts off of the whistling glass of a barely-cracked backseat window.

Eddie cranes his neck and unsticks the backs of his legs from the seat beneath him so that he can stretch to see out. Beneath the steady trundling car, asphalt burns in the sun and the reflective white of the dotted center line zips past in regular, too-quick-to-count increments. He braces his fingertips on the ledge against the window and tilts his head back, just enough to catch the barest edge of warm summer breeze as it slips in through the crack and ruffles the ends of his dark hair.

Warbled, soft Spanish hums through the car from the radio, too soft for Eddie to hear. The heat layers over his skin; the sweetness of relief from the breeze whistles above him, just out of reach. Eddie presses up to the window, tilts his head so that he can peer up ahead to where the road lays out long and flat and swimming with heat. And he wishes that he was bigger.

If Eddie was bigger, this would be a perfect day.

His thoughts drift to it as Sophia shifts in the backseat next to him, her questions to the grown-ups fading into background noise. There are lots of things that will be better when he’s big, Eddie thinks.

He’ll be able to pick the music on the radio, and he’ll be able to turn it up louder so he can hear it. He’ll pick something brighter and happier, too, something he can dance to.

He’ll be able to roll down the windows, more than just a crack at the top where the breeze doesn’t reach his skin. He’ll roll them down all the way, so that the summer air outside will whip and roar into the car and it’ll race through his hair and mess it all up and nobody will tell him that he needs to brush it. Yeah. He’ll roll the windows all the way down, and he won’t have to ask anybody to do it for him, because he’ll be in charge.

When he’s bigger— probably sixteen, since that’s when you can get your license, Eddie knows because he asked— he will be in charge of everything in the car. It won’t be just the radio or the windows. It’ll be even better than that, when he’s bigger and has his own car.

It’ll be red. Eddie likes red, even if Mom thinks it’s too flashy.

And it’ll be comfy. Eddie’s legs won’t stick to the seat when he leans back and rests his elbow on the window and steers the car with one hand. He’ll be tall enough by then to do all of that. He won’t have to stretch his neck anymore to see. He’ll need sunglasses, because it’ll be bright, and he won’t flip the sunvisor down because if he does, he’ll miss the view.

It’ll be a great view, too. Of course it will, because Eddie will be the one in charge of where the car goes. He’ll be able to choose everything— the music and the sunglasses and the color and how far down to roll the windows and most importantly, which turns to take and when to just keep driving.

He thinks he’ll really like that. It’ll feel good, to lean back in the seat and feel the sun on his face unshielded by the headrests blocking the view in front of him. It’ll just be him, and the road, and—

And what else?

When he’s bigger, he decides, there will be somebody sitting in the passenger seat. They’ll go out when it’s daytime; Eddie will pick the music and choose where to go and he’ll drive and drive and drive along the endless highways of Texas and maybe even farther away. Maybe he’ll drive to a new state that he’s never even seen before and he’ll drive for so long that he won’t need sunglasses anymore and he’ll have to push them up on his head the way Dad tells him not to, because bright, sunny day will turn to soft velvet night and all the lights will come on and he’ll have to turn the music down to hear the sounds of the evening.

And there will be someone with him. He’s sure that there will be someone right there next to him. Someone who doesn’t fuss. Someone who isn’t worried. Someone who likes the same music as he does and doesn’t care where the car goes at all. Eddie doesn’t know who it will be yet, because he’s still little. But it’ll be someone who likes him a lot, he thinks.

“Edmundo.”

A voice from the front seat breaks into Eddie’s thoughts.

“Sit back in your seat.”

Brown eyes flash, disappointed and sharp, in the rearview mirror as Eddie slinks back, his spine in line with the seat behind him, his legs sticking to the seat beneath him, the view disappearing as he pulls away from the window.

Above him, there’s a mechanical whirring sound and a little click and he looks up in time to watch the eyes in the mirror go back to the road as the sliver of open air at the top of the window seals shut again with a roaring kind of silence against a radio static backdrop.

When it’s Eddie’s eyes in the mirror, he thinks they won’t look like that at all. He’ll be bigger and he’ll be in charge and he’ll go wherever he wants to.

Yeah, Eddie thinks, settling in. When he’s bigger.

His father teaches him to drive.

It’s the summer that Eddie turns fifteen years old, and he doesn’t feel as big as he’d thought he would, back when he was little enough that it was hard to see out of the windows and he was safely tucked into the backseat with Sophia.

Everything is different now, except for the weather. It’s as blisteringly hot as it used to be, and the air is shot in the outdated pickup that his dad insists he has to learn in. There’s nothing cool or nostalgic about it, no matter how many halfhearted attempts his dad makes to spin it when he’s home for one day a week and feeling a rare surge of selfish guilt about his absence for the other six.

Eddie figures, as he wipes sweat off of the back of his neck beneath the burn of the Texas sun, that’s why they’re here at all. He’d assumed it would be his mom who taught him to drive, probably tense in the passenger seat of her Subaru while Eddie white-knuckled his way through trying to learn under her watchful eye.

The reality is worse.

His dad claps him on the shoulder in that way that always feels a little too rough to be any kind of affectionate and says, “Let’s try not to scrape it up the side this time, huh, Edmundo?”

Like it’s a joke. Eddie grits his teeth, feels the clench in his jaw and the grind of his molars against each other. Sometimes he wonders if someday some dentist will look into his mouth and make an off-the-cuff comment about how stressed he is. Sometimes he wonders if his jaw will break before then, if his mouth will be wired shut, if even that will stop his parents from expecting him to say something. He knows, sort of distantly, that these aren’t the kinds of thoughts he should be having.

The truth is that Eddie already knows how to drive.

He won’t admit to it, because he’s sure it’ll get him in trouble, but he’s pretty good these days at just keeping his mouth shut. He’ll let his dad teach him everything he already knows— how to shift the clutch and how to follow and when to put his turn signal on. But the truth is that he taught it all to himself last summer, as soon as he hit that growth spurt that made dancing harder and he was left with little to do but wilt in the heat.

He’s not the kind of kid to get in trouble; not really. He doesn’t want the dressing-down about appearances from his parents, but more than that he doesn’t want to disappoint his Abuela or set a bad example for his little sisters. These are the things that are important to him.

But last summer: Andrew Campbell and his big brother’s beat-up Jeep Cherokee. They’d taken it out to the empty, dirty fields near where the Campbell brothers lived and everybody had taken a turn. That’s where Eddie had learned to drive, scraping the clutch and braking at the wrong times and getting made fun of in a way that felt strangely nice.

Andrew had learned from Ethan, who was three years older and mysterious. Eddie didn’t have a lot of friends, not because he wasn’t popular so much as because he didn’t want them, but he liked Andrew and there were a couple of other people there that he liked well enough. And when the others went home and Eddie didn’t, that’s when Andrew taught him to hot-wire the Jeep, too. Eddie learned to drive it and how to steal it all in one fell swoop on a blistering Texas summer day that gave way to an oppressively warm night.

If he’s being honest, he liked that feeling. The cocoon that came with velvet night and freedom from the familiar living room walls, damp with disappointment. It’s distant now, even a year later. But that night had been good. Some of the subsequent ones, too, when his quiet neighborhood gave way to the empty fields and pecan groves specked with bluebonnets.

The truck is sweltering, that particular kind of heat in an enclosed space in the dead of summer. Eddie’s shirt sticks to his back and he immediately starts to feel uncomfortable as he settles in the seat and tries not to look too much like he knows what he’s doing.

“Alright, you’re gonna check your mirrors.”

Eddie is good at following instructions even when he doesn’t want to. He tries to remember where he learned to be like that, or when, and he isn’t sure. But he checks the mirrors like it’s his duty, shrinking to let his dad feel like he’s doing something.

He thinks about Sophia for a moment. She’s three years younger than Eddie, turned twelve this spring, and she’s astronomically better than he is. She wouldn’t hesitate, were their roles reversed, to put her hand on her hip and tell their dad that she already knows how to do it. That she doesn’t need his help. She says as much to Eddie two or three times a week lately, whether the subject is packing her lunch or doing her math homework.

It makes him feel helpless. He doesn’t want his parents to feel like that, even when he’s annoyed; even when he feels like he would be justified. He’s also jealous of Sophia, a secret he hides even from himself.

As he settles in the front seat, though, reaching up to adjust the rearview and catching his own dark eyes in the glass— Eddie remembers something.

A stretch of highway; a fragment of another summer; the blank expanse of his bedroom ceiling and an absent wish that he could stick stars to its surface. Driving, Eddie recalls, had been his dream once. The fantasy of a little boy that he isn’t anymore, as much as he is. It comes back to him in pieces now, shaped like the gear shift and the driveway and the flutter of his own eyelashes in the mirror and the empty backseat behind him.

He follows his dad’s every instruction, and when he takes a yellow light that he should have braked for and his dad’s voice gets loud and angry, Eddie drifts in his mind to the same fantasy he’d once escaped to in the backseat.

“You’re right,” he says, nodding. He’s a good kid, he tells himself. He’s a good kid.

“Edmundo, this is serious!” Ramon insists. He waves his hand in Eddie’s direction, a vague gesture that makes Eddie feel like a nuisance. “You are not a child anymore!”

There’s some hope in that for Eddie. He nods again, dutiful and attentive. But behind that, there’s an open highway with a shifting landscape; a sunset, headed west; an open future and his own brown hand on the wheel, his own brown eyes, his shoulders relaxed into the seat. Eddie is only fifteen, but the highway seems so much closer now than it had all those years ago when he’d first imagined it.

In a few months, he’ll have a license. He can get a job after school and work hard and pay for insurance and his parents will probably let him use the car as long as he helps with the girls. A couple of years after that, there will be a future for Eddie that extends past the city limits of El Paso and even farther than that, past the Campbell boys’ frequented dirt fields.

“I got it,” he says to his dad now. “Sorry.”

Ramon sighs. But he lets Eddie drive home and when they park back in the driveway just before dinnertime, the windows of the house are starting to glow. And reluctantly, Eddie’s dad pats him on the shoulder as he takes the keys.

“Not bad,” he says. “But we know you could do better than that, yes?”

Eddie is thinking of this moment when the next June brings his sixteenth birthday and a trip to the DMV. He’s thinking of it when he fails the test because his pulse races when the instructor asks him to take a left at the light and it turns yellow.

That day, he catches his own eye in the rearview mirror and all he sees is his father looking back at him.

Shannon is quiet today.

Things have been strange between them since that day in January. It’s been something like six weeks since Eddie clumsily kissed his best friend and she let him do it. There had been stars in her eyes as she looked up at him from her pillowcase patterned with little pink flowers, and Eddie had felt—

Well, if he’s honest, Eddie isn’t sure how he had felt.

Shannon’s childhood bedroom and otherwise empty house for that one weekend had felt, at first, like a thrill of freedom. Eddie spends a lot of time there these days, usually with the warm presence of Shannon’s mom somewhere in the house, the sounds of their life and their home drifting through the open bedroom door.

He’s spent a lot of time thinking about that door, juxtaposing it against his own at home and the compulsion he has to always keep it closed. The concept of sharing his life with his own parents the way that Shannon does with her mom is beyond Eddie’s ability to comprehend, and sometimes it reaches down inside him and twists, though he doesn’t have the word for that feeling.

On that weekend, he had not meant to kiss her. He hadn’t meant to have sex with her, either. Everyone thinks they’re dating. His own parents; the teachers; their classmates. They’re not. Or at least, they weren’t. He’s not sure what they’re doing now, since that day. She’s been a little bit distant, but he keeps telling himself that they’ll adjust, they’ll go back to the way they were. He hopes they will, anyway.

She’s his best friend. They have to.

“Hey,” he says, nudging her lightly with his foot. They’re at the mall, the bustling food court swirling around them and the rest of the people they’d met here earlier all scattered. Eddie had only really agreed to it to get out of the house and to hang out with Shannon, anyway, and now that she’s looking over at him he finds that she looks kind of pale and off.

“Hm?” she says.

Eddie smiles a little. “Wanna go for a drive?”

Shannon hesitates, her eyes skittering briefly over his face, and then she nods. “Yeah. Let’s do it.”

It is, in many ways, as Eddie had imagined it would be.

When he’d eventually passed his license test, what had been his Dad’s truck became his. He got a part-time job after school stocking the grocery store in order to pay the insurance, and he likes that it keeps him out of the house most afternoons and gives him extra money that he can save or spend on gas to drive around aimlessly on the weekends and buy extra large orders of fries to share with Shannon when they park out by the lake. Sometimes, he takes Adriana out for ice cream after her soccer practice or Sophia to the diner she likes if she’s feeling generous enough to want to be seen with him on a Sunday afternoon. It offers a kind of freedom that Eddie treasures.

And there’s this.

He can settle into the driving seat as Shannon clicks her seatbelt. He can catch his own eye in the mirror. He can reach out to adjust the radio dial so that it plays whatever he wants— to a certain point, anyway, since it’s old now and barely plays, but it’s his to play and that’s what matters.

They set off out of the mall parking lot and Eddie relaxes a little. It’s better like this, just the two of them in the truck as the winter sun begins to set. It’ll be spring soon, which may as well be summer, but for now the weather is soft and mild. It’s hard not to think back to the things he had imagined for himself as a kid in the backseat.

He glances over at Shannon at a red light, and she glances back with a small, fleeting smile on her face. Eddie has always thought she was pretty— even the first time he saw her, he was drawn to her, to the way her hair falls in waves and the ease with which she carries herself through the world. She has a quality about her that he can’t find in himself, an ability to pull anyone into her orbit and hold them in place with a soft blue gaze. Eddie included, who is usually just happy to have her next to him.

That’s what he’d wanted, back when he’d imagined what it would be like to grow up. Someone that he would like to have next to him, a kind of partner.

The radio crackles and Shannon rolls her eyes, a glimmer of normalcy in a sea of the uncertainty that’s been lingering between them for weeks now.

“What?” Eddie asks, amused, as she reaches for the latch on his glove box.

“Fucking radio,” she mutters. “I don’t know why you bother, you know it doesn’t get anything good.”

Eddie smiles, glancing over at her as they slow to a stop at a red light and watching as she rifles through the spare napkins and salt packets, then comes up with a tape that belonged to her in the first place. Joan Jett’s The Hit List. It’s older than either of them, and the corner of the tape case is cracked deeply enough that you can wiggle the pieces, but Shannon flips it open and slides it into the tape deck with the ease of someone who’d lived through the era herself.

“It’s 2010,” Eddie remarks, glimpsing Joan Jett’s blued-out face on the cover of the case as Shannon drops it into the center console.

She rolls her eyes again. “Yeah, well,” she says. “Then you should be driving something that doesn’t have a tape deck.” Then she casts her eyes over to him through her lashes and adds, “Also, it’s a classic.”

He hums, sinking into the familiar conversation— they’ve had it a dozen times or more, but he likes the way it feels to banter with her, the spark of hope that flickers in him at the familiarity, that they might get back to their old rhythm after all.

She turns her head to look at him at the next red light, and there’s something on her face that he can’t parse.

“You okay?” he checks.

He doesn’t get a yes or a no, but she looks at him steadily and says, “Can we go to the lake?”

It’s February, and approaching sunset, but far be it from Eddie to deny her. “Yeah, sure,” he answers.

As he drives, the road emptying out the further they go, he can pretend— just for a minute— that they’re going to just keep on driving. That they’ll pass the sign that signals the end of the El Paso city limits, and keep going on and on into the endless hazy horizon. That they’ll disappear from the walls of this world that they inhabit; that there won’t be any more question or uncertainty; that all the things he’d imagined will be true and he’ll end up somewhere with Shannon where he doesn’t feel like he needs to shut his bedroom door.

Instead, he slows the truck and takes the familiar right-hand turn toward the lake, winding along the smaller road at a speed that feels like crawling now, and eventually crunching over the gravel of the small parking lot until he pulls into the empty space at the end where they can look out at the slow deep water where it laps against the pebbled shore.

It’s pretty out here, even beneath the bare trees with their spindling stark branches. The water— bright in the summer— looks swirling and grey now as the light of day gives way to the bruiseblue sky of dusk. Eddie cuts the engine and Joan Jett quiets to a humming silence.

He looks over at Shannon and finds her hands folded in her lap. When he looks at her nails, he finds that the polish on them is chipped and notices that the end of the macrame bracelet she wears on her wrist all the time is frayed now, where there used to be a neat little knot and a bead, as if she’s been picking and pulling at it.

“Do you want to get out?” he asks, but Shannon shakes her head. She raises her gaze in the quiet and looks out at the lake, and Eddie looks too, but can’t really tell what she’s looking at. Her eyes are sharply focused, but there’s nothing— just the expanse of water and the familiar embankment.

There’s quiet for a moment.

“Are you okay?” Eddie ventures.

Shannon exhales sharply, and Eddie suddenly gets the sense that something is really wrong. Something more than just the awkwardness that’s been between them. His thoughts drift naturally to Shannon’s mom— who’s had cancer, but whose prognosis is good, who’s been feeling better most days.

“Is everything—” he starts.

And then Shannon looks over at him, and he understands that he’s wrong. He knows her, understands her, and this look in her blue eyes is something else, something that Eddie wordlessly comprehends is more complicated than worry.

“I have to show you something,” she tells him.

Her voice wavers, and Eddie feels for the first time a flash of fear. Is it childish, he wonders, to only be afraid now that she’s looking at him like this— whatever this is— belongs to him, too?

“Okay.”

Shannon sighs and reaches down into the floorboard where her wallet is, with her still-new license peeking out from the clear plastic and the soft patterned wrist strap with its swirls of green and blue. She opens it, and Eddie watches as she pulls out a gloss-finish square of thin paper, folded neatly in half.

He frowns as she takes a breath and holds it silently out to him over the center console. His fingers brush the edge, but when he grasps it she holds on tighter, drawing his eyes to hers as the paper touches them both, this unknown thing suspended between their fingers in the cab of Eddie’s truck.

There’s a look on Shannon’s face that Eddie is not sure he’s ever seen before. She’s magnetic; confident. But right now, blue eyes soft and bottom lip bitten, she looks like a child. She is, he guesses. They both are. But right now, as she looks at him like that, it’s so easy to picture her as the little girl in the frame that lives on the bookshelf in her house— her then-blonde hair in two ponytails; the pink Band-Aids on her knees; the little fluttery sleeves of her striped Sesame Street t-shirt and the way she grinned up at the camera with a smile so big it took over her whole face.

For just a moment, she looks at Eddie and that’s the Shannon he sees, just a little girl on a set of front porch steps in Texas.

“Just—” she says, scrunching her nose in a way that will become more familiar to him than he could ever have guessed. “Don’t hate me, okay?”

Eddie has to laugh— a breath, an incredulity.

“I could never hate you,” he answers.

He won’t know for a very long time how true it’ll be. How his words on that day will follow him forever, to a crosswalk in Los Angeles and on and on. In the moment, it’s just the way he feels about his best friend.

Shannon bites her bottom lip and lets go of the flimsy paper. Glancing between it and her face, Eddie gets his thumb under the lip and unfolds it.

A grainy, black and white image gazes back at him, printed with Shannon’s full name in the corner. At the center of the little square, there’s a blurry gray shape. And next to it in neat white text with a small arrow, it says BABY.

In the space of a half-second, Eddie’s whole world goes grayscale. The breath leaves his lungs and everything narrows, narrows, narrows, all the way down to the frozen in time flicker of a heartbeat captured on paper.

Eddie is silent for so long that the image darkens. The sun is setting down deep below the expansive Texan horizon, and Shannon didn’t eat at the food court, and Eddie is going to be a father.

He thinks, inexplicably, of Shannon’s open bedroom door. They are too young for this. His parents are going to be furious. He is not good enough to be anybody’s father. All of these thoughts are there, present, just behind his eyes.

But what he’s really thinking about is that afternoon in Shannon’s empty house, and the way her bedroom door had been open the whole time. The way she had looked up at him like she trusted him, like she loved him. And the way that— even though he hadn’t been sure about anything— there had been something about that feeling. It reached down into him and made him want. Her, maybe, but more than that— the feeling. The knowledge that she could tilt her head back on her pillow surrounded by the accoutrements of her whole childhood, and give herself to Eddie.

Worth. Trust. The complacency of an open bedroom door. And just for the smallest flicker of a moment, he imagines a child who might never want to close theirs, either. It’s there and gone in an instant, but it gives Eddie the courage to look up.

When he does, there are silvery tear tracks on Shannon’s cheeks, and she’s watching him silently.

Worth. Trust. And something else now, there in her eyes and reflecting back on Eddie. Duty. Responsibility.

And love. He looks back at the picture, and feels a spark of that amongst the fear. He isn’t sure if he’s capable of loving something that doesn’t exist yet— if that’s what this is— or if he just loves Shannon and the little girl that she’d been. If he loves driving out here to the lake. If what he loves is a dream, an idea.

There’s a voice in the back of his mind though, that sounds like Abuela’s kitchen or the floor of Adriana’s purple bedroom or the open door to the hall at Shannon’s. So Eddie takes a deep breath, nods his head, and feels his face twist. He reaches out, brushing his fingertips over the paper, and watches his life fall apart and reform in front of him.

Then he gets out of the truck as Shannon startles— the lights turn on and he leaves the door ajar, dinging softly through the cab. He circles the hood, his sneakers crunching lightly on the gravel, and opens her door, too.

She looks at him— that child on the steps and the teenager at the lake and the girl in his truck and someone’s mother, one day soon.

Eddie feels strangely ablaze.

“Eddie,” she whispers.

He nods, his own eyes stinging. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. Because at the end of the day, that’s what this is, right? His fault. His to carry. His.

Shannon shakes her head, a little helpless. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell you,” she says. “But I can’t— I have to—”

He understands what she’s saying, as her fingertips skim her thin waist through her t-shirt. He nods his head.

“We have to,” he says gently. He reaches out, touching her cheek, and she meets his eyes.

“Okay,” she breathes.

“Okay,” Eddie answers, and then he wraps his arms around her, and knows that nothing will ever, ever be the same again.

He wouldn’t have thought he’d be the type of man to run away from his problems.

But these are not problems. Christopher is not a problem. His life is not a problem, no matter what the doctor on base had said when he referred them to a specialist. Nothing about this is a problem, and Eddie won’t be convinced otherwise.

He had run from it, though.

It’s only now, on his cot back out here in a desert so far from home that it feels like another planet, that Eddie is able to recognize that action for what it had been. Cowardice, disguised as duty.

By the time he had returned from his first tour, Christopher was nine months old. Shannon was already convinced that something was wrong with their baby. She gave Eddie six days before she brought it up while Christopher napped in his playpen.

“I’m worried about him, Eddie,” she sighed.

Eddie was staring at the baby, watching his chest rise and fall. For the past six days, he had been trying to adjust to the presence of this little person— both physically around him, and in his chest. For all the nights he’d spent over the past nine months yearning to be able to touch his son, it didn’t compare to the feeling he got being in the same room with him.

There were other men in the service, guys that Eddie liked well enough, who’d see him staring at a picture of Chris and try to commiserate. Eddie had been willing to go along with it, but had consistently felt that they were wrong when they told him things like, “You’ll get right back to it when you get home.”

There was nothing for Eddie to get back to. Christopher had been one week old when Eddie left, and when he came back it seemed like he was a different baby entirely. Eddie ached to be close to him, more since being home than when all those miles and oceans separated them.

He tore his eyes away from Christopher and turned them to Shannon, who was watching him with an anxious look on her face. Later, Eddie would look back on it and he wouldn’t be proud of the way he felt. The flash of anger; the fear disguised as something else; inadequacy rearing its head and hiding behind a mask of his own making.

He was missing his milestones, she said. Not responding the way other babies his age did. He seemed uncomfortable to her. He cried all the time. Eddie’s mother, she told him, had dismissed her over and over again. But she knew that something wasn’t right.

“There’s nothing wrong with him,” were the words that came out of Eddie’s mouth.

Even now, back in the desert, he can picture the disappointed, crumbling look on her face as he’d said it.

In the moment, Eddie had felt like an outsider in his own home, his own marriage— to his own baby, who cried when he held him.

Later, they would sit across from a doctor with a grave face and Eddie would learn that Christopher didn’t cry because he didn’t like him. Christopher cried because he was in pain. It hurt Eddie so deeply that he got up and walked out of the office without a second glance behind him.

He’d signed up for a renewal of his contract the following day. He’d waited a week to tell Shannon. He’d shipped out, back to Afghanistan, just six weeks later and two weeks before Christopher’s first scheduled surgical procedure.

And it’s only now that he can lie here on his uncomfortable bunk, his hands behind his head, and recognize that what he’d done was wrong. Maybe some part of him had known it the moment the doctor explained to them what cerebral palsy was; definitely some part of him had known it when Shannon refused to kiss him goodbye and Christopher cried and Eddie felt shredded from the inside out, only held together by the fabric of his fatigues and the silver medal against his chest. But it’s only now that all of him knows it.

He doesn’t know how to be a good husband. He doesn’t know how to be a father. He doesn’t know how to hold his baby without hurting him; or what it means to consider his life now as it exists in front of him; or how to look at Shannon and not feel lost like a kid losing his footing in the deep end of the pool.

But he knows how to be a soldier. It’s the only thing that Eddie knows he can be.

He will be here, doing this, for months. He will miss Christopher’s surgeries. He will be absent when Christopher wakes up scared. He will miss the fitting for the glasses they now know he needs. He will not be the first thing his son sees through the lenses that un-blur his world.

And it’s all a mess of his own making. He knows that now. It’s too late to do anything about it, and all Eddie wants to do is turn back the clock or turn over and cry. Neither are much of an option out here.

Instead, he imagines.

With his eyes closed, it could be a sunny afternoon with the familiar roads of Texas laid out in front of him. The desert fades away and the pecan trees appear and there’s grass and earth, a terrain that’s more than blistering sand and punishing nightwinds. There’s a window rolled down and a breeze that cuts the heat and a car that is Eddie’s to drive and a road that can take him anywhere.

Anywhere but here.

At some point, Eddie had made the conscious choice not to think about this. Shortly after the night that Shannon told him she was pregnant, probably. He remembers that it had seemed pointless and immature, that he had told himself he was better off focusing on the here and now. It’s all out the window, though. His here and now is not what it had been then.

And there will come a day when that reality will be his again— when he will have to be behind the wheel of his own life. When there won’t be anywhere else to run to when he’s scared. Maybe if he dreams it enough now, it’ll look less terrifying by the time it’s in his hands.

So he tries to put himself back there between the lines on the asphalt, with his foot on the gas. He tries to imagine that he’ll get it right this time, that he’ll be everything he had thought he could be for Shannon when they’d kissed in her childhood bedroom.

But it’s harder than Eddie remembers it being. He can’t picture her next to him anymore, a cold hard fact that cuts him deep and quick. He remembers her face at the airport with vivid clarity and the way she’d turned away from him and it’s all he can see when he tries to turn to his right and see her in the passenger seat.

In the console, maybe there’s a Joan Jett tape. But there’s no carefree, soft, beautiful teenage girl to roll her eyes at him anymore. Eddie had turned her into a mother, and a wife, and he still could never hate her but he thinks maybe he made her hate him in the process.

There’s a distant sound. An explosion. Eddie flinches, but none of the other guys do. They’ve all gotten used to it, and Eddie can be calm and steady when he has to but he isn’t sure he’ll ever adjust to being where he is.

He reaches down into his pocket, the inner one that’s as safe as it gets, and extracts the already-worn picture of Christopher that he keeps in it. It’s old now. Shannon had promised she’d send him a new one when Christopher gets his glasses, but for now Eddie takes a breath and looks down at the tiny, perfect face of a smiling baby.

And he finds that there is something else he can picture.

An open road, once full of possibilities, has started to feel like a responsibility. But on it, when Eddie glances into the rearview mirror, there’s a carseat in the back. The reversed one, obscuring the baby in it from view. But Eddie doesn’t have to see him to know he’s there. He is— Christopher.

Eddie reminds himself that this is the important thing. That he’s safe in his carseat. That he’s smiling in the picture. Even if his life won’t look the way they thought it might. He’s safe. He’s smiling. He’ll be in the backseat of every car Eddie drives for the rest of his life, if Eddie can help it.

Maybe he’d ruined what he’d once thought would be his forever. Maybe there won’t be any more drives out to the lake. Maybe Shannon and Eddie— the way they’d been before the day Eddie moved toward her and changed their lives forever— won’t ever exist like that again.

But Christopher. The thing they’d earned from it.

He holds the picture between his fingers and closes his eyes. In the rearview mirror, the carseat. Eddie settles. When he gets home, he thinks, it’ll be the only thing he’s running to.

Eddie leaves El Paso on a Tuesday.

An innocuous, perfectly ordinary day in the spring of 2018, with a twelve-hour drive ahead of him spread out across two days and a new life waiting at the end of it.

“Eddie,” his mother implores in a tone of voice that he knows precedes a lecture. “Please. You have to consider what you’re doing.”

“I have considered it,” Eddie tells her. He picks up a box— the last of the boxes, which contains more of Christopher’s toys— and arranges it in the bed of his truck with the others. It’s full now, and he slams the tailgate shut, then dusts off his hands and tugs on the straps to make sure they’re secure.

Helena gestures to the boxes. “This is not a life for a child,” she says, like she’s trying to reason with him.

“Actually,” Eddie half-laughs. “It’s pretty much only a life for a child, considering that this is about ninety percent a child’s stuff.”

It’s true. Eddie only has so much space, and in the course of packing up his life in Texas he’d realized that it mostly meant packing up Christopher’s life. Eddie’s consists of two things: the paperwork for his enrollment to the Los Angeles Fire Academy, and—

“Daddy!”

Eddie grins. “Duty calls,” he says to his mom, and lopes back to the front porch of his parents’ house, where Christopher is standing, squinting into the sun and balancing one hand on one of the columns.

“Ah!” Eddie groans dramatically as he scoops him up and throws him easily over his shoulder, sending Christopher into peals of bright giggles. “Almost forgot the most important cargo.” He pulls Chris back into his arms and settles him on his hip so that he can peer into his face, turning his expression serious. “You think you can fit into a box?”

“No!” Chris laughs, throwing his head back and his weight into Eddie’s hands, all trust. “Dad, I have to have my carseat!”

“Of course,” Eddie gasps. “How could I forget?”

“You didn’t forget,” Christopher groans, and Eddie laughs and kisses him on the cheek.

“You’re right,” he admits. “I didn’t. But you better get used to my jokes, because we have a long trip ahead of us.”

Christopher cheers, and Eddie smiles big and bright, even as his mother crosses her arms over her chest and his father wanders hesitantly out of the house behind them.

“Alright,” Eddie sighs, setting Christopher back on his feet by the truck. “Time to say goodbye to your abuelos, yeah?”

The air shifts around them. Eddie steps back and watches as his mother leans down to hug Christopher. It’s not lost on him, the gentle way she touches him. There’s a flicker of anger, a spark of feeling toward himself, at the knowledge of how long he’s let it go on like this. But Eddie pushes it away.

He’s determined that today will not be about that. Today is the first day of a new life, for both of them. Nothing is going to cast a dark cloud over it.

“Christopher,” she says, her eyes wet. “You know that you can ask us for anything that you need, right?”

Eddie bristles, and Christopher shrugs his shoulders and says, “Okay! But I’m with Dad so it’s okay.”

Something warm and soft blooms in Eddie’s chest and he wonders— not for the first time— how it had taken him so long to see it. This is, after all, the child that had climbed into Eddie’s bed all by himself the morning Shannon left, putting his entire life in Eddie’s hands without a second thought.

He gets it now.

He watches as his dad goes in and hugs Christopher, and idly tries to recall if his dad ever hugged him at that age. His search of his memories comes up notably empty.

A moment later, Eddie’s mother turns to him. “Are you sure about this?” she asks him.

There are several things that come to mind. Primarily, Eddie wants to ask her if she was sure when she told him that he should leave his child in another state.

Her words and the pitying way she’d looked at him echo in his head. Don’t drag him down with you, Eddie.

Things between them have been icy since then. He finds it hard to imagine that they will ever not be.

But again, Eddie reminds himself that this day is not going to be like that. He nods his head and puts his hand on top of Christopher’s mop of blonde curls.

“I’m sure, Mom,” he says, and then reaches out to hug her quickly before he turns to his son. “You ready to hit the road, mijo?”

Chris tilts his head back and beams up at him. “Ready!”

So Eddie lifts him into the truck, triple checks that he’s buckled in and that his crutches are settled in the floorboard, and then gets into the driver’s seat.

His parents step back. The engine comes to life. The morning sun sparkles into the open window and sinks into Eddie’s skin. Eddie waves in the side mirror as he turns the wheels over the driveway and pulls carefully out onto the street, watching his childhood home disappear into the dust stirred up by the tires.

And just like that, it’s him and Christopher.

Eddie sinks back, adjusting the set of his shoulders against the upholstered seat, and glances in the rearview mirror. The highway isn’t far, and then it’s the interstate until they stop to sleep. In the backseat, Christopher is beaming.

“How does it feel?” Eddie asks him, navigating a greenlit intersection and splitting his focus between glancing back at Chris and ahead at the road.

Christopher catches his gaze. “Great!” he laughs. He’s always laughing— a genuinely strong, happy, smart kid, and everything Eddie ever could have hoped he would be.

So Eddie laughs, too, because for the first time it feels like he’s doing the right thing. A scary thing, sure. He’s starting to think everything about parenthood and life is at least a little bit scary if not more. But the right thing.

On the passenger seat, where he might once have thought there should be a person, there’s a file that bears the crest of the Los Angeles Fire Department. Inside, Eddie has signed his name to nearly every page. Unlike the last time he’d signed his life over to an institution, it feels like a way out instead of a trap. Like a path that’s made for him. Like the open road between Texas and California.

The truth is that Eddie has no way of knowing what awaits him or Christopher in LA. He’s planning to stay with his Abuela for a while. She’d been beyond excited when he called and told her his plans, and his Tia had been there too and they’d stayed on the phone with him for an hour, repeatedly assuring him that he was doing the right thing by getting Christopher out of El Paso.

It’s no secret that Pepa, at least, harbors some level of distaste for her brother and his wife. Eddie finds himself kind of grateful for that now, even if he’d spent much of his life unsure how to feel about it.

Beyond that— beyond this summer and the fire academy— he doesn’t know. He would like to think that they’ll have a place of their own; that Christopher will make lasting friends; that Eddie will put down roots there, somehow. But there’s no way to know yet. Right now, it’s a big, open space that could crash and burn and send him with his tail between his legs right back on this road to El Paso and his parents’ house.

But Los Angeles feels like the right choice. It feels like where he’s supposed to be, and although he doesn’t believe in fate or signs or anything along those lines, he has to think that there is some level of order to it all. Maybe that’s just hope, but even this feels like a precious commodity to Eddie right now.

Christopher is excited about going, not concerned in the least about changing schools. Eddie shouldn’t be surprised— the kid is a social butterfly, up for anything. He thinks this will be good for him, for both of them. There’s a part of him that wishes he’d agreed to it in the first place, when Shannon suggested it. There’s also a part of him that is quietly glad it’s happening this way— that when they embark on the journey to what he hopes will be a better life, it’s him and Christopher in the truck the way he’d once guiltily dreamed about.

Sometimes, Eddie looks at the kid the way he did when he was a baby— watching his chest slowly rise and fall or catching glimpses of himself in his features. And for these brief moments, Eddie believes that if there’s one thing in the universe that’s meant to be anything, it has to be Christopher.

Outside, it’s a beautiful morning. The sun is bright and dazzling, and the sky is endless. The road is smooth and easy. And Eddie is doing the right thing, for once. For both of them.

“Dad?” Christopher asks him.

Eddie glances back again, smiling at the sight of him leaning eagerly forward in his seat.

“Yeah, buddy.”

“Um,” Chris says. “Do you think that there’s— like—” He pauses, laughing a little bit at himself, and Eddie smiles as he waits it out. “Do you think there’s angels?”

Eddie’s smile creeps wider over his face. “What do you mean?” he asks.

Christopher grins impishly. “Angels,” he repeats. “In Los Angeles.”

As it dawns on him, Eddie laughs. It feels easier right now than it has in so long— maybe longer than Eddie can really pin down.

“You know what, bud,” he says as Christopher giggles. “I think you’ll just have to find out for yourself when we get there.”

“Okay!” Christopher cheers. “Let’s go!”

Eddie laughs again. “Let’s go.”

At the next turn, he merges onto the I-10, bound for California.

Eddie sits at the edge of a body of water in the silent cab of a pickup truck. It’s like that night at the lake all over again.

Shannon took Chris with her after the beach, making plans to get ice cream— they’d driven separately, and Eddie had knelt down and hugged his baby tight even though Christopher’s clothes got him damp, and he’d helped Shannon get his stuff and his crutches into her car and then they’d arranged for him to be dropped off at Eddie’s later, and then—

And then it was just Eddie in his truck.

So it’s the same as it had been, once, and it’s also not remotely like that at all. That night by the lake, it had— in a manner of speaking— been the three of them. Eddie and Shannon, just kids themselves and terrified. Christopher, before he’d been anyone, present in the space between his parents. Christopher, who is now undoubtedly chattering up a storm in the backseat of Shannon’s car, while Eddie’s sits empty behind him and the ocean spreads out endlessly past the windshield.

There’s so much about his life that is different this time. Loving Shannon had been easier when he was a kid, when he knew so little about the world, when all he wanted was an open road. But now—

“He loves having you around,” he’d said, looking up at her from where he was pressed into the sand, feeling the sun on the nape of his neck and watching it flicker across her features, once so familiar to him and now close to it again. She was as pretty as ever, like she’d been day one at the lake when Eddie’s life began to curve in one particular direction so slowly and subtly that he’d missed it entirely.

“Does he?”

“We both do.”

He had meant it. He does love having Shannon around. He’s just not sure what it is that he loves about it. It’s harder, now that he’s older, to parse out the truth about his feelings from the things that he wishes were true.

And in just the next moment she’d started asking him questions that he didn’t have the answers to. As she set her earnest eyes on him; as she’d asked him if Christopher’s mother is what she is to him— Eddie had heard the guardedness in her voice and wished that he knew. Wished that he could tell her exactly what she is to him, like he could back then, when she was his best friend and that was it.

She’s not his best friend anymore. She hasn’t been for a long time now. He hadn’t known it, not really, but she stopped being his best friend the minute she handed him that slip of shiny paper, proof of their baby’s existence.

And now here Eddie is, eight years later.

Her words echo back and back and back. I think I might be pregnant. I think I might be pregnant. I think I might be pregnant.

She hadn’t even been looking at him. The days of being best friends— the days of open bedroom doors and taking a drive and the lake— are behind them now. And in front of them, a child they both love and a question mark and the ocean, vast and blue.

Eddie looks out at it now in the distance and watches it lap against the shore and he tries— really tries, for the first time in a long time— to put himself back into that headspace. He leans back in the front seat of his truck and catches his own eyes in the rearview mirror.

In the glass, he tries to picture two car seats. Christopher comes to mind easily— doubled over in his booster seat, giggling, searching for Eddie’s gaze in the mirror through his little glasses or peering out the window, watching the world with his usual ardent curiosity.

But when Eddie casts his eyes to the other side and tries to imagine a baby there— a baby who, like Chris, is half him and half Shannon but who is otherwise their own person— he comes up desperately empty, as if the image is water through his fingers. He tries to imagine a daughter who looks like Shannon; or the weight of a newborn in his hands again; or Chris leaning over the seat, conspiring with a little brother who favors him.

But all Eddie can see is an empty seat, scattered with Christopher’s stray crayons or library books that have to be returned.

And he finds that when he looks over to his right— into the place where a teenage girl who loved Joan Jett and had the best laugh had once been— the view is similarly bare.

This time, he’s alone in the truck.

May sixth has never meant anything to Eddie. It’s nobody’s birthday; not his parents’ anniversary or the day that he signed his life over to the United States Army or even a day that he’s ever thought about before. He’s just shy of twenty-seven years old, and so the sixth of May has passed him by almost thirty times before it means anything to him at all.

For the rest of his life, May sixth will be the day that his wife died. The day that Eddie knelt in the street over his first best friend as she bled out onto a sunny crosswalk. The day that Eddie walked out of a hospital with her clothes in a plastic bag and found a new hollow in himself that he had never known before.

The day his son lost his mother. For good this time.

Eddie will never be able to think of the sixth of May, or to let it pass on any calendar, without remembering these things:

The sound of Buck’s voice on the street, the first sign that something was wrong, because Buck never talks to him like that, not ever, with that soft ache in his throat and the wild fear in his eyes.

The way Shannon had looked up at him. Noticing for the very first time that pain on her face looks like pain on Christopher’s. Wondering how he’s missed it so many times before, only as it slips through his fingers.

The feeling of watching the life drain out of her. Wondering what pain looks like on himself.

Buck, standing in the hallway.

Bobby, looking at him like he knows exactly how Eddie is feeling. The realization that he does. That they are now bound, not by a crest or a title, but by something that ties them together— a loss, that hollow feeling deep down in Eddie’s chest one that he is not the first man ever to experience.

And Christopher.

Christopher, in the doorway of his Abuela’s house with that quizzical, concerned look on his little face behind his glasses; his hands on the doorframe to balance himself; the way he’d reached for Eddie. The knowledge that this time, when Eddie is thinking about it being just the two of them in the world, it’s truer than it had been before.

Eddie is twenty-six years old and he doesn’t know what he’s doing when he sits his son down on the front porch steps at his Abuela’s house in the fading afternoon light and tells him that his mother is dead.

There’s no time to prepare, and nothing that could have prepared him, anyway. Not even if he’d had a thousand hours to study. So he just sits there with Christopher wrapped up in his lap, only eight years old and still so small, so new to everything. A child who’s never brushed death with his little fingers; a child who, until now, has been spared grief.

“Daddy?” Christopher asks him. “What’s wrong?”

Eddie swallows hard and then brushes his hand over the back of Christopher’s head, his palm against the soft curls and warm, alive crown beneath.

“Christopher,” he says softly, finding his voice, “do you know what it means if someone dies?”

Chris is quiet for a moment, and then nods his head. “Like…that they’re not here anymore.”

“Yeah,” Eddie manages to breathe, though it feels like something with thorns has wrapped around his lungs and his throat and may live there forever. “When someone dies, it means that they aren’t here on Earth with us anymore. So we can’t see them or touch them or— anything.”

Chris nods his head. “Are they on another planet?” he asks. “Like in my room?”

Eddie remembers their first night in Los Angeles: Chris sitting on the rug on the floor, looking up as Eddie climbed a stepladder to stick little greenyellow stars to his ceiling; watching as Eddie carefully hung a string model of the solar system over his bed. They’d laid there together, pointing to the planets as they trembled on their strings, not quite in orbit but not still, either.

He refuses to lie to him.

“We don’t really know where people go when they die,” he answers. “But, um— maybe. They might go to another planet, or they might go to Heaven. That’s what Abuela and Tia Pepa believe.”

Eddie has been told that he treats Christopher too maturely. The words have been flung at him across a living room in El Paso, but Eddie has to believe that they are wrong. He has to.

“Okay,” Christopher says. “What about animals?”

Eddie almost smiles, before his chest constricts and he sniffs. “Animals, too,” he says softly. “It’s something that we don’t really know about, but we can believe whatever we want to. Does that make sense?”

Chris seems to consider this for a moment. “Like wishes.”

Eddie wants to scream. Instead, he takes a measured breath and buries a kiss against the top of Christopher’s head, trying not to think about if it’s the last time he’ll kiss his baby before he becomes inevitably older, before Eddie has to be the one to change his life and teach him what it means to lose someone that you love.

“Yes, my love,” he murmurs. “Like wishes.”

“But it’s sad, right?” Chris asks him.

“When someone dies, you mean?” Eddie whispers.

“Mhm.”

Eddie flickers, back to the ambulance. She didn’t want to leave him again. It’s all so unfair. She should be here. It shouldn’t ever have been Eddie and Christopher, alone on the porch steps facing the world.

In front of them, a bird lands on the fence and ruffles its feathers in the light of early dusk. It’s a true blue California summer evening. Eddie isn’t sure of the time, but the sky is so beautiful and the bird flutters softly away again and Christopher’s mom is gone, forever. How all of these things can coexist, so much beauty with so much pain, is what Eddie considers to be the worst thing in the world.

Shannon, he thinks, would have said it was the best.

Christopher is too little to know, either way. Maybe that’s the worst part.

“Yes,” Eddie says softly. “It is sad. And— it’s okay to be sad.”

Chris tilts his head up, his blue eyes like his mom’s searching Eddie’s face for answers that Eddie is also too young to have.

“Did someone die?” Christopher asks him.

The weight of his body in Eddie’s lap feels like a solace that Eddie knows he doesn’t deserve.

“Yes,” he whispers, gently reaching out and brushing Christopher’s curls back from his forehead. “It’s your mom, honey. She died.”

Christopher is quiet for a moment. The only tell that he’s processing Eddie’s words is the way that his fingers wrap incrementally tighter around the fabric of Eddie’s shirt, a babyish, reflexive clinging.

There’s a breeze, unusually cool for this time of year, and it rustles the leaves on the tree in the front yard and the grass and the ends of Christopher’s hair. Eddie wishes, however briefly, that he might find some meaning in that— but comes up painfully empty.

When Chris looks back, his lower lip is trembling.

As Eddie had thought, he understands entirely what this means. It’s the first time in his life that Eddie wishes he didn’t.

“Come here, baby,” he whispers, drawing Christopher into his arms. Chris throws himself into it, burying his head in Eddie’s neck, and starts to cry in earnest as Eddie holds him tighter.

He searches for something to say, but knows that there aren’t words. There’s nothing, anywhere, that he can say that will help this. There’s nothing anyone could. He just holds him, and hopes it’s enough.

Eventually, Christopher falls asleep without eating dinner. Eddie carries him into his Abuela’s bedroom and puts him to sleep in her bed and sits there until the room gets entirely dark, just looking at the sleeping face of the son that he’s now entirely responsible for.

It’s strange, he thinks, as he puts his hand on Christopher’s chest and feels it rise and fall. Once, he’d been a little boy put to sleep in his Abuela’s bed. Not so long ago, he’d been right where Christopher is now. He pauses to listen, and hears the low hum of voices from the other room— his family, voices he’s known since before he can remember, people who are familiar to him. Even through the walls, he can hear the sorrow in the way they’re speaking.

Neither of them had ever liked Shannon for him very much. He kind of understands. The truth is that neither of them had really known Shannon. Eddie looks down at the little boy who holds half of her DNA and half of his own, and is suddenly very aware that he’s the only person here who had known Shannon.

Just as suddenly, the thought is oppressive.

He gets up, leaving Christopher asleep, and slips out into the hallway and then outside into the velvet dark evening without alerting anyone. The relief of it is short lived as he stands outside at the base of the steps, no plan in sight beyond a need to get out of the house.

He won’t go far, of course. There’s a little boy inside who can’t wake up and find his dad gone, too. Even being this far from him is like leaving something physical behind, an ache, but Eddie needs a moment.

He finds himself wandering into the detached garage. Tucked back in the corner of the lot, invisible from the street, he sometimes forgets it’s there at all. The door rolls up manually and sticks halfway, but Eddie puts a little more force into it and it goes onward, stirring up dust and revealing the shadowy corners of a slightly damp room, just big enough to fit the singular car that lives inside.

He isn’t sure exactly how the Chevelle came to live full time in his Abuela’s detached garage. His Tia and her family lived in Los Angeles from the time Eddie was a child, and though he knows that they lived in Texas at one point, he has always found it hard to picture. For a long time, they were the only family he had in California, until just a matter of a few years ago when his Abuela moved out here, too.

And at some point— between when his Tio passed away and now, when Eddie stands in the doorway of the garage— the Chevelle had come to be here.

But the first time that Eddie ever saw it, it was on the street. He remembers Paco standing proudly next to it and leaning over to tell Eddie, at the time no older than Chris is now, all about the car.

“Do you know what you’re looking at here?” he’d asked, and then grinned when Eddie shook his head, tapping the shining forest green hood of the car where it blistered and gleamed beneath the sun. “This is a 1970 Chevrolet Chevelle, Eddie. Pure American muscle.”

Mostly, Eddie had liked the way it sparkled in the light, the way the sun made the green shimmer and the way it reflected off of the spotless glass like the surface of water.

Right now, it’s nothing more to Eddie than a quiet place to sit. He tries the handle and finds it unlocked, and so he slips into the driver’s seat and tries to take a deep breath. As he does, his eyes sting brightly with fresh, hot tears.

Even here, alone in the garage in the cover of night, Eddie squeezes his eyes shut until they recede again.

She wanted a divorce. She wanted a life, and instead there’s just this. Eddie, alone with their son and the broken memory of a marriage that neither of them should have been in to begin with. Shannon, dead, and Eddie, alive. No matter which way he turns it, it makes no sense to him.

Barely in his twenties, he’d survived two tours in Afghanistan by the skin of his teeth. And before thirty, Shannon had gotten four more months with her child before she was swept off of the earth by a wayward car, just crossing the street.

Eddie drops his head against the seat with enough force to ache, and nothing is any clearer for it at all.

He opens his eyes, and in the same second he captures his own dark gaze in the mirror, the glass slightly cloudy with age. It does nothing to hide the grief that’s plastered all over his face, though. The guilt. The sorrow. It’s all there, in the glassy brown and the pink around them and the bruiseviolet darkness underneath.

It’s hard to imagine, at least today, that it was only ten years ago and some change that he sat behind the wheel of a car for the very first time. That it was even less than that when he drove Shannon out to the lake and watched his life change forever. That it was only slightly more that he yearned to be behind the wheel, thinking that it came with freedom and choice.

It feels like yesterday, and a lifetime ago.

He turns his head away from his own reflection and takes a long look at the empty passenger seat. He reaches out, skimming his fingers over the cool, soft upholstery. He reaches, too, down into his memory along with his fingertips. He reaches, and reaches, and tries to come up with that feeling of wanting the seat to be filled.

Hope, he guesses. A blind, childlike belief that he would grow up and find someone to share all of this with. But here he is, and it’s May sixth, and the seat next to him is emptier than ever. But it matters less than ever, too.

Because just like before, there’s a little boy with wishes and a whole backseat just for him. Eddie twists in his seat and looks into it, and thinks about the carseat in his truck and about the seat back pocket, filled with books and little toy fire engines that Christopher is not yet too old to find joy in smashing into the door while they traverse Los Angeles.

Eddie may be twenty-six and more broken than he’d thought. And Chris may be eight years old, and already learning more about pain than he should be. But they’re both still here. The backseat is still full of a child who needs his dad. Eddie is still that person he’d been, when he traversed eight hundred miles to bring them to a new life. A new life that is still theirs, broken or otherwise.

Eddie will go back inside. He will lift his baby out of his Abuela’s bed and tuck him into his carseat and make sure he’s buckled in. And then he will drive him home and climb into his bed with him and he’ll kiss his curls and wake up and do it all over again. He will. He has to.

He just needs a minute.

At the time that he bought it, Eddie had spent a lot of time convincing himself that the Denali was a good thing.

He’d told himself that over and over: that he needed the upgrade because in his old truck, the air conditioning worked only about half the time and Chris was always complaining about being too hot. It made Eddie feel guilty, a twisting kind of feeling way down in his chest. Like he was failing.

It came with its downsides, too. Eddie handed over the money like it was nothing; like he wasn’t well aware of where it came from. Everything comes at a cost, it turns out. Something more than cash handed over like blood money.

But at the end of the day, the new Denali was big and shiny and beautiful. Eddie genuinely liked it, liked the way it felt to sit behind the wheel and the safe stability that he got from knowing that it was a brand-new vehicle. It was bigger too than his last truck, which meant that he felt safer on the road; felt like Christopher was safer in the backseat.

At the time, safety had felt hard to come by.

Close to two years later, Eddie sits behind the driver’s seat and thinks that more recently, he’s actually felt too safe. It makes him restless in a way that bleeds into frustration and in this case there’s no underground fighting to tunnel it into.

Now, there’s a panic attack; a breakup; and Buck’s voice in his head.

That part is particularly annoying, because if Eddie’s being honest he would really rather be bleeding from his mouth on a dirty fight mat than here, replaying Buck’s words in his head on a loop.

Is that enough?

It’s not, of course. It wasn’t. He was right, not that Eddie will ever say those words to his face because to do so would be to invite a particular kind of smugness that he does not want to contend with right now, no matter how endearing it looks on Buck’s face. Buck would try to hide it, of course, under the circumstances. But Eddie would know.

Or worse— there’s also an alternative where Buck just feels bad for him, because Buck has that in him too, a kind of deep compassion. There would be a look of pure, sweet concern on his face and Eddie can’t handle that either.

So he won’t be admitting it, but it had very much been Buck’s insistence on the point that had driven Eddie to end his relationship with Ana. And now here he is in his truck waiting for school pickup and he can’t quite put his finger on what it is that feels so wrong in his chest.

Sometimes, like yesterday in his kitchen admitting how wrongfooted their relationship felt to him, Eddie gets this glimmer of a feeling. Even right now, his fingertips drumming on the wheel, he thinks that it’s almost within his reach. Like if he could just kick to the surface a little bit further, he’d be able to break the water into the light and understand these tangled-up threads of himself. He just never quite gets there.

He sighs, glancing to his right. The passenger seat is empty.

For the first time, there is something that’s clear. It goes all the way back to Shannon, back to Afghanistan and back even further. When he pauses, looking at that empty seat and really thinking about it, he can see that maybe it goes back to his childhood.

Eddie doesn’t want to be alone. It probably looks as if he does, the way he drives people away from him. But the truth is that Eddie has been clinging to a fantasy for longer than he would like to admit, and no matter how many times he tries to forget about it, it comes back to him one way or another.

A ready-made family, he muses, thinking about Ana and how perfectly she had fit into their lives. How, Eddie wonders, could she fit in like that and still feel so wrong? How could it have been wrong with Shannon, when she came back into their lives and it had seemed like the pieces were going to fall into place before it all fell apart instead? How does he keep ending up here, with an empty seat next to him and a dead end road?

Eddie startles at the sharp beep of a car behind him and glances in the rearview mirror. There’s a little Toyota back there against his bumper with an exasperated mom in the driver’s seat and a bored-looking guy in a suit next to her. Eddie offers an apologetic wave and pulls forward in the line one space, as if it’s really going to get either of them much closer to the school at all.

But isn’t that how everything works? He hadn’t accounted for that back then, when he’d imagined what it would be like to grow up. That the world does it for you; that there’s always someone waiting for you to make a move. That you’ll be shuffled along whether you like it or not, and that there will be someone who seems to have it figured out when you don’t.

There’s a teacher in a traffic vest waiting to open Eddie’s back door, and he twists in the driver’s seat so he can watch as she helps Christopher with his crutches and steadies him so that he can get into the truck.

“Hi, bud,” he says, smiling as Chris lifts his head up, his curls flopping over his forehead.

“Hi, Dad,” he says.

This, Eddie supposes, is how he keeps ending up here. Because when Chris is in the backseat, the rest doesn’t ever seem like it matters as much.

“Thanks,” Eddie says, nodding to the teacher as she wishes them a good evening and shuts the door behind Chris, enclosing them into the car together. Eddie reaches back to tap Chris’s knee affectionately, and then diverts his gaze back to the road and navigates through the exit of the pick-up line. “How was school?” he asks, looking in the mirror at Christopher.

He shrugs his shoulders. “Fine,” he says. “Are we still going to get Buck?”

Eddie exhales, half a laugh on his mouth as he shakes his head and checks both ways before turning right out of the school lot and onto the road. “Buck this and Buck that,” he teases. “Yes. We’re going there now.”

Chris cheers in the back and Eddie smiles, unable to stop himself.

There’s idle chatter, and Chris tells him about Mackenzie in science class who broke a beaker and then cried, and then Eddie asks about Mackenzie which leads into a whole drama involving Caleb who for some reason, Buck seems to know.

He catches the tail end of the story just as he drops into Eddie’s passenger seat with all the exuberance of a set-free puppy dog, and then he immediately twists in his seat, all the way around to look at Christopher behind him.

“I thought Caleb was mad at her,” he says.

“Hello to you, too, Buck,” Eddie says, though neither of them seems to hear him.

“He was,” Chris answers, nodding.

“Why didn’t anybody tell me about this?” Eddie complains, watching as Buck turns back around and flashes him a bright, easy grin.

“You should listen closer, Eddie,” he says.

“You should—” Eddie starts, and then cuts himself off with a glance back at Christopher, who’s smiling big in the backseat. “Nevermind. Who is Caleb?”

Christopher willingly launches into the backstory that Eddie had missed as Eddie backs the car out of the parking space at Buck’s loft. From there, it’s adjusting his sunglasses and interjecting with questions and then Buck is laughing and somehow, as they weave together through afternoon traffic, Eddie manages to forget what it is exactly that he was so worried about.

Time seems to move so slowly.

After he watches Buck disappear through those doors, barely clinging to life and taking some part of him, too— everything slows down. It’s as if the world moves around him, rather than him moving with it as he’s supposed to be doing, and parts of Eddie’s brain go static and gray. He briefly wonders, as he watches his own fingers shake, whether he is also hurt.

But he isn’t. Not really, not in a significant way, not like Buck is.

Buck.

Eddie has to remind himself to keep taking in breath and keep letting them out again; like his lungs are suddenly mechanical instead of automatic, like he’s in charge of all the moving parts of his body. Or maybe like Buck was in charge of them, and now his hands are off of the controls. That’s sort of what being his partner has been like: as if they take control of each other’s functions, because they move in such thorough lockstep with one another.

What is Eddie without that?

It’s not a question he has the answer to at the beginning of the night, and it’s not one he has an answer to later. Not when Maddie comes tearing into the emergency room looking terrified; not when he asks about Buck’s parents and has to walk down the hall to shake off the fury he feels at the answer; and not the next morning, when the world wakes up and Buck doesn’t.

A coma, they say.

Eddie wants to ask questions and demand answers, but he finds that he doesn’t really have the strength at all. In some ways, it doesn’t matter. Whatever they’re doing, it won’t be enough until Buck is safely back with them.

He thinks about Christopher at home with Carla and about watching the two of them together and about a world without Evan Buckley in it and feels so weak all over that he has to sit down.

If Buck is safely back with them.

Life goes on, impossibly. There are logistics to be handled and among them, as Eddie hears it being discussed between Bobby and Maddie in the corner of the room, is Buck’s Jeep.

“—still at the firehouse. It could stay, but we don’t know how long—”

Eddie gets to his feet without pausing to think.

“Do you have his keys?” he asks.

They both glance over at him, their faces pale in the harsh fluorescent light. There aren’t any windows in this waiting room, which isn’t helping with anybody’s sense of the passage of time. He stands there with his hands shoved into his pockets, looking between them and waiting.

“Um,” Maddie says. “I have them. They gave me his— his things.”

Eddie’s stomach turns, but he scrunches his face and swallows hard. “Okay,” he says listlessly, digging one hand out of his pocket and holding his palm up. “I’ll go.”

Bobby’s expression flickers. “Eddie,” he says cautiously.

Eddie wants to scream, but he doesn’t. He never does. At least, not anymore.

“It’s okay,” he says. Nothing is, of course, but the fact of the situation is that there won’t be anymore news on Buck right now. Not any good news, at least. The coma is on purpose, and miracles don’t exist. Eddie is well aware of that. And for reasons that are not entirely clear to his exhausted mind right now, he feels like this is his job. Like it has to be him. The thought of it being anyone else makes him feel unsettled and wrong-footed. “I can take it and Uber back to get my truck. I need to go and check on Chris, anyway,” he says.

This is a partial truth, and he’s pretty sure that at least Bobby sees right through him, even if Maddie might not. Still, the keys are pressed into his palm and he wraps his fingers around the little turtle keychain that hangs there.

It had been, once, a memento of a day that they all spent together. Depending on what happens next, Eddie is not sure he’ll ever be able to look at it again.

In the meantime, he runs through the motions and shortly finds himself in the parking lot of the firehouse where his own truck is parked right alongside Buck’s Jeep. Exactly as they’d been yesterday morning when he pulled in neatly and found Buck there waiting for him, leaning against the back bumper. Even now, Eddie can practically hear him.

He clicks the key fob and the Jeep unlocks for him, and he slips into the driver’s seat. It’s adjusted for Buck, of course, and for a moment Eddie sits there in the wrongness.

It’s pervasive, everywhere. The sky is blue and the day is astonishingly sunny after last night’s storm, which feels like a cruel twist. How is it, Eddie thinks as his breath catches, that something could sweep in like that and take Buck with it, only to just be gone again the next morning while Buck is left here to suffer?

How is that fair? How is any of it fair?

At some point in his life, before he knew Buck, there had been a version of Eddie who did want to believe in something. There had been a kid who dutifully went to church and admired his Abuela’s rosaries and liked the idea of someone out there, watching out for him. He doesn’t think he’ll ever feel like that again, like Bobby does. He’s not sure how anybody can.

The seat scrapes as Eddie slides it into position; he adjusts the mirrors and watches his gaze flash in the glass and thinks about Buck and this Jeep and Buck in this seat and Buck with his hand relaxed on the wheel. His chest is tight, and he’s already starting to get used to it, and he briefly, darkly, wonders if that’s just life now. If Buck will ever sit here again or if Eddie’s chest will ever loosen.

Maybe Bobby was right to be skeptical, to look at Eddie with concern the way he did. Maybe Eddie isn’t okay, because he looks up at a red light halfway through the drive and can’t remember how he got there and then the light turns green and Eddie goes without considering where the road is leading.

He didn’t really have an intention when he angled the Jeep out of the firehouse parking lot, but he’s not quite surprised when he looks up out of a haze and finds himself on South Bedford Street. The neighborhood is quiet as ever, its usual calmness not reaching Eddie today in the way that it might normally.

He blinks at the house from the driveway, at the darkness beyond his living room curtains, and then he remembers that Christopher is at school. Later today, Eddie will have to talk to him about Buck and the thought of it comes with a sharp pang down deep beneath his solar plexus.

He cuts the engine and stares through the windshield. Inside the Jeep, Eddie realizes suddenly, it smells like Buck.

As he sits there with the sun warming him incrementally through the window, darkness creeps in. Moving the Jeep, talking to Chris: these responsibilities, Eddie thinks, might not be the only ones ahead of him. There might be more than that, worse than that. He’d like to be the kind of person who doesn’t think this way but things have gone wrong one too many times and now there’s nothing Eddie can do but prepare for the worst. He’s not sure he remembers how to do anything else.

If Buck dies, there will be so much to think about.

After Shannon died, there was a lot of paperwork. But much of her practical life had been isolated from Eddie’s. With Buck, the threads are tangled. It won’t just be delivering the news to Christopher or attending the funeral in a daze. It’ll be clearing out the loft and emptying his locker and deciding what to keep and which pieces of Buck become detritus to a life suddenly ripped away.

For Eddie, it’ll be a trip to the lawyer and an empty space in his will.

It’ll be moving the Jeep again, and never seeing it in the driveway with its headlights sweeping over the house as a signal to Buck’s presence. It’ll be an empty passenger seat. It’ll be an empty place everywhere.

For three minutes and seventeen seconds, this had been Eddie’s reality.

He wouldn’t be able to say which of these thoughts is the one that breaks him. Maybe the combined weight of them all and the weak trembling of the muscles in his arms that still ache from trying to haul Buck back onto the ladder, back to life. But something in Eddie fractures, and his breath trembles, and he drops his head to Buck’s steering wheel and sobs so hard that it hurts; that his vision whites out and he sees stars behind his eyelids and suddenly, sickeningly, a world without Buck seems close enough to touch.

And then, it isn’t anymore.

Eddie goes to the hospital and turns his eyes away from the vessel of Buck’s body as it artificially rises and falls with breath that isn’t his. He stands there, throat closing up, as Christopher tells Buck to come back to them with unwavering bravery, more than Eddie has ever had in himself.

And then, Buck wakes up. The Jeep sits in Eddie’s driveway while he recovers. And then one day, he’s okay again and he drops himself into Eddie’s passenger seat with a satisfied hum.

“What?” Eddie asks, glancing sidelong across the console at him.

Buck shrugs his broad shoulders. “Nothing,” he says easily. Eddie can tell that he’s in and out of good spirits; that there are things about this experience that are sticking to him. But he’s not worried, not really, because Buck’s chest rises and falls now with breaths that belong to him again. Because Buck is alive and safe and only out of work for the time being. Because Buck is here in Eddie’s car, and the Jeep is going home with him today.

He doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to tell Buck about those moments of uncertainty. In fact, he doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to make sense of them for himself; they’re too much to think on, things he would rather forget.

Maddie had asked Eddie— fretfully, with an anxious twitch in her fingers— if he would take part in her brigade of visitors to check in on Buck. Eddie had refused. Buck will come to him; this much, he’s sure about, and he doesn’t have the words to explain to her how he knows or how much comfort the certainty of it brings him.

“Maddie would kill me if she knew you were driving,” he offers lightly, scrunching his nose against the light as Buck clicks his seatbelt into place and Eddie checks the mirror to pull out of the parking lot.

In his peripheral vision, Buck rolls his eyes.

“Maddie would kill me if she knew I wasn’t wrapped in bubble wrap in my bed,” he replies as Eddie smiles a little. “But I actually do have to get my car back at some point.”

Eddie hums. “Not until all the groceries people bought you run out.”

“Which will be in probably a year,” Buck huffs.

Eddie smiles, shaking his head, and Buck reaches forward to adjust the vents in front of him on Eddie’s dashboard.

“You’re being very dramatic,” Eddie says mildly.

“You try getting struck by lightning and see how dramatic you are,” Buck grumbles, settling back with a roll of his shoulders and tilting his head to the side, into the sun. He lasts that way for about thirty seconds before he lifts his head again, turning his gaze in Eddie’s direction with a question on his features.

“Hey,” he says. “Why is my Jeep at your house, anyway?”

Lying to Buck is not something that Eddie does.

“It was easier,” he says, flicking his turn signal. “Had to get it out of the firehouse lot.”

Lying to himself is probably different, but Eddie hasn’t allowed himself to think that deeply in weeks now.

“Hm,” Buck hums, then tilts his head back again. He’s still more tired than he’d admit to, and quieter. It would be unnerving if Eddie hadn’t just seen how quiet he could be.

The drive isn’t long, and it passes in stoplights and lane changes, an easy silence spreading between them as the light jumps in pools and stretches of shadow across the cab of Eddie’s truck. And soon enough, South Bedford Street rushes up to meet them again and the engine is cutting in Eddie’s driveway and they chatter meaninglessly, like Buck’s life had gone uninterrupted, as they get out of the car and stretch in the driveway like a habit.

“Thanks,” Buck grins, catching his keys out of Eddie’s hand as he tosses them to him. Turtle keychain and all, right where it’s supposed to be.

“Sure,” Eddie answers, tapping the hood as he shoves his other hand into his pocket. “Be careful, okay?”

It’s as close as he’ll get to admitting that he’s nervous, too. Buck seems to understand, because he doesn’t roll his eyes or shrug him off, but instead he just nods and dips his head down, an earnest flicker of feeling on his face.

“I’m good, Eddie,” he assures him.

Buck always is, in the end. That’s the dangerous thing about it, Eddie guesses.

“I know,” he says, smiling.

And so the Jeep pulls out of Eddie’s driveway, and things go back to the way they had been after all.

The garage door creaks as Eddie shoves it up, sending sunlight pooling over the Chevelle and particles of dust spiraling across the golden shafts as the day rushes in. It’s late in the evening now and Eddie is really regretting his choice to come here at all.

Pepa means well. He knows that.

But what was supposed to be fixing her sink had turned out to be a trap and when all was said and done Eddie was stuck and his tool bag was left unopened in the corner like a sad reminder of his naivete.

In the meantime, Christopher is at Buck’s, probably eating junk food or playing Mario Kart or both. He sulks, tugging the door halfway down again and stepping deeper into the space, past the shelf adorned with half-empty rusted paint cans and the leftover bits and screws from projects long over with now. The cover on the car pulls back easily and Eddie slips into the driver’s seat with a long exhale, nobody but him around to hear it.

The interior of the Chevelle smells like leather and stale air, so Eddie leaves the door propped open with his foot and leans his head back against the headrest, shutting his eyes and turning the world dark.

It’s not the first time he’s come here to do this in the intervening years between that first time the night that Shannon died and today. Sometimes, when he needs the quiet, this just seems like the place. The Chevelle is mostly his responsibility, anyway, and there are also times that he comes here to tinker with it to the best of his limited ability. He knows his way around it, at least, though he’s hesitant to do anything crazy for fear of messing with a good thing.

What a metaphor that is, he thinks now, a wry voice in his head that rings a familiar bell.

Opening his eyes, Eddie turns his head to the right without thinking and is met by the same sight as ever. The fantasy of that seat being filled has started to feel like a haunting one, if he’s being honest. Where once it had filled him with yearning, now to think about it sets off a pricking unease beneath his skin that’s rather like being watched; like being in the crosshairs, though of what scope he isn’t sure.

It breaks my heart to see you alone.

Pepa’s voice echoes; every time Eddie replays it the edges of the words turn sharper. Is that what he is? Alone, pathetic? Is that what Christopher is? Had Eddie— in his relentless self-interest, a thing he can never shake— done this to them both, a disservice to his child rendered by his own blind spots?

He would like to believe otherwise. He knows that there are people in his life who would say he’s doing well as Chris’s dad, that he’s giving him a good life. But everyone has their biases, and the pain in his Tia’s expression— that pinched worry at the corners of her eyes— is equally real. Eddie isn’t sure both can be true at the same time.

He isn’t sure he really wants that fantasy anymore. He isn’t sure it exists anymore, at least not for him. Every time he thinks about it he feels like he’s taken a wrong step on his way down a steep flight of stairs, like one wrong move will send him tumbling. And if that happens, he’s well aware that it won’t just be him he’s taking down.

Isn’t it safer like this, he wonders? To be sitting here in the half-light as the day turns around him?

But maybe more than that, does it matter what’s safer? Does it matter what fantasy Eddie wants now any more than it had mattered when Eddie was eight years old in the backseat and wanted things he didn’t yet understand?

He runs his fingers along the dashboard, the surface cool beneath his touch, and swallows hard.

The answer is probably no. It has never mattered very much what Eddie really wanted.

Eddie’s heart is still in his throat by the time he gets into the car.

It’s morning, the next morning. Buck’s knock on his back door and the pan of brownies that Kim had left at the firehouse have stuck with him all night, and Eddie feels sick and anxious down deep in a place he didn’t know he was capable of. He’d barely slept, but he’d gotten up anyway and took Chris to school like always and he’d ignored Buck’s texts and Marisol’s texts and then he’d ended up here in the god-forsaken truck again and now he’s sitting behind the steering wheel wishing it would all just stop.

There’s no way out of this, not that he can see. The damage is done: to himself, to Kim, to Marisol.

He’d been doing a good job of ignoring all that and probably still would be, but now the damage is done to Buck, too. Buck— Eddie’s best friend in the world— who will probably never be able to look at him the same way. Eddie sinks into the shame of it all like quicksand and he isn’t sure that anybody is ever going to be able to pull him up out of it now.

So he drives.

He passes the bright green flash of the sign for the interstate and thinks— distantly, wildly— about taking it. About just removing himself from it all. From LA; from Chris and Buck and everything else, from all the people he hurts more than he helps. He isn’t sure how it got to be like this: how what had been a fresh start off of that same interstate had gotten so ruined.

That’s just what he does to things, maybe. Like his dad’s truck with the scrape along the side; like Texas; like Shannon.

It’s not a conscious choice to take himself to the cemetery, but Eddie ends up there anyway. He doesn’t quite realize that’s where he’s going until he looks up and the gate’s in front of him, with the iron pushed open on one side to invite visitors.

His throat closes up further, tighter, itchier. He cuts the engine of his truck and in the accompanying silence there’s something in him that screams and wails. In an effort to escape it for something only slightly better, Eddie opens the door and steps out into the sunshine. It’s relentless, the light here. He’d loved that at first and for most of the intervening years but recently it has started to feel like maybe it’s a punishment of some kind, something that’s going to taunt him.

He clicks the lock behind him as his feet crunch on stray pieces of loose gravel, and then it gives way to a neatly-swept path. It’s been a while since Eddie made his way to Shannon’s grave; last time he brought Chris was a while ago too and even then his son had gone in by himself while Eddie waited against the truck. Still, the steps come easily to him.

He thinks back. It was always that way with Shannon, too. He could have picked her out of any crowd; drawn to her be it on the surface of the lake or laid out on the street in the crosswalk. Guilt chases rabbits of shame around his chest in wild circles like a hunter in lockstep, and the headstone now five years old greets him more coldly than Shannon ever had, even when he undoubtedly deserved worse.

Or maybe he’s misremembering that. Maybe she was cold with him. Maybe she hated him after all.

It’s hard to know, now. Every passing year, every passing month even— her memory grows more distant and further away. Like Chris saying he can’t remember her voice anymore, Eddie forgets things too. He forgets if he ever loved her the way he thinks he did; he forgets if she ever really loved him; he forgets what that love meant.

He exhales with a trembling breath as he sinks down onto the bench, the cold stone seeping through the denim of his jeans into the back of his thighs.

“They should make these things out of wood,” he says, brushing his fingers over the surface idly. The kind of thing he might have said to Shannon once, when she was the person he told all his idle thoughts to, when she was a girl with a Joan Jett tape and a fledgling smoking habit that she dropped just as quickly the next month.

At least then, Eddie thinks, the benches wouldn’t mimic the cold touch of death. It’s cruel, if you’re asking him.

Shannon, of course, doesn’t answer.

Eddie looks at the stone in front of him, at her name smushed against his own. Diaz, the name he’d given her, the name he isn’t sure she’d ever wanted. But they’d shared it and cut it into thirds to give a piece of it to Christopher, too, and they’d all been bound together by it and he doesn’t think she’d ever regretted that.

But he doesn’t know. Not really. He isn’t sure she even got the chance to know how she felt about it, herself.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers to the nothingness in front of him, to the date etched into stone. There’s a faint breeze that rustles the springtime leaves above his head and he shuts his eyes against it. In the darkness of his eyelids, he sees Buck.

He opens his eyes again.

“I’m sorry,” he breathes again. “It’s not fair. I— you would think this is so stupid.”

On this point, Eddie is confident. Shannon would have hated what he’s been doing with Kim; would have scrunched her nose and told him it was creepy. She would have hated what he’s doing to Christopher even more, and this thought sends a sharp, fierce ache through him.

He lowers his head and picks at a piece of pale skin around his cuticle, unable to keep looking at even the stone that represents her. Coward, he thinks darkly.

“He’s such a perfect kid,” he whispers to the empty space around him. Not a soul in sight at nine a.m. “And I’m fucking this up. You left him with me and I’m fucking it up.”

It’s not fair in so many ways that Eddie can’t begin to pick one thread to pull at.

“I’m sorry,” he repeats. The words lose meaning bit by bit. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m—”

I’m worried about me, too. Why, Eddie wonders, had it been easy to admit it to Buck but hard to say to an empty headstone? Shannon isn’t here anyway; Eddie doesn’t believe in that. He doesn’t think she’s crossing her ankles from a seat on top of the headstone, a spectre facing him. He doesn’t think she’s on the other side of some veil between worlds. He doesn’t think she’s anywhere, which is maybe half the problem.

He doesn’t think she’s in Kim, either. In the boat on the lake or in the store or in candles or standing across from Buck with a plate of brownies.

“Buck is going to have me committed, probably,” he huffs.

He can practically hear her: Good for him.

Kim’s voice is similar, but couldn’t ever quite hit the same notes as Shannon’s. Her laugh; the scrape of it. That’s all lost to him now.

“What am I doing?” he breathes, the words barely taking shape as he drops his head into his hands and presses the heels of his palms into his eyes, hard enough to see stars swirling in the dark.

He’s just so tired. Tired of fucking things up; tired of hurting himself and everyone around him; tired of running; tired of being alone. It’s like being trapped in the corner, snapping and snarling with nowhere to turn, and still somehow turning the wrong way.

Surrender has never come easy to him, but it’s starting to look good now.

He picks his head up again, his vision wavering in the new light. Shannon’s grave remains, unchanged, grasscovered and still. She’d messed up, too. She’d left him; left Christopher; left Texas. That much is still true, even if death has forgiven many of her sins, wiped the slate clean but for the hyphen bridging her life.

But before that, she’d been a child. She’d been a little girl with a Sesame Street shirt on the front porch steps and a pretty teenager taking his hand in hers, and a new wife beneath the smattering of color in a stained-glass window.

He remembers a day, a weekday, nothing special. Sometime between Christmas and when she died. He can’t even remember the month. But he remembers her sitting next to him in his truck and he remembers Chris in the backseat and he remembers feeling like he was doing something wrong; like they were still kids who were going to get caught. Like he was running from a faceless, nameless thing that he didn’t understand.

He remembers her looking at him like she’d known, somehow. Like she could see right through him.

He remembers, a matter of twelve hours ago, that look on Buck’s face.

Eddie, backed into a corner. Time to roll over; to surrender; to admit defeat and stop this thing in its tracks before it’s too late.

Later, when it’s all over, he’ll look back on it and be able to see that it already was.

Buck is following him.

Normally, Eddie would probably find this endearing. Normally, he would see it for what it is and would appreciate the fact that Buck cares enough to check up on him after the call they just had. Right at the end of their shift, a rough MVA, kid trapped in the backseat with his glasses smashed on his face. The kind of thing that nobody wants to see, but Eddie’s the only one shaking.

The truth is, he’s ashamed and exhausted and lost.

The truth is, he doesn’t have the energy to be kind to Buck because everything in him is screaming for a kid who’s not waiting for him at home. Normally, Eddie would leave a scene like that one and go home to Christopher; would settle on his bed and brush his fingers through his curls, even as Chris buried his head into his pillow and grumbled about being woken up. But inevitably, he’d turn his head into Eddie’s palm and nothing else would matter.

But Christopher has been in Texas for eleven days, and every inch of Eddie feels scraped out and raw with the pain of it, and with every step Buck takes closer to him Eddie only wants to push him further away.

“Eddie,” Buck says eventually, his voice like rough fabric against Eddie’s flayed-open nerves.

“Go away, Buck,” Eddie says flatly. Normally, he’d also try to be softer about it. Nothing is normal right now.

Buck huffs, still trailing after him. Eddie finishes what he’s doing: slamming his locker door, never pausing long enough for Buck to try to catch his gaze, and walks deliberately around the bench in the locker room.

Buck, of course, just follows.

“Eddie,” he tries again.

“Buck,” Eddie growls. “Drop it, okay? Shift’s over, I’m going home.”

“No,” Buck replies, stubborn as ever as their footsteps sync over the concrete floor of the engine bay, Eddie’s boots followed by Buck’s New Balances.

Eddie sighs. “I’m not in the mood to listen to you,” he says. Sharp, cruel.

It doesn’t seem to deter Buck in the slightest. He just keeps following Eddie like a particularly insistent shadow. And there’s a part of Eddie— a part that’s buried deep right now beneath exhaustion and fear and the urge to bite— that appreciates the way Buck never gives up.

But right now, Eddie looks at Buck and sees the day they stood side by side as Eddie’s baby walked out the front door and didn’t change his mind and come back home.

“I don’t care,” Buck replies, halfway to their cars parked next to each other in the shade.

Eddie whirls on him, sending their steady footsteps careening to a stop so suddenly that Buck has to step back so as not to walk into him.

“What’s your problem?” he snarls. “You think you can fucking fix me, Buck? I’m not your project.”

Buck looks impassively back at him. “Give me your keys, Eddie,” he says.

In spite of himself, there’s a part of Eddie that stumbles at that. A breathless second, a halting, a spinning.

“Fuck you,” he says.

Buck holds his hand out, palm up. “Give me your keys.”

“I’m not giving you my keys,” Eddie huffs. “I’m fine.”

Buck’s blue eyes meet his. Where he’d expected pity, there’s just a blazing certainty, a steadiness that could knock Eddie flat if he let it.

“You’re not fine,” Buck says.

Eddie scoffs. “Like you would know anything about having your shit together.”

Buck doesn’t blink; doesn’t falter; doesn’t rise to Eddie’s bait in the slightest.

“You always do this,” Eddie carries on, wild and blind like a wounded animal thrashing.

“Do I?” Buck says flatly.

“Yes,” Eddie hisses. “Acting like you have any right.”

“If you can get your hands to stop shaking,” Buck says evenly, “I’ll drop it and you can drive yourself home.”

They both know it’s no shot.

“Fuck you,” Eddie repeats, with less venom this time in spite of his best effort.

“Get in the car, Eddie,” Buck says, too softly.

Eddie locks his jaw, gives his head a shake, and shoves his keys roughly into Buck’s waiting hand.

He climbs into his own passenger seat, slams the door behind him, and crosses his arms over his chest as Buck readjusts the seat and settles behind the wheel. He takes his time adjusting the mirrors and Eddie glares, then turns to look out the window as Buck turns the key and starts the ignition.

“This is ridiculous,” he says eventually into the quiet.

“Okay,” Buck answers mildly.

Eddie huffs, shaking his head. “You’ve got a lot of nerve, you know that?”

“Yep,” Buck replies, unshaken, pulling to a red light and not bothering to glance in Eddie’s direction. “I’ve heard that.”

Eddie turns his body toward him. Outside, the light of evening fades bit by bit into lilac streaks of duskblue sky. “Is this a joke to you?” he demands.

At this, Buck does look over. For the first time, there’s feeling in his features. “No,” he says softly, his face lit by the glow of the lights and the fading presence of the sun. “You know it’s not.”

And then he turns back to the road, as the light goes green.

Shame creeps in. In the time that it takes them to get to Eddie’s house, the light fades and takes with it all the fury that had burned in Eddie’s chest. It comes and goes like that, and in its wake there are trails of scorched earth left behind. Eventually, he thinks, everyone around him is going to get tired of this. Eventually, he’s going to have to either pull it together or face the fact that they’re not going to tolerate it.

Eventually, Buck isn’t going to want to be around him any more than he wants to be around himself.

He’s exhausted by the time they get to his house, and he gets out in the blue haze of night beneath the glowing streetlight. Words stick to the inside of his throat, never even making it to his mouth, and so he just walks to the door, listening as Buck follows him.

Sometimes, Eddie still manages to be surprised by the depth of how he cares for him.

Tonight, he doesn’t have the words to say it.

Instead, he just silently lets it happen around him. The car locked behind them; the keys on the table by the door; the bolt sealing them inside; the house a little less empty than it would have been.

Buck says nothing. He just goes to the hall closet and drags out the linens for the couch; the spare pillow and the blanket and the sheet. Eddie watches him from the shadow of the hallway as he stretches the elastic corners over the couch; as he winces, sitting down and leaning in to unlace his sneakers; as he drops himself onto Eddie’s couch and deliberately avoids looking across the hallway to Christopher’s door the same way that Eddie does.

And in the morning, the house smells like coffee and Buck is moving around in the kitchen as if Eddie wasn’t throwing words in his face just yesterday. Eddie rises to consciousness, listening, and closes his eyes against the feeling that washes over him.

When he does pry himself up and throw on his jeans to walk into the kitchen, it’s to find Buck cleaning the corner where his sink meets his countertops. He’s still in his clothes from last night, and there’s a cup of coffee full and waiting for Eddie with cream and sugar in it, the things he would forgo if he were pouring it for himself.

His throat tightens.

“You don’t have to do that,” he says to the broad expanse of Buck’s back.

“I know,” Buck says, glancing quickly over his shoulder and then back again. “I want to.”

And isn’t that something, Eddie thinks.

An hour later, he sits in the passenger seat again as the morning spreads out into gold that hurts his eyes. He dips his head back, turning it to look at Buck as he drives them back to the firehouse so that he can get his own truck back.

His hair is smushed on one side from sleeping on Eddie’s couch, and there’s that focused look he gets as he spins the wheel to make the turn out of Eddie’s neighborhood and onto the main road. He’s paying Eddie little attention, but his shoulders are relaxed, carrying none of the tension or pain that Eddie had worried he might have caused.

“Buck,” he says softly, clearing his throat.

“Hm?” Buck asks, looking back at him as they rise up to meet the speed limit. “Yeah?”

Eddie swallows hard. “I’m— I’m sorry about—”

“No,” Buck interjects, waving his hand in the space between them. “Don’t do that.”

Eddie huffs. “I was an asshole to you.”

Buck turns to him and grins. It’s quick and sharp, but real. “I know,” he says. “Don’t worry about it.”

Eddie shakes his head, but he goes quiet again for a long moment, watching the lines on the road slip past him.

“You’re the only person who can put up with me right now,” he says a moment later.

Buck lets out a sort of half-snort at that. “Yeah,” he agrees, then softens. “But y-you’ve got a, uh, a pretty good reason to be an asshole right now.”

Eddie swallows against the lump in his throat. “Still,” he says, his voice thready. “Um, thanks. I know you have better… better things to do than spend the night on my couch.”

In the meantime, they’ve pulled back into the firehouse parking lot and Eddie watches as Buck shifts the car safely into park, then turns toward him. His face isn’t reflecting pity, not even now. He reaches over, patting Eddie soundly on his knee.

“Anytime, Eds,” he says softly.

And then he climbs out of the truck, and Eddie follows only reluctantly.

Eddie doesn’t want to get into the truck.

It’s this feeling that sinks its claws into him and holds on tight as he stands on South Bedford Street and wonders if it’ll be the last time.

Probably not, at least not with Buck living here, but maybe. Who knows how long it’s going to be once Eddie crosses the state line into Texas? Who knows what’ll happen in the meantime— the house that sort of belongs to them both now; the home that Eddie had made for his baby once, now half-emptied and echoing. He’d never thought that would be the case. He’d thought— romantically, naively— that he and Chris would be there forever. This, he supposes, is what he gets for wanting something that much.

And even if he does come back here: if he and Chris patch up their relationship in the new house in Texas; if Eddie gets hired at the El Paso Fire Department; if he gets a new partner and Buck is still here in this house and they come back to see him and become guests in this place. Nothing will be the same. It’s still an ending, even if it’s a beginning. Nothing will ever be what it was, and Eddie’s been pretending that he doesn’t mind because he doesn’t have the luxury to.

But the truth is, he doesn’t want to get into the truck.

He wants—

Not that it matters. He cuts that sentence off before it can get started, because it doesn’t matter what he wants. It doesn’t matter that it tore him apart to see that look on Buck’s face the day he walked in on Eddie house-hunting. It doesn’t matter that when Buck hugged him the night of the rental appointment, he had wanted to hold on and not let go. It doesn’t matter that Eddie’s been finding excuses all morning, one more thing he’s forgetting, one more run-through, one more check to be sure they have everything packed into the U-Haul that will take Eddie back the way he came.

It doesn’t matter, because only Christopher really does or ever has. But Eddie feels like he’s failing anyway. Like this is just the destiny he’s been running from since the morning he left Texas with Chris in the backseat, thinking he was starting a new life. Really, he was always just trying something that was never going to work. His parents had been right after all.

But it’s been long enough that Los Angeles has left a mark. It’s been long enough for Eddie to make a life here; and as he stands on the street in front of his best friend, he selfishly and bitterly and achingly almost— almost— wishes that he hadn’t.

If he hadn’t, this wouldn’t be so hard now.

And Buck wouldn’t be getting hurt. But he is. He’s putting on a brave face; and he means it, of course he does, of course he wants Eddie to get back to Christopher because he loves him like Eddie does and always has. But behind that, Eddie is hurting him. It makes him feel nauseous if he thinks about it for too long, but he unglues his tongue from the roof of his mouth anyway.

Because it’s Buck.

His words come out fumbling and unsure, he doesn’t even know what he’s saying, but Buck’s eyes soften. Later, Eddie will have a hard time remembering what he said to him. He’ll lay in Texas and reach for the memory but only really be able to come up with something else in its place: all the things he’d kept trapped behind his teeth, the things he’d wanted to say but didn’t.

Come with me, mostly.

He’d wrapped his arms around Buck beneath the faint new drizzle of rain and thought it so hard that part of him hoped Buck would hear it somehow. A distant fantasy: but Eddie doesn’t do that anymore. And the moment had slipped away, and then Buck had sent him off and Eddie had told himself not to look back but he did anyway. He couldn’t help it.

And then he leaves.

He makes it out of the neighborhood, Buck’s reflection wavering and shrinking and eventually disappearing. But he stops before the interstate. The sign is a reminder like everything else: the weight behind the truck; Chris’s favorite shirt with Buck’s touch still lingering on it; the cookies in the backseat. Eddie pulls into the parking lot of a shut-down gas station, recently boarded up and graffitied, and he stays there until he feels like he can breathe again.

Kind of.

It turns out that doing the right thing isn’t as easy as he’d hoped it would be. It turns out that failing still hurts. It turns out that Eddie still wishes he wasn’t alone in the truck, even now. Even when he should have learned better by now.

Eyes burning, he reaches for his phone. Taps across the screen before he can stop himself, lets it ring twice and listens as there’s a click through the car speaker and then—

“Eddie?” Buck asks. “Did you forget something?”

“No,” Eddie says. His voice wavers, and Buck ignores it because that’s his best friend, the person who knows him, dark corners and all.

“Okay,” Buck says, his voice softer now. “You want to hear about what I was reading last week?”

Eddie suspects that Buck has been keeping this one tucked away for a purpose much like this one. “Yeah,” he sniffs.

And he puts the car into gear, and slips back onto the road, taking the interstate right out of California.

For the second time in Eddie’s life, Texas disappears in his rearview mirror on a sunny day in the spring.

Admittedly, it’s edging closer to summer now. And that’s not the only thing that’s different. This time, there’s a house he sold back by the skin of his teeth and his parents seem honestly kind of glad to see him go. Not so much Christopher, but it doesn’t matter to Eddie now the way it used to.

Christopher is also different.

Today, he sits in the passenger seat at Eddie’s side, having needed only a steadying hand to climb into the U-Haul that Eddie is renting (again). He’s tall now, and taller all the time at fourteen. He’s no longer the little boy who had asked Eddie if there would be angels in Los Angeles, but Eddie does think that if he could go back to that day, he’d have a different answer for him.

It turns out, there had been plenty of angels in Los Angeles. One less now, he remembers with a pang of razor sharp grief as Bobby’s image swims in front of him, but he thinks that nobody would be happier to see them back on the interstate heading for California. He remembers Bobby’s promise that he would always have a place with the 118, and thinks about the paperwork that’s waiting for him at his first shift back the day after tomorrow, and feels a bittersweet sense of rightness as the truck rolls on against the smooth asphalt beneath them.

“Can we stop to get more snacks?” Chris asks him, pulling his focus.

Eddie glances over at the empty packet of Sour Patch Kids on the seat next to him. At his age, he eats like it’s going out of style.

“Do you one better,” Eddie bargains.

They hit the first drive-through past the California state line, an old building with red and white stripes and a faded awning over a wall of glass bricks. Eddie parks in the shade and they sit side-by-side in the wide, spacious cab of the U-Haul to eat: tearing into wrappers on burgers and coating their fingertips in salt from the fries. Chris launches into explaining to Eddie what he and Denny have been talking about doing when he gets home, and Eddie’s brain catches on that word and sticks.

Home. They’re going home.

It would be hard to explain this feeling to the twenty-six year-old Eddie who had driven his son along this route in 2018. That Eddie had been so unmoored, so unsure. He’d been lost and unconvinced: hopeful, maybe, but not certain of anything.

He had talked himself into a belief that he didn’t really have, the idea that he could do it all by himself like a brick wall that he kept running himself into until eventually, it knocked him down for good. He doesn’t want to do that anymore.

This Eddie knows what it feels like to go home. Knows the feeling of turning the corner into the final stretch, when the interstate gives way to Los Angeles and everything starts to look familiar bit by bit until the house is visible in front of the windshield. If the last year has taught Eddie anything, it’s not to take that for granted ever again.

“Hey, Chris,” he says as he shakes the ice in his cup and it rattles.

“Hm.”

Eddie looks over at him for a moment, watching his profile set against the window and the faint line of his jaw, a monument to his rapidly approaching adulthood.

There’s so much that Eddie has wanted to say to him, so many times. There’s so much that Eddie doesn’t know how to say, doesn’t have the words for and maybe never will.

“You don’t mind Buck staying with us, right?” he asks, instead of saying any of those things.

Chris snorts like this is a stupid question. “Well, yeah,” he says. His favorite hobby recently has been to humble Eddie and then give him whiplash with a rush of some kind of affection. “Buck is like— our family.”

Eddie softens. There it is.

“Yeah,” he agrees. “Just wanted to check with you.”

“Also,” Chris adds lightly, crumpling his burger wrapper and scattering stray crumbs over the seat. “He would be homeless and that— that wouldn’t be a good look.”

Eddie laughs, and means it. “No,” he agrees. “It would not.”

So they make the trek back into Los Angeles together; along the interstate and through painfully slow traffic on the edge of twilight and then, eventually, to the familiar turns and stop signs of the neighborhood at whose center lies South Bedford Street, and the little house with Buck’s truck in the driveway and Eddie’s Prius alongside it where he’d left it before the last trip to Texas to gather their stuff.

Tomorrow, they’ll unload the boxes and return the U-Haul. But tonight, there’s the front door opening and Buck spilling out with the light and Eddie climbing out of the truck. Tonight, there’s half of Buck’s stuff still in the house and takeout from that place that Buck knows Chris loves and before Eddie knows it, they’re side by side chattering about a book they’ve both read while Chris complains that he doesn’t know which box his game console ended up in, and Buck is laughing and Eddie’s mouth is full.

And the road to get there doesn’t seem to matter as much, at least for the moment.

Over the summer, Eddie goes to Pepa’s.

They’ve been home— officially— for a busy couple of weeks. Eddie has spent that time unpacking, resetting their home back into a facsimile of what it had been a year ago with the exception of Christopher’s bedroom which receives a timely upgrade more suited to the full-fledged teenager that he is now. He’d also returned to the LAFD and is in the process of finishing his paramedic certification along with the recertification as a firefighter that he’d passed with easy flying colors. Meanwhile, Christopher has been making the rounds across what seems like the entirety of Los Angeles, reconnecting with people across his social circle which somehow only seems to have expanded if anything. How he managed that, Eddie has no idea, but he’s more than happy to serve as a shuttle for his social butterfly if it means that he’s here to shuttle around in the first place.

Also, having Buck around has been good for them both. He’s looking for a place of his own, but Eddie has made it clear that there’s no rush and the truth is that he’s enjoying having Buck at home, even if the living arrangements are a little cramped. He barely notices, if he’s honest. Moving in tandem with Buck comes easily to him after years of carefully built partnership. They can practically speak wordlessly and Buck brings a bright, warm presence to any place he inhabits. They spend most evenings eating together, the kitchen alight with whatever rich, warm scent Buck is cooking on any given day. And some nights, Chris joins them for rounds of whatever game he’s into; ending up laughing most of those nights and sounding younger again, if only for a fleeting moment, long enough for Eddie to lap it up and file it away to remember.

Things have been good, is the long and short of it.

Tonight, Buck is at Maddie and Chim’s to see the baby and cook dinner for them. Eddie had been welcome to join them, but there’s something he’s been thinking about that he thinks he needs to do alone.

The Chevelle is as Eddie had left it the last time he took it out. He doesn’t drive it often, just enough to keep it in good shape. Lately, he’s been thinking maybe he should do it more. But tonight, he just slips into the seat behind the wheel again and exhales.

He traces the emblem on the center of the wheel; looks over the interior with his eyes; pauses to catch his own gaze in the mirror.

And for the first time, Eddie tries— actively, on purpose— to reach that fantasy again. He closes his eyes and tries to picture it. A perfect day; like what he’d imagined as a little boy. The radio; the windows down; the passenger seat. He thinks about the car rumbling beneath him and a faint static buzz and the wind, feeling sweet and warm through his hair. The perfect amount of sun overhead; an uncrowded, winding road dotted with signposts zipping past; endless time spread out deliciously against a hazy horizon.

Things are good now. So good. They’re all still grieving, and he does still feel guilty about not being there, but Eddie knows that Bobby would want happiness for all of them. And everything else is better than it’s been in so long. Eddie had gone to Texas and come back at ease in a way that he doesn’t think he’s ever been before.

He’s been thinking a lot about last fall, and his efforts to choose joy for himself, to offer it to himself without strings attached. He’d done that, that night. Stripped himself of his disguise. Then he’d done it again in Lubbock, when he’d leapt into fatherhood with the certainty that it belonged to him, that it was his to grasp.

He knows that he’s capable of doing this for himself; of holding that fantasy, that life, in his palms.

And yet— when he reaches, he comes up empty. Where there should be some image of the right car; the right day; the right passenger: there’s nothing. Eddie can’t conjure it up at all, beyond a half-formed concept of an open road leftover from what he’d imagined a long time ago.

Frustrated, he opens his eyes again, and the car remains as empty around him as ever.

He sighs. Maybe this is stupid, he thinks. A waste of his time.

In his pocket, his phone buzzes.

He digs it out and flips it over, clicking on the text from Buck that has just appeared on the screen. It’s a picture, which expands over Eddie’s screen as he taps it open: Buck, sitting on Chim and Maddie’s couch with newborn Nash curled up against his chest. The baby is snuggled into his neck and Buck is beaming at something off-camera.

Eddie smiles at the sight of it, heart reacts it, and closes his phone again.

Maybe it’s not that this exercise is all stupid, or a waste. Maybe it’s just that there are things Eddie would rather be doing. Or maybe it’s just the kind of thing that has to happen to you. Maybe he’s still learning. For the first time, that doesn’t sound so bad after all.

He looks around once more, and gets out of the damn car.

In the fading light of an autumn afternoon, Eddie slips into the driver’s seat.

The Chevelle, where it’s been sitting in his driveway for the last week.

Eddie had been itching to sell the Prius pretty much since he brought it back from Texas in the first place. Earlier in the week, it felt like it was time. There’s something about change. The Prius just didn’t feel like it was him.

But the Chevelle is? Christopher had asked with fair skepticism when Eddie was explaining it to him.

No, Eddie admitted. But it’s good for now, while Eddie figures it out.

The sun is lowering but still warm in a robin’s-egg sky, the promise of evening just creeping in when Chris maneuvers himself into the front seat, twisting to drop his crutches behind him and miscalculating. Eddie snatches his elbow back at the last second, narrowly avoiding being hit by the end as Christopher grunts out a teenage-typical half apology.

“Bigger console,” Eddie says.

“What?” Chris asks.

Eddie shakes his head as he turns the key, firing up the engine. “Car wishlist,” he explains. “So I don’t get whacked in the elbows.”

Christopher, unimpressed, clicks his seatbelt into place.

“Your suffering is…unmatched,” he deadpans, and Eddie smiles.

“You’re lucky Buck is the one making you dinner tonight,” he says, wiggling his eyebrows a little bit as he backs the car out of the driveway, one arm slung around the back of Christopher’s seat. “Two working elbows.”

“Dad,” Chris complains, and Eddie laughs.

The light of autumn filters across the car in long, golden shafts. They move and shift as Eddie navigates out onto their street, past the stop sign, and beyond the confines of their familiar neighborhood.

Chris reaches for the radio dial and Eddie flicks his gaze to watch out of nothing but habit. Christopher is so big now, closer to grown than he is to being small, and Eddie can’t help feeling like he’s still always looking out for sharp table edges that his little boy could hit his head on; rugs that could catch on his crutches; little spaces where he needs Eddie’s help. He isn’t sure that it’ll ever go away, that he’s ever going to be able to look at Chris and see a whole man, instead of fractals of baby and boy like kaleidoscope pieces shining everbright back at him.

Chris settles on a country station. It crackles, distant. Eddie’s smile digs into the side of his cheek at the sound of the twang, the little piece of Texas that finds them here in California, in Chris. He likes it more than Eddie does. His tastes could change in a year or two or never, but Eddie treasures every little piece of him he gets. More than ever, after the last year.

Music settled, Chris leans back and looks around as the world passes by in blurred increments. Eddie double checks that he’s taking the correct left turn and some old nineties song by the Dixie Chicks plays on the radio. Or— no. It’s not the Dixie Chicks anymore, Eddie remembers. He remembers that he thought it was good to change it, but he can’t remember what they’re called now and he feels kind of guilty about it.

Buck would know.

Eddie checks the next turn. The song ends and he doesn’t recognize the one that starts up after it. He recognizes this road, though, knows that there are a couple of turns left before he’s pulling up to Buck’s new place.

“This is weird,” Christopher says, out of the blue and a little like he’s admitting something.

Eddie glances over. “What’s weird?”

Chris shrugs one shoulder. “Like, sitting in the front.”

Eddie mulls this over, frowning. “What do you mean?” he asks, coming up empty on his own. “You’ve been sitting up front for years.”

Chris rolls his eyes a little. “Not because I’m older or something,” he says. “Just, after Buck was staying with us for so long. He was always in the car.” Christopher shrugs again as Eddie slows the car to a steady fifteen miles an hour, watching to be sure that he doesn’t miss Buck’s driveway. “I guess I just kinda feel like it’s his spot now.”

Eddie locates the low front of Buck’s place, his gaze catching on the familiar truck in the driveway as he turns and navigates his own car, pulling it into place right alongside Buck’s. In the shadow of the house as the sun slowly dips, Eddie’s headlights cast a watery beam of light against the wall.

The front door opens within seconds, flinging back on its hinges like Buck’s general sense of enthusiasm might touch it, too; like the house itself could become animated just by belonging to Buck. He steps out in his socks and a hoodie, bundled up against an evening that isn’t even chilly by Eddie’s standards. There’s an apron around his waist, cinched and tied with a floppy little bow; it hasn’t done much for the smattering of flour smeared onto his sweatshirt. He steps outside, leaving the door gaping open and light spilling out to meet the shadows and forgoing shoes as he walks across the small walkway toward them, beaming brightly.

“Hey!” he says, his voice floating down into the space from Christopher’s already-cracked car door in the silence left behind by the absence of the engine. “You made it. Hi, Chris!”

He’s opening the back door and reaching to take Christopher’s crutches out of the floorboard, unasked and unbothered in the slightest, when he tilts his head to look in and meets Eddie’s eyes across the backseat.

“Hi, Eds,” he adds, a little softer, blue-gazed and backlit.

When it occurs to Eddie, it does so all at once.

It’s Buck, he thinks, his eyes flickering unbidden to the now empty passenger seat as Buck shuts the door and offers Christopher his crutches. Chris is right. It is Buck’s spot. Eddie suddenly isn’t sure how he ever thought it could be anything else.

Chris declines the crutches in favor of putting a hand on Buck’s arm to navigate the slight incline of the driveway until the walkway flattens out. Eddie, frozen in the driver’s seat, watches them until Buck glances back at him.

He’s cast in the same light he’d been just a moment ago. The same light he’s been in, all these years. And somehow, suddenly, everything about it looks different.

“You coming?” he asks.

Eddie blinks. “Yeah,” he says, clearing his throat. “Yeah, sorry.”

Buck’s house is kind of perfect, Eddie thinks as they cross the threshold into the warmth inside. Neither of them have been here since the day Buck first moved in, when they helped with boxes. It’s warm and cozy and there’s a familiarity about it, only some of which can be attributed to the presence of all of Buck’s things.

Some of it is probably just Buck himself. The space he takes up; the way he fills a room; the light he carries with him everywhere he goes. Even now, after the year they’ve had. It may have flickered a little, for a while there. But he excitedly leads them into the living room now, with Christopher haphazardly dropping his backpack like he’s been here a million other times before, and Eddie thinks that they could turn off all the lights and exist just in the glow of Buck’s presence instead.

“How much did this cost?” Christopher asks from where he’s flopped unceremoniously onto Buck’s couch and is now frowning at a pillow with a needlepoint duck on it, wearing a cowboy hat. Were it anyone but Buck, Eddie would be hissing at his son under his breath for his rudeness.

With Buck, though— all bets have been off for a long time.

Buck laughs, taking it out of Christopher’s hand just so he can gently whack him with it and make him yelp in surprise. “You don’t want to know,” he answers.

Chris grins, his glasses askew and his curls rumpled, as Buck ducks back into the kitchen and Eddie follows in his footsteps. He looks around curiously as they move— taking in the familiar things and the new ones, the mix of little items that had once lived in his own house. He pauses by the inset corner bookshelf and runs his fingers over the rim of a little nondescript yellow vase, and finds that he can’t remember how or why Buck ended up with it.

It had been Eddie’s, and now it is Buck’s. Eddie wonders if it could really be that simple, a braiding of one life with another.

“Oh, hey,” Buck says, drawing him out of his thoughts and pulling his gaze to him. He’s halfway through closing the oven door, and the kitchen smells like something bright and soft at once, rosemary-warm. “I keep forgetting to ask you if Pepa got those flowers?”

There’s a brush of pink on Buck’s cheeks, and Eddie finds that he wants something he isn’t sure he’s ever wanted before, except that maybe he’s wanted it forever, for longer than he can remember, since before he was ever alive on this earth if such a time exists.

“Yeah.” His voice comes out soft. The flowers had been— well, extravagant might be putting it lightly. In the wake of Eddie’s Abuela’s funeral they had arrived on Pepa’s doorstep and Eddie had taken one look at them and had an inkling as to who they were from. More than an inkling, if he’s honest. “She loved them,” he says. “I meant to text you about it, I’m sorry.”

Buck waves him off, emerging from the fridge with a beer in his hand. It collects condensation in the oven-warm kitchen, beading against the glass by the time Buck has uncapped it with a hiss and is holding it out to Eddie all in one fluid motion.

“Don’t worry,” he says; their fingers brush as Eddie reaches out to take it. “I just think everybody sends flowers at the wrong time, you know?”

Eddie smiles a little. “And what about lasagnas?” he asks lightly, knowing full well where the one still in his own freezer came from when it appeared mysteriously in his kitchen the day after the news. “Are those well-timed?”

Buck blushes, a shade deeper.

“Those are practical,” he argues. “That’s what I’m saying. Practical stuff first—” He gestures vaguely, a spiral drawn in the air with his hand like a sparkler. “— something pretty to look at later.”

Eddie nods, leaning his hip against Buck’s countertop and surveying him quietly.

“We appreciated it,” he says softly.

Buck shakes his head. “No big deal.”

It isn’t, to him. Eddie knows that to be true. He lets it drift because he knows that Buck will want him to, as something hums beneath his skin. He watches Buck step back into the living room and busies himself with looking at the photos stuck to the fridge for something to do.

His eyes have locked onto that one old photo of Buck and Chris, taken on the day of the tsunami, when he hears a low sort of insistent chatter from the other room and tilts his head to listen.

He can just barely see from where he stands, a sliver of Buck and Christopher’s mop of curls over the side of the couch.

“— but you can go in my room,” Buck is saying as Eddie tunes in.

“The couch is okay,” Chris says, his voice like the verbal equivalent of a shrug.

“Hey, c’mon,” Buck insists. Eddie watches as he reaches out, tapping Chris lightly on the shoulder once then twice. His voice gets soft. “My bed is comfier. Promise.”

Chris groans, but he gets up and steadies himself against Buck’s outstretched hand, then trudges off in the direction of Buck’s bedroom and disappears from view.

Eddie’s breath catches in his throat as he stands by himself in Buck’s kitchen, and he clears away the tightness with a sip off of the rim of the beer still sweating in his hand as Buck makes his way back into the room, glancing over his shoulder at the spot where Chris had disappeared.

“Is that normal?” he asks.

Eddie laughs lightly. “You remember how he used to wake you up at six a.m. every time you stayed over?” he asks in return. “Well, those days are over. On Sunday I had to drag him out of bed at one-thirty.”

Buck looks astounded and Eddie shrugs.

“Teenagers, man,” he says.

“Well,” Buck says, shaking his head as he reaches for his own beer, “I didn’t think he’d be comfortable on the couch. I would have put him in my guest room, but I haven’t—”

Eddie waves him off. “Thanks, Buck,” he says, setting his beer down with a light chink against the counter. “I’m gonna go check on him, though.”

Buck gestures openly in the direction of the hallway and the bedrooms beyond that, and Eddie steps easily through the house, coming to a stop in the doorway of Buck’s room. Christopher is curled up on top of Buck’s made bed, wrinkling the fabric and tucking his curls into Buck’s pillow without a single second thought.

It’s mostly dark in here, sunset approaching, but a faint dusky light illuminates his glasses where they’re resting on Buck’s bedside table right next to the memoir he’s reading and last night’s empty water glass.

Something about it all catches up to Eddie quickly as he stands there, watching. Something about Christopher— his baby, the child who’s barely little anymore but had been, had been so small once when Buck took one look at him and decided that he was worth fighting for even before he really knew Eddie at all— here, like this. Something about how comfortable he is, in this house that Buck just moved in to, only because it’s Buck’s and he knows that Buck will fold him in, will love him, will be there every time he reaches out. Something about his baby, in Buck’s bed like it’s his own. Something about knowing that Buck is just around the corner.

Something about Buck in the passenger seat. About the Chevelle in the driveway. About the steady hum that’s lighting up beneath Eddie’s skin since he looked up and met Buck’s eyes over the headrest in the car, in the driveway, in a dream.

It’s now or never, Eddie thinks. It’s yesterday, and when he was twenty-six and when he was eighteen and when he first learned to drive and when he looked out the car window and wished to be bigger, older, freer.

Resolved, he steps forward and puts his hand on Christopher’s head, then lightly rubs his shoulder to rouse him.

“Hey, bud,” he murmurs as Chris grumbles. “You okay?”

Chris sighs. “School is so long,” he groans. “I am so tired.”

Eddie chuckles lightly. “Okay,” he says. “You can sleep. But, uh— hey, Buck and I are gonna go run an errand real quick, yeah? We’ll be back in a few minutes, you don’t have to get up. I just wanted you to know.”

Christopher stills, then cracks one eye open and looks over at Eddie.

“By errand,” he says, “do you mean that you’re going to finally talk to him?”

There had been a discussion. It had been brief and sweet and it had felt like a weight off of Eddie, a thing he hadn’t known he’d been carrying until it disappeared in the wake of his son’s blue eyes and knowing expression, the sweet tilt of his head as he told Eddie that it didn’t matter to him. He just wanted him to be happy. To be okay, he’d said.

Eddie had wept about it that night.

“Yes,” he says now. “You’re too smart for your own good. Go back to sleep.”

Chris turns his head into Buck’s pillow and breathes deep.

Eddie turns away from him, steps back across the long, warm floorboards to the kitchen, and looks at the love of his life cast in the light of a fading afternoon in November.

Buck looks back at him, a question on his features.

“Chris okay?” he asks.

Eddie nods, feeling the way his face looks— soft, he’s pretty sure. He doesn’t mind it.

“Yeah,” he answers, then nods toward the oven, noting that Buck has turned it off in the time that he was in the other room. “Can that wait for a few minutes?”

Buck glances between the oven and Eddie, frowning. “Sure,” he agrees. “Why?”

Eddie smiles, and means it so entirely, in that goldbright shining way that takes up space in all of his body, his chest and his fingertips equally.

“Go for a drive with me?” he asks.

Buck smiles too, then, a little puzzled but willing, always. “Okay,” he says, patting his pockets the way he always does when he’s looking for his keys— even though they’re at his house and Eddie knows his keys are in the bowl on the table by the door, like they always are, because he knows Buck like the back of his hand.

He shakes his head, reaches into his own pocket and down, down through years of winding roads and driver’s seats and stalled cars, then extracts his own keys and holds them up. Like something he’s won, a triumph.

“No,” he says, jingling them, and Buck’s eyes light up as Eddie grins. “I’m driving.”

It’s still plenty light out, the trees turning gold and plum with the mahoganies of November. It makes for a pretty picture: the stretch of distant palms into a fading sky; the closeup caramels of the occasional skittering leaf; the familiar but faded crimson of the car and the whitewash of the house with its pot of marigold chrysanthemums sitting just to the side of the walkway like a reminder that someone lives here.

And there’s Buck. Buck, whose broad shoulders relax and whose long legs go on forever as he meanders out onto the driveway and around to the passenger side of the car. Buck, who is swathed and cradled in the caress of sunlight where it casts low light across an open space between the houses across the street to the west; whose eyelashes and stubbled jaw and messy curls catch that light and reflect it right back to Eddie like a system of stars exist in him.

Buck, who smiles at him like it’s the easiest thing in the world. Maybe there have been times when it was easy. Eddie knows that it hasn’t been recently, for Buck. He knows that he’s spent the better part of this year clawing himself out of a well of grief; knows that it comes for him in the dark even now. Knows that it’s hard sometimes, to smile like that. It makes it all the more special to see it now, thrown over the hood of the car in Eddie’s direction with so much bright evening ease.

Seized by something deep inside of him that Eddie can’t name, he lopes easily around Buck and puts himself between him and the passenger side of the car, slotting himself into the space as Buck watches, amused and puzzled.

“What are you doing?” he asks. “I thought you were driving.”

“I am,” Eddie nods.

His cheeks are warm, but he presses on anyway— opens Buck’s door with a click and the faintest creak of the hinge, then steps back, holding it open with his fingertips as Buck looks him over.

“Are you holding my door for me?”

Eddie nods his head again, standing his ground. “Yeah.”

He doesn’t offer anything further, but there’s something about the way that Buck looks at him that shifts and changes in the light. It’s not hesitance— not exactly, and if he’s honest Eddie doesn’t really know what that would look like on Buck if it were— but it’s something like a shade of that, a flicker of uncertainty that goes as quickly as it had come.

And then he smiles again. It’s different this time, sweeter, softer. Eddie feels something stir in him at the sight of it as Buck carefully drops himself into the seat and looks back up. His face is tilted to the light, to Eddie, and Eddie fights with the desire to reach out and hold his jaw, to let all the things he’s kept caged up inside run free right now in this moment.

He refrains, only because there’s something that he owes himself first.

“Watch your fingers,” he says as Buck laughs, and shuts the door on him.

Edmundo Diaz is thirty-three years old.

He slips into the driver’s seat of the Chevelle and adjusts the seat, not much, just a little. He tilts his body, settles down in his lightwash jeans and the open flannel he’s wearing. He reaches up, taps the rearview mirror, and catches his own gaze in the silvery reflective glass.

His own dark brown eyes look back at him, lashes soft, face relaxed. The backseat is empty now, but if he focuses he can spot Christopher’s blue reusable water bottle left haphazardly on the seat.

And when Eddie turns from the mirror and looks over to his right, there’s someone in the passenger seat. Buck takes up much more space in the car than Christopher did, his broad shoulders and wide thighs filling the seat. He’s leaning back, blue eyes roaming curiously like he always has questions even if they’re innocuous. He’s shadowed now, still glowing.

Eddie smiles a little, unseen and secret, and cranks the engine. It roars to life, humming tangibly, and the car lights up. The radio crackles to life and Eddie reaches for the dial, his touch soft as he flicks through stations.

“Hey,” he says, remembering with a glance in Buck’s direction. “What are the Dixie Chicks called now?”

Buck grins. “The Chicks,” he answers.

“I knew you’d remember,” Eddie says.

“Obviously.” Buck wiggles, settling deeper into his seat, and Eddie smiles a little as he tests one channel, then another, and another, until—

A familiar note stops him. Eddie remembers hearing this song as a kid, when he was very little and the song was very new. Remembers its bright notes in his Abuela’s kitchen one weekend, when it was sunny and Eddie was afforded a rare afternoon alone with her. She had a radio, he remembers now, the kind mounted beneath the cabinet. It was crackly and the sound was awful and he loved that thing, loved the way she smiled at him like he was made of gold or the yellow paint on the walls. Her smile, he thinks now, bittersweet— the thing he’ll remember the most about her, forever.

She’d looked at him like that again, just days before her death, her hand on his chest and his heart beating strong beneath her palm. It’s hard not to remember now, that Buck’s hands have been there too. That Buck had been the one to hold his body together when it was ripped apart on an open street some impossible day.

Milagro, he thinks in an echo of the upbeat sweet Spanish on the radio. Miracle. Like being little in his Abuela’s kitchen; like getting Christopher ready for school; like Buck, with his hand on Eddie’s chest.

He’s pretty sure that he’s looking in exactly the right place now, as he glances over to his right.

There’s someone in the passenger seat now. Someone who doesn’t fuss. Someone who is never disappointed. Someone who likes him very, very much.

“I like this song!” Buck says, grinning.

All of Eddie softens. “Yeah?” he says, and Buck nods. “Me, too.”

Eddie backs the car out of the driveway as the music plays. It wraps around them, carried on the soft California breeze that sweeps in smelling like fresh air and snapdragons from Buck’s neighbor’s yard and the faint rosemary that clings to Buck’s clothes.

Eddie leans back and relaxes his shoulders against the seat, his elbow propped up on the open window and Buck next to him, the silence between the words of the song and the breaths of the world around them comfortable and easy.

It won’t last, though, if Eddie knows Buck. They make it nearly to the edge of Buck’s neighborhood before he looks over.

“Where are we going?” he asks.

Against a gust of soft breeze that rustles the ends of Eddie’s hair and brushes softly over his face and the fine hair on his arms where his sleeves are pushed up, Eddie grins. It’s bright, easy, open— he doesn’t hesitate to look over, to flash it in Buck’s direction as the car hums beneath them.

“I don’t know,” he admits.

And Buck— part delighted, part confused, all the more willing to bend to Eddie’s will— looks over at him and laughs.

Eddie turns right, toward the west, toward the sun, and just drives. He winds through residential streets and doesn’t think at all about where he’s going as the radio static flexes down and then up again; they climb in elevation and the sun flickers through the trees; Buck sits next to him and Eddie just breathes in, letting the warmth and the music and the freedom settle over him.

None of it matters so much now. Just the blur of the lines on the asphalt; the rumble of the engine; the settled feeling in Eddie’s chest.

And this.

What happens when he reaches out over the center console and wordlessly puts his whole hand on Buck’s upper thigh: curves his fingers over the inner hem of Buck’s worn jeans; presses his palm to the warm, broad skin with only denim cotton in between the blood in Eddie’s hand and the dusting of fine hair on Buck’s fair skin.

Eddie doesn’t look over. Doesn’t need to, to know that Buck is looking at him. He knows what Buck’s blue gaze feels like on his cheek, his jaw, his ear. And better than that, he knows what Buck feels like when he’s tense. Knows Buck’s musculature from workouts and stretches and physical training and years of existing together. So he knows that this isn’t that. He knows that when his hand makes contact with Buck’s leg, Buck lets out a breath and relaxes like an instinct.

It’s how Eddie knows— the final confirmation— that when he stops the car and lays it all out for him, Buck will respond with all of his usual warmth and enthusiasm and something deeper than that which Eddie no longer wants to deny himself.

Buck is unusually quiet for an unusually long time.

Eventually, as the sun lowers and Eddie takes another right-hand turn, he looks over at him again.

“You look happy,” he says, simply.

Eddie looks back at him, just for a second.

“I am,” he answers.

He pulls the car onto a narrow, curving road and takes it slowly. Not that Buck would ever criticize his driving— he never has, and wouldn’t— but Eddie would like to not scare him if he can help it. His thigh is still warm and soft beneath Eddie’s touch as he pulls the car to a stop against the side of an overlook, leaving just enough space for Buck to get out on the passenger side, and then cuts the engine.

“Where are we?” Buck asks.

“Come see,” Eddie says, and unclicks his seat belt.

At the front of the car, Eddie leans back against the engine-hot hood and braces his palms against the warm surface while Buck takes two steps further and they both look past the cliff of the overlook, nestled in the hills just high enough to get a view. They’re only ten, maybe fifteen minutes from Buck’s new place, but something about it feels like a different world as the sunset of a perfect autumn day burns orange and gold and vivid pink above a stretched out, muted Los Angeles.

All the hustle of it fades away, and for a few precious moments, it’s just endless sky and rustling breeze and this: the two of them; Buck’s awe; Eddie’s wrists out turned and his weight resting easily on the hood of the Chevelle.

“Wow,” Buck says, looking out at the view.

But then he turns back. To look at Eddie.

Eddie would have a hard time saying how long it’s been that Buck has been like that— how many years he’s spent, how many minutes have piled up in which Buck’s eyes were on him. There are a lot. He hopes, now, for more of them while Buck tilts his head in wonderment.

“Is there, uh—” he steps a little closer. “A reason for this?”

Eddie nods, leaning his head back and looking up at the sky briefly, at the shades of indigo and pale, pale blue streaked against its endlessness.

“I had this fantasy when I was a kid,” he begins, for the very first time outside of the sanctity of his own thoughts.

Buck, his first ever audience, is laser-focused, the sunset irrelevant.

“What was it about?” he asks.

Eddie smiles, a little wistful thing. “Going for a drive,” he says, spreading one arm out as if to say, like this. Buck just watches him, so he clears his throat. “It was before the hotwiring thing,” he clarifies, just to see a sparkle of amusement cross Buck’s face. He shrugs his shoulders. “I just liked the idea of— me, and the open road. I thought I would grow up and I would be able to pick the music myself and roll the windows down and that I would feel…you know. Bigger.”

Buck considers him.

“Did you?” he asks. “Feel bigger?”

Eddie thinks back, running over all the tires and steering wheels and gas stations and windows and street signs in his mind. A roadmap of his life, all of it leading somewhere he could never quite see.

“No,” he admits. “Not really.”

Buck nods a little, and Eddie jingles the keys in his hand.

“There was something else,” he ventures.

When he looks up, Buck is already watching him. He’s backlit by the sunset, streaks of color shifting by the minute as day creeps toward night and the light around them begins to fade. It’s like a timer counting down, like a fight ring, except that there’s none of the usual pressure. Eddie feels— conversely— like he has all the time he needs.

“What else?” Buck asks.

“Someone in the passenger seat,” Eddie says softly, and Buck smiles faintly.

“In your fantasy?” he asks. “There was— someone next to you?”

“Yeah,” Eddie says, leaning more of his weight back onto his wrists, feeling his pulse thrum. “Yeah. I was just a kid then, so I didn’t know who it would be. But there was always someone. I thought, you know, it would be somebody who was…”

He searches. Buck shifts his weight. “Who was?”

Eddie meets his eyes. “Who was my friend,” he answers, blazing and honest. “Someone who liked me. Somebody who— saw me, I think.”

Buck swallows hard enough that Eddie can see it in the twilight, the way it bobs in his throat, the newfound tension in his neck, in that hollow.

“I’ve thought about it a lot,” he offers. “That fantasy. Just— never feeling like I had it right, you know?”

“Yeah,” Buck says, something in his voice that sounds like sorrow, like yearning, like he understands it in a way that Eddie would never have wished for him.

Eddie pushes forward, off of the car, and closes the distance between them, comes to stand so close that he can see the lilac light on Buck’s jaw, the shadow of his cheek and his nose, violet in the evening.

“Chris said something to me tonight,” Eddie says. “We got in the car and he said he felt like he was in your spot.”

Buck’s breath catches in his chest, enough that Eddie can see it beneath his hoodie, the hitch in the way he breathes. There’s an instinct that Eddie has to soothe it, to reach out. It feels stronger, suddenly, though maybe that’s just because he’s uncovered it: pulled it from the earth and carefully dusted the soil off so that it can find the light, be seen.

The tension sparkles, though, and Eddie waits as Buck’s gaze flickers briefly to the car behind them, quiet but still warm; and then to the keys in Eddie’s hand; and then back to Eddie’s face. It’s not hard to see on Buck’s expressive features the moment that it falls into place: realization chases something vulnerable and surprised and touched all at once.

“Wait,” he says.

And then he looks a little bit scared.

That part carves out space in Eddie’s chest for sorrow, for the flutter of the wings of regret, something he can’t take back and wouldn’t if it got them here, but still wishes he could take away from Buck.

All he can do now is this: to reach out. To put his palm over Buck’s jackhammering heart and flatten it evenly against the strength of his chest.

Buck’s eyelashes flutter helplessly as he opens and closes his mouth and then says—

“Me?” He clears his throat, his face twisting. “I’m the— the—”

Eddie nods, unwavering, and ducks his head to keep looking Buck in the eyes.

“It’s you in the passenger seat, Buck,” he says gently. “I think…” He hesitates, shakes his head, and looks back at Buck’s wide soft gaze. “I think it always was,” he admits. “I think that’s why…nothing else ever fit right.”

“So- so this,” Buck says slowly, waving his hand vaguely. “It was your…your fantasy.”

Eddie smiles then. Easy. Real.

“Yeah,” he says tenderly. “It was. It is.”

And then he leans in, without any fear at all, and presses his mouth to Buck’s. It’s starlight. It’s sunset. It’s a long, winding road and the wind in Eddie’s hair like Buck’s fingers scrambling for purchase. It’s the engine roar of flamebright desire that flares and flickers and sparks beneath Buck’s hand on his waist, his touch an accelerant. It’s the radio dial turned all the way up; the mirrors reflecting the light of an endless summer day; sunglasses perched up on top of Eddie’s head and the passenger seat full of broad shoulders and soft thighs and his favorite laugh in the world.

Buck kisses Eddie back on a cool California night, and it’s every fantasy Eddie has ever had, turned to magic right before his eyes.

It’s freedom, wrapped up in a package with a butterfly tattoo and a head full of curls and a beating, ferocious heart that Eddie has restarted by hand.

Eventually, they break apart— breathless, panting, warm in each other’s mouths; eyes bright; tangled; lit lilac with Eddie’s knees pressed back against the car.

Buck’s lashes flutter and Eddie beams.

“Can I tell you something?” he pants.

“Uh-huh,” Buck says, sounding dazed.

Eddie tilts his head back just enough to see.

“I think I’m in love with you,” he says, and this time when Buck’s breath catches Eddie smoothes his fingers soothingly over his chest because he can, because he’s allowed, because Buck is so close that Eddie is surrounded. And then he says: “I know I’m in love with you.”

“Eddie,” Buck breathes, weak.

Eddie nods, and then Buck is kissing him again, mumbling through it, half talking half kissing in a perfectly Buck sort of frenzy.

“I love you,” he murmurs into Eddie’s mouth, his jaw grasped in the deliciously firm cradle of Buck’s palm, and all Eddie can think about is not being anywhere else ever again.

The sky darkens to indigo and Buck runs his tongue over Eddie’s bottom lip and breath becomes indistinguishable, and Eddie lets his heart run wild like a coast-to-coast highway, open and endless and big.

Eventually, he looks back at Buck and finds him shadowed but beaming. He reaches up, then, and brushes his knuckles over Buck’s cheek— all tenderness, Buck’s skin warm beneath him despite the falling temperature.

Between their chests, Eddie holds the keys up— an offering.

“Drive me home?” he asks.

Buck grins, takes the keys, and wraps up Eddie’s wrist in his fingers in the process, squeezing lightly like a promise as he nods, then leans in and kisses Eddie again for good measure.

“Anytime.”

Eddie settles into the passenger seat in the new darkness of an evening that will stretch out— into dinner with Christopher and the lights on Buck’s new patio and a night spent curled together in the same bed across town at Eddie’s house and a life beyond that full of street corners and stop signs and kisses and keyrings.

The car hums around them and the radio comes to life, and Buck clicks the seat into place, and the road opens up beneath the beams of the headlights, and Eddie holds his palm open and waiting on the center console— knowing that Buck will take it, having no doubt— and then closes his eyes to ride, without a single wish for anything different at all.