Archive of Our Own

Look. Five weeks of Eddie back in this house, and Buck hasn't opened the laptop one single time.

Five weeks of solid, unbroken, monk-tier restraint. Buck's walked past the laptop on the kitchen counter every single day since Eddie hauled the last of his stuff in from Texas and dumped two duffels on the dining table and gave him the laptop password along with the new joint WIFI and a reminder about trash day like he hadn’t been living here for months. 

Snooping in Eddie's bedroom? Hasn't happened, even on the days Eddie's been gone for hours and Buck's been alone in the house with nothing to do. The moving boxes still stacked in the hallway from move-in day? Buck hasn't nudged one with a foot. Some other Buck is running things over here. Current Buck doesn't recognize him.

Setup, for clarity — this is Eddie's house. Eddie spent the better part of the last few months in El Paso while he and Chris worked some stuff out, and Buck moved in and paid the rent on Eddie's behalf because Eddie wasn't going to ask but Buck wasn't going to let him eat the cost of an empty house in LA on top of everything else after Buck scared away all the nice people that were interested in subletting. 

They'd had a whole conversation about it. Eddie said you’d do that for me, Buck. Buck said yeah, for you and Christopher. Eddie said you’re one hell of a friend. Buck said sure, whatever we're calling it.

Buck slept in Eddie's bed for those months. A fact he’s been quietly choking on ever since Eddie got back. The bed's a king, Eddie bought it a couple years back when they both admitted there was no reasonable reason for Buck to sleep on the couch in a one-bedroom house with no other options except for the couch, which wasn’t awful, but — yeah. 

So Buck slept in the bed. 

He made it every morning, washed the sheets every Sunday, kept the rest of the room exactly as Eddie left it: books on the nightstand, watch he left behind in the dish on the nightstand, Buck's favorite cologne of his on the dresser, that Eddie left behind, too. For some reason. He watered the plant in Eddie's bathroom. He kept the place ready.

A time-capsule for if Eddie ever decided to come back, like he said he would.

Sure enough, five weeks ago, Eddie came back. 

Buck moved his stuff onto the couch before Eddie had brought the second duffel in. They'd had a small argument about it. Eddie said Buck, take the bed. Buck said I'm not taking your bed in your own house. Eddie said we can share, it's a king. Buck had gone red, changed the subject, and slept on the couch that night. 

He has slept on the couch every night since. The laptop took up residence on the kitchen counter on day one and has been navigated around like it's encircled by an electrified fence ever since.

Case in point — Buck hasn’t opened the laptop one single time since Eddie got home. No matter how much he may have wanted to. 

Tonight, though — tonight Buck's phone dies in the middle of an argument he's winning.

Drowning is the argument. 

Eddie's taken the position that a person can't technically drown in a foot of water, and Buck's taken the position that they absolutely can, that there are studies, that toddlers prove it on a depressingly regular basis, that there are pages and pages of bathtub statistics he could pull up on his phone if his phone had like eight percent of battery, which it doesn't, because his phone died mid-Google, also seemingly biased in letting Eddie win any and all arguments as long as it makes him smile.

And, well. Buck couldn’t find his charger, okay? And Eddie, traitorous, smug Eddie, won’t let Buck use his.

Whatever. 

Eddie's taken his smug self into the shower, flaunting his win, although his win was based on a technicality. The technicality being that Buck’s phone died and Eddie refused to let Buck use his to prove that he was right. Which he is, by the way. 

Now Buck's left in the kitchen with a dead phone, an unsettled argument, and one (1) laptop sitting open on the counter the exact same way it's been sitting on the counter for five weeks.

He shouldn’t but — well.

He'll be quick.

Eddie's shower takes nine minutes. That's established in The Routine Of Eddie Diaz, which Buck totally hasn’t paid super close attention to because that would be weird. And creepy. And weird, so. 

Buck's at minute four. That leaves a five-minute window of solo access to a household appliance Eddie has personally handed him the password to, on a topic Buck's correct about and can prove in one search if Google will simply do its job.

Tapping the trackpad, he wakes the screen. The browser's open already, search bar empty, cursor blinking, drawing him in.

Alright, now to prove he’s right. 

Finger on the cursor, Buck types an a to start.

Google, in all its autocomplete glory, gives Buck some options. Four suggestions stack top to bottom in whatever order Google decides matters most on any given evening, and the four that come up under Buck's single letter are, in order:

am i gay quiz (visited 2 days ago)

Amazon (visited 5 days ago)

american airlines

ammonia bleach mix

Buck stops chewing the inside of his cheek — which, honestly, he didn’t even realize he was doing. 

That’s — huh. 

That’s not what he was expecting at all.

Reading it twice feels like the responsible move, just to be sure he's read it correctly. 

The little gray subtext under the top suggestion reads visited 2 days ago in the same polite font Google uses for everything else, like the fact of when Eddie last visited the page is no more notable than the page itself. 

Two days ago. 

Eddie's been in this house every day for the last five weeks. Two nights ago Eddie made dinner and they watched half a documentary about deep-sea fishermen and Eddie fell asleep on the couch with his feet up on the coffee table, and Buck pulled a blanket out of the linen closet and dropped it over him and went to bed feeling, for once, like a person whose life was working out, and at some point in that night or the next morning or any hour Buck was elsewhere, Eddie was somewhere in this house typing ‘am i gay quiz’ into Google.

The other three suggestions aren't nothing, in hindsight. 

Amazon's whatever — every adult shops on Amazon. The airline result is mildly weird but Buck's choosing to ignore it. The bleach question, however, is alarming on its own merits, would in any other evening qualify as the dominant household crisis of Buck's life, except Eddie searched and possibly took an am i gay quiz and that’s taking up all of Buck’s current brain power. 

The screen sits there.

am i gay quiz (visited 2 days ago)

The sentence keeps being the sentence for as long as Buck looks at it. There's no version of the sentence that resolves into a different sentence if he just tilts his head right. The duck isn't going to be a rabbit.

Cool.

Cool, cool. That’s — that’s neat. Eddie is exploring his sexuality.

Good for him. 

Down the hall, the shower shuts off.

Slamming the laptop closed with the heel of his palm fast enough that he catches his own thumb in the lid, Buck hisses through his teeth and shoves the thumb in his mouth and stands there in his old academy t-shirt and sweatpants with a throbbing thumb and the closed laptop, all evidence at the scene of the crime. 

The bathroom door opens down the hall and out comes Eddie in a t-shirt and the gray sweatpants Buck's been trying to explode with his mind ever since Eddie came back, toweling his wet hair with a hand towel of all things, stopping a few feet shy of the kitchen to take in the picture, which is Buck, frozen, thumb in his own mouth.

"You good?" Eddie asks.

Buck, present enough to acknowledge that sucking his thumb is a little odd, pulls his thumb out. "Yep."

"You're sucking your thumb."

"Banged it. Cabinet. Phone died." Up comes the dead phone, exhibit-style. "Drowning."

Eddie squints. "Drowning."

“Yes."

Eddie does a once-over, tracking Buck's face, then the closed laptop on the counter, then back to Buck's face, taking everything in with no rush, and for a second Buck thinks Eddie's about to ask. Fully prepared for the whole situation to be over before it's properly started. 

"Going to bed?" Eddie asks, still rubbing the towel through the back of his hair. 

"Yep." Without meaning to, Buck takes a half-step backward toward the hallway.

"It's barely past eleven." 

"Big day tomorrow." 

Buck folds his arms across his chest, decides that looks defensive, drops them, picking at the cuff of his shirt instead.

"You're off tomorrow." 

"Big off day." 

Buck stares at a point on the cabinet six inches left of Eddie's head and refuses, under any circumstances, to look at the laptop.

Another second passes. Eddie walks past Buck into the kitchen, drapes the wet hand towel over the back of a chair, opens the fridge, pulls out a bottle of water, unscrews the cap, and drinks half of it. 

Throughout the entire process, Eddie's eyes never leave Buck's face. 

Buck doesn't move. Staring at the closed laptop in his peripheral, he thinks very loudly about anything else, and what he focuses on is the wet towel Eddie just put on the chair, which is a stupid thing to be focusing on right now except that it isn't, because the wet towel on the chair is one of those small habits Eddie's been demonstrating since coming back, alongside leaving shoes by the front door instead of in the hall closet. Alongside reorganizing the entire house without saying anything, alongside walking around the house barefoot like he lives here, which he does, because it's his house. 

But Buck's been the only one walking around the house barefoot for months and is having to mentally readjust to having company.

"Okay," Eddie says, capping the bottle. "Sleep good."

"Yep."

Buck heads to the couch, much to Eddie’s protests,  and commits hard to normal guy turning in early for a big day tomorrow that does not exist. He folds the throw blanket and unfolds it and does some half folded half not situation before giving up on the blanket entirely and lying flat on top of it. 

He closes his eyes. He opens his eyes. He closes them again, because closing them and then immediately opening them looked, somehow, even crazier than just lying there with them open. 

Down the hall, Eddie moves around for a while, eventually walking past the couch on his way to get a drink without commenting on the fact that Buck is lying on his back with his hands folded over his chest like a guy who's definitely asleep and not a corpse. 

Making his way back to his room, Buck hears the bedroom door click shut. Sleep evades him for hours out of spite. 

Okay. Not sleeping doesn't really qualify as an activity, when you get down to it.

There’s not really anything to do. Lights off, phone charging on the coffee table with his charger he found wedged between the couch cushions, Eddie’s bedroom door shut, and the absolute total silence of a house Buck's been alone in for months that's suddenly no longer empty. With nothing else available, the only thing to do is think, and thinking right now goes back to the laptop, and the laptop goes back to four words and a world of possibilities.

He tries thinking about the drowning argument. Plenty of meat there, bathtub stats and toddler stats and the annual count of accidental residential bathtub drownings in the continental U.S. that he could mentally rehearse and emerge from this night with a stronger position for round two. 

Thirty seconds in, the rehearsal collapses, and what's left in his head is what were the questions?

Yep. New thought process. 

The quiz. Am I Gay? — 15 Questions. 

What does a fifteen-question quiz about a grown adult's entire sexuality actually ask the grown adult, on the internet, alone, in the dark, in the kitchen of a house, two nights ago, while the only other person in the house was asleep in the bedroom they take turns in with the blanket pulled up over his face like he does every night?

Buck's never taken one of these despite having been bisexual for a while now, an oversight he's suddenly and uncomfortably aware of, because if he'd taken one he'd have a sense of what Eddie was clicking on at the unspecified hour of the unspecified evening, and the absence of that sense is becoming a real personal problem.

Question 1, in Buck's reconstruction, has to be the lay-up. 

The opener. Probably have you ever found another man attractive? which is the gimme. Every adult clicks yes, gay or straight, because everyone has eyes and the only socially functional answer in the current decade is yes. Eddie clicked yes, almost certainly without reading the question. 

One point in the yes column, useless data point, moving on.

Tightening the screws is Question 2, presumably. 

Probably something along the lines of have you ever wondered what it would be like to kiss another man? Which means Eddie's being asked to draw a real distinction between finding a man attractive in the museum-piece sense and wanting your mouth on a man's mouth in the practical engineering sense, and Eddie was somewhere in this house two days ago on this laptop, and Eddie was clicking… what?

What did he click? 

Buck doesn't know. Buck wants to know. Buck is now fully invested in Eddie's answer to a hypothetical multiple-choice item on a hypothetical quiz Buck hasn't seen, can't see, and is, at present, writing in his head from raw materials.

By Question 3 the quiz has to name a name. That's where these things go. Question 3 is the pin in the map. Is there one specific man you find yourself thinking about more than other men? 

And Eddie, two nights ago, in this house, with Buck dead asleep in his bed, was clicking. Out of presumably four answers. On a quiz Buck's inventing as he goes, flat on his back on his own couch with his hands folded like a body laid out at a viewing.

Feelings come in at Question 4, in Buck's design. Have you ever felt closer to another man than you expected to? 

Which is where Buck rolls over and pulls the blanket up over his face, because Question 4 is where the quiz stops being a quiz about Eddie and starts being a quiz that, with minor pronoun adjustments, also kind of applies to Buck. 

He's been answering them on Eddie's behalf this whole imagined sequence. Somewhere around Question 4 he's started answering them on his own behalf in parallel. The two answer keys are alarmingly congruent. Buck didn't give himself permission for the answer keys to be congruent. It happened on its own, without supervision.

Inside the humid little pocket of blanket, he breathes for a stretch.

"Fuck," he says into the cotton, quietly. "Fuck."

Sleep happens at some point, because the next thing he's aware of is light through the windows and the smell of cinnamon coming from the kitchen, which is bad news, because the smell of cinnamon means French toast, and French toast means Eddie's awake and in the kitchen, and Eddie being awake and in the kitchen means Buck has to get off the couch eventually too.

The French toast is a recent development. It started a couple weeks ago when Eddie woke up one morning and decided to be a guy who makes breakfast, and now Eddie is a guy who makes breakfast. 

Most mornings of the last two weeks have featured French toast or pancakes or, one memorable time, breakfast tacos that Buck has thought about regularly during otherwise unrelated parts of his life. There hasn't been a morning without something cooked. Buck's slept negative hours and is in no condition to navigate French toast, but the French toast is happening, and the only way out is through.

Pulling on a hoodie he found hanging next to the front door, he heads to the kitchen to face the music.

Settling onto a chair at the table, Buck stares at the backsplash and counts grout lines. Gets to seventeen. Doesn’t really trust the count, so he recounts the last six, Gets the same answer and doesn't trust that either. He's working his way down a third count when Eddie asks, without turning around, "Powdered sugar or syrup?"

"Eddie?”

"Yeah?"

"Did you Google how to mix ammonia and bleach?"

The spatula stutters against the pan before stilling. Eddie sets it down on the spoon rest and turns around with one hand braced on the counter behind him. 

"What?"

Buck shifts in the chair. "As your roommate and your best friend, I’m, uh— ‘m just asking."

"I don't remember Googling that."

"Mm" Buck picks at a loose thread on the edge of a placemat. "Just wondering."

Eddie says nothing but his eyes flick to the closed laptop on the counter, then back to Buck. 

Buck can see Eddie panic a little, see his face do the small visible work of realizing that Buck has maybe been on his laptop and is now asking sideways about it at breakfast. Buck has a one-second window to start lying with enough conviction to be believable. 

"Had a dream," Buck says. "Last night. About cleaning products. In the dream you were Googling how to make chloramine, which struck me as suspicious, so I woke up wanting to ask."

"Chloramine."

"Yeah."

Pinching the bridge of his nose between two fingers, Eddie sighs. Buck notices the back of his neck flushing above the collar of his shirt as he picks the spatula back up and turns to the pan and can’t help but wonder how far it spreads. 

"I read an article a couple weeks back," he says, fiddling with the spatula. "Guy killed his wife with cleaning products. Said it was an accident. I wanted to check if I'd ever come close."

"And?”

Eddie hums. "I haven’t."

"Cool."

"Cool."

"Yeah.” Buck nods. “Yes to syrup."

Eddie comes over with the plate and slides it in front of Buck. Three slices, golden, butter melting into the surface, a small puddle of syrup at one corner because Eddie remembers Buck likes it concentrated rather than poured across the whole plate like a barbarian. 

He sets the plate down without a word and turns back to the stove. Buck waits for the question, waits for Eddie to bring it up, waits for any kind of opening he can shove one of his rehearsed answers into, and Eddie just whisks eggs, because Eddie has apparently decided that the most devastating thing he can do this morning is give Buck absolutely nothing to work with and let him sit here with a head full of rehearsed sentences no way to use them, which — yeah, it's working.

Buck can feel himself being whisked into submission.

Cool.

Cool, cool, cool. Great. Fine.

The French toast is annoyingly good. Eddie hits an egg-to-cinnamon ratio that tastes like sorcery but bread-shaped. Buck has been quietly furious about it since Eddie moved back in. He cuts off a corner and chews. Just a man eating breakfast with a perfectly clean conscience. 

Then he cuts off another corner, smaller, in case the previous corner had been suspiciously large.

Across the plate the syrup is sitting in its corner, behaving itself, which is more than Buck can say for the contents of his own head, where Question 5 has been playing on repeat for the five hundredth time since dawn.

Question 5 is the friendship escalator, probably — do you find yourself wanting more from your friendships with men than you used to? — which sounds totally benign and reasonable and is, in fact, an eight on the scale of one to ruining Buck's life, because every single one of his close male friendships over recent years have been completely normal and fine.

All except one. 

One (1) close male friendship scaled up to weird proportions, and that man is presently three feet away cracking an egg one-handed and humming.

Eddie is humming. Eddie Diaz, who has hummed — Buck actually can’t think of a single time Eddie hummed before. But he is. Humming. At the stove. On this specific morning. The morning after Buck found the Google search. 

Eddie. Humming.

Buck doesn’t know what to do with this. Eddie could be humming because he’s fine. Eddie could be humming because he is so fine, in fact, that he has internally processed the gay quiz situation, drawn his own conclusions, and emerged into a fuller and more melodically expressive life on the other side of it, while Buck sits on this side of it and dies.

Probably both. Probably happening at the same time.

Whatever. Eddie can be gay and hum if he wants. That’s his choice and Buck will support it. 

Also, Eddie cracks eggs one-handed. Why is Buck including this information? It’s irrelevant. Also true. He has watched Eddie crack eggs dozens of times and the eggs have never once been what he was paying attention to.

Hands. His hands are the thing Buck pays attention to. If that wasn’t clear.

Another square comes off the slice.

"You're quiet." Eddie taps the spatula against the edge of the pan twice.

"Eating,” Buck says, lifting the fork. Exhibit A.

"Mhm."

Buck chews. Eddie whisks. The whisk against the metal bowl makes a tinny competent clinking that on any other morning Buck would find pleasant and today is hitting his ears as a small competent interrogation soundtrack composed specifically for him by somebody who wanted him dead.

How is he supposed to do this? Sit here and have a conversation about — what, trash day? — when two nights ago Eddie sat at that laptop and clicked through fifteen questions that for all Buck knows had Buck's face hovering over every single one of them, and Eddie has not so much as alluded to the existence of the quiz. 

Why hasn’t he mentioned it?

Buck knows why, okay? Sexuality is scary and confusing and Eddie will come to him when he’s ready, but like, sooner rather than later would be nice. 

If Eddie had just mentioned it. Casually. Hey, took a fun quiz the other night, you should try it. Buck would have died, sure, would have left his body briefly, but he would have come back to himself, and they would be functioning, and Buck would currently be eating French toast normally instead of cutting it up like baby food.

Question 6 is where the quiz cheats. Buck is convinced of this. Question 6 has to be have you ever found yourself thinking about a specific man and surprised yourself? — which barely qualifies as a question. It is a sentence with a question mark stapled to the end. Every man — gay, straight, bi, whatever — has, at some point, thought about a specific man and surprised himself, because men are surprising and thoughts come and go willy-nilly all the time. 

Question 6 is so wide-open you could drive a truck through it. So whatever Eddie clicked, the answer tells Buck nothing.

What Buck would like is the source material. The actual fifteen actual questions, in order, with all four multiple-choice options visible. He would like to lay them out on this kitchen table in front of him and conduct an interview on each one in turn, which is, he is suddenly aware, the only professional title he has ever felt fully qualified for. 

Gay Quiz Detective. He could solve cases. He could appear on podcasts. The Gay Quiz Detective, premiering this fall on whatever streaming service has the lowest standards.

He’s perfectly suited for the role. He has the eye for it. Has been ungovernably attentive to small details concerning Eddie for years now, a private specialty he has been carrying around without a credentialing body to certify him in, and now — when the universe has finally produced a niche for which he is the world's leading expert — that expertise will go to waste.

Maybe he’s making this bigger than it is. Maybe Eddie was just bored.

Except.

The act of taking the quiz. That tells Buck everything. The act of opening a browser and typing out the letters and watching Google offer up a slew of quizzes and choosing the gay one.

Eddie chose the gay quiz.

Eddie could have gone to Amazon. Eddie could have bought a phone case or some dish towels or one of those long phone charger cords that reaches from the outlet to the bed. He could've booked a flight. He could've checked whether mixing ammonia and bleach was going to kill him and his roommate in their sleep. He’d looked at all of those things before, obviously, because they were all there in glaring clarity, lined up and ready to go.

Buck wants to know what Eddie scored.

Is there a score? There's gotta be a score. These quizzes always have a score. Some percentage at the end with a little blurb underneath explaining what the percentage means, maybe a graphic, maybe a rainbow, maybe one of those sliding scales with a dot on it showing where you fall between Totally Straight and Extremely Gay, and Eddie's dot is somewhere on that scale, Eddie has a dot, Eddie received a dot and Buck doesn't know where the dot is and he needs to know where the dot is with so much urgency he feels like he might implode.

Where is Eddie's dot?

Buck needs Eddie's dot.

Okay. He needs to calm down about the dot. This is fine. He's fine.

He sets the fork down. It taps the rim of the plate loud enough to be heard at the stove, and his eyes flick up before he can pull them back.

Eddie is looking at him.

"You good?" he asks.

"Y-yep." Buck nods like a broken bobblehead. "All good. I'm great. I-I was just, uh— looking. At the syrup. It's good syrup, it's just— really doing what syrup does, over here, in the corner. Nice pool. Tight little pool, no runoff onto the rest of the plate. I appreciate that. About the syrup. The containment."

Eddie sets the whisk down. "The containment."

"Mhm."

"Of the syrup."

"Mhm."

"You're appreciating the containment of the syrup."

"Yep." Buck stabs another square.

Eddie doesn’t move, just stands there with his head tilted, watching Buck. "Eat your French toast," he says.

He cuts the next square down to the size of a postage stamp, lifts it, chews twenty times, swallows, breathes once for fortification, and immediately cuts another postage-stamp-sized square so it’s at the ready. 

This is his life now. He is going to spend the rest of his life cutting French toast into ever-smaller squares while Eddie hums and looks at him like he’s concussed.

He can see it. Buck at ninety, in some assisted living facility somewhere, sitting at a small linoleum table, cutting an unidentifiable piece of toast into squares while staring at the wall. The aides will assume it's senility. But no, it’ll be this morning, replaying until the end of time.

They eat in silence for a while. Eddie finishes at the stove and brings his own plate over and sits across from Buck, and now they're just two guys eating, which should be fine, which is fine, except Buck can feel Eddie looking at him every few seconds with careful attention, like this is something he's decided to keep an eye on, and Buck is chewing and staring at his plate and thinking about hypothetical questions and the fact that Eddie is sitting across from him possibly being gay and Buck can't ask and can't stop thinking about it and can't figure out where to put his eyes because every time he looks up Eddie is right there, being Eddie, being distractingly and completely Eddie, and Buck cannot handle this right now.

"Good French toast," Buck says.

"Thanks."

"Really good. The— the cinnamon is. Yeah."

"You always say that."

"Because it’s always true."

Eddie looks at him for a second, and Buck can see him deciding whether to push, can see the question forming and then getting put away. Nodding, Eddie goes back to eating, and Buck goes back to eating, and the kitchen is quiet except for forks on plates and the hum of appliances and Buck's entire life collapsing in on itself.

He's fine. Everything is fine. Eddie took a quiz and Eddie is humming and Buck is eating and nobody is talking about any of it and that is how this morning is going to go. Buck is going to finish this breakfast and put his plate in the sink and walk to the couch and lie down and stare at the ceiling and not think about Eddie's dot for the rest of the day.

Seriously.

By midmorning, Buck's decided he's not going to think about it.

Decision firm, Buck's on the living room couch, looking up at the ceiling. Eddie's driven himself to an annual physical he apparently booked weeks ago, even though Buck's off today, because Eddie didn't want to "make a thing of it," which Buck's chosen to interpret as Eddie not wanting Buck in the waiting room while a doctor checks his blood pressure and asks him to cough. So now Buck's alone in a house full of Eddie's absence with the laptop on the coffee table where Eddie quietly migrated it at some point after breakfast and before leaving, closed, minding its business.

Five seconds.

Five seconds is the lifespan of the decision, because Buck, theoretically not thinking, kicks off Question 7 unprompted.

Question 7 is have you ever pictured a specific man in a romantic scenario. Because Question 6 was the vague one about surprising yourself and Question 7 is where the gloves come off, and Eddie answered Question 7, and Buck is now answering Question 7 on his own behalf, and the answer is yes. The answer has been yes for a humiliating length of time. The specific man in the answer is currently sitting in a paper gown at a doctor's office without Buck there to keep him company. 

Buck sits up, stands up, and paces into the kitchen and back. Folds a dish towel, unfolds the dish towel. Standing in the middle of the kitchen, he stares at Eddie's toaster, which has no opinion to offer on Buck's situation, because the toaster's a toaster — the toaster has one job and that’s toast. Buck is not toast, no matter how much he wishes, at this moment, that he was.

Question 8 is going to be about touch.

Yeah, he's not doing this.

He's not doing this on negative hours of sleep, in front of Eddie's toaster, while Eddie's at the doctor's office. He's a fully formed adult who has hobbies and a job and a paid streaming subscription. He can sit on Eddie's couch for the next hour without inventing a fifteen-question multiple-choice quiz from scratch.

He invents the fifteen-question multiple-choice quiz from scratch — well, the rest of it. He’s already on Question 8.

By the time Eddie's truck pulls into the driveway, Buck has gotten through all fifteen items on Eddie's behalf, and then a second pass on his own behalf, and the answer keys past Question 11 are so reliably identical that he's stopped distinguishing between them. The front door opens and Eddie comes in with a paper bag of takeout from the place down the street.

"Got lunch," Eddie says.

Buck, still in front of the toaster, says, "Great."

Setting the bag on the counter, Eddie looks at him.

"You’re… standing in front of the toaster," he says.

"Yep."

Sleep doesn't happen the next night either. Buck describes it to himself as resting his eyes, which makes it sound voluntary.

Eddie's in the bedroom with the door shut. Buck's on the couch with the blanket pulled up to his chin and absolutely no reason to be awake except that his head won't stop thinking thoughts. 

Dangerous territory.

The ceiling fan is doing its wobbly rotation above him. He's been watching it long enough to have opinions about its speed, which is too fast for sleeping and too slow for cooling and exists in a middle zone that is useful to nobody, including Buck, who is lying here at two in the morning having opinions about it because the alternative is having opinions about Eddie’s sexuality and his own sexuality and the significant overlap between those two topics that he has been avoiding for what is starting to feel like an unreasonable number of years.

He's bisexual. He knows this. He came out and everything, told people, said the word out loud, kissed a guy in front of his friends. That part is handled, has been for a while now and Buck is very proud of himself for handling it, gave himself a mental trophy and everything, good job, Buck, you figured out you like men, here's your certificate, please proceed to the rest of your life.

The rest of his life apparently involves living with Eddie and spending most of his time wondering whether Eddie also likes men, which would be useful information to have. For no other reason than he’d like to know this. Because he could be supportive. And that’s all.

Buck's bisexuality has been, up until this point, a largely Eddieless bisexuality. He came out, yes. He dated Tommy, yes. He has been attracted to men, plural, in a general and distributed way that he felt good about. But if he's being honest — and he might as well be, since he's alone and there is nobody here to judge him except the ceiling fan, which has already proven itself to be useless — the specific man at the center of his specific bisexuality has always been Eddie.

Every other guy was just a guy Buck happened to find attractive. Eddie is the guy Buck built his entire life around and then figured out he wanted to kiss.

That's a different thing. Significantly different and Buck has been stuffing it into the same category as the general bisexuality for, well, ever and the categories are separate, okay? There’s a hey, you like dudes category, and a hey you wanna kiss your best friend and also spend all your time for the rest of your life with him, too, category. 

The categories are Eddie’s couch and Buck is lying in it. Or however the saying goes. 

He rolls over and presses his face into the cushion to muffle a scream. 

Here's the problem. The quiz means Eddie is asking himself a question. The question being, roughly some version of: I don't know what I am. 

And Buck has been there. Buck has been in that exact chair at that exact hour with that exact question sitting like a stone in his chest, and it is the loneliest feeling Buck has ever felt, and Eddie felt it while Buck was right there. Asleep. Being zero help.

He could've been help. If he'd known. 

He could've sat down next to Eddie and said hey, I did this too, it's scary and it's confusing and the quiz is going to tell you a percentage and the percentage is going to feel either too high or too low and neither one is going to capture what's actually happening inside you, but that's fine, because the percentage doesn't matter, the question matters, and the fact that you're asking it means you already know the answer even if you can't say it yet.

He could've said that. He could've been that person for Eddie, because he's been that person for Eddie in every other context — the person who shows up, who stays, who sits on the floor at three a.m. when Eddie can't sleep because Christopher's in El Paso and the house is too quiet.

Instead, Buck was asleep. And Eddie was alone. And now Buck knows about the quiz and Eddie doesn't know Buck knows and the whole thing is just sitting between them like a piece of furniture nobody's willing to move.

Question 8 was about touch. 

Buck finished constructing it around hour six of his sleepless night and it hasn't left. 

Have you ever wanted to be physically close to a specific man in a way that felt different from regular friendship? Which is a stupid question because yes, obviously, Buck has wanted to be physically close to Eddie since the third day they knew each other, but that's just Eddie — Eddie is a person you want to be near, Eddie is warm and steady and smells good and has a nice body, and the fact that Buck wants to be near Eddie doesn't necessarily mean anything because everybody wants to be near Eddie, that's just a universal experience, that's just gravity—

Okay, no. That's not gravity. 

Gravity doesn't make your mouth dry when your roommate reaches for something on the top shelf and his shirt rides up. Gravity doesn't make you hold your breath when your roommate falls asleep on the couch and his head tips toward your shoulder by degrees until you can feel his hair tickling your neck. 

Gravity is a force between objects with mass. 

What Buck is experiencing is a force between himself and Eddie's body and it has nothing to do with physics and everything to do with the fact that Buck wants to touch him so badly his hands ache with it sometimes, and he has been calling that friendship because the alternative was too big and too terrifying and too likely to cost him the only person he can't afford to lose.

He rolls onto his back again. The ceiling fan is still going, a merry-go-round of uselessness. 

Tomorrow Eddie has a shift and Buck has a shift and they'll ride to work together because they do that now, since Eddie moved back, and Buck will sit in the passenger seat and look out the window and not mention any of it or the fact that he has been in love with Eddie for longer than he has been bisexual, which is a timeline that doesn't make sense until it does, and then it makes so much sense it's almost embarrassing.

He was in love with Eddie before he knew what to call it. 

He just didn't have the language. 

And now he has the language and it’s sitting in his chest like a brick and he can't say any of it because Eddie is on the other side of a door wondering whether he might like men and Buck can't take that from him, can't make Eddie's discovery about Buck's feelings, can't walk into the room and say hey, I know you're figuring yourself out, and by the way, I'm in love with you, no pressure.

That would be insane.

That would be the most selfish, worst-timed, most Buck thing he's ever done, and he has done a lot of Buck things over the years, many of which have ended in property damage.

So he's going to lie here. On this couch. Under this blanket. And he is going to wait for Eddie to come to him, whenever that is, however long it takes, even if it takes months, even if it takes years, even if Eddie never comes to him at all and Buck just lives on this couch for the rest of his life with the permanent knowledge of what he feels and no way to say it.

He can do that. He's done harder things.

Like dying. He’s done that, technically. Feeling like you’re dying on the inside and pretending you’re not can’t be too much harder. 

He can survive loving Eddie in silence. People do it all the time. It's probably the most common thing in the world, loving someone and not saying it. There are songs about it, movies, an entire genre of literature dedicated to people who feel exactly what Buck is feeling right now and manage to get through their whole lives without blowing it up.

Buck can be one of those people. He can be quiet and restrained and patient about it, and nobody will ever know, and it'll be fine.

He'll just lie here. On Eddie's couch. In Eddie's house. Loving Eddie in the dark.

How hard can it be?

It lasts three days.

Three days of being quiet and restrained and patient, which is a personal record and Buck thinks that should be acknowledged. Three days of eating breakfast across from Eddie and driving to work with Eddie and sitting on the couch with Eddie watching whatever Eddie wants to watch because focusing on anything is off the table anyway — his whole brain is just Eddie might be gay Eddie might be gay Eddie might be gay on an endless loop while he watches a documentary on octopuses.

Octopi? Octopodes?

He's seen this debate online. There's a whole grammar thing about it. The word is Greek, not Latin, so the Latin pluralization rules don't apply, which means octopi is technically wrong even though everyone says it, and the correct plural is either octopuses or octopodes depending on how pretentious you want to be about it, and he is going to think about this for as long as he possibly can because if he's thinking about octopuses he's not thinking about Eddie being gay.

Eddie might be gay.

Fuck.

And the documentary is actually good, which makes it worse, because Eddie put it on for him — Buck mentioned cephalopod intelligence at dinner once, weeks ago, a throwaway comment about how octopuses can open jars and recognize individual human faces, and Eddie remembered, and found the documentary, and put it on without saying why, just handed Buck a beer and sat down and pressed play. 

The octopus on screen is currently changing color to camouflage itself against a reef, which is genuinely one of the coolest things Buck has ever seen, and on any other night he would be fully locked in, probably pausing it to tell Eddie about chromatophores and the neuroscience of cephalopod camouflage and how octopuses have neurons in their arms that can make independent decisions, which is insane, each arm is basically its own little guy—

Eddie might be gay.

The thought crashes through the octopus content and suddenly he's not thinking about chromatophores anymore. He's thinking about the fact that Eddie remembered he liked octopuses. And found a documentary. And put it on. For him. Without being asked. On a couch they share. In a house they share. While possibly being gay.

That might just be Eddie being Eddie. Eddie does things for people. Eddie is a person who does things for people, that's his whole deal, he's a doer of things, and putting on a documentary your roommate would like is a normal roommate activity and does not require gayness.

Except Eddie is also possibly gay. And he put on the documentary. And he's sitting right there.

"I went on your laptop."

Wow, okay. That’s not — that wasn’t supposed to come out of his mouth during a scene where the octopus is squeezing through a hole the size of a quarter. Which is actually really cool but he can’t think of that right now because he just blurted out words and Eddie is just sitting there. Saying no words. 

"The night we had the drowning argument. My phone died and I didn’t want to wait for it to turn back on so I went on your laptop to Google it and I saw your— I saw the autocomplete. The search. I saw what you Googled."

Eddie shrugs but doesn't look over. "Yeah, I gave you the password."

Which is — that's not the response. That's not any of the responses he's been rehearsing. He had a whole menu of possible Eddie reactions prepared — anger, betrayal, the silent treatment, Eddie getting up and walking out — and "yeah, I gave you the password" was not on the menu. That is an off-menu response. That is a response from a completely different restaurant.

"I— okay, yes, you gave me the password, but that was for wifi stuff and paying bills, that wasn't— I wasn't supposed to see—"

"Buck."

"I wasn't snooping, I-I swear. I was trying to prove that people can drown in a foot of water, which they can, and I typed the letter A and Google just— it showed me—"

"I know."

"—and I know it's none of my business and I know it's private and I had no right and I've been trying to figure out how to tell you and I couldn't figure out a way that wasn't weird because there's no way to make this not weird, I've tried, I've been on this couch every night running scenarios and none of them end well, and I'm sorry, the timing is terrible, and—"

"Buck." Eddie's looking at him now. The TV is painting half his face blue. "I know."

On screen the octopus detaches one of its arms as a decoy to escape a predator. Buck would like to do that. He would like to leave a limb on this couch as a distraction and disappear through the front door while Eddie’s distracted.

"You know," he says.

"That you saw it. Yeah, I figured."

"How?"

"Because you've been acting insane."

"I have not."

"You have. For days. And I've been waiting for you to bring it up but you just keep staring at me and breathing really hard. At first I thought maybe you were getting sick, but then you asked me about the ammonia, and yeah. I figured.”

There is no argument to be made here. Eddie is right. He has been acting insane. Verifiably insane, in a way that apparently required no detective work at all, which means all those hours he spent thinking he was pulling off a convincing performance of normalcy were, in fact, hours Eddie spent watching him fail at it. 

Every single effort to seem fine — every carefully timed nod, every attempt at casual conversation — apparently so transparently not fine that Eddie just sat back and waited for the whole thing to collapse on its own.

Which it did. Just now. During a documentary Eddie put on for him because Eddie remembered that Buck likes octopuses. 

Damn. He’s going to have complicated feelings about octopuses for the rest of his life.

"So you've known this whole time," he says.

"Yeah."

"And you just— let me do all of that? All of it? You just watched?"

Eddie shrugs. "I wanted to see how long you'd last."

"You wanted to— Eddie,” Buck whines, pouting. “You suck and I hate you, actually.”

“You lasted longer than I thought, honestly."

"Oh, wonderful. Great. Glad my psychological deterioration was entertaining for you. Really glad I could provide that. You're welcome. Anytime."

"Little bit." Eddie bites back a grin.

On screen, the octopus is unscrewing a jar lid to get at a crab inside. It takes the octopus about thirty seconds. Buck has been trying to unscrew the lid on this conversation for three days and the octopus is lapping him.

The couch cushion dips as Eddie shifts, and when Buck looks over Eddie is closer — has moved from his end to the middle, setting beer on the coffee table and turning toward Buck, and he looks so nervous. So soft and sweet. Like a cookie. A really nervous and flustered cookie that Buck would really like to eat. 

"Can I ask you something?" Buck says.

"Yeah."

"Why," he says. "Why did you..."

Eddie glances toward the TV for a second, chewing the inside of his cheek, before looking back at Buck. He looks more sure now. Buck still wants to eat him, though.

"You."

Buck's whole body goes still. "Me.”

"You,” Eddie repeats.

"That's— Eddie, that is not a full sentence. You can't just say 'you' and expect me to—"

"You moved into my house." Eddie's looking right at him, like he's been thinking about how to say this for a while and finally has the words. "Paid my rent. Slept in my bed and washed my sheets and watered my plant and kept everything exactly how I left it, and when I came back you gave me the bed and slept on the couch. You drive me to work most of the time. You fall asleep watching whatever I put on." Eddie smiles at him, a little wobbly. "And I kept looking at you and thinking, why does it feel like this? Why does it feel like— like this is already what it is, and I'm the only one who hasn't caught up yet? And I didn't have a word for it. So I Googled one."

Buck is not going to cry. He’s not.

Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Don’t—

He's crying. Obviously he's crying. His face is wet and his nose is running and the sound coming out of him is deeply unattractive, some hitched honk, and he can't stop, because he’s the reason. 

Buck is the reason why. 

He’s not sure he’s ever been someone’s reason before. 

"You're the worst," he manages, wiping his face with both hands. "You can't just— I've been suffering for days thinking I was going to have to keep this to myself forever and you just— you just said that.”

Eddie smirks. "Sure did. What's your point?"

"My point is— my point—" Buck's hands are shaking and his face is a mess and there's an octopus on screen doing something incredible that he's fully missing because his best friend is gay and he’s the reason. "My point is I love you. That's my point. That's the whole— I'm in love with you and I have been for— honestly I don't even know how long because I think it started before I knew what it was and I just kept calling it friendship because that was easier and less scary and didn't require me to think about the fact that I wanted to kiss you every time you did something stupid and thoughtful like putting on a documentary about octopuses because I mentioned them once at dinner."

"Once."

"Once! I said one thing! One time! About octopuses! And you remembered it and found a whole documentary and I'm supposed to just sit here and not be in love with you? How is that fair? How is any of this fair?"

Eddie grins wide, eyes crinkling at the corners. "You're yelling."

"I'm expressing myself!"

"You're yelling about octopuses."

"I'm yelling about love! The octopuses are incidental!"

A laugh erupts from Eddie, big and bright. "Can I kiss you now or do you have more to say about octopuses?"

Buck opens his mouth, pausing for a second before saying, "I probably have more to say about octopuses."

"Later?" 

"Yeah," he murmurs, eyes flicking down to Eddie’s lips. "Later."

Before Eddie can close the gap Buck puts a hand on his chest. “Wait, I have a question.”

Eddie pulls back and raises an eyebrow, beckoning Buck to continue.

"What was your score?"

"My what?" Eddie says, brows furrowing. 

"On the quiz. What'd you get?"

Eddie huffs a laugh. "Ninety-two."

"Ninety-two percent?"

Eddie hums. "That's what it said."

“Wow,” Buck says, leaning back slightly. He stares at Eddie with wide eyes. “So you’re like really fucking gay.”

A startled laugh erupts from Eddie as he smiles at Buck, fond and awed and so content, loose in a way Buck’s never seen him before. “Yeah, Buck. I’m really fucking gay. And also in love with you, too.”

Buck lets out a shaky breath. “Thank God. This would’ve been really awkward if not.”

He doesn't know who moves first. Probably him. He leans in and so does Eddie at the same time and they meet somewhere in the middle. Eddie's hands find the sides of his face and Buck's hands thread through Eddie’s hair and they just sit there for a second, breathing, looking at each other, best friends who finally ran out of reasons not to do this.

Eddie kisses him.

Or he kisses Eddie. Or they kiss each other. Doesn't matter because it's happening, Eddie's mouth is on his, and his fist tightens in Eddie's hair. Sharp canines find his bottom lip and he gasps into the kiss, whimpering into Eddie’s mouth. 

Eddie's hands are warm on his face and Buck’s crying again, or still, hard to tell, and Eddie pulls back just enough to press his forehead against Buck's and say, quietly, "I got you."

"I know," Buck says. "You always— I know."

They stay there for a while, breathing each other in as the documentary plays on. The octopus is doing something with a coconut shell now — carrying it across the ocean floor, holding it under its body, using it as a portable shelter, which is actually one of the only examples of tool use in invertebrates and Buck is absolutely going to tell Eddie about it later, is going to pause the documentary and rewind to this exact moment and explain the whole thing in full, and Eddie is going to listen, because that's what Eddie does, and Buck is going to love him for it, because that's what Buck does, and that's fine. 

Better than fine, actually. Incredible. 

Eddie drops his hands and he’s smiling, teary-eyed. He moves them around so Buck is practically laying on top of him now, his face tucked into Eddie’s chest. 

The documentary keeps going, now having at least ninety percent of Buck’s attention. The octopus on screen is drifting through open water now, arms trailing behind it, moving through the blue like it was built for it. 

Buck read once that octopuses have three hearts and blue blood, and that two of the hearts stop beating when they swim. He'd told Eddie that at dinner, too, the same night he mentioned the jar thing, and Eddie had looked at him across the table and said that's kind of beautiful, and Buck had changed the subject because he could feel himself blushing. 

Two hearts that stop so the third can keep going. 

Something about that feels right, sitting here, Eddie's hand resting on his waist, the TV casting blue light across both of them, their own version of open water. 

Buck spent years trying to keep all three of his hearts beating at once — Eddie’s best friend, Eddie’s partner, somewhere in-between — and it was exhausting, all that pumping, all that effort to stay alive in every direction at once.

Maybe he can let two of them stop. Let the rest of it fall away and just swim with the one that matters — Buck who loves Eddie, carried forward by something that turns out to be so simple it's almost funny, now that he's stopped thrashing against it long enough to feel which way the current goes. 

He's been drowning on dry land for years, lungs full and no surface to break through to, sinking in the middle of a life that looked fine from the outside while he held his breath and held his breath and held his breath.

Turns out the water was never the problem. He just needed someone to breathe for.