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Eddie's problem, according to his sister, is that he'd rather die than admit he wants something.
She said this a few days ago, on the phone, while he pretended the connection was bad. He came out to her in March. It's June. In the months between, Adriana has developed exactly one personality trait, which is asking Eddie when he's going to "do something about it," like being gay is a leak under the sink he keeps meaning to call someone about.
And the thing is, he wants to. In theory.
In theory Eddie is extremely normal and chill about being a gay man now, a thing he is, that he said out loud, to a person. In practice the theory has not once survived contact with reality, because every time he gets as far as imagining an actual date with an actual man, his brain helpfully fast-forwards past dinner to the part afterward, and then his brain, which is supposed to be on his side, goes: and then what? And Eddie does not have an answer to and then what. Eddie is in his thirties and has the working knowledge of a deeply confused teenager.
He knows the general categories of what's involved the way he knows there's a transmission in his truck — it's in there, it does something, he is not the guy to ask what that something is. He's pretty sure there's prep. There seems to be a lot of prep. Nobody hands you a manual when you come out, there's no orientation, no pamphlet, his sister just said I'm proud of you and his mother lit a candle and not one person in his life sat him down and explained the logistics, and he is not about to be the grown man Googling it, because that history is forever, that's in a vault somewhere with his name on it, so instead he just doesn't date anyone and the problem solves itself by never starting. Airtight. Adriana calls this "self-sabotage." Eddie calls it risk management.
He's thinking about none of this, on purpose, lying on the couch with a murder documentary watching him more than he's watching it. A neighbor is on screen saying the man seemed so normal, kept to himself, always waved. Eddie waves at his neighbors. He keeps to himself. He’s normal, he thinks.
Is he a murderer?
A question for another day.
Christopher is asleep down the hall. Brisket is on his back in the middle of the rug with all four legs in the air and his tongue hanging sideways out of his mouth for no reason, doing the thing he does where he stares at the ceiling like it holds the answers to the universe, if that were something dogs cared about. He’s been like this for the better part of an hour. Eddie has stopped finding it concerning. Brisket is a deeply strange animal and the vet has confirmed there is nothing wrong with him, he's just like that.
The phone lights up on the coffee table, and Eddie looks at it with the suspicion any reasonable person directs at a phone this late at night. It's a number he half-recognizes — a few weeks back a package for his apartment went to 4D by mistake, and he texted the guy to sort it out, and the guy wrote back a paragraph and a half about how the mail situation in this building was, his words, "a war crime." Eddie didn't save the number. He meant to. It just lives in his phone now as a stranger, and the stranger is texting him.
Unknown: hey. HEY. ok this is the package guy from 4D. ur 4B. i need to ask u somethign and its important
Unknown: u have the good dog right
Eddie: Who is this?
Unknown: i JUST said. package guy. 4D. anyway i hear his little feet in the hallway sometiems. tap tap tap. like a tiny gentleman. and i need to know hes real
Eddie knows who this is. Big guy, loud, holds the elevator and then narrates the entire ride down. Walks dogs for a living, a fact he disclosed both times they've spoken, unprompted, the way other men tell you their fantasy football record. Also — and Eddie noted this both times, against his will, and is noting it again now — built like the guy on the cover of a magazine, the kind of face that makes you assume he's about to ask you to be in his pyramid scheme. Eddie has decided on prior occasions that this doesn’t affect him and he’s deciding again now.
Eddie: Are you drunk?
Unknown: thats a seperate issue from the dog
Which is not a no.
He should put the phone down. He pulled a kid out of an overturned sedan today and his whole body feels like a wrung-out towel, and the correct adult decision is to leave the drunk neighbor unanswered and go to sleep. He looks at Brisket, who chooses this exact moment to sneeze so hard he startles himself, glares at the rug like it did it, and resumes staring at the ceiling. Eddie takes the picture. He'll wonder about that later, the speed of it, his thumb moving before any part of him signs off.
Eddie: [image]
Unknown: OH MY GOD
Unknown: hes just LAYING there. legs up. tongue out. no thoughts in his head at all. eddie this dog has never once worried about anything and youc an tell. i would die for him and we have not met
Unknown: whats his name
Eddie: Brisket.
Unknown: briskey????? like the meat?????
Eddie: My kid named him
Unknown: ok ur kid is the smartest person in this building including everyone with a job. tell brisket hes the most important man ive ever seen and ive seen a normal to high amount of men
Eddie doesn’t smile, ok? He's firm with himself on this point. He sets the phone face-down on his chest, where it glows up through the gap, and then he picks it back up.
Unknown: one more? for the road
Eddie: You live next door. There is no road.
Unknown: the road of LIFE eddie
He takes one more, Brisket mid-yawn looking annoyed with life, and sends it.
Unknown: im going to think about this dog until i die. goodnight. (to the dog) (and also you i guess)
Eddie locks the phone and looks at the ceiling fan, which wobbles a little and will, he now accepts, wobble until one of them dies. He’s not smiling, still. Really. He’s not. He goes to bed, where he lies awake slightly longer than the day warrants, thinking about absolutely nothing, definitely not about a face with blue eyes and a cute birthmark, and certainly not getting anywhere near and then what.
For context, the other end of this.
Buck's evening went as follows. A Pomeranian named Sir Reginald slipped his harness on the four o'clock walk and led Buck on a foot pursuit through a farmers market, in the course of which Sir Reginald accepted a free sample of artisanal goat cheese from a vendor who found the chase so charming she filmed it. Buck recovered the dog. He did not recover the video, because the vendor has six thousand followers and this, she informed him, was the best content she'd gotten all month. He is now, against his will, slightly known to the stone fruit community of greater Los Angeles, three beers into the evening, and by himself.
Which is the chain of events that leads a grown man to text a near-stranger about a dog he has never physically met. Buck will defend this in the morning by noting that it genuinely made him feel better, a defense that no one believes, Buck included.
Buck wakes up with a headache he's earned and the slow horror of scrolling up through his own outbox.
Buck: hey so. i think i texted u last night. about ur dog. there was no reason for it. i'm really sorry, i don't know what came over me, i think it was the three beers and a goat cheese situation that i don't want to get into
Eddie reads it at a red light on the way to the firehouse, which is legal, he checked, you can read at a red light.
Eddie: You said Brisket was the most important man you've ever seen
Buck: ...yeah
He doesn't say anything else for a second. Eddie waits. The light turns green.
Buck: ok but in my defense have you SEEN him
Eddie puts the phone in the cupholder and drives and does not delete the thread, and he's aware that he's not deleting it, the way you're aware of the last slice in the box that you're not eating because eating it means admitting you wanted it the whole time. He doesn't think about it. He's good at not thinking about things. It's basically his entire skill set outside of work.
The texts don't stop, is the thing.
Not every night. Buck isn't drunk every night, he has dogs to walk and a body to keep healthy, at least kind of (a body Eddie has now seen exactly once, in a hallway, in a tank top, an image that now lives permanently behind his eyelids), and the same engine noise running under every guy in his thirties, the one that goes shouldn't this look like more by now? But a couple nights a week the phone goes off after eleven and it's him, gentle and sincere, asking for proof that a dog he's still never met continues to exist.
Buck: is brisket up. if hes asleep leave him. but if hes up tell him i said hi pls
Buck: a guy today told me his dog was basically vegan and then the dog ate a churro off the groudn. off the sidewalk. a whole churro. and the guy goes "he doesn't usually do that" and walked away. anyway brisket would never lie to me about being vegan
Buck: do you thik brisket knows hes loved. like KNOWS knows. i need him to be awaer. this is keeping me up
Eddie answers all of them. He tells himself it's basic neighborliness, the same as telling a guy his tail light's out. This holds up for about a week and a half, right until he catches himself rereading them during a slow stretch on shift, and the neighbor explanation quietly falls apart and doesn't get back up.
And look — Eddie has thought about this, because Eddie thinks about everything until it's a fine powder. Answering is fine. Answering is correct, even. The man is clearly going through something, alone, at night, and Eddie is a first responder, this is arguably within his professional remit, this is basically a welfare check that happens to be about a dog. Eddie finds this argument completely convincing, which is how he knows it's nonsense, because nothing true has ever been that easy for him to believe.
Chimney catches him at it from across the bunkroom. "What's funny?”
"Nothing."
"You're smiling at your phone."
Eddie grunts. "It's a dog."
Chim looks at him a beat too long, then decides not to pursue it. "A dog. Sure."
And under all of it, where Eddie keeps the stuff he doesn't take out and look at, is the actual reason — it's easy. It's easy because it's nothing. He isn't on an app. He isn't standing in a bar at thirty-something trying to remember how this is supposed to work. He's answering a neighbor about a dog, and if his chest pulls tight every time the screen lights up, that's deniable, and deniable is the one thing Eddie has always been able to live inside. He could live in deniable forever. He's got it furnished. There's a recliner.
Meeting Buck in person two weeks in, aside from elevator run-ins or bumping into each other at the mailboxes, ruins the whole thing.
It starts over text, Buck working up to it across what are clearly three separate drafts, asking whether he might be able to meet Brisket sometime in real life, given that they have, in his words, "a real relationship now" and it's strange for it to be long distance when they live in the same building. Eddie says sure before he can talk himself out of it. Buck asks when. Eddie says Saturday. Buck sends a thumbs up and then, immediately, "is it weird that im nervous to meet a dog?" and Eddie just stares at it for a while.
It’s a little weird that he’s nervous to meet a dog. But he’s hot, so.
Buck shows up at two holding a grocery bag against his chest the way you'd hold a baby, or a bomb. Sober. Alarmingly sober, hair combed, in a green shirt — and here is where Eddie would like to note, for whatever internal committee handles these things, that the green shirt is an issue. The green shirt fits him the way clothing fits people in advertisements for the shirt. Eddie's own shirts have never once, on him or anyone, looked like they were grateful to be there. He notices all of this in the half second it takes to open the door and then sets it down somewhere and leaves it there.
"I brought stuff," Buck says. "I didn't know what you'd want. So I covered a few bases."
The bases are dog treats, a bag of coffee, a six-pack, and a single orange. Eddie looks at the orange. Buck looks at the orange. "I don't know," Buck says, before Eddie can ask. "It was by the register. I made a decision and now we both have to live with it." Eddie takes the bag, and that's the last thing about this afternoon that goes the way he plans, because Christopher comes around the corner, sees Buck, and reaches a verdict on the spot.
"Are you Brisket's boyfriend?"
Eddie shuts his eyes. "Chris."
"That's what Dad calls you." Christopher reports this with flat, ruinous honesty. "He smiles at his phone and then turns it over really fast."
"Okay, that's—"
"I— am. Brisket’s, uh, boyfriend. In a non-weird way," Buck says, folding down into a crouch like he's been waiting his whole life to confirm it. "Your dad's been keeping Brisket from me. I've only ever seen him in photos. I'm honestly pretty emotional about this."
Christopher studies him. "He's kind of famous in our building."
"I know. That's why my hands are sweating."
And that's the end of it, that's the whole thing, because Eddie watches his son hand this man his full and complete trust inside of sixty seconds — Christopher, who is not generous with that, Christopher who once told Eddie's own mother to her face over Thanksgiving turkey that she "asks a lot of questions for a guest" — and Eddie stands in his kitchen holding an orange he didn't ask for and feels the floor fall away.
Okay. So. Eddie would like to raise an objection with management.
The drunk texts, those he had handled. A drunk man telling you your dog is the most important man he's ever seen is a bit, and you can't fall for a bit, no stable adult catches feelings off a bit, that's not reasonable. The drunk texts were fine. The drunk texts were a part of how Eddie was getting through this with his dignity in one piece.
What nobody warned him about was that there was a sober one.
Nobody told Eddie there'd be a sober Buck who'd show up at two in the afternoon and lower himself onto Eddie's living room floor and listen to his son talk about literally every single fact he’s learned about snails without his acting annoyed once, asking real follow-up questions, retaining the information. Nobody warned him this man would get visibly, sincerely emotional when Christopher knots a length of yellow ribbon around Brisket's neck and steps back to evaluate the result, that he'd put a hand flat on his own chest and say "buddy. buddy, he looks so distinguished," about a dog in a ribbon.
And nobody — nobody — warned Eddie that the man would do all of this while being, in direct sunlight, at close range, somehow better-looking than he was in the hallway, which Eddie had thought was the ceiling. It is not the ceiling. There is no ceiling. Eddie keeps thinking he's adjusted to the face and then the face does something new, like smile, and he has to start over.
You can hold a drunk text at arm's length for the rest of your life. This you cannot hold anywhere. There's nowhere to set it down. Eddie has been trying, internally, the entire time, smiling like a normal host, and it just sits in the middle of his chest taking up the whole room.
Meanwhile Brisket, who has spent two weeks as an abstraction in this man's phone, takes one look at the physical Buck and lies down directly on his feet, then rolls belly-up across both of Buck's shoes, then makes a noise Eddie has never heard him make, a long groan of total contentment, an animal whose entire life has been building to this exact afternoon. Brisket has known Buck for a minute and a half. They appear to be in love. That’s — Eddie isn’t jealous of a dog. Just fyi.
"You good?" Buck calls toward the kitchen. "You’re being quiet. Is it the orange? Did I mess up with the orange?"
"The orange is fine," Eddie says. The orange is the only object in this apartment currently behaving normally.
He goes back in and sits on the floor, because everyone's on the floor and a man can only stand at his own sink for so long before someone asks about it. Brisket immediately redistributes himself across both their laps at once, a structural decision that presses Eddie's shoulder against Buck's, and neither of them adjusts. Eddie keeps not adjusting for a span of time that stops being explainable as an accident. He's close enough now to confirm the green shirt situation extends to the arms, which he did not need confirmed, but he confirms anyway, and then loses the thread of whatever Christopher is saying about a flying reptile, and has to ask him to repeat it, and Christopher sighs at him like the disappointment he's becoming.
He doesn’t measure how long he sits there shoulder to shoulder. He's decided he'd rather not know.
After that the texts keep coming and they change, and Eddie knows they're changing, and he answers them anyway.
They stop being about the dog. They still start with the dog, Buck reaching for Brisket first the way you grab the doorframe walking into a room you're not sure about, but they don't stay there.
Buck: rough night. walked a dog whose owner died last week, family's keeping her till they sort it out. she just sat by the door the whole hour. wouldnt walk. didnt want the treats. just sat there waiting for a guy whos not coming back. sorry. heavy text. how's brisket
Eddie: He's good. He's asleep on the couch he's banned from. You okay?
There's a pause long enough that Eddie sits up against the headboard.
Buck: yeah. better now actually. you're like the only person who asks me that
Eddie holds his fingers over the keys. There's a whole pile of things he could say and he can feel every one of them ready to go — I think about you on the nights you don't text. Christopher asks where you are. I came out in March and haven't done one thing about it since and you're the only thing I've wanted and I can't make myself want it anywhere people can see me do it.
He types: Brisket says hang in there.
Buck: tell him i love him. tell him i mean it
Eddie sets the phone on his chest and lies there in the dark being quietly, privately furious with himself, which is a thing he's felt many times and has gotten very efficient at feeling without anyone finding out.
Then Buck stops.
It's nothing at first. People don't text every night. Eddie has a whole life — a kid, a job, a dog that may not even like him — and he does not sit around waiting for a dog walker to get drunk enough to text him, he's a grown man. That would be asinine.
But a few nights go by with nothing, and he notices on the second one, which tells him something about himself he'd rather it didn't, and by the fourth he's rereading texts and has started picking up his phone, getting irritated at himself for picking up his phone, putting it down, and picking it up again a while later to confirm the situation is identical, which it is, because that is the fundamental nature of a phone.
He tells himself Buck is busy. Dogs don't walk themselves, that's the literal job. He tells himself he's being ridiculous — that he's a recently-out man in his thirties developing a whole situation over a guy next door who texts him about a dog, that the situation has grown teeth now, and the silence has handed those teeth something to do.
He also, in a moment he's not proud of, finds himself wondering whether the silence is about someone else, whether somewhere across this city Buck is being gentle and sincere at eleven at night to a different person entirely, and Eddie has to sit up and turn on a light to make that line of thinking stop, because that one isn't deniable, that one has a name and the name is jealousy, and Eddie is not equipped.
On the fifth night he does a thing he has never once done in this entire arrangement, which is text first.
He drafts it like a fourteen-year-old. He types hey and deletes it because hey might be too much. He types Brisket misses you and deletes that because it's cowardice wearing a dog as a disguise, which, given the entire premise here, is too on the nose to survive. He's sitting on the floor of Christopher's room with his back against the bed frame, Chris asleep and starfished above him with one foot off the edge, because sometimes a man just ends up on his kid's floor and doesn't fully know why. He types it plain, which is about the bravest thing he's managed in a while.
Eddie: Haven’t heard from you in a minute. You good?
The dots come up right away, like Buck's been sitting there with the phone in his hand.
Buck: hey
Buck: yeah sorry. ive been in my head. its a bad neighborhood up there, i shouldnt go alone
Eddie: About what?
A pause. The dots come, go, come back.
Buck: can i say something and you promise not to make it a thing
Eddie: I'm the last person who's going to make something a thing.
Buck: i think the only time i text you about brisket is when im drunk. and i think thats because when im sober i know hes not actually why im texting you
Eddie reads it, and then reads it again, and Brisket, who is banned from Christopher's room, noses the door open and pads in and lies down across Eddie's feet, fully unaware that he's just been relieved of duty.
Buck: like to be clear the dog is a 10/10. but ive been hiding behind a very good dog and thats not fair to him or to you or honestly to me, the guy doing the hiding. i went quiet because i finally figured out why i kept texting and it scared the absolute hell out of me
Here it is, the thing Eddie has spent weeks not saying, coming back at him from the wrong direction, and the first thing he feels isn't relief. It's fear, clean and complete, because Buck putting it into words means Eddie has to put something into words too, and out loud is the exact place Eddie has never once been willing to stand.
March was like four months ago and he still can't believe he got the sentence out to his own sister. Now there's a man on the other end of a phone being braver about this than Eddie has been about anything in years — a man who, Eddie is now forced to recall in high resolution, has freckles across his nose that Eddie counted to seven before making himself quit, on the floor, in front of his kid — and Eddie is sitting in the dark with a dog on his feet, scared out of his mind, understanding with total clarity that he can stay a coward for the rest of his life, comfortably, with the whole thing already furnished, recliner and all — or he can not do that.
He looks up at the glow-in-the-dark stars Chris stuck to the ceiling last summer, every constellation wrong, none of them fixed because Eddie never had the heart to correct them.
Eddie: Come over
Eddie: Now's good
Buck knocks a suspiciously short time later, short enough that he must have run, which Eddie notes to himself and decides not to say out loud. He opens the door before the second knock, which gives away that he was standing near it, which he also decides not to say out loud. Then he gets the door fully open and there's the face again, doing its thing, except now it's doing its thing while terrified, hair wrecked like he spent the whole walk with both hands in it, and Eddie has the deranged and untimely thought that this is the best he's ever looked, here, scared, at his front door. Which is an interesting thought.
"Hi," Buck says.
"Hi."
"So I had a whole speech worked out on the walk and it all left my body the second the door opened, so we're improvising." He breathes out. "You should know I'm good at the midnight version of this. The version where I'm a little drunk and funny and there's a dog involved. Standing here sober in the hallway is a completely different skill that I do not have."
"I know what you mean."
"Can I take you to dinner?" It comes out in a rush, like he's been holding it under water and finally surfaced. "You. Not the dog. I checked, dinner's a person thing, the dog can't come. Christopher can come some other time, I'd love that actually, but the first one I want it to just be you. And if I've read this completely wrong then say so and I'll walk back next door and we'll never bring it up again and I'll go back to only texting you about the—"
"Buck."
"—because the dog stuff was real, that part wasn't a long con, I wasn't running a—"
"Buck."
Down the hall, nails on hardwood, tap tap tap, and Brisket arrives to assess developments, takes in the two grown men frozen in the doorway, walks directly between Eddie's feet, sits down on them, and lets out a long groan, like the wait has been unbearable. He looks up at Buck. Buck looks down at him. For a second nobody in the doorway is breathing except the dog.
Eddie looks at Buck and lets himself, for one second, just look, the way he hasn't allowed himself to since this man first stepped out of an elevator and into the worst-timed crush of Eddie's adult life. The freckles. The hair. The whole stupid, sincere, magazine worthy face, scared, in his doorway, for him.
"Yeah," Eddie says.
Buck blinks at him. "Yeah you'll think about it, or—"
"Yes. Dinner. Pick a night you'll actually remember."
Buck's whole face changes, every emotion he has showing up to the door at the same time and trying to fit through at once. "I'll be sober this time. I'll remember all of it, start to finish."
"Don't oversell it." Eddie steps back to let him in. "You want coffee? It's the middle of the night, so it's a genuinely terrible idea."
"I would love a terrible idea," Buck says, and steps past him, his shoulder brushing Eddie's chest on the way through, and Eddie lets himself have the one second of it — the nearness, the warmth, the fact that he said yes out loud, somewhere a real person could hear him do it. And underneath that, quiet but no longer deniable, the first calm thought he's had about any of this: that whatever and then what turns out to be, he'd rather figure it out with this idiot than keep being right about it alone.
Later, both of them sober, two coffees neither of them had any business drinking, Buck asleep on the couch under a blanket because it's the middle of the night and Eddie's not walking him back out into it, the phone lights up on the kitchen counter.
Eddie picks it up. Buck is twelve feet away and snoring loud enough to hear from the kitchen.
Buck: is brisket awake
Eddie looks over. Buck has one arm flung across his face, the phone glowing on his chest, and the dumbest grin on the part of his mouth Eddie can still see.
Eddie: You don't need the dog anymore. You know that, right?
Buck: yeah i know
Buck: i wasnt asking about the dog
Eddie sets the phone face-down on the counter, smiling like an idiot. Over on the rug Brisket rolls onto his back, sticks all four legs straight up in the air, lets his tongue fall sideways out of his mouth, and goes back to staring at the ceiling like usual — next to the most important man either of them has ever seen, pretending to be asleep, right about both of them from the very start.