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Eddie has seen four houses today and has feelings about none of them, which his realtor keeps taking personally.
It's the fifth one that gets him, and the house has nothing to do with it.
The house is fine. The listing called it a "charming starter home with character," which Eddie has figured out over one brutal weekend is realtor for small and old and something's wrong with it we're not mentioning. He and Christopher have stood in four of these now, Eddie nodding at crown molding he could not possibly care less about, Chris asking every agent if the house has a basement and getting told no every single time, always with a flick of the eyes toward Eddie that makes it clear they think the basement was his idea, and that they have some theories about what he wants it for.
So Eddie's expectations walking up to number five are in the dirt.
He's so fucking tired. The exhaustion of trying to build a whole life out of cardboard boxes, showing up to this city with a kid, a U-Haul, and a plan that turned out to be a to-do list wearing a plan's clothes.
He just wants a house with rooms in it.
That's it. That’s literally all he wants at this point.
The house is not the problem. The problem is, however, the new realtor he chose, it seems. The realtor he hasn’t met before, but will in a few seconds, which is the entire problem.
The door opens and the guy standing in it is so good-looking that Eddie's first actual thought is that it can't be legal to look like that and also sell real estate. Pick one.
"Hi! You must be Eddie." The guy sticks a hand out. Tall. Distractingly good-looking, smiling like Eddie showing up to look at a house he's paid to sell is the best thing that's happened to him all week, which Eddie resents, because he is tired and was promised a house, not this. He keeps it off his face in front of his kid. "I'm Buck. We talked on the phone. Well— my voicemail talked to your voicemail. Mostly. So we didn't really— anyway." He stops himself. "Come in."
"Eddie," Eddie says, and shakes the hand, and the hand runs a few degrees hotter than Eddie’s own, which is what hands are, and not worth a single second of the attention Eddie is giving it. Outwardly he gives this man a polite nod and nothing else, an act of restraint he considers the real accomplishment of his day.
"And who's this guy?" Buck drops into a crouch to get level with Chris, which — okay. Most adults don't do that. Most adults talk to Chris like he's a lamp that might pipe up.
"Christopher." Chris sizes him up. "Does this house have a basement?"
"It does not," Buck says, like he's delivering grave news. "I checked, because the last kid who came through asked and I felt awful telling him no, so I looked into it, and I'm pretty sure basements are just illegal here. Don't quote me. But I think it's a law."
Chris turns to Eddie with the grave, vindicated face of a man whose conspiracy theory has finally been confirmed by an expert. Eddie's stomach does a traitorous roll, which he blames on low blood sugar and definitely not on the fact that this guy has existed in front of him for under a minute and is already winning over the toughest critic Eddie knows.
"Okay!" Buck claps his hands together once, and there's a jittery energy coming off him that’s kind of contagious. "Let me— right. The tour. So this is the entryway. Which. You're standing in it, so you knew that. You don't need me to announce the entryway. God. Okay. This way."
Eddie says nothing. Internally a great deal is happening. None of it shows on his face.
The tour does not get better.
It's not that Buck is bad at this. Eddie keeps waiting to think this realtor sucks, because that would be easier, that would let him write the whole feeling off as a memorable disaster and nothing more. But Buck clearly knows every single thing about the house — the year, the deal with the pipes, which direction the kitchen faces so you get the morning light. He has all of it. He just says every fact while coming visibly more unglued, talking too fast, walking his hip directly into the kitchen island hard enough to make a wounded sound and then powering through like it didn't happen, calling the pantry "a great little— storage situation, for, you know. Storing." And then looking like he'd pay money to leave his own body.
By the third room Eddie can't keep pretending he doesn't get it, because Buck keeps sneaking these looks at him, quick, then snapping his eyes away and going pink at the ears, and Eddie — who has spent an embarrassing amount of his life being a complete idiot about this exact thing — finally lets himself think oh, he's like this because of me, and the thought makes him a little weak in the knees.
"And through here," Buck says, leading them into the living room, finding a groove now, getting his confidence back, "is honestly the best part of the place. Original hardwood, the built-ins are original too, and the natural light in here is just—"
He throws an arm out wide to present the light. His hand goes straight through the window.
There's a crack, then a second worse noise, and then a whole pane of the afternoon just leaves, drops out of the wall into the side yard, and the room goes very bright and very silent, and Buck is standing there with his arm still hanging through the hole where a window used to be.
"Oh my god," Buck says.
"Whoa," says Christopher, deeply impressed.
"Oh my god, I'm so sorry." Buck yanks his arm back and checks it — no blood, the window ate it clean — but he's gone gray and he's looking at Eddie like he just got them both killed. "I have never— that has never happened, that's not a thing I do, I don't— are you okay? Did any of it get you? You're not hurt, tell me you're not hurt."
"I'm fine," Eddie says. He’s standing a solid six feet away. There is no physics under which Eddie is hurt. But Buck's already coming at him across the room, scanning him head to toe like he's hunting for shrapnel, and Eddie feels his face flush, which is its own small disaster, because Eddie does not blush, Eddie has a reputation, and it's coming apart right now over a broken window in a house he's not going to buy. "Seriously, man. I'm good."
"You sure? Sometimes you don't feel it right away, that's the adrenaline, I know that one personally—" Buck's close now, hovering, hands half up like he wants to check Eddie over and knows he's not allowed. "Let me at least— here, okay." He starts slapping his own pockets. "I'll give you my info. My real info, not the— in case you need to get looked at. I'll cover it. All of it. The window, a doctor, whatever you want, this is a hundred percent on me—"
And here's the thing about Eddie. He held it together all day. Four houses, a basement crisis, a guy that looks like that opening a door. By any fair count Eddie is the composed one in this room. His whole method is to keep his mouth shut and his expression under control until the feeling passes, and it's gotten him this far in one piece.
Then it doesn't.
"Can I get your number?” Eddie asks.
The surety in the question isn’t new, it’s how Eddie says basically everything, and that's the only reason neither of them flinches at first, because it sounds like a normal question a normal man asks.
"Oh— yeah, yeah." Buck's already nodding, already digging for a card. "Of course, that's what I'm— here, this has my cell on it, call me anytime, if your neck stiffens up later, sometimes that's a delayed—"
"No," Eddie says. "Not for that."
Buck stops. "Not for— to see a doctor."
"I want to take you to dinner." It's out before Eddie can get a hand on it, and once it's loose there's apparently no getting it back, the whole day's worth of held-down feeling coming off the spool at once. "And— look, I don't do this. I have never once done this. But I think I want to fall in love with you. Maybe. If that's—" He can hear himself. He cannot stop. "The 'maybe' is carrying a lot in that sentence. I think the falling-in-love part might've already happened, honestly. Somewhere around you putting your arm through the window. I couldn't tell you the exact moment, but it feels done."
The living room is real quiet. Great light in here, though.
"I—" Buck's mouth opens and shuts. He's still holding the business card out into the air between them like he forgot it's there. "Oh??"
"Dad." Christopher's been parked by the built-ins this whole time and has officially run out of road. "Can we go to IHOP after this? Also why are you being weird?”
"I'll buy you anything you want if you stop talking," Eddie whispers to his kid, not breaking eye contact with Buck, because the second he looks away he's going to have to deal with what just came out of his mouth and he is nowhere near ready.
Chris, smelling a deal, cuts out the middleman and goes straight to Buck. "Do you like pancakes?"
Buck nods. He does it slowly, like a guy who took a blow to the head, card still floating in midair. "Yeah," he says, kind of distant. "Yeah, I like pancakes."
"Cool!" Chris lights all the way up. "Let's go to IHOP!"
"I'm—" Buck looks at Chris, then at Eddie, then back at Chris, trying to reboot himself into a functioning professional. "I'm still on the clock, bud. Got another showing at four. But—" He's already got his phone out, deciding on something. "Lemme just text my boss real quick. He'll get it. He's a chill guy."
A pause while Buck types. A longer one while the three dots show up. Then Buck reads whatever his boss says and his face drops.
"So it turns out," Buck says, "my boss is not a chill guy. Sorry, kiddo. I can't. I've got the four o'clock, and apparently the window is, and I'm quoting here, 'a conversation we're going to be having.'" He pockets the phone, sagging. "Rain check on the pancakes. I mean it, though."
"It's no big deal," Eddie says, fast, because Chris's face is gearing up to fall apart, and because Eddie has a deep, ugly reflex against anyone rearranging their day for him, a reflex currently getting steamrolled by how badly he wants this disaster of a man to come eat pancakes with them. "He's got a job, Chris, he can't just—"
Chris pouts. It's a high-level pout. Years of practice in that pout.
Buck looks at the pout, pouts himself, then looks back at Eddie. Something reckless and dumb crosses his face, and Eddie watches him take the phone back out.
"Okay so, actually," Buck says, thumbs going, "I could just quit."
"You're not gonna quit your job—"
Chris is already beaming, already nodding, watching his whole afternoon swing back around in his favor.
"You're not quitting your job to get pancakes with us," Eddie says. "You met us twenty minutes ago, if that. You just put your arm through a window. You don't owe my kid a—"
"Done." Buck hits send and looks up, and the sweaty, fumbling guy from the tour is gone, swapped out for somebody who looks, for the first time since the door, completely at peace. "I quit. Let's go get pancakes."
IHOP at three on a weekday is almost empty, which turns out to be perfect.
Chris orders the funny-face pancake with extra whipped cream and runs a full interrogation on Buck — whether realtors get to keep the houses (no), whether he's ever found a secret room (once, technically a closet, but Buck sells it like it was a hidden vault and Chris is rapt). Eddie mostly just watches. Buck's got whipped cream on the menu he's holding and has no idea, and he's talking with his hands again, more careful this time, keeping them well clear of anything that can shatter, and Eddie sits with the fact that Buck is now jobless because of them, but also seems happy, also because of them.
"You're really not freaking out about the job," Eddie says, quietly, while Chris is busy drowning a pancake in syrup.
"A little." Buck puts the menu down. "But I've been trying to talk myself into leaving for like a year. I keep feeling like I should be doing something that matters more." He shrugs, then looks at Eddie, straight on, none of the panic left in it. "Today felt like— more."
And there it is. The thing under the whole mess. The reason Eddie loaded a U-Haul and drove to a city he doesn't know without any clue what he’s doing.
He's been treating it like a math problem — right number of bedrooms, right school district, a home — and he was so busy being exhausted about square footage that he forgot a life isn't a thing you find behind the correct front door. Sometimes it just walks up and puts its arm through a window.
"So you should know I meant it, about dinner," Eddie says. "An actual dinner. Not just—" He waves a hand at the entire afternoon. "All of that. The love thing came out faster than I planned. But the offer's real. Once you're done quitting jobs over my kid's breakfast."
Buck grins, big and bright and life-ruining, the one from the doorway. "Are you asking me out? After confessing your love to me?"
"I'm asking you out after confessing my love to you.”
"Dad," Chris says, mouth full of whipped cream, not bothering to look up, "is Buck gonna be around now or what?”
Eddie looks at Buck — unemployed, faintly covered in dessert, completely and obviously willing.
"Yeah," Eddie says. "I think he might be."
"Cool," says Chris, and goes back to his pancake, the whole thing decided as far as he's concerned.
Nobody at the table disagrees, least of all Eddie.