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Eddie locks the door behind him, which is funny, because it hasn’t been his door to lock for over four months now.
Buck’s the one who’s been paying for it. Took over the lease a couple weeks before Eddie’s flight left, kept the lights on, mowed the stupid lawn, kept Christopher’s room exactly how the kid left it down to the partially-built Lego thing on the desk. Because that’s what Buck does — he shows up. He holds the whole thing together for a guy who walked away, and that’s where the road ends. Buck keeps the house standing and gets a girlfriend named Sarah for his trouble.
Months of being the guy who stayed, and the payoff is finding out he was a placeholder the whole time. Cool. Great system. Loving it.
Chris is still in El Paso with Eddie’s parents, riding out the rest of the school year. So it’s just the two of them here tonight. No kid down the hall or reason to keep it down, nothing to stop this from becoming exactly as ugly as it wants to.
Two weeks of just them before Chris gets home — that was the plan, that’s what Buck had been low-key losing his mind over for a month, circling it on the calendar like an idiot — and Eddie couldn’t even give him one night of it before dragging all of this in the door.
Buck leaves the overhead light off. He'd blame the power bill if anyone pressed him. Truthfully, he can't survive Eddie under the full light right now — the dark sands the edges off his face into a shape Buck can almost stand to look at.
It isn't helping.
He's been sleeping on Eddie's side of the bed for a while now and couldn't tell you when it started. Woke up over there one morning with his face in a pillow that stopped smelling like anyone ages ago, and just never moved back.
He kept doing the dumb stuff too. Bought the detergent Eddie likes even though Eddie wasn’t here to use it. Texted him goodnight every single night and told himself he was just being a good friend, keeping the home fires lit, keeping Eddie’s spot warm.
Turns out he was the only one keeping anything warm. Eddie had a whole other fire going the entire time and never once thought to mention it.
"You've been off since the party," Eddie says as they settle in, lounging in the kitchen for a late night snack.
Buck hums, non-commital. "Have I?”
"You barely said a word to Sarah."
"I talked to her, she's great." Buck leans into the counter, letting it hold the weight his legs can’t manage. "Real funny. Already knows pretty much everything about you, Eds. What's that take, three weeks? A month, tops?"
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Nothing, man." It comes out flat, threadbare, the same lie he's failed to sell since the morning Eddie left. He's never once gotten Eddie to believe a single one. Distance didn't sharpen the skill any.
"That's not fair," Eddie says.
"No?" Buck pushes off the counter and closes half the gap, regrets it the second he's there, the old pull starts grabbing at him the second he's inside arm's reach, a hook behind his ribs nobody ever bothered to cut loose. "We talked every single day, Eddie. I could draw your parent’s house from memory. I know what it sounds like at six in the morning. I know about the corner store you wore a path to. And out of all of it — every dumb little nothing you handed me — you couldn't find one second to go, hey, I met someone?"
Eddie sighs, looking at his shoes. "I didn't know how to bring her up."
"You found a way to bring up all the other stuff."
"That's not the same and you know it."
"Yeah, you're right, it's not." He’s whispering now, because silence has done more than yelling ever has, and he's not above using it. "The rest of it wasn't her. That's the part I can't get past, man. It's not even that there was someone. It's that you looked at her every day and went, nah, not him, he doesn't need to know, every fucking day. Do I— do I really mean that little to you?."
Eddie flinches, and his hand floats up before he seems to choose it — old muscle memory outrunning his judgment. His palm curves toward Buck's jaw on the route it learned all those months back, and for one suspended breath Buck's whole body forgets every reason it has to pull away.
For half a second, Buck's whole body tips toward it. Who can blame him? His skin's been starving for this specific hand since the night it last had it and never got the memo to quit. A plant leaning at a window. Pathetic. He'd hate himself for it if he had the energy.
Then every reason comes back, all at once.
Buck catches his wrist a hair before skin meets skin, holds it suspended in the narrow air between them, neither pushing it back nor letting it through. His voice scrapes out close to a plea. "Don't. You don't get to do that tonight. Not after all this."
Eddie's wrist shakes inside his grip, and Buck feels the moment the refusal sinks into him, dropping into ground that used to hold them both.
"Buck—"
"I mean it." He lets go of the wrist like it's scorched his palm. "I can still feel where you touched me. Don't put it back just to show me what's not mine anymore."
He doesn’t say the rest. That he’s spent months reaching for Eddie’s lingering touch on his skin, pressing his own fingers there, trying to fake the weight of a hand that was a thousand miles away, starting a life without him.
He can’t say that now, though.
Eddie's arm drops. His face crumbles, bared down to a layer Buck has seen exactly once, on a night neither of them has dared speak aloud since.
"I wasn't hiding her," Eddie says, smaller now, part of his armor gone.
"Then tell me why." It's almost a yell now, except it keeps cracking apart in the middle. "Months of good mornings and FaceTimes and pictures of Chris, and the woman you're falling for just never comes up? You met her three weeks in. Three weeks. And you kept texting me every morning like nothing was different, like we were still — while the whole time you've got this entire other life going that I don't know a single thing about. You didn't just not tell me. You let me keep thinking I was still— " A sob breaks through. He pushes forward. "God, you let me keep thinking."
"I didn't know what to do with you."
"Excuse me?" His laugh comes apart partway out, folding into a sob before it clears his teeth. "You didn't know what to do with me. After I was in your bed, in this house, in the dark, hearing things out of your mouth you'd never once say with the lights on — you didn't know what to do with me?"
"That's not—" Eddie rasps. "I thought about that night every day I was gone. Every single day, Buck. I'd wake up and it'd just hit me out of nowhere — your hands on my skin, the sound you made when I said your name, how you held on after like you thought I was about to disappear and you weren't gonna let it happen without a fight." The words break apart, nearly disappearing midair. "I couldn't carry all of that around and still get up everyday. So I reached for someone. Someone who didn't need me to be more than I had in me right then."
"So I was too much for you." Every bit of fight drains out of Buck at once and leaves the wound bare underneath, which is a worse trade than it sounds. "Too heavy to carry across a state line, so you went and found something lighter to bring home. But you know what, Eddie? You know what really fucking sucks? I'd have taken less. You hear me? I'd have taken whatever you had left at the bottom of the day. You never even let me try to be that for you. You just looked at the whole thing and decided I couldn't be, and you packed it up, and you left and found someone who got the version of you I would've done anything for."
"That's not fair."
"None of it's fair, Eddie. That's kind of the whole problem."
He's close enough to see how glassy Eddie’s eyes are. Close enough that the memory just walks right up and grabs him — Eddie under him, looking at Buck like he was worth torching a careful life for.
God, he wants to reach across this and find out if it'd feel the same.
His heart pulls toward the gap between them, traitorous, half-convinced one touch would prove it’s real. He locks his feet to the floor instead.
"You held me like I mattered. You made me feel like you’d never leave. Then you boarded a plane and built a home with somebody else and never breathed a word of it, the whole time texting me every morning like I was still yours to keep parked somewhere for whenever you wanted me again.”
It’s going to rot him from the inside out later, the fact that he would’ve waited. That he was waiting. He’d have parked himself in this exact spot for years, if that’s what it took. Eddie didn’t even have to ask. Buck had already been saving the spot.
All Eddie had to do was come back and want it. Instead, he came back and brought proof that he wanted something else.
Eddie's hand lifts again, helpless, hauled forward by a gravity neither of them ever managed to bury, like he can't stop it, like whatever's been pulling him toward Buck never once got told it's over. Fingers reaching for Buck's face like the door might still hang open by a crack.
Buck steps away before it can reach him. He backs the full width of the kitchen this time and folds his arms over himself, bracing against a blow that's already a part of him.
"Don't," he croaks. "You don't get to almost have me. You don't get to reach across this space like it doesn’t hold the memory of me belonging to you. You traded that away the morning you decided I wasn't worth staying for. And I get it, Eddie. You had to go, for Chris. I know. But for fucks sake. I would have come with you. I would’ve—" There it is. The thing he never let himself admit. I would’ve come with you. You never asked. I’d’ve followed you across the country without a second of hesitation, and you decided I was easier to leave behind than to bring along. “I would’ve said yes to anything. But you didn’t ask.”
"Buck, please—"
"No! There's nobody here but us, Eddie. Chris is in El Paso. It's just me and you." He laughs, humorless. "Two weeks. Two whole weeks of just us before he's back, and you couldn't leave me be for one single night. I had it all planned out, you know that? Dumb stuff. Pancakes. Dragging you to that terrible movie you'd complain about the whole time. I was gonna let myself have two weeks of pretending it was real. And you walked through the door with her and didn’t let me have a single fucking day of it.”
"I didn't plan it like this."
"You never plan it. It just happens to you, right? You just fall into an easy life with somebody else and happen to forget to mention it to your one-night hookup who also happens to be your best friend. I’m such an idiot, huh? Stupid little Buck, fooled again, dumb enough to think someone wants him enough to keep him." He drags the back of his hand across his face, furious that he's crying, furious that Eddie still draws it out of him.
It’s the same script, isn’t it? He hands somebody all of him, never learning how to hold back, and stands there while they take what they want and leave the rest.
He thought Eddie might be the one to finally want it all.
This is the one who won’t make me sorry I gave it.
Joke’s on him. Joke’s always on him.
"Go away, Eddie. There's nothing left here for you to fix."
"This is my house too."
"Yeah. It sure is." He keeps his back to him, eyes burning too hard to risk turning around. "Crazy that's what you care about. Out of everything in this house you could've claimed tonight, you went for the lease."
Not Buck, though. Eddie could’ve claimed him. He’s been standing here practically gift wrapped, after all.
"I think about that night more than I'll ever say," Buck offers finally, eyes pinned to the stove light because Eddie's face is more than he can take right now. "How you traced every inch of me like you were trying to memorize me before I was gone. How you told me you'd never felt anything like it, shaking like the truth of it scared the hell out of you. I kept that night like it was worth something. Carried it around for months like a coin in my pocket, the letters worn from how much I held it. Did you, Eddie? Or did you spend it before I even had the chance to miss you?”
He already knows the answer. It’s so humiliating it’s almost funny — he’s not even asking because he wants to know. He’s asking because some stupid, starving piece of him still thinks maybe, maybe, if he gives Eddie the opening, Eddie will finally say the thing.
He never learns.
It’s just another thing to add to the list. He never, ever learns.
"I didn't forget you."
“Oh, but you didn’t think to tell her about me." His voice goes fully under, the last plank of his composure breaking loose. "Four months as the person you called at sunrise and leaned on past midnight, and you'd already made up your mind I wasn't important enough to mention. So tell me what that is, Eddie. Tell me what the hell I'm supposed to think, because I've been turning it over since you came back and none of it feels right. You made me yours and you made me your secret, but you don't get both. Pick one."
Eddie has nothing. He stands emptied out, and the silence answers for him in the same old voice it always uses — loudest thing in the room every single time it actually counts for anything.
Well, there’s his answer.
Buck gave him the opening, laid it right out, pick one — and Eddie picked anything in the room so he didn’t have to look Buck in the eye.
Buck waited his whole life to be somebody's easy yes, and he finally found the guy he'd say it to, and Eddie can't even look at him.
"I'll, um— I’ll call Ravi. See if I can stay with him tonight," Eddie says at last, hollowed down to almost nothing. "Give you some room."
"Yeah." Buck won't look. "You should."
He doesn't watch him go. He hears it instead — boots crossing the living room, keys lifting off the hook, the front door easing open and clicking shut behind him. The retreat of someone backing out of a mess they made and can't take back.
No fight in the leaving.
If Eddie had slammed something, raised his voice, fought to stay — anything — Buck could've held onto that, turned it over later, called it proof there was something worth fighting for. Instead, Eddie just left, leery and apologetic, the same way you back out of a room where somebody's sleeping.
As if Buck was already a thing of the past he was trying not to wake.
Buck stays at the counter long after the engine fades down the street, eyes fixed on the cleared patch of floor where Eddie stood and reached twice and got stopped twice, where months of careful, polite nothing finally came home to fall apart in the one room he can't stand to be alone in now.
He leaves his phone face-down. He's not going to scroll back through texts hunting for the warnings he missed.
There wasn't one.
It’ll keep him up tonight, knocking around alone in a house that was supposed to be theirs — not that Eddie picked somebody else, but that Buck had him. And now he doesn’t.
For one night, months ago, he had every single thing he ever wanted, and he didn't know it was the only time he'd get it.
Nobody tells you when it's the last time. You just find out later, when you least expect it, that the best night of your life already happened and you spent it thinking it was the first of many.
He’ll still be here in the morning, though. He’s still going to keep the lights on, mow the lawn, leave that Lego set right where Chris left it. Because that's what he does. He shows up. And loving someone who already let you go doesn't come with an off switch — he just gets to do it softer now, in a house with Eddie's name on the paperwork and his own whole heart soaked into the walls.
He'll use the detergent Eddie likes. He'll text goodnight. He'll keep the spot warm in a bed that's never coming back to him, because he doesn't know how to do it any other way.
Because the awful, permanent truth of Evan Buckley is that he'll keep loving people exactly this hard long after they've made it clear they're done — and he'll do it diligently, and he'll do it well, and nobody will ever once have to ask him to.