Archive of Our Own

Chris has been to exactly five of Theo’s soccer games this season, and he can say with full confidence that they are the most entertaining events in Los Angeles County. 

Better than any Dodgers game. Better than whatever overpriced immersive experience Hen is dragging him and Denny to next weekend. Better than literally anything. 

Because no amount of money can buy the specific brand of unhinged this family brings to a recreational soccer league for kids who still occasionally eat grass on purpose. 

Theo’s team is called the Lightning Bolts, which sounds fierce until you remember that their youngest player cried for ten minutes last week because a ladybug landed on his shin guard. 

They’ve won two games this entire season, and one of those was a forfeit because the other team got hand, foot, and mouth disease. 

Chris loves them. He loves every single one of their stupid little faces. 

He’s parked in a camping chair his dad hauled out of the truck, sandwiched between a woman in a giant sun hat and a guy who keeps taking phone calls and wandering away mid-conversation. 

Prime real estate. 

Close enough to the field to see everything, far enough from his dad to maintain plausible deniability when things inevitably go sideways. 

Because they will. They always go sideways. 

Buck is already sitting cross-legged on the grass about ten feet away, surrounded by a semicircle of kids who got subbed out during the first quarter. He brought a cooler full of Gatorade and apple juice and orange slices and like four other kinds of snacks. 

Chris isn’t surprised in the slightest. Buck is basically just a giant, overenthusiastic four year old himself. One that the city of LA trusts with sharp tools and fire equipment. 

Buck is also drinking one of the juiceboxes. A grown man. Built like he could bench press Chris’s entire chair with Chris still in it. Sitting criss-cross applesauce in the grass sipping a Mott’s through a tiny straw while a four-year-old named Dakota explains — with grave intensity — her ranking of every bug she’s ever found in her backyard. 

Buck is nodding along like this is the most important conversation he’s had all week. 

And honestly, it actually might be. 

Full eye contact, active listening posture, the whole deal. Chris watches him ask “and where does the rolly polly fall on the list?” with more genuine investment than most adults bring to their actual jobs. 

It’s honestly kind of beautiful in a really embarrassing way. 

His dad, meanwhile, is currently standing six inches from the sideline with his arms crossed and his jaw clenched so tight Chris can practically hear his molars grinding into dust. 

The ref — some college kid, maybe twenty, in a shirt that’s a little too big for him — has already made the mistake of calling a foul on Theo. Twice. Eight minutes into the game. 

Chris watches his dad’s posture from across the field, spine straight, shoulders squared, and sinks deeper into his chair because this is about to be incredible. 

“That was a clean tackle!” Dad yells, about a tackle that was absolutely not a clean tackle. 

Theo practically launched himself at another kid like a dog chasing a squirrel. 

Both of them went down in a tangle of limbs. 

The other kid is fine — already up and running — but the principle of the accusation has offended his dad on a cellular level, and there’s no recovering from that. 

Chris kind of feels bad for the ref. 

Chris is also, currently, on the edge of his seat. 

The lady next to him leans forward in her chair and claps politely when one of the Lightning Bolts kicks the ball vaguely in the direction of the goal. It goes wide by about fifteen feet. She claps anyway, so Chris claps too. 

“Which one’s yours?” she asks, turning to him with the kind of smile that adults give teenagers when they’re trying to figure out why a sixteen-year-old is voluntarily at a four-year-old’s soccer game on a perfectly nice Saturday afternoon.

Chris points at the field. “Number seven. The one who just—”

Theo slides into another kid. Studs up, absolutely zero regard for the rules of the game or the laws of physics or the general social contract that says you probably shouldn’t torpedo someone half your size during a friendly scrimmage. 

The kid goes sprawling, crying out in a I’m not really hurt but what the hell kind of way. 

Theo pops back up immediately, looking at Buck with a giant smile and a happy little thumbs up. Buck grimaces, but gives him a thumbs up anyway.

Then, Theo turns to Dad, completely unbothered, thumb still held high proudly, and Chris can actually see the exact moment his dad’s soul leaves his body. 

“That’s a fifty-fifty ball!” Dad shouts at the ref, who looks like he’d rather be literally anywhere else on the planet right now. The ref reaches for his pocket. Dad’s eyes go wide. “You are not carding him again. He’s four! He is four years old.”

The ref cards him again. 

Chris pulls out his phone and opens his notes app. He needs to start keeping a running tally of Theo’s fouls or he’s going to lose track and he wants accurate data for when he roasts his dad about this later. 

That’s three so far. They’re fifteen minutes in. 

“So,” Sun Hat Lady says, glancing between Chris and the unfolding disaster near the sideline, “is that… your dad? The one yelling?”

Chris looks at Dad, who has now moved from crossed arms to hands-on-hips, which is stage two of the Eddie Diaz Escalation Protocol. Stage three is the finger point. Stage four is Spanish. Chris isn’t sure they’ll make it to Spanish, but the game is young. 

“Yeah,” Chris says. “Well. One of them.”

He takes a sip of his Gatorade and waits for it. 

“One of—”

“My other dad’s over there.” He gestures casually toward Buck, who is still watching the game but is now laying fully on his stomach in the grass while Dakota shows him something in the dirt. Could be a bug. Could be a rock. Could be literally anything and Buck would still be giving it his genuine attention because that man has never met a child he wouldn’t drop everything for. 

Case in point: him. 

Another case in point: Theo. 

He’s got grass stains on his elbows. There’s a fruit snack stuck to the back of his shirt and he clearly has no idea. 

Chris loves him so much it’s stupid. 

They’re not together, technically. Or at all, if you ask them, maintaining with increasingly unconvincing conviction that Dad is straight. 

Capital-S Straight. 

They’ve said it out loud and everything, multiple times, usually unprompted, which is always a super convincing indicator of how heterosexual a person is. 

Chris has eyes, though. He’s seen the way they always find each other across a room like a compass finding north. He’s watched his dad laugh at stuff Buck says that isn’t even funny. Like, really. And Chris thinks Buck is funnier than most people. 

But his dad’s face gets red and stupid with it, throwing his head back in a laugh so obviously exaggerated it’s a little embarrassing to look at. 

Only with Buck, though. So yeah. “Straight.” 

Sure, Dad.

Sun Hat Lady’s expression does this rapid little journey from confusion to realization to aggressive open-mindedness. “Oh! Oh, that’s— how nice. They’re both so involved.”

“Yeah, they’re really hands-on,” Chris says, keeping his face completely neutral. “In very different ways, obviously.”

She laughs a little too hard at that, the way people do when they’re overcompensating for being caught off guard, and Chris feels the first spark of what is either a terrible idea or the best idea he’s ever had. 

He has roughly fifteen minutes of soccer left. 

He could just sit here and watch the game like a normal person. 

Or. 

“It’s actually been kind of a rough year for them,” he says, letting his voice drop a little. Sun Hat Lady immediately leans in closer. Adults are incapable of resisting gossip disguised as concern. “Like, they almost didn’t make it.”

“Oh no,” she breathes. “Oh, honey.”

Chris takes a measured sip of his Gatorade and lets the silence build. He learned this from watching prestige television — you gotta let the audience come to you.

“Yeah, it was… I mean, I don’t want to get into it.” He absolutely wants to get into it. He is going to get so far into it that they’ll need a search party to pull him back out. “But basically, Theo— my little brother, number seven, the one who keeps—”

A whistle blows. Theo’s committed another foul. This one might actually be assault — Chris isn’t a legal expert but Theo basically used that kid as a speed bump. 

Doesn't look like Theo even knows what he did, already chasing a dandelion puff that drifted across the field while the kid he leveled is still on the ground blinking at the sky. 

Dad throws both hands up in the air like he’s appealing to God directly. 

“—doing that. So, Theo wasn’t planned. And when my dad, the blonde one, told my other dad, it was like…” Chris exhales wearily, having seen too much. Except he’s seen none of this, because none of it is real. “They were struggling. Communication issues. You know how it is.”

Sun Hat Lady nods gravely. She knows how it is. 

“And my dad— Eddie, the one who’s about to get thrown out of a recreational soccer game for four-year-olds— me and him moved out for a while. Stayed with relatives. He wouldn’t answer Buck’s calls. Like, for months.” 

Chris is pulling this entirely out of the most unhinged corner of his imagination. It really should concern him how easily it’s flowing out of him. 

“I was stuck in the middle of it.” He sighs. “Going back and forth. Whole custody situation.”

“At your age?” Sun Hat Lady puts a hand over her heart. “That must have been so hard.”

“I mean, I had my therapist.” He did actually have a therapist for a while, so that part’s technically true. Wildly different context but it adds texture and he’s committed to his craft. “And my dad’s— well both my dad’s— Buck’s, sorry— I still go back and forth on what to call him. It’s a whole thing.”

It’s not a whole thing. He’s never called Buck anything other than Buck since he met him. But the lady’s eyes are glistening with empathy and Chris is riding that wave straight into the sun. 

“My dads’ friends from the firehouse really stepped up.”

“They’re firefighters?” She asks, enthralled. 

“Yeah. Both of them. Same station, too, which made the whole separation even more brutal because they still had to see each other on long shifts.” Chris leans in a little, whispering now. “One time Buck slept in the firetruck for a week because he couldn’t be in the same room as my dad without crying.”

He’s going to hell. Express lane, no stops. 

Sun Hat Lady has rotated her entire body toward him now, and the phone call guy on his other side has officially ended his conversation and is pretending to scroll through his phone at a suspicious angle, so Chris is in too deep to stop now. 

Frankly, he wouldn’t even want to if he could.

“Then, Theo was born,” Chris continues. 

Fake tears well up and his voice is all scratchy and rough because he’s sixteen and petty and a genius. 

“My dad— Eddie— Wasn’t even going to go to the hospital. He was that angry. Hurt.” He puts his hand on his chest. “But Buck called him in a total panic, and my dad just… dropped everything. Drove across the city at like two in the morning to hold his hand through the delivery. They didn’t say a word the entire time, just held onto each other.”

“Oh my god,” Sun Hat Lady whispers. Phone Call Guy has abandoned his fake scrolling entirely. 

“When they both saw Theo for the first time, my dad just looked at Buck and said— Buck tells this story way better than I do, but— he said ‘I’m not going anywhere. I have your back.’ And that was it. That was the turning point.”

Chris deserves an Oscar. And Emmy. A Golden Globe and whatever award they give to people who terrorize innocent bystanders at children’s sporting events. 

He deserves all of those. 

On the field, Theo picks up the ball with both hands and just starts running with it. Sprinting, carrying it like a football. 

The ref blows the whistle so hard Chris is worried the guy might pass out, and Dad— well he looks like he might actually storm the field. He’s taken two steps past the sideline. Another parent has a hand on his shoulder, gently steering him back, and Dad’s allowing it physically but his face has not agreed to a single part of this arrangement. 

“That’s what a hustle looks like!” Dad yells, now praising the foul instead of contesting it. The pivot is so bold it almost circles back around to respectable. 

Buck glances up from the grass. “Huh? What happened?”

“Buck! Are you seeing this?”

“Hang on, Dakota’s showing me a centipede.”

Buck holds a finger up in Eddie’s direction and Chris watches his dad’s mouth drop open before he turns back to the field, grumbling something in Spanish that could either be a marriage proposal or a death threat. Hard to tell with Dad sometimes. 

Sun Hat Lady watches all of this happen. “They seem like they’re in a good place now,” she offers carefully. 

“Yeah,” Chris says. “Therapy helped. Couples’ counseling. Individual, the whole thing. And honestly I think Theo kind of saved them? Like, once he was here, they couldn’t keep doing the back-and-forth anymore. They sat me down one night—” He pauses for effect. Pacing matters. “—and Buck was sobbing. Kind of gross, actually. Couldn’t even talk. And my dad was doing that thing where he refuses to cry so he just stares at the ceiling for a really long time and breathes through his nose.”

“I do that,” Phone Call Guy mutters. 

Chris almost breaks character. Almost. He digs a fingernail into his palm and keeps his face absolutely still. 

He could keep going. He’s already thinking about a subplot about Buck’s mom’s disapproval and a Thanksgiving incident that ended with someone throwing a casserole dish, but Buck chooses this exact moment to finally extract himself from the grass to jog over to Eddie, which means Chris’s audience is about to get a live demonstration instead. 

Buck falls in step next to Eddie and places a hand on the small of his back, casual as anything. Chris has watched Buck do this a thousand times. Drift into Eddie’s space and put a hand on him as if he’s checking that he’s still there. 

Eddie never flinches or moves away. If anything, he leans into it a little. This little micro-adjustment that Chris is pretty sure neither of them notice. 

And yeah, Dad, very heterosexual behavior. Totally normal thing that bros do. 

“Hey,” Buck says, all easy and warm. “What’d I miss?”

Dad gestures at the field like it’s a crime scene. “That ref has called six fouls on Theo. Six. In one game. He’s four, Buck. He barely knows what a foul is.” 

“He did pick that kid up by the jersey earlier.” 

Dad scoffs. “He was helping him.”

“He was carrying him away from the ball.”

“Okay, I don’t see a problem with that. The whole point of the game is to keep the ball from the other team.”

Buck presses his lips into a flat line, obviously trying to stop himself from laughing, and squeezes the back of Dad’s neck. Lets his hand sit there, thumb against Eddie’s skin, and Eddie’s whole body loosens under it. 

Chris sips his Gatorade and watches two men who are absolutely, definitely, one hundred percent homosexual about each other, stand there looking at each other with enough unresolved tension it could power the entire city grid.

Buck’s hand is still on Eddie’s neck. Eddie hasn’t blinked. If they kissed right now, right here, in front of Sun Hat Lady and God and the entire Lightning Bolts roster, Chris would feel zero surprise. 

He’d clap, probably. Standing ovation.

They do not kiss. Because they’re stupid.

“You’re right,” Buck says, smiling with barely contained joy. “It’s biased. The ref has a personal vendetta against our four-year-old.”

“Thank you,” Dad mutters.

“A grown man is targeting a child who ate a dandelion fifteen minutes ago.”

“I can’t tell if you’re making fun of me.”

Buck gasps, his hand flying to his chest in mock offense. “I would never.”

Dad squints at him. Buck smiles back, wide and obvious and completely full of it, and Eddie’s shoulders drop about two inches because that’s all it takes. 

One Buckley smile and Eddie Diaz, the man who was ready to physically fight a twenty-year-old over a yellow card, relaxes. 

Chris has front row seats to the most painfully obvious mutual pining he’s ever witnessed and these two idiots are just going to stand there with their hands on each other pretending they’re just friends. 

Unbelievable. He could scream. 

They watch the last few minutes shoulder to shoulder, still touching, cheering like the Lightning Bolts aren’t down 6-1 with their sole goal being an accident where the ball bounced off a kid’s face and rolled in. 

“Go, go, go. Theo, you’re open!” Dad crouches a little, as if that’s going to help.

“Use your left foot, buddy!” Buck adds, which is ambitious considering Theo spent most of the second half spinning in circles pretending to be a helicopter. 

As if Chris is witnessing a literal miracle, Theo gets the ball. 

His little legs are pumping, face scrunched in concentration, and for one beautiful, shining moment it looks like he might do something awesome. 

Dad grabs Buck’s arm. Buck grabs him back. 

His parents, clutching each other over a pee-wee soccer play. 

Chris is so honestly so tired of these people. 

Theo looks up, spots Chris in the crowd, and launches the ball directly at him with every ounce of strength in his tiny body. 

It sails past the sideline, past Chris, and connects with Phone Call Guy’s head. 

Hollow. Resonant. Almost musical, really. 

Phone Call Guy — who had just sat back down, mid-sentence into his phone about quarterly reports — tips sideways out of his folding chair and hits the grass. 

Everything goes quiet. 

The ref blows the whistle. Sun Hat Lady gasps. Buck and Dad freeze with identical expressions, mouths open, shoulders hunched, looking at each other like they’re silently negotiating whose kid this is right now. 

Picking up the ball, Chris holds it over his head so Theo can see, and gives him a thumbs up. “Good shot, Buddy!”

“Thanks!” Theo screams from across the field, already sprinting in the opposite direction, fully uninterested in the aftermath. 

Phone Call Guy sits up with grass in his hair, blinking. Chris hands him his phone back. “You good?”

“I think so,” he says, staring at the field.

The ref calls the game about three minutes later. 

7-1. A massacre. 

The Lightning Bolts don’t seem to care — they’re already swarming Buck’s cooler like extremely small, extremely loud hyenas. Buck is handing out Gatorades and telling each kid individually that they did amazing, never having left a kid un-encouraged. Dad scoops Theo onto his hip and Theo immediately launches into a monologue about a cloud that looked like a dinosaur, his entire foul record already ancient history. 

Chris is packing up the chair when he sees the migration. Parents, drifting toward Buck and Dad with purpose. 

Sun Hat Lady is leading. Phone Call Guy — grass still in his hair, slight dent in his dignity — is somehow part of it. A woman Chris hasn’t talked to but who was definitely within earshot of his performance trailing behind. 

Chris watches them close the distance and feels his stomach drop. 

It’s occurring to him, rapidly, and with growing horror, that consequences are a real and actual phenomenon that apply to him. 

Eddie is telling Buck that the ref clearly has an axe to grind when a group of parents materializes in front of them carrying an energy he can’t immediately identify. 

There’s a woman in a sun hat who looks like she might be on the verge of tears. A guy sporting an honestly weird amount of grass in his hair. A couple of others hovering behind them, emotionally compromised by something Eddie has not been briefed on. 

Eddie glances at Buck. Buck glances back. Neither of them has any idea what’s happening. 

“We just wanted to say,” the lady in the giant sun hat begins, her voice already wobbling, a red flag Eddie doesn’t know how to respond to, “that your family is so beautiful. What you’ve built together, after everything—” She presses her hand to her heart. “It’s really inspiring.”

Eddie blinks. 

He looks at Buck again. Buck’s mouth is slightly open. He looks like someone just read him a sentence in a language he took two years of in high school and has no clue how to speak. 

“I’m sorry,” Eddie says. “What’re you talking about?”

“Your son told us,” the guy sporting the grass in his hair says, looking at Eddie earnestly, kind of tenderly, radiating this deep, startling solidarity, like they’ve been through something together. Isn’t this the guy Theo hit in the head with a soccer ball? “About the separation. And the custody stuff. And how you drove across the city the day Theo was born.”

Eddie goes completely still. His hands stop moving, his breathing hitches, and his heart rate ticks up significantly. 

He turns, very slowly, to look at Chris. 

“Chris told you,” Eddie repeats. 

“He’s so brave,” the lady in the sun hat continues. “Going through all that at his age. And you can tell how much he loves you both. The way he talks about his stepdad—” She gestures at Buck, misty eyed. Eddie watches Buck in a way he’s never seen before, this slow-motion comprehension where each individual word is registering about two seconds apart. 

Stepdad. 

Buck mouths it. Doesn’t say it out loud, shapes it silently while staring at Eddie, and Eddie can see the moment it clicks because Buck’s eyes go wide and his ears go red and he does this aborted laugh-cough hybrid, quickly covering it. 

“Ha,” Buck manages. “Yeah. That’s— yeah.”

Helpful. Thanks, Buck. Really contributing here. 

Eddie really should correct this. 

He should open his mouth and say actually, we’re not together, my son is a pathological liar, and I’m straight. 

That is the obvious and reasonable thing to do. He’s done it before, to other people, in other contexts. 

Hey, we’re not a couple, we’re just best friends, co-parents, two guys sharing a life in every conceivable way except the one that would make sense. 

He opens his mouth. 

“It was a hard year,” is what comes out instead. 

What the hell. 

Buck’s head snaps toward him so fast Chris probably heard the vertebrae crack from the other side of the parking lot.

Eddie doesn’t look at him. 

Can’t, actually, because if he looks at Buck right now something is going to happen to his face that he won’t be able to explain or take back, so instead he stares directly at the lady and commits fully, completely, catastrophically. 

“But we got through it.”

He puts his hand on Buck’s shoulder and feels Buck go rigid under him before relaxing into it, and Eddie’s stomach flips. “Communication, mostly. Learning how to talk to each other.”

“And, uh, counseling,” Buck adds, because apparently they’re doing this now. 

Apparently Buck has also chosen chaos. 

His voice is pitched slightly too high and his cheeks are flushed and he’s gripping Theo’s sippy cup hard enough to crack it, but he’s smiling at these strangers, beaming that megawatt Buckley grin. 

Eddie cannot deal with what that’s doing to him, so he’s not going to think about it right now. 

Later, he’ll deal with it. Maybe. 

“Couples’ counseling is so important,” one of the other parents chimes in. 

“Critical,” Eddie agrees. He still hasn’t looked at Buck. 

“I think it’s wonderful,” Giant Sun Hat Lady says, dabbing her eyes. 

She is actually crying. An actual stranger is shedding tears over Eddie’s fake — something. Relationship? Marriage? 

“And your boys are just— Theo is so spirited, and Chris is so mature.”

“He’s something,” Eddie says flatly. He means it in a way that Giant Sun Hat Lady isn’t equipped to parse. 

The parents drift away eventually, after another round of congratulations on the survival of his fictional relationship, and Eddie and Buck stand there and determinedly, almost impressively not looking at each other. 

Eddie’s thinking about the word stepdad. 

He’s thinking about Chris saying it to strangers, as if it were already true. He’s thinking about how it didn’t sound wrong. How hearing “what you’ve built together” from a crying woman in an ugly sun hat felt less like a misunderstanding and more like someone holding up a mirror he’s been standing sideways to for years. 

He’s straight. 

He’s —  yeah. He’s straight. He is. 

He likes women. He married a woman. He has empirical, documented evidence of heterosexuality walking around in the form of a sixteen-year-old who is currently trying to flee the scene of a crime. 

But. 

There’s a but, and Eddie’s been keeping that but locked away in a part of himself he doesn’t visit, and the door just got kicked open by a crying woman in a floppy hat and a dude still picking turf out of his hair.

Eddie is standing in the doorway looking at everything inside going: oh. Okay. So that’s been there the whole time. 

He didn’t correct them. He could have. Easily. One sentence, two seconds, done. He’s had a decade of practice delivering that particular line. And instead he put his head on Buck’s shoulder and said we got through it like he was talking about something real, something that actually happened, like they have a marriage to survive. 

Like Buck is his to claim, hold onto, stand next to in front of a crowd and call partner, husband, mine.

Eddie built an entire family around his best friend, and was apparently the last person on earth to notice. 

Cool. Great. Totally fine. He’ll process this later in a healthy and productive way, by which he means he will bury it so deep it fossilizes and continues to function on a surface level for another ten years. 

Theo tugs on his shirt. “Mr. Eddie, can we get ice cream?”

“Sure, buddy.”

“Can Chris come?”

“Sure, let me talk to him first, yeah?”

“Okay,” Theo says, as if Eddie just told him gravity exists, and Eddie’s heart grows three sizes.

Buck is across the field now, crouched down, helping one of the other kids find a missing shoe. The kid is standing on one foot next to him, looking patient as Buck is combing through the grass methodically, giving this missing shoe the same attention he’d give a search-and-rescue operation. 

The sun is hitting his hair and Eddie is noticing it and he’s wondering when he started keeping a running inventory of Buck’s hair. 

The answer is probably always, and that’s — yeah. 

He might not be straight. 

Okay. He’s going through it. 

He’s at the part where he feels like he might throw up, which he thinks is like, stage one. Or stage three. He doesn’t know the order.

He should google it. 

“Stages of realizing you might be in love with your male best friend slash co-parent.”

Probably a Reddit thread for that. Probably several. Probably an entire subreddit full of guys standing at youth soccer games having identical crises and Eddie could be their king.

“Eddie?” Buck jogs back over, missing shoe raised triumphantly over his head. One-shoed child trailing closely behind. “You okay? You look weird.” 

“I’m fine.” 

Buck tilts his head. “You sure?”

“Get in the truck, Buck.”

Chris has never put headphones on faster in his life. 

He’s in the backseat before Buck and his dad even make it to the truck, seatbelt clicked, AirPods in, hood up, phone out — the full teenage invisibility cloak. Theo is in his car seat next to him, already half asleep, clutching a fruit snack pouch he convinced Buck to let him bring, his soccer jersey smeared with grass and dirt and what Chris genuinely hopes is chocolate, given Theo’s relationship with putting mysterious substances in his mouth. 

His dads — his dad and Buck, whatever, semantics — are taking forever to get in the car. 

They’re standing outside the truck doing that thing where they both reach for the same door handle and then stop and look at each other and do an awkward little shuffle. 

Buck gestures like go ahead and Dad gestures back like no, you and they do this weird halting dance that Chris has witnessed a million times and has never gotten less painful to observe.

Buck finally surrenders and goes around to the passenger side, which is usually what happens, because lately Dad usually drives and Buck rides shotgun and Theo always falls asleep and Chris always sits behind the driver’s seat because there’s more legroom on that side. 

They have assigned seating in a vehicle that doesn’t have assigned seating. 

They’re a married couple who forgot to get married.

Getting in, they close their doors at the same time and neither of them says anything for about ten seconds. 

Chris has his music playing loud enough that they’d assume he can’t hear them. 

He can absolutely hear them. He’s not listening to any music. 

His AirPods are in transparency mode because he did not orchestrate the social event of the century just to miss the fallout. 

He’s not an amateur. 

He needs to see this through. He owes himself that much.

Finally they start the truck and pull out of the parking lot. Buck fidgets, Eddie fidgets differently but somehow complementary to Buck, filling the cab of the truck with so much anxious energy that Chris can practically feel it vibrating through the seat cushion. 

Dad’s are at ten and two, which is how Chris knows this is bad. Relaxed dad drives one-handed, elbow on the window, steering with his palm. Spiraling dad drives like he’s taking a driving test in front of a very strict teacher. Chris learned this when he was twelve and has been secretly using it as an emotional barometer ever since. 

“So,” Buck says. 

“So,” Eddie says.

Riveting. Groundbreaking stuff. 

Chris waits. Surely more is coming. A follow-up. Some sort of elaboration on so. Anything. 

Nothing comes. They sit there marinating in their inability to communicate. Chris has to bite his cheek to keep from screaming use your words from the backseat.

“Chris really, uh.” Buck pauses. “He told them a lot.”

“Yup.”

“Like. A lot a lot.”

Eddie’s hands tighten on the steering wheel. “I gathered.”

“The stepdad thing was—”

“Yup.”

And that’s it. That’s all they’ve got. Buck literally never stops talking, could befriend a house plant if you gave him enough time, and now he can’t string together a full sentence. 

His dad, meanwhile, has responded exclusively in single syllables, which is his version of a shut down. Conversational blinds pulled and door locked.

Chris is going to lose his mind. He’s the most emotionally intelligent person in this car by a staggering margin and he’s only sixteen. That should be embarrassing for the two grown men upfront, but it’s not because they’re both too busy imploding over a story Chris made up half an hour ago.

They don’t talk for the rest of the drive. 

Buck puts the radio on. Eddie turns it up slightly. Buck taps his knee along to it. Eddie glances over at the tapping, lingers there for maybe a second too long, then snaps his eyes back to the road hard enough to give himself whiplash. Buck doesn’t notice. 

Noticing isn’t Buck’s strong suit, though. Chris has been watching his dad not-look at Buck for years and it’s honestly impressive how oblivious Buck remains because Dad is so unbelievably obvious about it that Chris is starting to wonder if Buck might actually need glasses. 

Or a CT scan. Maybe just someone to grab him by the face and aim him at the right thing. 

Theo falls asleep and starts snoring, tiny whistling breaths through his nose, his head lolled sideways until it’s resting against the edge of his car seat at an angle that cannot be comfortable but doesn’t seem to bother him at all. Buck twists around to look at him and goes “oh my god, Eddie, look at him” in this hushed, melted voice and Dad glances in the rearview and his face — okay. 

Chris isn’t going to describe what his dad’s face does when he looks at Buck looking at Theo because he actually can’t describe it. And also it would make him feel things. Which would ruin his reputation entirely. 

Can’t have that.

But anyway, it’s a lot. 

There’s a whole situation happening on Dad’s face and Buck misses it entirely because he’s already turned around. 

Chris wants to grab both of them by the shoulders and shake them until their collective brain cell activates. 

 It lasts maybe two seconds before Dad blinks and it’s gone, shutters back up, eyes on the road. But Chris saw it. 

Buck already turned back around. Missed the whole thing. Obviously. 

Chris stares at the back of Buck’s head and wonders if obliviousness at this level qualifies as a medical condition. There has to be a clinical term for it. He should look it up later. 

When they get home Theo wakes up during the transfer from his car seat to the house and immediately demands dinosaur nuggets. Buck is already in the kitchen pulling the bag out of the freezer before his dad even closes the door. 

Buck knows where they keep the dinosaur nuggets. Dad knows they have to specifically be the Tyson ones because Theo rejected the store brand after one bite and declared them the wrong dinosaurs. Buck knows which burner to use for mac and cheese that doesn’t overcook it. Dad knows Theo likes the blue plates with the rockets on them. Buck knows to preheat to 425 instead of 400 because their oven runs cold on the left side.

They both move throughout the house like it’s theirs, because it is. 

Chris doesn’t know when it happened, exactly. When Buck stopped being a guest and started being someone who lives here in every way except officially, but it was years ago. 

Buck has a toothbrush in their bathroom, a phone charger on the side table on the left side of the couch — Buck always ended up on that side of the couch during movie nights and Dad moved the charger there “for convenience” about a year ago and Chris had to leave the room before he said something that would’ve gotten him in trouble. 

Once in the house, Chris deposits himself in his bedroom. Headphones off, door cracked — he’s already broken the rules a few times today, he hardly thinks eavesdropping moves the needle. 

Plus, he needs to know what happens next. He did cause this, after all. 

He can hear them in the kitchen. Cabinets, the click-whoosh of the oven igniting, Theo in the background rambling about his dinosaur cloud again, asking Buck if dinosaurs had birthdays. 

Buck tells him he thinks they probably did. Theo asks what kind of cake a T-Rex would want. Buck says probably something with a lot of layers, because their arms are too short to eat a wide cake. Theo finds this hysterical. 

Chris hears his dad laugh from somewhere near the sink, small enough to miss if you weren’t listening for it, but Chris is always listening for it. It’s one of the real ones, reserved for moments he thinks nobody’s paying attention to. 

Buck coaxes it out of him, every time, like a lock only he has the combination to. 

Theo must wander off to the living room because his voice gets distant, replaced by the muffled sound of cartoons starting up. The kitchen is quieter now. 

“Buck,” Eddie breathes. It sounds stripped back, no sarcasm or deflection, nowhere to hide. Chris presses closer to the gap in his door. 

A beat. Shuffling, someone shifting their weight, leaning against the counter, probably. 

“I’m sorry, Eddie.” Buck isn’t whispering, but sounds scratchy, like he’s trying not to cry or something. Chris doesn’t like that. “I know that was probably uncomfortable. You could’ve corrected them, I wouldn’t have minded.”

“It’s not a big deal, Buck.”

“It is to me.” A pause. Chris can picture him leaning against the counter, picking at the skin around his thumbnail. A nervous habit he’s had as long as Chris has known him. “You’re straight, and—”

“Buck.”

“No, let me— you’re straight, Eddie. You’re straight and you’re the most important person in my life besides Theo and Chris. I don’t— I can’t lose you over something stupid that Chris made up to entertain himself at a soccer game. I can’t lose my family because some parents there think I’m your husband.”

Chris’s chest feels tight, and not in a fun way. 

Buck said family as if he was holding something breakable. As if he’s been carrying it around carefully for years, scared of gripping too hard. 

And the thing is — Buck is his family. Has been since Chris was old enough to understand what that word really meant to him, which has nothing to do with blood or paperwork or whatever his dad and Buck keep telling themselves. 

Buck came over every single night to tell Chris goodnight for a year after the tsunami. Buck learned how to do Chris’s physical therapy exercises so he could help at home. Buck showed up, every single time, for every stupid school thing and every appointment and every bad night. 

Chris has always called him Buck to his face, but he’s been calling him Dad in his head for longer than he’ll ever admit. 

Now, Buck is standing in their kitchen, convinced he’s about to lose all of it because some lady in a sun hat got the wrong idea. 

Or the right idea. 

Depending on which Diaz you ask. 

“Really, Buck, it’s—”

“No!” Buck is shouting, almost desperate. “Stop being so nonchalant about this. I’ll correct them next week. I’ll tell them I’m your friend, your coworker, whatever you want me to say. I’ll fix it, I’ll—”

Eddie groans. Chris can picture him squeezing his eyes shut. 

“I don’t want you to correct them!”

Chris stops breathing. 

By the silence coming from the kitchen, Buck might’ve stopped breathing, too.

The oven is ticking faintly while the cartoon from the living room plays some jingly theme song. Theo might be singing along. Chris can’t really focus on that, though. His entire existence has narrowed to the three-inch gap between his door and the frame and whatever is happening on the other side of it. 

“W-What?” Buck breathes. “Eddie, what are you—”

“I don’t want to correct them.” Eddie says again, steadier this time, finding his footing and committing. Each word comes out pronounced, as if he doesn’t want Buck to miss a single one. “I don’t want you to tell them you’re my friend. I don’t want to tell them you’re my coworker.”

Buck sighs. Chris imagines him throwing his hands up in frustration. “Then what do you—”

“I want to marry you.”

Chris claps both hands over his mouth. 

Everything is dead silent. Chris can hear his own heartbeat, stupidly fast, thudding in his ears. He’s braced against the doorframe, hunched over, one eye pressed to the crack in his door. 

He looks like a lunatic. 

But a happy lunatic. A lunatic whose dad is gay.

He’s been waiting for this since he was old enough to understand what it meant when his dad looked at Buck across a room and forgot whatever he was saying mid-sentence. Since he was ten and asked Buck to stay for dinner and his dad said “he always stays, Chris” as if it was built into the foundation of their house. 

“You—” Buck starts, spluttering a frankly ridiculous amount that has Chris rolling his eyes. “You want to— Eddie. You can’t just—”

“I know,” Eddie replies, quietly. 

Buck laughs, disbelieving. “You can’t just say that in the kitchen while the dinosaur nuggets are in the oven, Eddie. What is wrong with you?”

“I know, Buck.”

“Are you serious right now? Like, actually serious? Because if this is some kind of joke—”

Eddie scoffs. “You really think I’d joke about this?”

Buck laughs, a real one this time. Watery and choked and a little unhinged. “Never. You are the least funny person I’ve ever met.”

“Okay, that’s—”

“I love you so much, Eddie. I love you so much it makes me stupid.”

“You were stupid before I met you.”

“Oh my god, you are proposing to me right now and you’re being mean about it.”

“I’m being honest. There’s a difference.”

Buck harumphs. “I hate you.”

Eddie smiles, or at least it sounds like it. “You literally just said you love me.”

“Yeah, well. I contain multitudes, Eddie.”

“I love you, too, y’know.”

“You should. I’m awesome.”

“Yeah. You are.”

Chris hears movement, quick footsteps, then a sound that is unmistakably two people crashing into each other. He squeezes his eyes shut because some things are sacred and some things a sixteen-year-old does not need to witness. Even a little bit. He can hear enough — Buck making this shaky little exhale, his dad murmuring something too low to catch — and that’s plenty. 

More than.

“Courthouse,” Eddie says after a minute. “Tomorrow.”

“To—” Buck’s voice is muffled, probably pressed into his dad’s shoulder or neck or wherever. “You want to— EDDIE. Tomorrow?!”

“Why not tomorrow?”

“Because— because I need to— there should be flowers, Eddie. And I need to tell Maddie. Not to mention I don’t even know what I’m going to wear and all of our friends think you’re straight.”

“You have clothes, Buck.”

“Sure. I sure do, Eds.” Buck laughs manically. “That’s your response? I have clothes?”

“I mean…” Eddie trails off. “Would prefer you didn’t have as many clothes right now.”

Chris’s eyes go wide, jumping away from his door. 

Ew. Disgusting. He needs to die.

Chris is forever traumatized, but if he had to guess, he’d say Buck is probably blushing. Gross. 

“I-I need a suit, Eddie. I can’t get married in jeans.”

“I’d marry you in jeans.”

Buck stops talking. Then, very softly, “That’s not fair. You can’t say stuff like that when I’m trying to be mad at you.”

Chris can hear his dad laugh. The same quiet one from earlier. The Buck one. 

“Is that a yes?”

“Of course it’s a yes. It’s been a yes for— Eddie. Come on. You know it’s a yes.”

“Tomorrow?”

A pause. A long, trembling breath. “Yeah. Okay. Tomorrow. Oh my god. Tomorrow. I’m gonna throw up.”

“Please don’t throw up.”

“I’m not going to throw up.” A beat. “I might throw up.” Another beat. “No. I’m fine. We’re getting married tomorrow and I’m fine.”

Eddie gasps. “Shit. We need to get rings.”

“Wait—” There’s rustling and some giggling, then Buck says, “there.”

“Perfect.”

Biting his fist so hard it leaves teeth marks, Chris vows he’s going to be normal about this. 

He’s going to be the most normal anyone has ever been about their parents finally getting their act together after a near decade of painful, excruciating, unwatchable mutual pining. 

He’s great. His eyes are watering because he yawned. 

Suddenly — footsteps. Coming down the hall. 

Chris moves so fast he almost eats it on his desk chair, launches himself onto his bed, grabs the nearest book, and arranges himself into what he hopes is a convincing portrait of a teenager who has been peacefully reading this entire time and heard absolutely nothing. 

The door swinging open, his dad and Buck are standing there, shoulder to shoulder, practically grafted together. Buck’s eyes are red and glassy. His dad’s hair is messed up on one side in a way Chris is choosing to believe was caused by the wind and absolutely nothing else. Theo is on Dad’s hip looking cheerfully lost about why they’re all standing in Chris’s doorway. 

And on two hands laced together between them, adorned neatly on each ring finger, is a paper ring. 

He’s pretty sure they were made out of a straw wrapper from takeout the other night, each twisted to match, tied carefully in a little bow. 

“Hey, bud,” Dad starts, rehearsed and slow. Chris can tell he practiced it between the kitchen and here. Probably murmuring it under his breath while Buck squeezed his hand. 

They’re so predictable. Even now, even in this. 

“So, Buck and I wanted to talk to you and Theo about something.”

“We wanted to tell you guys,” Buck picks up, already wobbling, barely held together. “That, um. Your dad and I— we’re— I mean, we—”

“We’re together,” Dad finishes. “Buck and I are together. And we want to get married. Tomorrow.”

There’s a pause. 

Buck is visibly holding his breath. His dad’s jaw is clenched, tight and scared, bracing. They’re both looking expectantly at Chris and the weight of it is enormous — every almost, every dinner where they sat too close, every movie night where Chris fell asleep on the couch and woke up to find them still there, murmuring in the dark, just existing near each other like they couldn’t figure out how to stop. 

Chris looks up from his — oh, his book is upside-down. 

He stares at them both for a second, letting the tension build. 

“Fuckin’ finally.”

“Chris!” Dad laughs, trying to maintain outrage but failing. “Language!”

Looking over, Buck’s got his face pressed into Dad’s shoulder, shaking, making sounds that could be laughter or crying or both. Chris honestly can’t tell and he doesn’t think Buck can either. 

Dad breaks, giving up on trying to maintain parental authority when his fiancé — fiancé — is having a full blown breakdown in his shirt sleeve. 

“I’ve wanted to be your dad for so long, Chris,” Buck sniffles through whatever’s happening to his face. His voice breaks on the word dad and his face crumples and — Chris was supposed to be normal about this. 

He was going to be so cool and sarcastic and unbothered and instead his throat is closing up because Buck is crying and finally calling himself Chris’s dad and Chris has been waiting to hear that out loud for so long. 

Since before he even understood why he wanted it so badly. 

“You’ve been my dad,” Chris whispers, eyes blurring through what he refuses to call tears. “You’ve been my dad for a long time, Buck.”

Buck makes a sound that is not a word. Dad pulls Buck tighter against him and presses his mouth against Buck’s temple and Chris can see his dad’s hand shaking slightly on Buck’s arm and okay. 

Chris is done. He’s tapping out of the emotional sincerity portion of the evening because if he stays in this moment for one more second he’s actually going to cry and that would be super embarrassing. 

Theo blinks down at Chris from Dad’s hip. Chris looks back at Theo.

There’s a moment between them. An understanding that bridges the gap between sixteen and four.

“Fuckin’ finally!” Theo screams at full volume, pumping both fists in the air, every syllable bouncing off the walls and probably reaching their neighbors on both sides. 

Dad and Buck both turn to look at Chris slowly, in unison. Chris doesn’t look up from his upside-down book. 

“What?” He defends. “You guys were taking forever.”

“Fuckin’!” Theo repeats, delighted with himself, testing the word out, rolling it around in his mouth like candy. 

“Theo, buddy,” Buck coos. “That’s a grown-up word.”

"Fuckin' finally," Theo says, calmer this time, staring at Buck.

Chris pulls his book up over his face and laughs until his stomach hurts. 

He lives with lunatics. 

Certifiable, emotionally repressed, straw-wrapper-ring-wearing lunatics. 

He could’ve gotten parents who had a calm, rational conversation about their feelings at a reasonable time in a reasonable location. 

Instead, he got these people. 

He’s weirdly fine with it.