Work Text:
The thing about a Swiftie education course, Adriana had explained roughly forty minutes ago, tapping the rim of her glass for emphasis, was that you couldn't half-do it. You couldn't just put on the hits. You had to go in order. You had to understand the eras.
Eddie did not understand the eras. Eddie understood his sisters had shown up in his barely furnished kitchen before 10 am with a bag of oranges, 2 bottles of prosecco, and a printed itinerary, and somewhere around the second mimosa the itinerary had become their new religion. Sophia was running the aux with the focus of a woman defusing a bomb. Adruana had her girlfriend, Sutton, on speaker for consultation purposes, which meant every few minutes a tiny voice from the counter would render some verdict about a bridge, and both of his sisters would gasp like it had been handed down off a mountain.
He was, he would admit later, having a good time. He'd stopped fighting it about twenty minutes in. There was a plate of their mother's polvorones that Sophia had made wrong and somehow better, and the windows were open onto a bright Texas Saturday, and nobody had asked him a single hard question yet. He was off-duty in every sense of the word. It was easy to sink into the couch and let his sisters be loud about a woman he'd never knowingly listened to for longer than a chorus.
"Okay," Sophia said. "Okay, okay. This one. You have to actually listen to this one, Edmundo, I mean it."
"I'm listening."
"You're not. You're doing the thing where your face is here, but your brain is in California."
He wasn't going to dignify that. He was, a little. He turned his phone face-down on his chest anyway, which felt like a concession, and Sophia took it as one and pressed play.
It wasn't what he expected. He didn't know what he expected. Something bigger, maybe, something with more going on, but it was almost simple, a bright little thing about sending a message out into the world and hoping it washed up somewhere wanted. He listened to it the way you listen to something when people are watching your face to see if you'll listen correctly, which is to say he didn't hear the first verse at all; he heard his sisters not-breathing, and then somewhere in the second verse he stopped performing listening and just listened.
These days, I'm restless; workdays are endless. Look how you made me, made me, but time moves faster, replaying your laughter, disaster.
And the thing was, he thought of Buck.
Not on purpose. He wasn't thinking about anyone. He was thinking about the song, and then the song was reaching across a distance toward somebody who might not even know to look, and his brain, unsupervised for once, loose and warm and safe in a room where nobody wanted anything from him, quietly filled in the blank with the most obvious answer it had. The person across the distance. The one he'd call first about everything and last about nothing, whose name was already halfway up his throat before Eddie understood it was going to be a whole sentence.
The song ended. Sophia was saying something into the phone. Sutton was responding.
"I think I'm in love with Buck," Eddie said.
He heard it the way you hear your own voice on a recording, foreign but undeniable. He hadn't decided to say it. He had barely decided to know it. It had simply been true and then spoken.
The house went silent. Even the phone on the counter was silent.
Eddie stared at the ceiling and waited to feel afraid.
He didn't. That was the strangest part, the part he'd turn over for weeks afterward. He was in a room where his little sister's girlfriend was on speaker, in a subsection of his family that had quietly made room for this kind of admission years ago, and the fear he kept reaching for wasn't there. His hand closed on nothing. There was no floor giving way, because the floor, it turned out, had been pretty damn solid the entire time. He'd just never let himself stand on it.
He turned his head.
Sophia had a hand over her mouth. Adriana was frozen, and there was something in her face that wasn't quite surprise, but he understood it to be gentle. She had understood the weight of his words probably before he did. They stared at each other for a moment before her face broke open.
"Adrieana, do not—"
"BUCK?" Adriana was already off the counter. "Chris's Buck? Sunday FaceTime like clockwork Buck? Buck who mailed you a cooler of pastries last week Buck? THAT Buck?"
"There's only one Buck."
"I knew it." Sophia had abandoned the aux entirely. "I've known it since — Adriana, how long have we known it?"
"Years."
"About damn time, is the point," Sophia said, climbing over the arm of the couch to get to him, "which, might I add, you are the single most oblivious man either of us has ever met, no, don't do the face, don't you dare do the face. Too late to take it back now."
"I'm not taking it back." And he wasn't. He was now closer to lying on a couch with his sisters descending on him, and the thing he'd said was still true, was going to keep being true, and he found he had no desire to take it back at all. He wanted, absurdly, to say it again. "I'm not. I just…don't know what I'm supposed to do with it. I'm here. He's there. I just moved my whole life down here. He thinks I abandoned him. He thinks I'm a disaster. He thinks I'm straight. I can't exactly FaceTime him and open with this."
His sisters looked at each other.
He knew that look. He'd been managing that look since he was ten years old. It was the look that meant they'd already skipped six steps ahead of him and were waiting patiently for him to catch up to a decision they'd finished making without him.
"No, you're right," Sophia started slowly.
"I know."
"You'd have to send him something," Adriana said. "A message, per se. And just…hope it gets to him."
The song was gone from the speakers, but the ghost of it wasn't. Eddie looked at his sisters. Sophie looked at the bare walls of what should be the dining room, and Eddie watched her start to see it fill with something that wasn't there yet.
"Oh no," he said.
"Adri. Adri, get a pen."
"Oh no."
"Get the good pens. The glitter ones. This is going to be amazing."
What his sisters built over the next ten hours could not, in good conscience, be called a plan. A plan is an organized document. This was a crime.
By early afternoon, they switched from mimosas to sangria and the bare wall was bare no longer. Sophia had produced actual index cards from somewhere, an entire brick of them, and a ball of red yarn that Eddie did not remember owning and suspected had been purchased specifically. There were columns. There were arrows. Sutton, who was way too invested to let a silly thing like work keep her out of participation, was dialed in via an open Google doc that updated in real time with annotations like skip this one, it's about her master's. It'll muddy the waters and save this bridge for last. At one point, Eddie came back from the bathroom to find both sisters standing very close to the wall, arms crossed, heads tilted at the identical angle, the way you'd stand in a museum in front of something you weren't sure you were allowed to touch.
"The problem is that he thinks you're straight," Adriana said without turning around.
"Among other things. But yes, that one's glaring."
"But the man knows Taylor. Bless him." Eddie shot her a look she ignored. "so a normal amount of this he reads as us being unhinged. Which, fine, correct, on brand for sure. But if it's only unhinged, he never gets there. And if it's obvious, you might as well have called him. So it has to be—" She made a shape with her hands. "It has to start dumb and get less dumb. Slowly. So slow he doesn't notice he's climbing until he's already at the top going oh."
Eddie looked at his little sister, barely twenty-three years old, standing in front of a yarn-strung wall at 2 pm, describing with total precision the exact way a person allows themselves to be loved.
"When did you get like this?"
"I had good practice," she said, distracted, moving a card as she went.
They ordered the ring light around thirty minutes later. Nobody could later say whose idea the ring light was. It arrived on a stranger's bike in ninety minutes, and Sophia clapped like a child. They set it up in the corner, and it made the whole kitchen look like one of those confessionals from the Bravo shows the girls were always trying to get Eddie sucked into.
The idea they landed on was honestly, according to Eddie, cleverer than the sangria should have allowed. He would post a series of stories on his Instagram. It wouldn't be anything that looked chosen. His sisters being ridiculous (something they were never not doing), dancing badly, explaining lore with the intensity of hostage negotiators, and he'd simply be there, in the corner, the long-suffering brother, filming his sisters the way a teasing brother would. Nobody films their sisters to say something. And every clip he'd "catch", every single silly clip, would just so happen to have a very specific line of a song in it, lines that just so happened to be true, lines that applied to one Evan Buckley. From an outside perspective, he was just a guy who didn't know anything about Taylor Swift, stuck on a couch, documenting chaos.
The deniability they built into it was a gift. It was the thing that let him do it at all. He could send the most honest thing he'd ever sent and, right up until the moment he decided otherwise, pretend he'd sent nothing.
"And then tomorrow morning," Sophia had said, holding a card she'd been guarding all afternoon, "after he's had the whole night of it, when he's really watching, you post the last one. Not publicly. Just to him."
"To him?"
"Yeah," she offered her hand for his phone, which he handed wordlessly, still confused.
"Dear God, brother. You're tragically hopeless. We'll set up your close friends list for you. You can make it whoever you want. We'll just add Buck so it's basically like sending the story but private. He'll be the only one who will ever see it." She turned the card so he could see the title written, but only for a moment. "Paper Rings. Trust me. But that's tomorrow. Tonight, it's more subtle."
Eddie held out his hand for the card. She slipped it into the pocket of her shorts instead.
"Tomorrow," she said.
It was somewhere in the long gold middle of the afternoon, loose and happy and three cards deep into an argument about whether a lyric counted as pining or merely yearning, that Eddie said the thing he hadn't known he needed to say.
"How did you two know? Before me. You said you knew before me."
Sophia and Adrana traded a look.
"No, I mean it, because I didn't. I really didn't. That was — that was real, right. I mean the marriage was mostly mom and dad. We were just young. We didn't know how to communicate. But I loved her. She gave me Chris. I never sat around thinking about men. I never once looked at Buck and thought, there, that, I want that. It wasn't ever like that." He turned a random card over in his hands, fidgeting. "It was just…he keeps showing up. He showed up for Chris before he showed up for me, honestly. He was Chris's before he was mine. And he was so — he made it so easy. He folded into our whole life like he'd always had a place set at the table and we'd just forgotten to notice the chair was already there. I didn't fall for him. There was no falling. He just existed. It was easy. By the time I felt it, it wasn't new; it was structural. I can't even find the day it all started. There's no day. It's just every day."
He stopped, the silence in the room dawning on him. He had taken up the rambling role of the man he was speaking of.
"That's not how it's supposed to work, right?" He asked quieter. "You're supposed to see someone and want them. That's the whole — that's every song on the wall. I didn't want him and then fell in love. I've loved him this whole time, and I'm only now catching up to the wanting him part. That's backwards. That's broken."
"It's not broken," Adriana said as she put her glittery green gel pen down. She said it like she was sure.
"There's a word for it, actually. For when the wanting doesn't come first. When you have to build the whole deep thing, the trust, the years of relationship before the rest even switches on." She shrugged like it was simple. "It circles around connection. You have to be all the way in with somebody before you can even see them that way. Which is kind of how you and Shannon were, if I'm remembering correctly. And it's exactly what you described with Buck. You didn't skip a step. That's just the order your wiring runs the steps in." She typed something quickly into Google. Demisexual. "Look, there's a flag and everything. I'm not saying you have to go get a flag. I'm just saying, you're not the first person to love somebody into being wantable, and there's nothing broken about you."
"How do you know all this?" Eddie said, and then heard himself, and understood the answer before she gave it.
Adriana looked at him for a second. "Because I figured me out all on my own. You're one of three people that I looped in. You two and Tia Pepa. Honestly, the only thing saving my ass with mom and dad is that they have never once successfully opened Instagram. Dad thinks a story is a text you have to pay for. Mama accidentally liked Soph's own comment on one of my photos last month, and then we spent half an hour explaining to her they were the same account."
"That," Sophia said serenely, not looking up, "is genuinely my favorite thing about them."
Eddie snorted, despite the heavy thing they had just handed him. A part of him knew already that his parents had no idea about Sutton, but hearing her say it out loud was something different. This is the way their family had always handled things. Silence. Whispers. Secrets. It wasn't surprising, but Eddie wasn't a huge fan of the fact that they were relying on two people's inability to find a button. He was one of three she trusted to keep her safe. Here she stood, being one of his back. That was not nothing.
"Huh," he said, which was the sound he made when something enormous had just quietly clicked into a slot he hadn't known was empty. It wasn't a revelation. There were no fireworks. Just a thing that had always been there but never named finally getting a name. He felt it slowly stop feeling like a defect and more like a fact. "Okay, then."
"You don't need the label, by the way. For yourself. You clearly already know who you are. But it might help, for when you tell Buck." She must have seen Eddie revert to his confused face because she smiled gently before continuing, "That man has spent how many years thinking you were straight? You get points for naming your feelings, bro, but that's a lot to hand someone cold. The label gives him something to hold onto while the rest of it lands. It's faster."
Eddie nodded in agreement. He knew Buck. If he handed him too many words, it was too much of an opportunity for him to spiral. Which, valid, probably, given the circumstances…but he didn't want this to be a spiral. He wanted this to be good.
"So when this works, you and Chris gonna move back to L.A. or—"
"We're going home," Eddie said instantly. It was out of him before she had even finished her question, which surprised exactly no one. Not we'll have to figure it out. Not it's complicated with Chris and the house, with my job. Just the simple fact that home is L.A. It was only after, in the quiet that followed, that he heard what he actually said, and understood that he'd known the answer to that question for longer than he'd known the answer to any of the rest of it.
Because no matter how many ways he spun it, there wasn't a version of this story where Chris and Buck and Eddie stayed separated the way they were now. Because Chris, who before Eddie had even driven to Texas, had told his tias everything there was to know about Buck. Because Chris had very carefully and casually mentioned twice now that he missed home. Home meaning California. Home meaning a one-story house on Bedford Street.
Eddie had been afraid to ask his son the question outright. He was still afraid. What if he was wrong? What if he had built the whole thing up in his head out of his hope and Chris had his peace with Texas? That fear didn't necessarily dissipate as much as it sat down next to the newfound certainty and made itself comfortable. He knew where home was. He hadn't yet found the nerve to say it to the people it mattered most to. But he knew.
He had caught himself so off guard with his own instantaneous response that it took him a second to realize his sister's non-reaction. They were just smiling, still moving cards around on the wall. He had never been more grateful for his two little tornadoes.
They had the first story ready to go a little after eight, when his sisters had somehow found their fourth wind and the whole thing could plausibly be a lazy Saturday that just happened to have a documentary crew.
The rule was that he wasn't watching his phone. The reality was that he was watching his phone like Athena Grant watched her suspects.
⁂
CLIP ONE — "Love Story" First Verse
Scene: Soph & Adri dramatically playing out Romeo and Juliet from atop Eddie's kitchen counter.
Why: A Swiftie Staple - Non-negotiable
Caption: fund the arts so a theatre teacher can be subjected to this and not me.
⁂
Nothing, at first. Views, no replies. May watched it, and Hen, and a couple of guys from B-shift. Buck watched it. Buck watched anything Eddie posted, always, within about 4 minutes, a fact Eddie had noted years ago and done nothing with.
The girls made him wait 15 minutes before posting another one.
⁂
CLIP TWO — "Welcome to New York" Second Verse
Scene: Adri scream-singing the lyrics like she's lecturing a class. Complete with pride flag.
Why: Because you can want who you want. <3
Caption: As you can see, Adri feels very passionately about this one. I'm told not knowing this one was "uncultured." Consider me educated.
⁂
The first text came eight minutes after that one.
Buck: how on earth did you get talked into a Taylor Swift night?
Eddie: they brought sangria.
Buck: all i needed was sangria??? i identified that song from the first beat. i belong there. 😫
Eddie: they have a WHITEBOARD man. there's YARN. WHERE DID THEY GET YARN???
Eddie: Soph just started speaking polish 90 miles a minute. not my strong suit. i think she said something about holes in a fence. that can't be right, can it? i'm afraid to ask.
Buck: don't ask. tell them i said you're not ready for that trauma yet.
Buck: …did you tell them?
Eddie: yes buck, but now i wanna know.
The whole story was true. That was one thing he promised himself. He wouldn't lie. Every word he sent was something that actually happened. He was, for the most part, very overwhelmed by his sisters dedication to this project, and honestly, also to Taylor Swift, but he would admit that they had done what they had set out to do. He'd be able to consider himself a fan by the end of all of this.
They waited about 20 more minutes before posting a third clip.
⁂
CLIP THREE — "Gorgeous" Second Pre-Chorus
Scene: Soph rocking out. Adri coming out of nowhere with the perfectly timed triangle.
Why: OCEAN BLUE EYES. DUH.
Caption: where did they even get a triangle?????
⁂
The text came through immediately.
Buck: GORGEOUS. ok your sisters have TASTE. top 3 rep track easy.
Buck: a song aggressively about someone being too hot to think straight lmfao taylor gets it.
Buck: also where DID they get the triangle??
Eddie looked at it for a while, at Buck cheerfully identifying exactly what the song was about and blissfully unaware that it was currently about him, ocean eyes and all. Too hot to think straight. Buck had typed that. About a song Eddie was directing at him. Buck read the whole world except the parts that were about being loved; those he walked straight past, every time, because it had simply never been safe to assume any of it was for him. Eddie typed back The mystery remains, and put the phone down, physically forcing himself to keep his mouth shut on all other opinions for the time being.
⁂
CLIP FOUR— "Cruel Summer" Bridge
Scene: Adri and Soph back on the kitchen counter, putting on their best performance of the eras tour
Why: I DON'T WANNA KEEP SECRETS JUST TO KEEP YOU. this ones obvious.
Caption: this can't be a normal reaction to this song right?
⁂
Other people were starting to catch on before Buck, which was its own particular kind of torture. May replied to the Cruel Summer video with a string of question marks and then, a minute later, just his name, with a period, the way someone says your name like a warning. She was Buck's, basically, the way the girls were Eddie's; she'd have started down the exact pipeline the girls intended, one clip at a time. He'd give her points later for being so quick.
A few minutes later, Chim responded. An hour ago, Eddie would have bet money that Howard Han didn't know a single Taylor Swift lyric. Turns out he would have lost that bet. He sent something cryptic about a bet, a date, and Hen owing him dinner, which Eddie chose not to read into right now. His loved ones wagering on his love life was a Monday problem.
This one Buck didn't answer for eleven minutes.
Eddie counted them. He wouldn't have admitted to counting them, but he watched the little seen-checkmark, and then he watched nothing, no dots, no reply. Eleven minutes of a man two states away doing something Eddie couldn't see, and when the text finally came through, it was different. Eddie could always tell when Buck was reaching for casual, but not quite landing it.
Buck: ok wait. are the girls doing a bit
Buck: like is this a whole thing they're running on you lol these picks are getting kind of pointed
Buck: what are they up to over there 👀
Eddie read it and felt his universe tilt half a degree. Buck had felt it. Not the truth, nowhere near the truth, but the temperature of it, the way the night had quietly stopped being random somewhere around the third song, and he'd gone looking for a reason and landed on the only one his particular wiring would ever offer him: the girls. Buck, who had Maddie, Harry, and May, who knew exactly what it felt like to be a sibling's chosen target, took one look at something aimed at him and assumed it was a bit being run at him by somebody else.
And the eyes emoji. The little fishing hook he had carefully placed at the end of the text. Buck angling for information he couldn't have named a reason for wanting, tacking an emoji on at the end so that if there was nothing to find, he could pretend he hadn't been looking. The exact same trick Eddie was running from the other direction. Two people, one string between them, each hiding behind a small deniable thing on their own end of it.
Eddie turned the phone around to show his sisters.
Sophia read it first and made a sound like she'd been punched. Adriana read it over her shoulder and then both of them were gone, folded over the dining table, wheezing, Sophia smacking the surface with a flat hand, because there it was: the single best-case outcome for the most unaware man in North America. He had looked directly at a love confession being assembled in real time and asked, with genuine concern, what his future sisters-in-law were up to.
"He thinks — he thinks we're — oh my god, he thinks we're doing this to you." Sophia managed between peals of laughter.
"He's not wrong; you are doing this to me."
"Not the way he means it!" She wiped her eyes. "Oh, that man. That sweet, oblivious idiot man. Eddie, Eddie, he's so close and so, so far; you have to marry him."
Adriana surfaced just enough to tap the guarded index card. "Tomorrow!" she said, before losing it again.
Eddie: they're EDUCATING me. you'd know. apparently you went to this school too.
Eddie: no bit. just two women and an unsanctioned documentary level of knowledge. go to bed weirdo.
Buck: yeah yeah
Buck: tell the girls i said im a fan of their work.
Eddie put the phone face-down on his chest, the way he had on the couch that morning, the exact same gesture, and lay in the wreckage of index cards and red yarn and did not sleep for a while. It still stunned him a little bit that fear had not found him yet.
His sisters set his Close Friends list up for him over breakfast the following morning because he genuinely did not know how. He was a man who could rappel off a burning building but had never once found the need to deep dive into his social media settings. They also managed, to their credit, to show him how to add a GIF on top of the video with very little judgement. Adriana leaned over him and typed a few letters, and it allowed him to pick from the little flags that came up: the gray and white and purple stripes with the black wedge cut into the side, and she didn't make a thing of it even though he could tell she kind of wanted to. He picked a clean one, no theatrics, and tapped it into the corner of the video. There was something to be said about the simplicity of the truest piece of this whole operation being as simple as a sticker.
The video was the same shape as all the others. It started with his sisters. Adriana blowing a kiss at the camera, then heart hands, which Eddie was told was very important. Adriana holding up the final index card. The text was unreadable, but the mischief on her face wasn't. The ring light made everything gold. Then, right as the bridge to Paper Rings began, Eddie snatched the card from her hand from behind the camera, just before Sophia took the camera and turned it on Eddie. He read the card for the first time before looking directly into the camera, directly at Buck.
He didn't say anything. He didn't need to. He and Buck had spent eight years building a language that didn't require any words, whole conversations conducted across a truck bay or a dinner table in nothing but a look, a thing his sisters had teased him about only yesterday. So he just gave the camera the look. The one that was only ever Buck's. The one that meant you. I mean you. I've meant you the whole time, and you were the only one I was ever talking to.
And in the corner, small and certain, the flag.
He posted it to a Close Friends list of one, and he set the phone down, and this time he didn't count the minutes. Not that he really needed to.
It didn't take long till his phone was lighting up. Not a text. A FaceTime — of course FaceTime, of course a call he could see, Buck who never in his life could sit on a feeling long enough to type it and never once had chosen a voice call when he could have a face instead.
Eddie let it ring one more time, so he could keep the feeling of the second before, and then he answered, and there was Buck, filling the screen, panic and breathless and about six questions deep already, hair a disaster, the familiar kitchen behind him, close to the camera the way he got when he forgot to perform being fine.
"Eddie. Eddie, that went to Close Friends. I saw the — who's on that list, who else saw that, oh my god, did you mean to, who did you just come out to, are you okay, do the girls know you—"
"Buck."
"— because that flag, Eddie, that's a whole — that's not a subtle flag, that's a very specific flag, and it went to your Close Friends, so I need to know who —"
"Buck." Eddie was smiling. He could feel it on his own face, and he watched Buck see it, watched the sight of it stop him mid-word. "It didn't go to anyone else."
"…it was a green circle."
"It went to you." He let that sit. "The list is one person. I'll post a real one, a public one, whenever. Once I've talked to Chris. But that one, the — that one wasn't for everybody. That one was just for you."
Eddie watched it click. He had never been so grateful for FaceTime. Had it been a regular phone call, he never would have gotten to see the whole slow avalanche of it crossing Buck's face in real time. He watched Buck go still. Watched the precise moment it went through him — not the coming out; Buck had already gotten that part, had already spent about five minutes, give or take, braced and protective and terrified on Eddie's behalf about the coming-out. No. He was processing the other thing. The part that recalculated all of the other clips, every dumb text, and turned all of it, all at once, from a thing Eddie had been broadcasting into a thing Eddie had been saying to him, only him, the entire time. The audience of one.
"Oh," Buck finally said, very quietly.
"If you need to go back through them, I think they're still up." He offered gently.
"No, I think I got it." He said it in a way that told Eddie he was definitely going to watch them again later.
"Yeah?"
"Eddie." There it was, cracking right down the middle. Buck had spent his entire life being the one people didn't choose, the leftover, the afterthought, the one that got picked last or not at all, and here was Eddie Diaz choosing him on purpose, with a whole plan and his whole family. "Eddie, you got your sisters to help you make a Taylor Swift edit to tell me you're — that we're —"
"They had a whiteboard. I told you, there was yarn. You know how much shit I'm about to get from Chris for owning a ring light?" He asked as he pulled the light into view.
Buck laughed, or sobbed, or something in between. Eddie could see into his living room where his two favorite women were standing, gripping each other's hands and not making a sound.
There was so much Eddie wasn't going to say yet. Not like this, not today, not even now that he could see Buck's face. The part he'd worked out in his kitchen with a card in his hands — that Buck had found his place so slowly and so easily that Eddie had loved him before he'd even known there was anything to name, that loving Buck had been the least effortful thing Eddie had ever done. Buck, who was certain down to the bone that he was hard to love, that he was work, that he was the one people had to be talked into. Eddie was going to have to tell him, to his face, properly, that the truth was the exact reverse. But not through a screen, not with states between them. That one he'd hand over in person, in their home, where he could put his hands on his Buck's face when it landed.
Buck finally found the words he had seemed to be searching for, "Can I come —"
"We're coming home," Eddie said quickly. "Me and Chris. To you. I just gotta talk to my kid first. But we're coming home. Soon."