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The rules, as far as Eddie was concerned, had never actually been agreed on. They'd just accumulated, the way rules do when two people spend enough time trying to embarrass each other in public.
Rule one: it had to be a real restaurant, not fast food. Nellie's on Fig didn't count because Nellie's didn't have servers, it had a guy who yelled your number.
Rule two: no repeating a venue within six weeks, because the staff needed time to forget.
Rule three, added after the incident at the place on Sunset, was that Eddie was not allowed to cry. Buck could cry. Buck was, annoyingly, an incredible crier, could get his eyes wet on command like some kind of Broadway understudy, and it worked every time. Eddie's face just did something that looked like he was passing a kidney stone, and one waitress had asked if he needed her to call someone.
Tonight's restaurant was an Italian place off Ventura that Eddie had picked because it had cannoli on the menu and Buck had spent the whole drive over talking about cannoli like he'd never had one before, like it was a rumor he'd heard about and was choosing to believe.
"I'm just saying," Buck said, forking up the last of his chicken parm, "a properly fried shell is not a given. Half these places give you a soggy shell and call it artisanal."
"You've had three cannoli in your life."
"Quality over quantity, Eddie."
Eddie watched him talk with his hands, watched him nearly knock over his water glass and catch it without looking, and thought, not for the first time in the last few months, that this had stopped feeling like a bit to him sometime around March. He hadn't figured out what to do about that yet. So he kept doing the bit, because doing the bit meant he still got to have this — Buck across a table from him, laughing, unaware, three cannoli deep into a lifetime of cannoli opinions.
He caught their server's eye. Her name tag said DANA. Dana had the exact posture of someone who had already clocked that this table was going to be a whole thing, because Eddie had asked her twice how the kitchen was doing tonight and complimented her on her "energy," which were, he'd learned, the two tells.
"You ready?" Buck asked, voice dropping the way it did right before, like he was announcing a boxing match. "Round face or worried face?"
"Worried face. I want her scared."
"You got it."
This was the part Eddie actually loved best, if he was honest — the two seconds of setup, the two of them getting their game faces on like they were about to run into a burning building instead of guilt a nineteen-year-old into free dessert. Buck cracked his knuckles. Eddie took a breath.
Then he slid out of the booth, got down on one knee on the slightly sticky floor of an Italian restaurant on Ventura, and took Buck's hand.
"Evan Buckley," he said, pitching his voice to carry, because carrying was the whole point, "I have loved you since the day you almost died in a pipe crawling toward a truck full of my kid's future birthday cake, and I am done pretending I can live one more day without telling you—"
Buck was already laughing, shoulders shaking, already saying "oh my God, Eddie, get up, people are staring," except he didn't mean it, he never meant it, he loved the staring.
Dana had frozen mid-step with two waters on a tray. Two tables over, a woman had her phone out before Eddie even hit the last line.
Eddie kept going. Commit fully or don't do it at all. "I want to grow old with you. I want matching sweatshirts. I want to fight you over the thermostat for the rest of my natural life—"
"Eddie—"
"Say yes, Buck. Say yes in front of God and this entire dining room and this nice woman named Dana who I can tell already loves us—"
"Oh my God, we do not know her name is Dana, you're reading her tag—"
"Dana," Eddie said again, louder, and Dana, to her eternal credit, played along, pressed both hands to her chest like she was witnessing something holy.
Buck wiped a fake tear, dramatic as ever, voice cracking on cue. "Yes. Yes, a thousand times yes."
The table next to them applauded. An older man raised his wine glass. Eddie stood, pulled Buck into a hug that got a little too real for a second — it always did, that was the part nobody but Eddie seemed to notice, the extra half-beat before either of them let go — and then they sat back down like nothing had happened, both grinning like idiots.
Dana came over two minutes later with a slice of tiramisu, two forks, and her manager's blessing. "On the house," she said. "That was the best one I've seen all year, and I've been here since Valentine's Day."
"We appreciate you," Buck told her, completely sincere, and tipped forty percent, because that was rule four: you always tipped like the free dessert cost real money, because it did, just not to you.
---
It had started as an accident, technically. Eight months ago, at a Cheesecake Factory in Pasadena, waiting almost an hour for a table, both of them starving and cranky, Buck had said, half-joking, "we should just tell them it's our anniversary, get a free slice out of it," and Eddie, who'd had two beers and no patience left, had said, "we should get married right here, that'd get us seated faster," and then, because Buck had looked at him like that was the funniest thing he'd ever heard, Eddie had actually done it. Right there in the waiting area, surrounded by buzzing pagers. Gotten down on one knee on the tile by the hostess stand and asked.
Buck had laughed so hard he'd had to sit down on the bench they were still waiting for. The hostess, a guy named Gary, had seated them within ninety seconds and comped their dessert without being asked, just to be part of the story.
They still went back to that Cheesecake Factory sometimes. Gary had been promoted to shift lead. He always sat them himself.
That first time, it had been nothing. A bit, born out of hunger and boredom, the kind of thing that made sense between two guys who'd been through being shot and a tsunami and a building falling on them and had run out of normal things to be afraid of. Eddie hadn't thought about it again except as a good story.
The second time, three weeks later, Buck was the one who suggested it, at a barbecue place that had made them wait forty minutes for a table that was, visibly, empty. "My turn to propose," Buck said, dead serious, and Eddie had gone along with it because refusing would've meant explaining why, and he didn't have a why yet. Not one he could say out loud.
By the fifth time it had rules. By the eighth time it had rules debated retroactively over drinks, litigated like case law — was Buck's crying against the spirit of the bit, was Eddie allowed to bring a prop. (No. Eddie had tried to bring a prop. It had been vetoed unanimously by a jury of Buck.)
Eddie couldn't point to the exact night it had stopped being funny to him in the way it used to be funny. He'd tried, a few times, lying awake with Christopher's computer-light glow leaking under the door, tried to find the seam where it turned. He thought maybe it was the one at the seafood place in June, when Buck had said, off script, eyes too bright to just be bit-crying, "I mean it though, you're stuck with me," and Eddie had said "good" before he could stop himself, and Buck had looked at him a second too long before the waiter interrupted.
Or maybe it was earlier than that. Maybe it was always this, dressed up as a joke because a joke was survivable and the truth, back then, hadn't seemed like it would be.
What Eddie knew for sure: somewhere in there he'd stopped performing the words and started rehearsing them. Not the bit's version — the real one. He'd catch himself in the shower running through what he'd actually say, if he ever said it, and then he'd hear how much better it was than the bit's version, how much less funny and more true, and he'd shut the water off and tell himself he was being an idiot.
Then, two weeks before the Ventura dinner, Christopher, apropos of nothing, doing homework at the kitchen table while Buck made grilled cheese at the stove with his back turned, had said, "when are you gonna just tell him for real," and hadn't even looked up from his worksheet.
Eddie had nearly dropped the plate he was drying. "Tell him what."
"Dad." Christopher had given him the look, the one he was getting better at every year, the one that made him look unsettlingly like Shannon. "You guys have fake-proposed like fifteen times. Just do it for real."
"It's a bit, mijo."
Eddie didn't answer right away. He was rinsing a plate that didn't need rinsing, and he made himself finish the motion, made himself set it in the rack, before he turned around.
"Chris—"
"You don't have to say anything." Chris shrugged, like it cost him nothing, like he hadn't just cracked something open. "I'm just saying. It's not a bit."
Neither of them said anything else about it. But Eddie had gone out the next day, on his lunch break, alone, and bought Buck a ring.
He'd almost taken it with him to Ventura. Stood in front of the mirror that morning turning the little box over in his hand, thinking maybe tonight, maybe he could fold it into the bit somehow, let the real thing hide inside the fake one where it would be safe.
Then he'd pictured it. Pictured getting down on one knee for the fifteenth time, Buck already laughing, already halfway into round-face-or-worried-face, and Eddie trying to signal no, this one's different with his eyes while Dana hovered with her manager's blessing already loaded up. It would get lost. Buck wouldn't even know to look for it until it was too late to land the way it needed to land.
He put the ring back in the drawer and went to Ventura and did the bit instead, and it was a good night, one of the best ones, and driving home with Buck asleep against the window somewhere around Coldwater Canyon, Eddie decided something with the same finality he usually reserved for decisions involving fire.
Whatever this was going to be, it was not allowed to look like the bit. Not even a little. No waitstaff in on it, no rules, no round face or worried face, no restaurant they'd already burned through the goodwill of. Eight months of getting down on sticky floors to say things that got truer every time he said them as a joke — that had been its own thing, and it had been good to him, but it wasn't going to be the thing he used to ask Buck to marry him for real. The real one needed its own room to happen in. Someplace that had never seen either of them perform anything.
He recruited exactly one person, because he needed a second opinion on a tie and there was only one person whose opinion on anything currently mattered more to him than his own nerves.
"That one," Christopher said, not even looking up from his phone, when Eddie held up two options in the kitchen a week later. "The dark blue. Obviously."
"You didn't even look."
"I looked for half a second, which is all that tie needed." Christopher finally glanced up, and something in his face went soft in a way that made Eddie's chest hurt a little. "You're actually doing it."
"I'm actually doing it."
"Does Buck know?"
"Buck," Eddie said, "does not know anything. That's the whole plan."
Christopher grinned, delighted with himself, delighted with his father, delighted with the entire secret. "Finally," he said, and went back to his phone like he hadn't just watched his dad's hands shake putting on a tie.
---
Eddie decided three days out that he wasn't going to give Buck anything more than "wear something nice," and he badly underestimated how far that would get him.
"Wear something nice for what?" Buck said, the second the words were out of Eddie's mouth, toweling off after a call like the question was more urgent than getting the rig restocked. "Are we celebrating something? Because if we're celebrating something, I feel like I should know what it is before I show up in — what does 'nice' even mean, nice like a button-down, nice like an actual jacket—"
"Nice like wear something nice, Buck."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one you're getting."
Buck folded his arms, working up to a proper interrogation. "Is everything okay? Is this a — are you about to tell me you're moving to Texas again. Because I will fight you regardless of dress code, I want that on the record."
"Nobody's moving to Texas." Eddie clapped him once on the shoulder, mostly so he'd have an excuse to touch him and call it casual. "Just trust me. Wear something nice."
"You're being weird."
"I'm being normal. You're the one demanding a dress code breakdown."
"That's called due diligence."
He didn't sleep well the three nights leading up to it, which struck him as its own kind of funny, because he'd gotten down on one knee in public more times than he could count at this point and never once felt his pulse do what it was doing now, just thinking about a restaurant with actual tablecloths and no rules protecting him. There was no bit to hide the shaking hands inside of this time. There was no Dana who'd already agreed, silently, to be part of the story. It was going to be just the two of them, and whatever he could manage to say without his voice giving out on him.
Which was, he decided somewhere around two in the morning the night before, exactly the point.
He picked Buck up himself instead of meeting him there, and he clocked the moment Buck noticed that too — Eddie never picked him up, they always just showed up separately from whatever shift or errand had eaten their day. When Buck opened the door in the dark blue button-down Eddie had specifically not mentioned wanting to see him in, something happened in Eddie's chest that he still didn't have a good name for, even after weeks of it happening every time Buck did something as simple as laugh at his own joke.
Buck opened the door and then just stopped, one hand still on the frame, looking at him a beat too long before he said anything at all.
"Hi," he said, like the word cost him something.
"Hi."
Neither of them moved for a second. Buck's eyes went down and then back up, slow enough that Eddie felt it somewhere he didn't have a great name for.
"So," Eddie said.
"Yeah, no, so." Buck nodded, like that had been a real sentence. "Did you — the truck. Is the truck outside. You probably drove the truck."
"I drove the truck."
"Good. Great. That's the — yeah." Buck still hadn't stepped back to let him in, and Eddie realized he hadn't moved either, both of them just stalled out on the porch like neither one trusted what would happen if they closed the last of the distance. "How was, uh. How was work. Today. Generally."
"It was work."
"Cool. Cool, cool, cool." Buck exhaled, dragged a hand back through his hair, and finally seemed to notice he was doing it, stopped himself halfway through the motion like he wasn't sure it was allowed. "I don't know why I asked that, I saw you literally six hours ago."
"You did."
"So that was a stupid question."
"A little bit, yeah."
Buck let out a breath that was almost a laugh, more air than sound, and he still hadn't stepped back, and Eddie still hadn't made him. "Okay, I don't — I don't know what's happening right now, with the not talking, we're just standing here—"
"We are standing here."
"Yeah." Buck finally moved back, slow, still looking at him. "Eddie. What is happening tonight.”
"Dinner," Eddie said, and reached out to fix Buck's collar, which didn't need fixing, purely so he'd have an excuse to stand that close for a second. "That's it. Get in the truck.”
"You still haven't told me where.”
"You'll see.”
Eddie felt something settle the closer they got. Not calm, exactly — his hands were doing a low, steady vibration against the wheel that he didn't bother trying to hide — but a kind of certainty that felt almost like relief. Months of turning this into a running joke between best friends, and now here was the actual thing, and it turned out the actual thing didn't scare him the way he'd expected. It felt like finally putting something down that he'd been carrying wrong the whole time.
The restaurant announced itself in warm gold script lettering over the door — Averill's — and Buck's eyebrows shot up the second he read it. "Okay, this is nice-nice. This is not a nice we've ever done."
"We're doing it tonight."
"Right. Okay. Yeah." Buck nodded like that settled something, then didn't move toward the door. "I just — you keep saying 'it' like I know what it is, and I don't, and that's — I'm choosing to be fine with that. I'm fine."
"You're not fine."
"I'm a little bit not fine, yeah." He laughed, short, more breath than sound, and rubbed the back of his neck. "I don't know why. You've never once made me nervous getting into a restaurant, that's a new one, put that on the list of things happening tonight that I don't have an explanation for."
"Get inside, Buck.”
The maître d' greeted Eddie like a regular, which he wasn't, except he'd called three times that week to make sure of small things nobody else would notice — the corner table, away from the kitchen doors, a view of the window without being in front of it, no birthday songs happening at any nearby table, because he'd checked, and had felt like an idiot checking, and had checked anyway.
Buck slid into the booth across from him, picked up the menu, and immediately made a face. "There's no prices on this."
"That's how you know it's nice."
"That's how you know it's a trap." He set the menu down without really reading it, hands not quite settled — on the table, then off it, then back. "Okay. What's the occasion. You can tell me. I want to know, I think I want to know, is it bad that I don't know if I want to know—"
"It's not bad."
"You didn't answer the question."
"You'll get an answer.”
Buck picked up his water, put it down without drinking it, picked it up again. "I don't do well not knowing things. This is a known fact about me and you're just — sitting there. Calm. Which is somehow worse, you're never this calm, you get twitchy waiting for takeout—"
"Order the wine, Buck.”
Buck ordered a bottle by jabbing a finger at a name he liked the look of, more decisive about the wine list than he'd been about anything else all night, and the waiter didn't even blink. Somewhere between the wine arriving and the bread basket, something in Buck's shoulders came down an inch — not gone, just quieter — and the next time he laughed it was the real one, not the performance version he did for waitresses and audiences, and Eddie felt it land somewhere low in his chest. For a few minutes it was almost easy, the two of them falling into the same rhythm they always did, except Eddie could feel something underneath it that hadn't been there before, and once or twice he caught Buck's eyes narrow at him like he was trying to place it and couldn't. Eddie's knee found his under the table and stayed there, which Eddie never did. He watched Buck talk instead of half-watching the room the way he usually did in restaurants — old habits, exits mapped out of instinct — and, just for a minute, let himself not.
"You're staring," Buck said, over the appetizer, quieter now.
"Can't a guy look at his best friend?" Eddie said, and heard it come out easier than it felt.
"You don't usually. Not like this." Buck's fork stopped halfway to his mouth. "Eddie, seriously, you're kind of freaking me out. In a — it's not a bad freaked out. I just don't know what's happening, and normally I'd needle you until you cracked, but tonight I keep almost asking and then not, which isn't a thing I do, I always ask—”
"Someone wanted tonight to be quiet," Eddie said, and reached across the table and took his hand — no thought in it, no careful math the way there usually was, just his hand finding Buck's like it was the easiest thing he'd done all week. Their appetizer went cold between them. This was the table Eddie had picked on purpose, tucked into the corner where nobody else could see, and for once that was the whole point — not an audience to perform for, just the two of them, finally alone with it.
Buck's gaze dropped to their joined hands and stayed there. Something crossed his face — surprise, maybe something sharper than that — gone before Eddie could get a good read on it. Eddie's thumb moved once over his knuckles, absent, like his hand had made the decision before he had.
"Eddie." Buck's voice had dropped somewhere Eddie hadn't heard it go before, not quite steady. "What are we doing right now.”
"Okay. I had a — I wrote things down, actually, I had a whole thing I was going to say." Eddie exhaled, short, and pushed forward anyway. "Doesn't matter. I'm just going to say it badly instead of not saying it right."
Buck went very still. "Eddie—”
"I'm not doing the bit." Eddie heard his own voice drop into a register he'd only used once before, by a restaurant door with a mint wrapper crinkling in his hand, except this time there was no mint, no crinkling, nothing to fidget with except the small velvet box he took out of his jacket pocket and set, closed, on the white tablecloth between them. "I want to be really clear about that up front, because I know what your face does when you think we're about to run a bit, and I need you to not do that face right now.”
Buck's eyes dropped to the box and stayed there, fixed on it in a way Eddie had never seen him fix on anything — there'd never been a box before, never anything in Eddie's hands but nerve, and this time there was no room, no floor, no audience, just the two of them and a table Eddie had specifically requested away from anyone else's night.
"You did this on purpose." Buck's voice had gone thin, and his hand was still in Eddie's, gripping now instead of just resting there. "The wear-something-nice thing. The not telling me anything. The — you've been weird all night, I thought I was imagining it, I told myself I was imagining it—"
"I didn't want this one to be anything except true." Eddie turned the box over once under his fingers, not opening it yet, watching Buck instead of the box. He'd rehearsed this in the shower a dozen times, and every version of himself in the mirror had looked less sure than he felt right now, sitting across from the person he'd been hiding this feeling behind a joke for, because a joke was the only way he'd ever found to say something true out loud without risking what they already had. "You know how many restaurants we've gotten a free dessert out of at this point?”
"Eleven," Buck said immediately, helplessly. "Eleven restaurants.”
"Eleven restaurants where one of us got down on the floor and said things that started out as a joke and stopped being one somewhere around restaurant four, for me anyway, and I never told you that, because telling you felt like it would ruin the only good way I'd found to say it at all." He opened the box. The ring caught the low restaurant light exactly once, small and plain and nothing like a prop. "So I'm not doing that again. No Dana. No round face, no worried face, no rules. Just — Buck. I love you. Not the way I love you as my best friend, though God knows I've loved you like that so long I stopped noticing it was even a separate thing. This is the other one. The real one, that I've been carrying around in a drawer for three weeks because I couldn't find a night that felt like it deserved it, until I realized the night wasn't going to feel like anything special until I made it one. Marry me. For real. No punch line.”
Buck's eyes went bright, and Eddie could tell there was no ambiguity in it this time, no bit-crying to weigh against real, because there was no bit in the room to compare it to. Buck laughed, wet and startled, one hand coming up to cover his mouth like his face hadn't caught up to whatever was happening underneath it yet.
"You held my hand before the food even got here," he said, which wasn't an answer, which was clearly the only sentence that had made it through. "You've been holding my hand this whole time and I thought — I didn't let myself think anything, Eddie, that's — that's the most you thing you have ever done, being that quiet about it—"
"Buck."
"I'm getting there, I'm processing, you gave me zero warning, at least the eleven fake ones had a countdown—"
"Buck," Eddie said again, laughing now too, something in his chest finally, finally unclenching all the way, "you can process out loud all you want, I've got nowhere to be, but I would love an answer at some point tonight."
"Yes." It came out of Buck fast, like it had been sitting right behind his teeth the whole time, waiting. "Yes, obviously, yes — you didn't even have to ask, you know that, right? You've had a yes sitting here for months, you just never asked the real question."
"I'm asking now.”
"Then yes." Buck reached across the table with his free hand and gripped Eddie's wrist, and then he was leaning in, and Eddie met him halfway — the two of them fumbling a first kiss over a half-eaten appetizer, neither of them apparently having planned for this part, Eddie least of all. "A thousand percent, actual, no-bit yes.”
Nobody applauded. No phone came out. The older couple at the next table glanced over once, smiled the small, private smile of people who understood exactly what they were seeing, and went back to their dinner. Eddie found he liked it that way. After months of turning this into a performance, there was something almost perfect about nobody watching now. Buck was still staring at him across the table like Eddie had managed to surprise him for once, and the ring that had spent weeks hidden in Eddie’s drawer was finally where it belonged.
They paid — Eddie had to physically pull the check out of Buck’s hands when he kept trying to argue about splitting it even now — and walked out with their fingers still tangled together. Somewhere between the table and the door, Buck’s thumb brushed once over Eddie’s knuckles, small enough that Eddie might have missed it if every point of contact between them hadn’t suddenly felt charged. Neither of them let go.
It had started raining while they were inside, the fast kind that didn’t announce itself first, and by the time they hit the sidewalk it was coming down steady enough that Buck laughed and dragged his jacket up over his head one-handed, the other still tangled with Eddie’s.
“We should make a run for the truck—”
Eddie didn’t.
He stopped right there on the sidewalk and Buck made it another half-step before their joined hands pulled him back. Rain was already soaking through Eddie’s shirt, running cold down the back of his neck and catching in Buck’s hair, flattening one of his curls against his forehead.
Buck laughed and turned toward him. “What?”
Eddie tightened his fingers around Buck’s.
For a second, he only looked at him. At the rain caught in his eyelashes. At the smile still pulling at his mouth. At the ring on his hand, bright whenever they passed beneath the light spilling out from the restaurant windows.
“That didn’t count.”
Buck blinked. “What didn’t?”
“The kiss.”
Something in Buck’s face changed. The smile stayed, but softened around the edges.
“Eddie.”
“There was a ring box on the table and you were staring at me like I’d lost my mind.” Eddie stepped closer, enough that the rain running between them didn’t feel like space anymore. “And I’m pretty sure I was still shaking.”
“You were definitely shaking.”
“Thanks.”
Buck’s smile widened.
Eddie could feel his own starting despite himself. “I’m serious.”
“I know.”
“I want a real one.”
Buck’s smile went softer, his eyes dropping briefly to Eddie’s mouth before finding his again. His fingers tightened around Eddie’s, warm even with the rain running cold between them.
“A real first kiss?” Buck asked quietly.
Eddie nodded. “Yeah.”
Buck’s thumb moved once across his knuckles.
“Okay,” he said.
“Eddie,” Buck said, a laugh still caught somewhere in his voice. “We have a lifetime for kisses.”
Eddie’s heart stumbled over the word.
Lifetime.
“I know,” he said. “I still want this one.”
Buck’s eyes dropped to his mouth again.
Then he stepped closer and lifted his free hand to Eddie’s face, palm warm against his rain-cold cheek. His thumb brushed beneath Eddie’s eye, catching a drop of water there before it could run any farther.
“Okay,” Buck said softly.
And kissed him.
Slowly this time.
Slow enough that Eddie felt the first press of Buck’s mouth against his, the tiny breath Buck let out through his nose, the way his hand slid from Eddie’s cheek to the back of his neck and held there. Eddie’s eyes fell shut. Rain ran into his hair and down his face, cold everywhere except where Buck was touching him, and Eddie stepped closer until there wasn’t room for it between them anymore.
He kissed Buck back like he had all the time in the world.
Maybe he did.
His free hand found Buck’s waist, fingers curling into the wet fabric of his shirt, and Buck made a soft sound against his mouth that nearly ruined Eddie’s plan to take this slowly. Eddie smiled into the kiss. Buck did too, and then they were kissing around it, badly for half a second because neither of them could stop smiling, before Buck tipped his head and kissed him again.
Buck’s thumb moved against the nape of Eddie’s neck. Eddie could feel the ring between their joined hands, unfamiliar against his fingers every time he tightened his grip, and something about that nearly undid him — this new little piece of Buck underneath his hand, proof of the question Eddie had finally found the nerve to ask and the answer Buck had given him without hesitation.
When they finally pulled apart, they didn’t go far.
Buck’s forehead settled against his. Rain caught on Buck’s eyelashes and ran down the bridge of his nose, and Eddie laughed when one cold drop landed between them.
Buck opened his eyes. “Did that one count?”
Eddie looked at him.
At his wet hair and his flushed mouth and the smile he was trying and failing to hold back. At the man Eddie had spent years finding his way toward without realizing there had ever been anywhere else he was supposed to go.
He leaned in and kissed him once more, softer this time, because apparently having a lifetime didn’t make Eddie any less greedy for the beginning of it.
“Yeah,” he murmured against Buck’s mouth.
Buck smiled.
“Good.”
Then Buck kissed him again.