Let me take Christopher for a night, Pepa had said. You’re a young man, you have a Friday off, and you should go do something fun. Enjoy life as a bachelor.
Okay, Eddie had replied, and he’d thanked her on top of that, because he’s a good boy who was raised to listen to his kind aunt’s advice.
Turns out good boys with kind aunts end up sitting at home alone on a Friday night, missing their kid. Eddie does the dishes, cleans the nearly spotless bathroom, folds some laundry, scrolls through his Netflix queue start to finish, and thinks about just calling it a day. His phone tells him it’s 19:30. He scrubs a hand over his face and sinks deeper into the couch.
Thing is, he’s not friendless. He has great friends, the best he’s ever had, but all of them have kids or partners of their own. All of them, with one notable exception.
Eddie turns his phone over and over in his hands. He could call Buck.
He shouldn’t, though. They hang out together all day, and frequently outside of work too, so he should leave the guy a little Diaz-free time. Nobody likes a needy friend.
On the other hand-
Okay, Eddie’s got nothing. He’s feeling kind of pathetic and lonely though, and sometimes that’s what friends are for, so he calls Buck anyway, just to see what he’s up to.
“Hey man,” Buck says, the moment he picks up. He sounds upbeat, and it helps lift Eddie’s spirits too, just like that.
“Hey,” he echoes. No need to announce himself – clearly Buck knows. The rush of that makes him a little bolder than he planned. “Listen, Pepa has Chris, so I’m free tonight. Wanna hang out? Order in some pizza, watch a movie?”
“Ah,” Buck says, in a tone that spells trouble before he has to say anything else. It’s a needle to Eddie’s bubble of hope. “I’m actually on my way to meet Josh.”
Josh.
That would probably be Josh, Maddie’s friend from the 911 call center who’s in a private text conversation with Buck and Chim. Josh, the guy that Buck once laughingly told Eddie it almost seemed like Chim and Maddie were setting him up with during a dinner party. That Josh.
Eddie’s gut doesn’t like the idea of Buck hanging out with Josh at all, but that just goes to show he’s a petty and overbearing friend and he now knows for sure he shouldn’t have called. “Oh,” he hastens to say. “Hey, that’s cool.”
“You could tag along though, if you want,” Buck offers, with almost the same amount of haste. “It’s just a group hang. There will be some of Josh’s friends too that I’ve never met in person, so you’d help me feel less like the outsider.”
“Oh,” Eddie hears himself say again, but with surprise instead of feigned cheerfulness. Well, if he can do Buck a favor, what kind of friend would he be to say no?
*
Buck’s truck pulls up outside his door twenty minutes later, and another twenty after that they’re looking for a free spot in the half-dark parking lot of a pretty swanky bar Eddie’s never been to. While he’s manually locking the car, Buck suddenly says, “So Josh has a lot of queer friends.”
Considering Eddie knows Josh is gay, that’s not exactly earth-shattering news. “So do we.” They hang out with Hen and Karen and even Michael all the time, Eddie still drinks a beer with Lena sometimes, and clearly Buck keeps in contact with Josh a lot.
“Ha!” Buck actually says that out loud. He doesn’t laugh, he just yells “ha”. “Yeah!”
Eddie doesn’t need to have Athena’s years of experience at solving mysteries to figure out that’s not where Buck was going with this. He waits for Buck to come around the car so they can fall into step on their way to the entrance, and then tries again. “What’s on your mind, man?”
“There’s more than just gay or straight,” Buck says, like he’s fishing, or hesitantly hoping Eddie already knows this.
Eddie shrugs. He doesn’t live under a rock. “Well, yeah.”
“Yeah,” Buck echoes, but a switch has been flipped and he’s animated and grinning now, like relief. “Bisexual, pan, ace, aro - not to mention, of course, that it’s all a bunch of spectrums anyway, and then there’s the split attraction model that works for some, and other people don’t like using labels at all. And obviously gender is a whole other thing that can play into it in pretty complex ways, right?”
“Right,” Eddie says, even though his head just started spinning. He doesn’t know what half those words mean in this particular context.
“So uh,” Buck continues, because apparently he’s on a roll, “I’m bi and in there are some of the first people I’ve come out to, some via text, because Josh kinda helped me by like, letting me talk about it and stuff. Just thought you should know what you’re walking into.”
The answer to that is very nearly a door, literally.
“Whoa,” Buck says, laughing, hand still on Eddie’s arm after stopping him just before he breaks his own nose. “Better watch where you’re going.” Buck lets go – Eddie immediately feels... unmoored, somehow – but only to grab the offending door and pull it open. “After you.”
“Thanks,” Eddie says, and steps inside, past his bisexual best friend who is bisexual.
Bisexually.
At least that was one of the words he knew.
*
The bar, from the inside, is still pretty swanky. It has concrete floors, dark walls, high ceilings with lamps dangling on very long cords and furniture with lots of wood and metal, giving it the feeling of a warehouse where somebody forgot a few potted palm trees and some bamboo screen dividers. There’s a square bar counter island in the center of the huge room, which Buck weaves around to get to the far left corner, like someone has instructed him where to go. This turns out to be a table in a nook created by two walls and a planter box on stilts – the table, likewise, is higher than one would expect, and surrounded by padded barstools of which three are already taken.
It’s not as weird as Eddie thinks it’s going to be, being the only straight person at what was apparently supposed to be a meetup for not-straight people. He doesn’t feel like he belongs, but he can fake it. He has a lifetime of practice. It’s the same front that rubbed Buck completely the wrong way in the beginning.
He’s never fully been able to figure out why that getting off on the wrong foot happened, but his running theory is that he entirely by accident got right at the heart of Buck’s own fundamental insecurities – being replaced, left behind, forgotten by the people he cares about the moment they find someone else to fill the spot.
Which is total nonsense, of course. Anyone who thinks they know someone who could replace Evan Buckley clearly just hasn’t figured out who Buck really is yet, but that’s easy to realize while looking on from the outside. Inside, in Buck’s head, Eddie knows that knowledge is also present but still being tested, and frequently doubted. So Eddie will fit in, because Buck does, and clearly should, and should never doubt that.
It’s still a little tricky though, because all the goodwill in the world can’t save him from being out of his depth the moment introductions happen. He vaguely knows Josh, an affable white guy he’s never talked to but that he’s seen across the room at birthday parties and that he has obviously heard of before. Josh’s promised queer friends are just two people. One of them is an intimidatingly beautiful woman in a light purple suit, who is half a head taller than Eddie and introduces herself as Semra.
The other is a short and stocky person with a buzzed head and a double nose ring, who shakes Buck and Eddie’s hands and says, “Jan they them.” It sounds like a phrase Jan’s said a thousand times, to the point where there’s no break between the well-worn words. It takes Eddie a second to untangle the knot and realize the second part is not a last name (Tatum? Dayton?), but Jan stating their pronouns. By that point they’re hopping back on their barstool and adding, “Queer as the day is long.”
Buck laughs at that. “Awesome!” he says, but Josh pulls a critical face.
“Twenty-four hours? You’re queer for twenty-four hours?”
“That’s a lie,” Semra whispers into her martini. Eddie can’t do anything but watch this banter conversation, like a table tennis match between three people that know the rules well enough to play with them a little.
Jan swats away any objections. “I’m testing it as a tagline. It’s a work in progress.”
“What does a person need a tagline for?” Semra asks.
“I think it’s a cute idea,” Josh says. He moves his open hand horizontally through the air like he’s envisioning a banner. “You could print a little card to hand to strangers. Name, pronouns, slogan.”
Apparently Semra’s skepticism was anything but deep-rooted, because she jumps on board without further acknowledgment. “How about ‘Jan, they-them, just f*cking Google whatever you were about to ask’?”
Josh nods. “‘Don’t ask me about my gender’, but you spell it J-A-N-der.”
Jan snorts at that one, but they shake their head either way. “I can get my own slogan, idiots. Put that energy into finding one for the group.”
Buck grins like he’s already having the time of his life. “Can I suggest a classic? We’re here, we’re queer, we’re having a beer.”
The rest seems to like that – what follows is a cheer.
It’s all coming together very nicely, like good poetry. Eddie sits back and lets it wash over him.
*
Chimney is an integral, valued member of the team. That’s true every day, but it’s a little truer still on days that he’s in charge of putting on the coffee at the stationhouse. “Please?” Eddie asks, because there’s no way to raise a little kid to always use the magic word and not get it stuck in your own head sometimes.
“See, this I like,” Chim says, while he takes pity on Eddie and refills his cup with the very top of the second can he had to brew that morning. There might be a need for more – Eddie can run on fewer hours of sleep than normal just fine, but it does his mood a world of good if that’s compensated for with an equal number of cups of coffee.
Buck, holding his empty cup out to Chimney, doesn’t say anything and therefore gets skipped over in favor of Chimney’s own mug. Buck is leaning one hip against the kitchen island and doesn’t even notice, fully turned Eddie’s direction. “So by the way,” he says, in a tone that sounds like it definitely isn’t something low key that just occurred to him, but rather like he’s been bursting to ask since they came in that morning and he’s finally allowing himself to because it could convincingly have been casual by now if he hadn’t been so Buck about it, “what did you think of last night?”
“Last night?” Chim questions. He looks up from one-handedly spooning sugar into his coffee.
Buck looks at Chimney, at the can still in Chim’s hand, at his empty cup, and then back at Chim. “We hung out with Josh and a couple of his friends.”
Chim perks up and points at Buck with the sugar spoon. “I’m taking credit for that.” He leans over the island to finally pour Buck his coffee, as if in celebration. “Maddie and I introduced you two.”
“Well, thanks,” Eddie says, in Chim’s direction, who acknowledges this with a satisfied nod. Eddie turns back to Buck, who’s doing the opposite of Chim and shaking his head. “It was fun. Thanks for letting me tag along.” He even learned some stuff. More than he thought would be possible in a single night of drinking.
Buck promptly seems to forget all about Chim’s claim to fame. “Great! The group’s actually thinking about making it a regular thing, maybe every first Friday of the month. You in?”
“I don’t know. Depends on whether I can find someone to watch Chris on those dates.”
Buck pulls a face like he knows he should feel guilty, but he doesn’t. “Yeah. About that, I may have already texted Carla and she’s free that day next month.”
Eddie gapes at Buck while Chim openly cackles. “I think you’ve been drafted.”
Eddie considers that quietly while he sips his coffee. It’s mostly to watch Buck wrestle with having to be patient, because as slightly crazy as this is, knowing Buck wants him there this badly is a bit of an ego boost. “Well, I’d lose my military pension if I turned into a draft dodger.”
Buck beams. “It’s a date! I’ll add you to the group chat right now, so you won’t have to keep going through me.”
Chim gives them a curious look, but he shrugs and hides behind his mug when Eddie notices. “Still taking credit,” he says, while Eddie’s phone begins to buzz like mad, because apparently Josh and Semra are in the middle of a conversation right that second that’s carried out entirely through cat memes.
*
Eddie does go to the next monthly hangout. And the next, and one more. It’s not a judgment free zone – they judge people all the time, purely for sport – but it’s never about the things that cut into someone. It’s not disappointed tutting at the news of a divorce or a painful silence after learning about career plans, but instead it’s Jan literally pointing and laughing at Josh over his grandpa sweater and everyone, Josh included, offering their insights into what his impending retirement should look like and how he should keep his hair rich and luscious in old age. There’s a ten minute detour to the conversation when Buck says to eat a jar of pickles every day to avoid going gray, and they all switch to making fun of him for starting a sentence with “I read on Facebook” and then ending it like that.
It’s a very different kind of judgment, one that barely even fits the definition anymore. When they rag on someone it’s not to express discontent and to get the person to change their mind, it’s an open expression of affection. It’s harmless and it’s fun and everyone is in on it, including the target. It’s undermining turned on its head so it becomes uplifting.
It’s what families do to each other, the good kinds. The supportive ones.
Which makes it hard not to get sucked into it, or not to feel safe around these people. At the fifth gathering, when Buck is already at the bar ordering because everyone knows what everyone else likes to drink by now, Eddie is chatting with Jan and Josh about finding babysitters (Carla, bless her soul, is watching Chris again) when Semra shows up and completes their group.
She’s taking off her jacket when she asks, “Where’s the boyfriend?”
It takes Eddie a second to realize she’s talking to him. “Who?” he asks, before he realizes how stupid that is. Like there’s any other person she could be talking about.
And yes, as Semra is sitting down she replies, like it’s a little odd Eddie even had to ask, “Buck.”
Eddie laughs, but even he can hear how it sounds. Someone just pulled a rug out from under him, and there aren’t even any in this concrete-floored building. “Oh, no, he’s not- I mean, we’re not-” He’s vaguely aware of seeing Jan’s eyebrows shoot up from the corner of his eyes, but he ignores that for the time being.
“You’re not?” Semra seems genuinely surprised. “Sorry. I guess I just assumed, from the way he talks about you and how you always come in together-”
“Buck is getting drinks,” Josh interjects, and Eddie instantly likes him ten times more for the rescue. “And stop giving the poor guy a hard time, Sem.”
Jan leers. “Why though? Semra’s right about Buck, and if I were you-” They look right at Eddie, who kind of just wants to sink through the floor at this point. “-I’d climb him like a tree. I mean come on, Josh. You know I’m right.”
Josh does a dramatic eye roll, but two seconds later his curiosity still seems to get the best of him. He turns to Eddie with a bent head and a loud whisper, like they’re sharing secrets. “Honestly, why haven’t you?”
“Ha,” Eddie says, and feels his heart race. It might seem that after a person’s been through their first chopper crash in a war zone not much fazes them anymore, but nobody ever questioned him on what he actually wanted out of life while he was dragging his friends’ bleeding bodies to safety. This is much harder to face.
He should just say he’s straight. That would make sense, but with a lurch in his stomach he realizes that he doesn’t know if he wants to say that.
When did that happen?
He doesn’t have time to figure any of it out on the spot. Before he’s forced to put together an entire word - or God forbid, a sentence - there’s suddenly a warm hand on his back. It doesn’t make him jump, which clues him in one second before the drink tray slides onto the table that it belongs to Buck, who slips into the chair next to his. “What’d I miss?” Buck asks, brightly.
Jan opens their mouth, but then snaps it shut on a yelp and glares at Josh instead. Buck pauses handing out the drinks to look between them in confusion and then turns to Eddie for an explanation.
Eddie feels kind of endeared by that, even if he’s not exactly up to describing the background of what’s going on. He sticks to the facts. “Pretty sure Josh just kicked Jan under the table.”
“Damn right he did!” Jan complains. They ball up a napkin and launch it in Josh’s direction, who ducks and covers his glass. The napkin bounces off Josh’s forehead and Semra snatches it right out of the air with one slender hand before it can sail to the floor. “Damn, woman,” Jan says, and if they were trying to sound annoyed, they missed the mark much worse than with the napkin. Their tone hits impressed instead.
Buck still can’t possibly be caught up, but being Buck, he rolls with it, and happily so. He grabs Eddie’s shoulder again. “Hey Jan, if you need help, Eddie here was an Army medic.”
Jan shoots a very loaded look across the table. “Yeah, I definitely think some of us need help, Eddie. I do.”
“So!” Josh says, just a little too loudly. “Did you see that they added a new co*cktail to the menu? What do we think about that?”
Semra is the one that jumps in with the expert judgment of a former bartender, all while smoothing out and refolding the napkin ball. Eddie can feel Buck’s eyes on the side of his face for a few seconds, but he pretends he doesn’t notice and is instead riveted by this mysterious new drink, whether it might be worth getting, and just how crinkle free Semra can get the napkin.
He’s never been much of an actor, but it seems to do the trick, because Buck doesn’t ask questions.
*
Somehow, somewhere along the way, Eddie stopped pretending and started just fitting in. That’s fine usually. It’s the plan, because it makes everything a lot easier if he doesn’t have to keep actively trying. There’s never a guarantee that it will work out that way, but he’s had it happen before: a few new friends when he got to high school; the people he knew in the Army; the 118.
But it was easier this time, and it’s different, and that scares him a little.
*
What does it mean if he feels so at home in a space full of queer people? Does it have to mean anything at all?
*
The answer is probably no. They’re good people, and they’re also gay and bi and non-binary, and confusing one with the other makes him sound like he’s uncle Raul, worried his son might turn gay because his son’s college dormmate has a boyfriend.
It’s stupid, that’s what it is. The thing that’s different with this friend group compared to others Eddie has known is that he’s never met many people outside of school or work, and from there he’s projecting that idea of similarities, which is making him find patterns where there are none, which is an impulse that’s hardwired into the human DNA.
That’s it. Yeah.
*
There are other people he fits with, anyway.
The 118 are a close-knit group and last minute plans are not out of the ordinary. What is out of the ordinary is Eddie arriving at Hen and Karen’s place, where Chim and Maddie have already claimed a couch, and being told they’re not expecting anyone else tonight. Bobby and Athena already had plans, which happens occasionally because they’re the grown-ups in this group of adults, but apparently – and here it gets weird – so did Buck.
That never happens.
“He’s on a date,” Karen says, complete with suggestive eyebrow waggle, after Eddie asks what kind of unearthly force could possibly keep Evan Buckley away from family game night.
Eddie’s pretty sure his eyebrows also do something in response, but they only move up. He hasn’t heard about this, which, again, a little weird. “Good for him.” Is it? It should be. Why wouldn’t it be?
“I agree,” Maddie says. She’s sorting the little white, blue, red and orange Catan buildings and roads into four separate piles on the coffee table while next to her Chim is shuffling the hexagon pieces they’ll need to form the board with his full concentration. Last time Chim and Maddie lost to Bobby and Athena by a single point, and they seem determined to avenge their honor even in the absence of their greatest rivals. “I think it would be nice if it worked out.”
Looks like Eddie’s going to have to go it alone tonight, so he sweeps up the orange pieces. He has to put a surprising amount of effort into acting casual. “You know the person?”
“No,” Maddie admits, and a little of the knot in Eddie’s chest loosens. If there’s a loop, he’s not that far out of it. “I didn’t even know Buck was going on a date. I just meant in general.” Maddie’s voice gets a wistful note. “He still seems lonely sometimes, you know?”
“He knows he’s always welcome at mine and Chris’s.”
Maddie smiles. “That’s sweet, but it’s not really the same thing, is it?”
“I suppose not,” Eddie says, while at the same time wondering why he supposes that, and why everyone else seems to, too.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Karen says. “I got the impression it was only a first date. A Tindr thing or something.”
“Speaking of first,” Hen says, and rolls one of the dice. It’s a three, Maddie rolls a two, and Eddie gets a five, which means he immediately has something else to concentrate on while he decides where to build the very first house of the game.
Catan is fun, and it’s still fun with just five people and playing on his own against two teams of two. He doesn’t have to run his decisions by anyone, but is free to just make them. He totally doesn’t miss Buck.
That’d be weird, when he’s already in a room full of his friends.
The game is a tense one and scores keep rising pretty evenly between them, but there’s a turning point when Hen reveals a fourth knight and Karen gets to take the biggest army card from Maddie and Chim. It’s all over two rounds later when Hen and Karen upgrade their third settlement to a city, even though Maddie and Chim were already back on track by managing to steal Eddie’s longest road in the intervening time.
Clearing away the game pieces takes a while, because it happens to the soundtrack of victory cries interspersed by laments from the losers. Eddie does take part, though his complaints are by far the least passionate. At one point, Chimney starts to list ways he and Maddie could cheat next time to be assured of their extremely deserved (in his words) victory, and it’s unclear if he’s consoling Maddie or uttering threats. Spirits only begin to settle down when Karen breaks out more snacks, because it’s hard to angrily crunch through a peanut M&M and talk at the same time.
The doorbell rings just as the Risk board is being broken out. Hen and Karen exchange a confused look, but the first thing that can be heard after Hen leaves to answer the door is her laugh.
“Hey,” the unexpected guest says, who sounds an awful lot like Buck. “Is there still room for one more?”
The reason this stranger sounds so much like Buck becomes clear soon after, when there is no stranger, and instead only Hen and Buck round the corner into the living room. Greetings abound from all sides, but Eddie’s so busy studying Buck he almost misses them.
Buck’s wearing a pair of jeans Eddie’s never seen before and one of the subtly patterned button up shirts he picks when he’s trying to comes across as stylish but approachable. It looks good on him.
“Couldn’t bear to leave Eddie all by his lonesome?” Chim asks.
Buck laughs, and that looks good on him, too. Eddie is very distracted tonight for reasons he can’t quite pin down. “Yeah, figured I’d come make sure he stands a chance against you cheaters.”
“Hey,” Eddie says, but not too seriously, because he’s not the one that was just accused of cheating.
“What happened to the date?” Maddie asks. “Did you get stood up?” And oh, God – Eddie hadn’t even considered that yet, but he’s swept by a sudden wave of anger just thinking about it.
Buck doesn’t seem too emotionally wrung out. He shuffles around Hen and Karen’s chairs to take his customary spot next to Eddie on the tiny two-person couch, left half empty when he didn’t show up. Eddie doesn’t mind too much that it’s kind of cramped when they’re both sitting there. Buck’s shoulder against his is a comfortable warmth. “No, it got cut short. He was kind of weird.”
Chimney’s head whips up. “Hang on, he?”
“Oh, yeah,” Buck says, and he sounds a little surprised. “I guess in this room only Eddie and Maddie knew this, but Buck 2.0 has realized he’s definitely bi.”
It stirs something in Eddie that Buck was seemingly able to casually forget that he hadn’t made any grand announcements yet. It’s good, but… complicated, somehow.
“Aw,” Karen says. She seems genuinely endeared to see some personal development happen right before her eyes. “Congrats.”
“Ahhh,” Chimney intones, confusion vanished as quickly as it came. He stretches the sound, thoughtful rather than skeptical. “That makes sense.”
It’s Hen’s turn to be shocked, though she’s playing at it more than it seems like a real emotion. The hand she puts to her chest is definitely comical exaggeration. “Chimney Han, when did you develop a gaydar?”
Chim laughs and says around the M&M in his mouth, “No, I meant like, two point oh? Bi?”
Buck’s eyes go wide. “sh*t, that does make sense,” he agrees. He seems delighted. “I’m Buck bi point oh now.” He slaps his knee, and then Eddie’s, as if for good measure. “It was right there all along.”
Hen is shaking her head like she’s wondering how she ended up in this room full of children, but Chim nods solemnly.
Eddie nudges Buck’s arm. “I bet Jan would appreciate that.” That gets Buck to grin at him, a private little interaction in the middle of this group of people, and fine, okay. Maybe Eddie did miss Buck a little more than he was previously willing to admit. Perhaps he’s very glad Buck is here now. It might just be that he’s already looking forward to Risk way more with Buck there to try to convince him to make a few incredibly ill-advised moves.
“Okay,” Karen says, “but none of this explains what made your date so weird. That sounds like a story, Buckley.”
For no apparent reason whatsoever, Eddie’s mood takes a dive again.
Buck wrinkles his nose. “I found a gay Republican.” That elicits various noises of amusem*nt and disbelief, so Bucks waves his hands, as if to pre-empt any commentary. “I didn’t know! It all seemed mostly fine until we accidentally got onto political topics and he wouldn’t shut up about trickle-down economics and how we should overturn Roe v. Wade. I told him that’s insane, and then he just got up and walked away.”
Chimney looks horrified in the way of people slowing down to gawk at a car crash in the opposite lane. “Did no one ever tell you that you shouldn’t meet strangers from the internet until you’ve at least talked to them?”
“I did talk to him! But we mostly sent pictures. There weren’t as many words.”
“Buck! TMI,” Maddie complains. Eddie’s gut agrees.
“Nothing like that, come on. He had a really cute dog.” Buck frowns. “Though it was called Bush, in hindsight.” That elicits a new wave of laughter, and Buck has to raise his voice to add, “But it was a very bushy dog!”
Eddie can’t watch this continue. He grabs Buck’s arm before Buck can start waving his hands again or pick up a shovel and dig an even deeper hole for himself. “I think this might be a good point to stop, before you lose your last shreds of dignity.”
“Yeah?” Buck asks. His focus has swung back to Eddie, and Eddie really should have expected him to fire back at a statement that brazen. “And when’s the last time you went on a date, huh? And don’t say it’s because of Christopher, because you have Carla and me and everyone in this room to babysit.”
Eddie is not above beating a strategic retreat when needed, and it seems pretty needed right now. It’s silly, but the first thing that jumps into his head when Buck says date is Semra’s misunderstanding from the other day, and he wasn’t planning on sharing any embarrassing stories of his own. He lets go of Buck’s wrist – which he was still holding, apparently – so he can scoot forward in his seat and clap his hands together. “So!” he says, intentionally a little too loud. “Risk?”
No one has to be told twice, not even Buck, who snorts but also scoots forward to help with the setup of the game. Every time he reaches across the table, his shoulder brushes Eddie’s.
Feels like there could be some risk involved in that, too, in a way that has very little to do with the game.
*
So okay, Eddie’s been feeling some stuff. It’s the kind of stuff that’s too big to be a normal response to a good friend brushing their shoulder against yours, and it throws him right back into being confused again, maybe.
Which is bad.
Thing is, if you’re not sure about something, you can always just gather more intel. That’s what he did after he discovered there were a lot of letters in LGBTQIA+ that just seemed like alphabet soup to him, it’s what he does every time they’re out on a call and they need to know how to treat a medical emergency without making things worse, and it’s also what he could do know, if he had reason to take a good look at how he defines his own sexuality.
Which still might be a no, but that phrasing also means it could feasibly be a yes.
He’s not big on change, and even less so on being proven wrong, but some things, once you’ve spotted them, will keep coming at you no matter how hard you try to shake them. Like a bear, crashing through the woods. You could try to keep running for the rest of your life, but odds are at some point you’re going to stumble and get caught whether you want to or not, so you might be better off turning around and taking a stand when it’s still your own choice to do so. Can’t know for sure if the bear is going to eat you or not unless you confront it.
Besides, he also doesn’t like uncertainty, and this is one hell of a question mark to carry.
So he decides to throw the question mark at Buck. Buck has great hand-eye coordination, as proven when he’s busy chopping up some carrots in the stationhouse kitchen for a recipe Bobby’s promised to make. He’s going at it with a speed that Eddie is pretty sure can only have been gained through instruction from either Bobby himself or a YouTube video, combined with some trial and error Band-Aids.
Eddie is next to him, working his way through a dazzling pile of potatoes in need of peeling. The rest of the team is in the same room, but all the way over in the sitting area, making this probably the most organically private moment with Buck that Eddie’s going to get today.
It still takes him a while to gather up the courage. “Hey,” he says. Buck starts to look up and then thinks the better of it, for which Eddie is glad, both for the sake of his nerves and that of Buck’s fingers while he’s still hammering a very sharp knife down on his cutting board over and over. “How’d you-” He drops another listlessly peeled potato in the giant pan with water and picks up the next, but doesn’t get started on it yet. “How did you know?”
Buck is already done with his carrots. Nonetheless, he apparently either has his eyes closed or his hands tied behind his back, because coordination be damned, he looks up with an entirely guileless expression. “Know what?”
Eddie hesitates. If he wants Buck to catch his meaning, he’s going to have to give it a little more physical shape. “That you were-”
One more word, and what he’s asking would have been blindingly obvious. Eddie never gets to utter it. The bell rings, and he is either saved or just plain interrupted.
“Never mind,” he says, as they both abandon the dinner prep and start the race downstairs.
It doesn’t seem much like Buck was going to ask him to continue anyway, because he grabs an opportunistic handful of carrot in passing and is busy stuffing it all in his mouth at once so Bobby won’t berate him for taking snacks on the truck.
*
They get called to a strip club, and for sure someone up there is laughing at Eddie. Whether it’s his tía abuela Val or the guy upstairs himself he can’t tell, but he can feel in his bones that somebody is having a ball with this, and it’s not him.
Granted, there are far worse places to work, but the timing? Unnecessary.
It’s too early in the afternoon, so the club hasn’t opened yet. The overhead lights are on, but still the room with the main stage in it is badly lit, gaudy and a little cheap in all the ways one would expect. It’s also empty and quiet, with no guests yet and no music pounding away, which is an odd experience. Another thing that is clearly out of place – and cheap – is the pole on one of the two secondary stages.
“How did this happen?” Bobby asks, as the team is spread in a loose semi-circle and most of them are tilting their heads, taking in the seemingly metal pole that has an extreme almost ninety degree bend in it a foot from the ground.
More poignantly, on said ground is a woman, seemingly unconscious and with her shoulder and leg at angles they shouldn’t be.
“Ricky,” one of the half a dozen agitated and bathrobe-clad women clustered around the victim hisses. “I’m gonna kill that son of a bitch, I swear.”
It seems that Ricky, who has the misfortune of walking into the room right around that moment, is the caretaker of the club, and if anything looks like it should have been replaced but wasn’t, or was simply bought from all the wrong places for all the wrong suspiciously low prices, then fingers should fly in his direction. Which they do, along with one of the women, who launches herself at him. Buck and Eddie spend a good few minutes struggling to get them apart, only succeeding once another of the strippers steps in to help talk down her friend.
“Thanks,” Eddie says, because somehow Buck had ended up with Ricky, and Eddie hadn’t quite known where to put his hands on a shrieking woman wearing only lingerie and a feather headdress after her robe slipped off. It’s just a body – everyone has one, nothing shameful about that – but he finds himself hyperaware of anything that might imply some kind of sexuality. The situation is in no way arousing, but everything from the décor to the clothes in this place is so pointedly intended to be so that it leaves Eddie feeling unsettled regardless.
In other words, whatever’s going on with him is interfering with his work now. Great.
“Whoa,” Buck says, which rips Eddie out of his anxious wallowing about nothing. Buck waves him over, and Eddie confirms that yes, upon inspection there is a whoa amount of blood on the arm of the woman that helped him a moment ago. She introduces herself as Irene and tells them she was already bleeding a little because she got hit by the pole coming down while she was coaching her friend and that the wound got bumped in the struggle, so Buck takes her by her healthy arm and leads her to an empty table, while Eddie jogs to get some medical supplies.
In the end it really isn’t as bad as it looks. The actual tear in the flesh is relatively small, and the amount of blood is not inconsiderable, but it was smeared along Irene’s bicep, making the picture way more frightening than the reality. While Eddie works to clean up the wound, Irene suddenly laughs.
“Uh, sorry,” Buck says, but Eddie looks up just in time to catch him tearing his eyes from Irene’s cleavage, left visible because she hasn’t fastened her thin blue bathrobe. Under it she’s wearing a bright red low-cut bra with silver shimmery tassels on the nipples, but if Eddie were taking a wild guess, he’d say Buck wasn’t studying her clothes.
“Buck,” he says, because really. It does help him to regain the feeling of being on the high ground.
Irene grins. “That’s okay.” She shimmies her shoulders, which makes the robe fall open further and shakes the tassels. “It’s meant to be distracting. Works on most men.”
“Not Eddie.” Buck says it to Irene, but he’s looking at Eddie, and it sounds a little like a question.
“I’m a true professional,” Eddie quips.
Irene leans into Buck and loudly faux-whispers, “Or he’s gay.”
Buck shakes his head, smiling. “I don’t think so.”
“Where’s this conversation headed?” Eddie asks, as normally as he can manage. It would make sense for him to be amused but annoyed, and he hopes to God he can act that out well enough to hide any nerves. “Should I leave?”
“Sorry,” Buck says, but he doesn’t seem as genuinely remorseful as when he apologized to Irene. Which is good – it means he’s not reading anything into this. “Hey, do you ever wonder what your life would have been like if you’d become a stripper?”
“You mean, as alternative to enlisting? To support my family?”
“Oh, if you do it right stripping pays way better,” Irene chimes in.
“I believe it. Still, I think I’m good. No disrespect.”
She shrugs philosophically, which also makes her tassels swing. “To each their own.”
“I considered it once,” Buck says. “After I ditched the SEALs.”
“Of course you did,” Eddie says, because yeah, he feels exactly zero surprise at that bit of Buck backstory. “I bet you would’ve been good at it.” A performance art that takes athleticism, good looks and charisma? Obviously Buck would have killed.
Buck grins. “Thanks, man.”
Irene looks from one of them to the other. “I’m loving this dynamic. You’re very cute firefighters.”
She doesn’t seem to be the only one that thinks so. By the time they have everything wrapped up at the scene and are ready to head out, Buck is richer one napkin with a phone number scrawled on it. It came from one of the other strippers, no less, who had been leering at him a while and personally put it in his pants pocket with a wink and a shake of her front area that made Buck laugh.
Boobs. Eddie knows the word. They did not have tassels, but they were very jiggly.
For which Buck has always harbored some type of appreciation, even in his more advanced versions, so as they’re heading back out to the truck, Eddie asks, “Are you going to call her?”
Buck smiles ruefully. “Nah,” he says, and their shoulders bump, and Eddie flashes back to a similar situation, after a girl stuck her head in a tailpipe and Eddie said those women weren’t his type. “I think I’m going to take it easy with the whole dating thing for a while, you know?”
Eddie doesn’t, but he’d like to. It’s Buck. “Why? Scared off by the trainwreck of that one date?”
Buck laughs, which doesn’t make it seem like he turned shy after burning his fingers on one unfortunate match. “I just think that maybe for the next little while I only want to start dating after I’ve gotten to know a person a bit. You know, let feelings develop more organically. Does that make me sound like I’m fifty?”
“At least,” Eddie says, but this time when his shoulder bumps into Buck’s it’s deliberate. “It’s sweet, though.”
“Thanks. Maybe that means I’ve got a chance.” Their eyes meet and Buck flashes another grin while he says this, which is totally normal. Buck’s an excitable guy, who grins a million times a day.
But this time, Eddie almost misses a step and has the deranged burst of a thought that’s me, he means me before blinking and coming back to himself. That settles it: his thoughts have been running amuck, and now they’re so muddled he’s adding up two and two and getting a number that doesn’t even exist.
“God, I could eat a horse,” Buck says, and it startles a laugh out of Eddie. Yeah – if Buck’s got his eye on anything at the moment, he can rest easy knowing it’s not him.
*
Eddie has no love for superstition, so he knows the timing of that call didn’t mean anything and he should just try again. The problem is that the more he mulls it over – during the drive back to the station, while watching tv, during dinner, while doing the dishes – the less sure he becomes that there’s even anything to talk about in the first place. What’s he going to say? Hey Buck, can we talk about this very personal topic that I probably just think I have a connection to because this is the first time in my life I’m really learning about it? It’s unfair to Buck to just dump something like that on him.
A nature documentary Eddie watched with Christopher a while ago said that five times more people in North-America are killed by dogs every year than bears, anyway, so maybe he’s worried about nothing in the first place. He’s never seen a bear, but he’s petted dozens of dogs and has always gotten away with all of his limbs still attached.
The metaphor’s getting a little complicated (if the bear is his sexuality and being chased is not wanting to question it, does that imply being anything other than straight would be the same as getting mauled? perhaps he should be concerned he might be hom*ophobic instead), but he lets himself off the hook for that one, because it’s all confusing enough without adding literary problems on top. English was never his best subject.
Which is not why he’s surprised when Hen slips into the seat beside his and says, “How are you?” It is English, but it would have been weird only if she’d approached him in Spanish.
They’re in the deserted workout area at the stationhouse, sitting on one of the hard wooden benches. He ended up there because his mom called him, mistakenly thinking this was his day off, and since they are all just waiting around for the next moment they’re needed, he told her he had time to talk and slipped downstairs for a little quiet away from the TV. They hung up a few minutes ago, and he’s been texting her pictures of artwork by Christopher that Buck took and that he mentioned and she scolded him for not remembering to send sooner.
He looks up in confusion. “What?” That’s an odd question to be asking someone you’ve seen every day this week.
Hen gives him a strange look, sort of… gentle. She’s not someone to treat people with kid gloves unduly, so that’s enough to raise suspicion. “I overheard you trying to ask Buck something before the call this afternoon. And bless his giant heart, but he’s not always the quickest on the uptake, is he?”
Eddie’s nerves spike. He fumbles with his phone and realizes how obviously on edge that makes him look, so he slips it into his pocket and keeps his hands still. “I wasn’t- That didn’t mean anything.” He’s stumbling over his own words, which is not amazingly convincing. He tries again. “It’s not what you think.”
“That’s okay.” Hen manages to make it sound like it actually might be. “I’m just saying, if you ever need someone to talk to, I’m here. About whatever.”
“Sure. Thanks.”
Hen nods and gets up. That’s a huge relief, but at the same time, Eddie is slammed by the awareness that he’s found a bear expert, and he knows that if he lets her go now, he’s never going to take her up on that offer. He’s a lot of things – more than he used to think, maybe – but a coward can’t be one of them.
“Hen?”
She’s not even two steps away, but stops and turns back.
Eddie opens his mouth and to his own surprised relief, words come tumbling out. “How did you know?”
He doesn’t say any more than that because he can’t, not yet, but the good thing is that he doesn’t have to. Hen smiles. “Easy. I fell in love with my best friend.”
“Oh,” Eddie says, and distantly, like it’s in slow motion and down the hall, he can hear a penny drop.
*
He’s in love with Buck. He’s-
He’s really, really in love with Buck.
*
Or maybe he isn’t?
It just doesn’t add up. When he looks at Buck his heart swells, and that’s what love is, far as he knows. Wanting to be close to someone and to keep them safe and for them to love you back, but wanting them to be happy, above all else. It’s like he feels about Christopher, or like the way he felt about Shannon. But is that enough?
He’s thirty-two and he’s spent his life in locker rooms and barracks. If he were into guys, shouldn’t he have known by now? Shouldn’t some ripped shirtless guy somewhere have made him wonder?
*
The days immediately after that are a blur. He goes through the motions, but unless he’s with Chris or on a call, his mind is not in the same time and place as his body.
That’s his only excuse for why he startles when Buck breaks the rhythm of his sit-ups to stay vertical and says, “Hey.”
They’re at the station. The rest of the team is upstairs, but Buck asked if he was up for a workout. Eddie said yes, blindly did his usual warmup routine, and then agreed to anchor Buck’s feet and got distracted. He’s still kneeling on a mat on the floor, his hands on Buck’s ankles, with Buck’s questioning face right in front of him. “What?”
“Earth to Eddie,” Buck says. He laughs, but it sounds confused. “You’ve been staring at me all day, man. Do I have something on my face?”
“Your nose,” Eddie says. Christopher still thinks that one’s hilarious.
So does Buck, who grins. “Dad jokes, awesome.” When Eddie doesn’t immediately respond, Buck’s grin fades away too fast, replaced by something that’s worried. “Seriously though, you’d tell me if something were up, right? With you or me, or us?”
Eddie feels like a heel. “Yes, Buck,” he promises, and all of Buck’s tension evaporates instantly. “Of course.”
The moment sticks, and they linger in it for a bit. It breaks when Eddie blinks and realizes he’s staring, again. He pats Buck’s shoe. “Go on, you’re not done yet.”
“I went five past my goal,” Buck says, which could be true, or could be a total fabrication. Either way Eddie can’t fact check him and Buck knows it.
“You can never have too much core strength.”
“I think you can,” Buck argues, but he’s folding his arms over his chest again and falling back. When he comes back up the first time, he adds, “You also need to be able to bend.”
*
Eddie’s immediate response to Buck’s being able to bend comment was to laugh, but the more time passes, the less he thinks it was funny. Buck wasn’t trying to give advice, but those are usually Buck’s greatest moments of wisdom. Most things that don’t bend eventually break, and in the past Eddie might have viewed that as an acceptable risk, but he’s not his own first priority anymore. He has Christopher to think of now.
He swore long ago he’d never be an absent dad again, not after those first years of Chris’s life. He changed jobs and moved across the country and endured therapy for Chris, and if he now needs to sort out a new pile of complex mental stuff so he can be the best, most present dad that it is within his abilities to be, then that should be a piece of cake, comparatively.
He ends up going to Hen. It’s not planned – it’s just that she already seems to know, he trusts her not to bullsh*t him, and she’s easier to get alone in person than anyone from the once-a-month-on-Friday group.
So, after offering to help her check for gaps or expired products in the medical supplies on the ambulance, he taps his pen against the clipboard a few times and says, “How can I know – really know – if I’m into men as well as women?”
Hen, sitting on one of the benches in the back of the ambulance, pauses her check of the bandages. “It’s women only for me. Have you considered talking to Buck about this?”
Eddie looks for a delicate way to phrase his answer, and then gives up. “I can’t.”
Hen, bless her, doesn’t ask for more. It’s probably because she already knows what the problem is, but Eddie is not going to dwell on that. “Okay, so why not keep it simple? What did you feel when you looked at Shannon?”
“I loved her.”
“Yes. And?”
“And?”
“When I look at my wife, I see the person that I chose to spend my life with, and that makes me so happy. And I also see a really, really sexy woman.” Hen grins. “Which also makes me happy.”
Eddie huffs, laughing along. “Right. But that’s just one of those things people say.”
“How so?”
“Sexy, hot.” He adds air quotes for effect. “Deep down, what’s that even supposed to mean, really?”
Hen doesn’t nod along like he expects her to. Instead she looks concerned. “You weren’t into Shannon that way at all? Were there ever any women…”
She leaves the sentence open, but it’s pretty clear what should be closing it, and it’s not even remotely what Eddie had prepared himself for. Eddie’s mind, for its part, feels like it’s closing in on itself. His chest is so tight suddenly it’s hard to breathe. “I’m not gay.”
Hen stands up, placing herself into his line of vision very obviously as something to focus on. Her face is tense. “There wouldn’t be anything wrong with that,” she says, like she’s trying to talk someone down from a ledge. God, how bad must he look for her to take that kind of tone? “It’s not at all uncommon for people to figure themselves out much later in life. Especially for someone like you, who spent a good chunk of his life in the military, that’s-”
“No.” He takes a deep, deliberate breath. “I mean- I don’t have those kinds of thoughts about men.” He looks her right in the eye. Something still hurts, and it’s very close to his heart. “Or women.”
“Eddie-”
He pushes the clipboard at her. “I need a moment.”
“Sure,” Hen says, but he only catches it faintly, behind his back, as he’s jumping out of the ambulance.
*
The problem, of course, is that firemen can’t always afford to take that moment. He makes it to the bathroom and manages to splash some water in his face, but before he can even get in the cliché pose of leaning on the basin and staring at his wet face in the mirror, the stationhouse alarm sounds. He dries off, straightens his shoulders, and gets on with his day.
This day ends up including three back-to-back calls. Their shift started out pretty slow but picks up speed near the end, so when they get back from the last scene, he’s already late picking Chris up from a schoolfriend’s house. He rushes over there, bundles Chris into the car, gets them both home while Chris reports about school and his playdate at length, parks Chris in front of the TV, and tries to figure out what’s for dinner for the two of them.
The fridge yields leftovers from last weekend’s dinner at Pepa’s, so he throws those in the microwave and sets a timer and then, suddenly, there’s nothing for him to do but wait. He feels at a loss, not sure if he’s ready for this yet, but he’s also too tired to move and take a look at the laundry or unloading the dishwasher or making sure Chris has done his homework, so he ends up doing nothing, a little overwhelmed by getting to stand still and lean against the counter and having that be everything he needs to concentrate on. He watches the leftovers in the microwave. The plastic container is hypnotic, spinning round and round and-
He’d lay down his life for Christopher. For the rest of his family, too.
For Buck, gladly. In a heartbeat.
None of that is new. He was like that when he woke up this morning, and he still is. That probably holds for the things that are bugging him now, too – if you don’t know something is true, that doesn’t change a bit about the actual facts. Life doesn’t work like that and it never has, and he knows that. He’s had to learn that lesson over and over again. It’s made him miss time with Chris, with Shannon, and sometimes with a man that would have felt more like himself.
Which, in the end, just means he’s being an emotional idiot about all of this. That’s never accomplished anything.
He’s hardly had that thought when his phone chimes. It’s a text from Hen, reading Just checking in. It’s three words, no questions, but he sends back a Thanks. I’m okay, anyway.
It could be true. He’s not really sure yet.
*
It makes no sense that he’d be-
He’s had sex, anyway.
*
It makes no sense.
*
Except, of course, for all the ways in which it does.
*
Hen can be a pushy person. She is smart and often right and she knows it, and she’s had to fight for her place in the past and is not afraid to open up her mouth because of it. Eddie lingers in her general vicinity for two days, waiting, until it dawns on him that apparently none of this is going to save him.
He sits down on the couch, on his own, to work through this disappointment, when suddenly Hen is joining him. She has a huge mug of tea that she is blowing on, fogging up her glasses, and she’s not really paying attention to Eddie. With how little she must be able to see at the moment, it’s unclear if she’s even aware he’s there at all.
But she’s in his space, so she must be. “What?” Eddie snaps, before he can think the better of it.
Hen turns her head a little slower than usual. “Excuse me?” she asks, also slow.
The way she’s acting makes it very clear that she wasn’t deliberately riling him up by stretching his anticipation to excruciatingly thin threads, which… makes sense, because why would she? “Sorry,” Eddie says. He takes a deep breath. “I just keep bracing for when you’re going to try to- Talk. About-” The sentence gets too stupid for him to be physically able to finish it, so he fills the rest with a vague head tilt and, “You know.”
Hen stares at him for a second, but when she talks, it’s way more forgiving than he thinks he deserves. “I wasn’t going to. This is your thing. I’m not telling you how to deal with it.”
He laughs. He hears himself, and it sounds like when Semra suggested he was dating Buck – nervous as hell. “I think I was hoping you would.” A little guilty even, maybe. He has to shake his head at himself. “It doesn’t matter anyway. It’s silly stuff.”
“It’s never silly to feel something, Eddie.” Hen puts her tea on the coffee table and he can’t help but feel awkward, like a kid acting out to get a parents’ attention. What’s worse is that she’s definitely seeing right through him, but she’s allowing it to work. “You know there are words that you might identify with, right? Like-”
“Yeah,” he says, cutting her off, because he doesn’t really want her to start listing terms. “I know.” He did a lot of googling when Buck first introduced him to the group. It wasn’t even because he was going to spend more time with them, but there was a bunch of stuff he’d just found out he didn’t know. He figured he should. As a parent, if nothing else.
Turns out there might be a lot of else here.
“When Shannon and I-” He can’t finish that.
Hen doesn’t attempt to fill in the blank, for which he’s pathetically grateful. He’s never liked talking about his sex life, and now he finds himself forced to wonder if that finds its origins in this whole thing too. He’s always been a private person, and he doesn’t like the idea of integral parts of his personality being explained away now, like this one thing that he might be is at the root of every decision he’s ever made. It isn’t. He’s his own person.
“I don’t regret it,” he eventually says. It seems important that Hen hears that – that Shannon’s memory isn’t tainted by misguided assumptions, even in just one person’s mind. “It was good. I liked the closeness.”
“Okay,” Hen says, which is also okay. He wasn’t aware he’d been dreading being questioned on how that meshes with their last conversation until no question comes.
It draws more words out of him. “On some level I’ve always known there was something… off.” What he said about Shannon was true – this is as well. It’s a lot to wrap his mind around. “But I just- I thought maybe-”
“If you just keep trying, it’ll happen? Attraction shouldn’t take that much effort.”
He shrugs. “I figured this is what it’s like for everyone.”
Hen shakes her head. It’s kind, but it’s not a question. “You didn’t really.”
“I didn’t,” he agrees, a heavy stone in his chest again. He can admit to himself now that he remembers hours spent lying awake at night, wondering if he was even capable of loving Shannon the way she deserved. Those bouts usually resulted in him making breakfast in the morning, kissing Shannon hello when she woke up, feeling like his ribcage was two sizes too small for his heart when she smiled at him and knowing that he really wanted to be enough. “But I also couldn’t be sure.”
“Plausible deniability is a powerful drug.”
It’s worse than that. “How do you prove a negative?” How can any person know that they don’t feel something they’ve never experienced?
“Look, I get it. You have a logical mind. You like evidence.” Hen shakes her head a little. “But you have to stop using that as a weapon against yourself. There’s never any hard proof when it comes to human emotions or feelings.”
He lets his head drop back against the couch, and then rolls it around to look at Hen again. He tries a smile, and it kind of works. “You’re an amazing friend.”
Hen is such an amazing friend that she gets that that’s a sign he’s done talking, at least for the time being. She drops her patient understanding for something more self-satisfied, a gentle half joke. “Oh, I know. Want to know how I know?”
“How?”
Hen reaches for the coffee table and takes the mug she set down earlier. There’s still steam rising from the surface, which means their talk can’t have lasted the eternity that it felt like it did. “Because I’m giving you this cup of tea and making myself a new one from scratch, just because you look like you need it.”
Eddie laughs, accepts the tea, and feels a little better the moment he wraps his hands around the warm ceramic. There’s not much that’s logical about that, but Hen is a clever woman – he should probably believe her when she tells him to trust his gut.
*
The next first Friday of the month, Jan shows up in a denim jacket with three little square patches sown onto the lapel. One is a rainbow, one is the non-binary flag, and one is two shades of green and then a stripe each of white, gray and black.
Eddie does not stare. He hopes.
When halfway through the evening it’s Jan’s turn to get drinks, Eddie is out of his seat before they are. “I’ll give you a hand.”
Jan eyes him with a little curiosity, but then they shrug. “Sure, thanks.”
Eddie emphatically does not check to see how the rest of the table reacts, but he still thinks he can feel eyes on him. The two of them make their way through the room to the bar in silence, only broken by the low music that’s playing and the continued noise of dozens of conversations. Eddie is fully aware he’s already been caught out, because there’s no reason Jan wouldn’t be able to carry a tray of drinks on their own and the two of them are not close enough that Eddie would spontaneously offer to tag along just for fun.
He still waits until Jan has recited their group’s order and they’re both watching the bartender do his thing. Then he admits, leaning on the bar as casually as he can manage, “I noticed the aromantic flag.”
“Yeah, it’s not really hidden,” Jan says. They seem wildly unimpressed. “Just ask whatever you wanted to ask.”
Eddie does. “How did you know?”
“Why do you want me to tell you?”
Eddie looks for words like a fish on dry land. He didn’t expect to get a question fired back at him. “I think it might be… relevant. In the sense that, I’ve been thinking-”
“Hey.” A tiny bit of Jan’s demeanor relaxes. “You can stop. That’s fine, I get it.” They pause for a moment, and Eddie’s about to apologize for asking at all, when they continue, “I’ve just never felt that way. I love people. I love my found family and my friends, but romantic love? Not for me. Never has been.”
It sounds so simple when Jan says it. “But how are you so sure? You don’t know how it feels for anyone else.”
They huff, something between a laugh and derision. “I know how it feels for me, and nobody else gets to decide that,” they say, like it’s obvious. “Seriously, trust yourself. All you have is what you know now. There might be a change to that in the future, and you’ll deal with it then, and that’s okay. Or that change might never come, and that’s okay too.” They tap the bar, making a physical point. “You have to let go of the idea that there are rules for this. It’s just you, existing as who you are. You literally can’t do it wrong.”
The bartender pushes a tray with five drinks and a basket of garlic bread their way. It gives Eddie a moment to blink hard without going noticed.
Jan draws the tray to themself, but then stays where they are and turns back to Eddie, like there aren’t three people waiting for them. “Hey, I’m sorry about that climbing like a tree comment about Buck if that made you uncomfortable in any way.”
“It did,” he admits, but then also, “but it wouldn’t have, usually.”
“Interesting,” Jan says, which is certainly one way to describe it. “I hope you figure it out. If you ever need to talk more, you have my number.” They raise their eyebrows, like a suggestion is being made. “I also know a lot of ace and aro-ace people.”
“I don’t,” Eddie says. Not that he’s aware of, anyway. Considering everything, who knows.
“Maybe you should.”
“I think the others are waiting for their drinks.” He pushes off from the bar, forcing Jan to follow.
They do, but with no hurry. Eddie falls back so he isn’t awkwardly charging ahead while letting Jan carry their order. “Chocolate cake,” Jan says, when they’re side by side again.
“What?”
“That’s the ace stereotype. Aces prefer a good chocolate cake over sex.”
It’s vanilla all the way for Eddie, but he’s not naïve enough by half to say that out loud in a conversation about sexual preference. “I’ll take that into consideration.”
Jan barks a laugh. “Yeah, you do that.”
“Do what?” Buck questions, as Jan plants the tray in the middle of the table and lets everyone figure their own drink orders out.
“Eat cake,” they say, which is both true and entirely deceptive, and Eddie loves them for it.
“Ooh,” Buck says, and his eyes light up, so Eddie doesn’t just sit back down, he settles in for a mini lecture on an extremely random topic that’s about to be dropped on the table. He finds himself smiling at the garlic bread, and Jan is laughing a little and it’s probably at him, but that’s okay, because Buck’s animated hand lands on his shoulder right when he says, “Did you guys ever read Marie Antoinette’s Wikipedia page?”
*
Marie Antoinette, according to one of Buck’s many weird little did you know! moments in his rambling recount of a French noblewoman’s life, had six adopted children and four she gave birth to. It’s historically documented that she had sex at least four times, Eddie’s brain translates this into, without needing Buck as an intermediary.
What is not documented is how she felt about it. Did she like it? Did she enjoy herself, or was it a duty to be performed? Presumably it wouldn’t have mattered either way – in that era, a queen who did not produce an heir was not performing well as a wife or a royal. She would have been viewed as lacking something.
Which spirals Eddie right into the thought – is that true for him?
He sits with that for a few days, carrying it around like a hot potato. He keeps throwing it from one hand to the other, and it burns at both ends. Maybe there is something he’s missing, and the whole world is right – on the other hand, maybe there is not, and nobody ever told him until very recently. It’s a strange ache, something that leaves him feeling a little hollow and alienated either way.
He’s sitting at home at the dinner table, head in hand and empty plate in front of him while he’s watching Chris finish up his lasagna, when Chris suddenly puts down his fork and says, “Are you sad?”
“No.” This is the kind of thing that will make a father sit up. The kind of thing that will make him feel a little guilty, even, in spite of Chris looking curious rather than scared or upset. Eddie puts both his arms on the table and very consciously tries to project that he’s listening but he’s fine. “Why did you ask me that?”
“You seem like you’re thinking a lot.”
It’s an endless source of pride as much as it’s scary, sometimes, how perceptive Chris is growing up to be. “Well, I am. But it’s nothing bad, I promise.”
“That’s okay, dad,” Chris says, sounding like himself, and then he says, sounding distinctly more like he’s parroting a mixture of all the adults in his life, “Take all the time you need. I love you no matter what.”
“Yeah? That’s really good to know, buddy.” It’s moments like these that Eddie thinks he might be the luckiest bastard on earth. The best kid and a village to raise him – what more could anyone need?
Chris pokes him in the arm. “You have to say it back.”
“Ow,” Eddie says, playing it up and rubbing his arm, and Chris is already grinning when Eddie half gets up to sling the poked arm around his neck and smack a kiss to the top of his head.
“Dad!” Chris protests, undercut by giggles.
“I love you so much, kid,” Eddie says, and he does. Every fiber of his being thrums with it.
And there’s the answer, he realizes: he’s a whole person, regardless of what anyone says or thinks or what life has told him, and there’s nothing special he needs to do or desire for that to be true. After all, hey – the best person on earth loves him no matter what.
*
Epiphanies aside, that short dinner conversation also serves as a wake-up call. This is what it’s come to: Chris, taking time out of his day to worry. As sweet as it is, and as good a sign for his social development it may be, Eddie would still rather avoid anything even close to that entirely.
It’s yet another sign he can’t spend his life sitting around and waiting for something to disprove what he’s pretty sure he knows, just because there’s no hard line he can look at to see where he stands. That line is never going to exist – it’s all blurry. Buck was right in that ramble just before he came out, when he threw half a dozen labels into a pile and then said there was no good way to stick them to boxes without someone ending up in the cracks of that organized little system anyway.
Eddie was right too. He should get over himself, just not in the direction he kept trying to go.
It’s not wrong if he uses a word that might fit him, even if he could later find that it doesn’t, because a word like that is a tool for communication. He can pick it up and hold it, weigh it, keep it or put it down, but whether it’s of any use to him is what matters.
And he’s almost sure – not with blind faith, perhaps, but with what’s a pretty good feeling – that it would be.
*
He spends a few days considering Jan’s offer to talk. It might do him some good, but he’s not one for putting his feelings out there if it’s not absolutely needed, and he’s already had to grasp around in the dark for so many words recently. Besides, Jan is aro, and Eddie is… not.
He could ask Jan to put him in contact with one of their friends and that might be good. But still, there’s the talking thing.
*
The talking thing is not the obstacle and he’s fooling himself (again) if he keeps believing that it is. He already has the word, and from there it wouldn’t be that big of a leap to say it, but he’s being picky about who he wants to hear it. There’s one person he sees every day and that makes whole sentences just spring up completely formed, burning on his tongue and pushing at his teeth to get out – that’s who he wants.
He doesn’t want to talk to Hen or Jan or a therapist or a stranger. What he wants, if he does the hard work and is honest with himself, is to talk to Buck.
*
They get a call on shift right as they’re about to sit down for dinner, which is always an awful start, no matter where they’re sent next. In a somewhat interesting twist, the emergency they’re sent to is related to food, or at least something that once upon a time had hopes of being such.
A college freshman tried to make pasta without knowing you need water in the pan, which led to a lot of smoke, several blaring fire alarms (which at least means they work, Eddie points out, as he helps one of the dormmates take out the batteries one by one), a small stovetop fire that’s already been put out by the time they arrive, and second degree burns on the unlucky pasta-less kid’s arms. It’s nothing time, clean bandages and following Hen’s instructions won’t fix, and they’re done at the scene fairly quickly, after reminding everyone to put those batteries back once the smoke clears out. The kids all look like they mean it when they say they will – nothing like a close call to really scare fire safety into people.
All in all, the scene mostly leaves Eddie feeling a parental indignance that whoever raised this kid never taught them even the most basic cooking skills. Buck seems to be having similar thoughts, because in the truck on the way back he asks, “Hey, can I come over and cook with Chris this weekend?”
“Sure,” Eddie says. “But he already knows how to boil pasta.” At least theoretically – Chris has operated the tap enough times when Eddie needed to fill a pan.
“Yeah, I know,” Buck says. “I just really want mac and cheese now, and it always tastes better if he’s there to help sprinkle over the cheese.”
“Wait, wait,” Hen says, “seeing that charred smokey mess made you think of food?”
Chim and Bobby side with Hen while Buck stays course and makes no apologies for his insatiable and somewhat strange appetite, but the other part of what Buck said sticks with Eddie. It tastes better when Chris is there – that makes no sense, of course, because it’s the same cheese on the same pasta, but it’s enjoyed together. Shared.
I’m mac and cheese, Eddie thinks, which feels profound for precisely one second before he has to turn his head to the window so nobody will ask why he looks like he’s about to laugh.
He’s not macaroni, and he’s definitely not cheese, but the principle might not be wrong. He’s found something – something specific, about himself – and that is fine, and it’s good even if he keeps it to himself forever. There wouldn’t be anything inherently wrong with that, it’s just-
It would taste better if Buck were there.
*
With that fresh on his mind, Eddie lingers in the turnout room, taking a little too much care stowing his gear in his locker for their next call. Chim, Hen and Bobby filter out of the room one by one, but Buck sticks around, as if he can sense Eddie wants to talk to him.
The truth is that he probably can. He knows Eddie, and he knows it doesn’t usually take him this much time to perform a small, extremely routine task, so he must have put one and one together and come up with something’s going on. When Eddie closes his locker, Buck is leaning against his own, waiting.
Eddie nods at the bench. “Wanna sit?”
They do, and that seems to be when Buck can’t keep up the patient quiet anymore. “Is everything alright?” he asks, and it reminds Eddie so much of Chris he almost wants to laugh.
He does not. He takes a deep breath, and rubs his hands over his jeans, and then clasps them loosely in his lap. “I think I’m-” He gets that far, and then he falters, stumbles, glances at Buck and is helped back up and spits out, “I think I’m asexual.” It’s been on his mind for weeks now, but out loud it’s still an unfamiliar, nerve-wracking word. It strikes him only after it’s out how odd it is that he’s actually never said it before, not once.
“Oh!” Buck says, and blinks a few times in quick succession.
Eddie’s stomach churns. He has no clue what that means. “What?”
Buck gives his head a shake. “No, it’s just- That makes a lot of sense for you, actually. That’s really cool.”
“It’s-” Eddie wonders whether Buck heard him right.
“Feels pretty good, right, to figure something like that out about yourself? Like you finally found a missing puzzle piece.”
Eddie opens his mouth, and then it all crashes into him at once. Buck doesn’t care. Buck thinks that if anything he’s more complete now, not more broken. Buck knows and is happy for him, and there’s no reason for Eddie to keep biting this down or ignoring those moments where it feels like he doesn’t quite fit. He fits into a lot of places, and one of them is right here at the 118, next to Evan Buckley. “I’m also bi,” he blurts, his heart pounding.
“Hey!” Buck shouts, openly grinning now. He immediately offers his fist.
In a deeply surreal moment, Eddie reflexively bumps his own into Buck’s. Fist bump of biromanticism. What.
Buck seems to think this makes total sense. “Welcome to the club, man.” He leans in, and Eddie forgets to breathe for a moment. “We meet every Tuesday and Thursday. Bring at least two types of snacks, but obviously you don’t need to have personally sampled everything to get in.”
Eddie is startled by his own laugh. It releases any remaining pressure he felt, and he thinks if they get a call now, they wouldn’t need the ladder truck. He could probably just float up there. “That’s a really stupid joke,” he tells Buck, who just grins even wider about that.
“Shut up, I’m hilarious.”
“Guys!” It’s Hen’s voice, drifting into the glass-walled room through the open door, coming from somewhere halfway down the stairs presumably. “What’s taking so long? Dinner’s ready!”
“Coming!” Buck yells back, and Eddie feels stupid and delighted and says at a perfectly regular volume, for only Buck to hear, “Out?”
“Oh my god,” Buck says, surprised for a moment, and then he laughs. Eddie thinks he can feel it when Buck pretends to use his shoulder to get up. When Buck takes the hand away, he offers it to Eddie. “You need food, before your jokes get worse than mine.”
It’s not that Eddie ever doesn’t want to take Buck’s open hand, but he waves him on anyway. “You go ahead. I’ll catch up.”
Buck wavers, uncertain. “You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Cool,” Buck says, with one last look, as if to doublecheck that Eddie is actually okay.
Eddie watches until Buck has left the room, and then he drops his head and closes his eyes for a second.
It’s really only a second, because firemen never get a moment to themselves. A voice says, “Hey.”
Eddie jerks his head up.
It’s still Buck, leaning on the door jamb, like he made the tiniest little U-turn to boomerang right back. He is wide-eyed but frowning. “Is it too forward if I ask you out right now? Because I get that you might not be interested in me that way even if you do like guys, and it’s probably not very fair of me to drop this on you while you’re maybe still figuring yourself out, but I feel like I should be honest with you and I don’t want to blow my chance.”
Eddie feels like he missed a step somewhere. “Your chance?”
Buck slips his hands into his pockets and shrugs a little, like he’s not sure what to do with his body. Like he’s nervous. “I’m really into you. I’m, like, ridiculously into you, and I probably need to finally tell you that before you end up dating some other person and it’s too late.”
“Buck,” Eddie says, and the world seems to be spinning too fast, but not inside this room. Inside this room he’s right when and where he needs to be and finally seeing things clearly, and how often in life does that happen? “Do you know what triggered my sexuality crisis?”
“No.” And like a good friend, Buck asks, “What’s that?”
Which means Eddie can say, “You.”
Buck is frozen for a second, and then his whole body language loosens up and he seems to grow an inch and he’s laughing. Not like he thinks it’s a joke, but better, like something about what Eddie said delights him. “You know, I kinda- I kinda went through the same thing.” He finally pushes off from the doorframe, but only to move closer. “I guess I always would have arrived at this whole bi revelation eventually, but you came along and I kept having these weird responses. Just a little too much, you know?”
“I do.”
Buck grins like he wants to audition for a teeth whitening commercial. Eddie’s not sure he’s looking much better. “So that’s a yes on the date?” Buck asks.
Hen appears behind Buck, a few paces shy of his former spot in the open doorway. The look on her face says Bobby is enforcing his rule that everyone needs to be at the table before any of them are allowed to dig in. “Guys, what’s taking so long?”
“Hey Hen,” Eddie says, without taking his eyes off of Buck, because that’s suddenly become an impossible feat. Eddie’s heart is still pounding, but the thing that’s making it go is not fear anymore. Not even close. “Do you know any good first date restaurants?”
It’s Hen’s turn to start laughing.
*
“So how did this happen?” Chim asks, and later Eddie doesn’t really remember what he said – something about gaining a better understanding of himself, and how it all seems obvious now, and Buck – but he must have mentioned Josh somewhere in there, because the next thing Chimney says is, “Oh! Hey!”
Suddenly, Buck and Eddie are cast aside as Hen tries to convince Chimney that he can’t take credit for someone’s relationship or queer coming out story just because his wife is friends with some guy (“I was instrumental!” Chimney insists, on a clearly intentional mission to get Hen to roll her eyes so hard they fall out of her head. “I am the Ally that’s missing from LGBTQIA!”), and Bobby shakes his head and gently herds all of them to the dinner table. He squeezes Buck’s shoulder as he does so, and Eddie does not miss Buck’s brief surprised start at the gesture and his misty eyes when Bobby leans in and says something to him, too low for anyone else to catch.
Eddie doesn’t ask about it when he takes the seat next to Buck. He’s pretty sure, anyway, that dad just gave them his blessing.
*
Of course I would love to take Christopher for another night, Pepa had said. You’re a young man, you have a Friday off, and you should go do something fun with your partner. Enjoy the honeymoon phase of your new relationship.
That’s around when Eddie had groaned and attempted to beat a hasty retreat from the conversation. It didn’t work, and instead he was fully called out on looking too happy for any of his protests to sound convincing. Pepa had made the observation, but Christopher had jumped in with relish, and there’s no arguing when the both of them gang up on him.
Not that there’s much point in debating the truth, anyway. Eddie doesn’t even want to try anymore, these days.
That Friday, after Eddie drops off Christopher and picks up Buck, they go to the same bar as always. Buck stops Eddie three feet from the door and jumps ahead to hold it open for him, making extra sure he can’t run into it, and Eddie pushes Buck into the overreaching leaves of a fake potted palm tree in thanks once they’re inside. They arrive at the half full table that their group has been frequenting with Buck still unable to talk without his words being laced with laughter, and that vibe keeps up all through the first round of drinks.
Everyone is about to debate whose turn it is to get the second round when Jan suddenly lets out a yell, like they either just heard they got a promotion or found a spider in the onion rings for the table. If Eddie were a slightly jumpier man, he’d have dropped his empty glass. “What’s that?” Jan demands, and points over at Buck and Eddie’s side of the table.
Eddie gets caught up and looks down, even though the answer is obvious. “My hand,” Buck says, just a touch smug, using his other one to take the last onion ring from the little basket. It’s entirely spiderless.
Semra gasps and grabs Jan’s arm, like she needs something to cling to. “Yes, but why is it holding Eddie’s?”
“Why do you think?” Josh asks, in a tone that should be accompanied by an eyeroll, but his actual face is far too amused to make that kind of movement. Eddie is pretty sure that with Josh’s better angle from the head of the table he noticed their hands a while ago, but kept quiet in hopes of exactly this kind of drama.
Jan eyes Eddie in particular, so he raises his eyebrows at them. They incline their head. “Well done, Diaz. You’re smarter than you look.”
“Thanks. I’ll take that as a compliment.” He has to bite away a grin, which gets even harder when Buck squeezes his hand.
“I won’t!” Buck proclaims. “I demand compensation for this slight against my boyfriend’s intelligence. The way I see it, that should come in the form of-”
“Oh, you just wanted to say the word boyfriend,” Semra says, talking over Buck, while Jan clings right back to Semra’s hand on their arm at this next bit of apparently earthshattering news, and Buck stubbornly continues, but louder, “The form of a round for the table!” All that does is earn him equally loud howls of protest from the other side of said table.
Eddie crosses eyes with Josh, who gives him a thumbs up through the joyful chaos that’s erupted between them. People at the surrounding tables are starting to look, but Eddie has Buck’s hand in his and all these people making a huge deal out of how much they care, and he can’t remember a better night out in ages.
Only because their first date was over lunch, of course.
