let's hear it for the boy - Chapter 1 - hattalove (2024)

Chapter Text

“I been lookin at people on the street. This happen a other people? What the hell do they do?”

- annie proulx, ‘brokeback mountain’

Eddie doesn't tell anybody, at first.

Or—okay, he kind of tells Buck, because it's Buck, and then he accidentally ends up telling Bobby when he needs to come into work an hour late because of his assessment, and then he tells Hen because she's the only person he knows who can help explain some of the questions on the pre-screening form he has to fill out.

But in theory, he doesn't tell anybody. He isn't sure why, exactly, but he knows it was the right decision when he's standing in front of the building and staring up at the rainbow flags. It's the scariest thing he's done since he went back to seeing Frank, and he's almost sure he's about to tuck tail and run, and this way, he won't have to field as many questions about how it went.

He takes a sip of his coffee, watching people come and go, passing by the giant Los Angeles LGBT Center plastered on the front of the building. Most of them don't even look up at it, pay no mind to all the rainbows flying on flagpoles and hanging out of windows and even outlined on the sidewalk in flaking paint. It's only Eddie, all pathetic and hunched and kind of shaking on a bench right outside, clutching an iced coffee so hard he's bent the cup out of shape, terrified by the colors of the visible spectrum.

Maybe another day, he tells himself as he tries to gather all his limbs and stand up. Maybe if he gives it another week or two, just to settle into the idea of being—

Eddie's phone buzzes in his pocket.

Go inside, says Buck's text, and while Eddie's busy looking at it and trying to swallow his heart back down, another one comes through: proud of you :).

So Eddie goes inside.

He finds the door easily enough, exactly where his welcome email said it would be. It's propped open, and there are voices coming from inside, laughter and conversation because these people probably all know each other already, and Eddie's going to walk in and they're going to stare at him like he's under a f*cking microscope and he's. Fine. He's fine. He isn't having a panic attack at the thought of entering a room full of men who are, in one way or another, like him.

And he isn't terrified of discovering that he doesn't fit in with them after all, because that would be irrational. If Frank knew, he'd look at him and purse his lips and hum in that way Eddie's come to learn means you can do better than this.

It's just that he's not so sure he can. Maybe this can be a good first step: enter the building, walk up to the door, turn around and go home. Next week he might manage to stand in the doorway.

“Oh, Eddie,” someone says from behind him. Eddie turns to find Mahit, who did his assessment last week, smiling under his mustache like he's genuinely happy to see him. “I'm so glad you made it.”

Eddie clears his throat. “I'm, uh,” he gestures toward the bright, bright rectangle of light spilling out of the room and over the shiny floor, “I'm not so sure I've made it yet.”

“Nah,” Mahit says, and gives a booming, echoing kind of laugh. He's a giant of a man, even taller than Buck by a full head, with arms that make Eddie equal parts intrigued and afraid, but he has an energy about him that reminds Eddie of Bobby, somehow. Like he's been through awful things that only made him kinder. “Walking into the building was the hard part, I promise.”

Eddie bites his lip. “Yeah,” he says, and mulls his next words until they lose shape on his tongue. Last Thursday, in a little windowless room right off the entrance that only had two chairs and a rack of pamphlets in it, Mahit had told him that the group was there to understand, not judge, but they don't know him. They have no reason to just—

“The rainbows are a lot,” Mahit says, smiling. Eddie marvels a little at the way he holds himself as he says it, chin up, shoulders back, perfectly at ease. “Can't really pretend you don't know what you're walking into, right?”

“Um,” Eddie says. His mouth is dry. “Yeah. That's—yeah.”

“And you still walked in,” Mahit grins. “So come on.”

Eddie's expecting him to sidestep and go inside first, but of course that would be too easy. Instead, Mahit stands and waits until Eddie turns around, clutching his cup for dear life, and steps through the door.

And it's just a room. Plain, beige-y, with a noticeboard on the wall full of yellowing posters and straight-backed wooden chairs arranged into a circle. Just like Eddie expected, there are people on them, several of them bent close in a lively conversation that cuts off when he walks in. He counts five pairs of eyes on him, silent, expectant, but none of them look like they clock him, the way his knees feel like they're melting away under him, the pervasive feeling that he doesn't belong here.

“Alright, gents, I need you for a second,” Mahit says, squeezing Eddie's shoulder as he passes by. “We're going to do a little round of introductions, and I'm counting on you to behave.”

“Never,” three of the men say in unison, and that, of all things, puts Eddie at ease.

So he throws away his cup, closes the door when Mahit asks, and takes the last free chair, closing the circle. He's better with faces than he is with names, but his entire body is humming with a nervous energy that puts everything into focus, and he remembers them all as they go around the circle: Cliff, with the bright white hair and matching bushy eyebrows, who's been coming here since his husband passed two years ago. Cyril, square-jawed, with an accent Eddie can't place, who divulges absolutely no information about himself other than his name and age. Max, dressed way too formally for something like this, whose smiles are a little on the dim side in a way Eddie recognizes from the mirror. Sandro, who introduces themselves by pulling their phone out of their pocket and showing Eddie their lockscreen, a picture of them holding four tiny dogs. Leon, who is wearing a wide-brimmed hat and at least eight rings, and also runs a book club at the Center because he misses the bookstore he couldn't afford to keep open, and also runs a soup kitchen off La Cienega, and you should come by sometime—

“Um, Eddie,” he says, and tacks on an embarrassing little wave that makes him want to break his own fingers. “I'm mostly here because I don't pay my therapist enough to deal with all this.”

All of them are looking at him, unblinking - but he doesn't feel watched, in a way he can't explain.

“I'm not, like—it's not self-deprecating, I'm serious. I started seeing him to unpack all my trauma, and then this—”

“What's this?” Mahit interrupts, leaning forward. Eddie very quickly remembers that this is, technically, therapy.

“I, uh,” he takes a breath, trying to remember what he already told Mahit during his assessment, the way Frank tried to get him to think about this: an opportunity, not something to suffer through. He interlocks his fingers, squeezes his hands in his lap. “I guess I'm not used to this yet.”

“Take your time, honey,” Sandro says, and when Eddie looks up, they're smiling. “You don’t have to say anything you don’t want to say. That's not what we do here.”

“You do say a lot of things I don't want to hear,” Cyril says, deadpan, but Eddie could swear the corner of his mouth is twitching. Leon lifts his giant hat off his head and nods in Cyril's direction, grinning. With their eyes no longer on him, Eddie takes whatever breath his lungs will allow and says:

“I'm gay.”

He's looking at his feet, because he hasn't quite come to terms with the fact that he's saying this in a room where other people, strangers, can hear it.

But this is still the first time he's said it this way: out loud, in a declarative sentence. Being nervous is fine. Frank said that being nervous is fine, and Buck just said he's proud, and the only thought Eddie has in his head is that it's embarrassing he can't raise his head and say it like a man, so clearly, he's going to need to hang on to other people's words for the time being, someone who isn't his dad trying to explain the ways Eddie's allowed to inhabit the world.

He doesn't need to ask anyone's permission to be who he is. That's also a thing Frank said.

Eddie takes another breath. “I think,” he adds, into a silence that doesn't feel stifling or expectant or disinterested. It's just—silence. “I think I'm gay.”

“Hey,” Leon says, gently knocking the pointy tip of his shoe into Eddie's boot, “me too.”

Eddie looks up, then, and finds four grinning faces and Cyril kind of smiling with bright, bright eyes. The room is still sunlit, still a perfectly boring, uniform beige; there's still a poorly erased outline of a cartoon dick on the whiteboard behind Mahit's head, and Eddie just—laughs.

He laughs, and it feels like relief, like the first breath he's taken all day, especially when the rest of them join in, the room filling with the sound and with the uniform creak of chairs as all of them lean in, closing the circle tighter.

“This is a new development, right?” Mahit asks, the first one of them to sober back up. “Not the gay thing, but.”

“Not being repressed?” Eddie asks, untangling his fingers, wiping his sweaty palms off on his jeans. “Yeah, that's new. It's—I think actually sticking with therapy this time around kind of made room for me to think about things I just didn't allow myself before, and now—yeah. Now here I am.”

“And we're very happy to have you,” Max says. He's looking at Eddie steady, unblinking, in a way that should be unnerving, but all Eddie feels is reassured. “God knows I need help keeping these three in check.”

Sandro, Leon, and Cliff make an identical offended noise.

“It's like I don't even exist,” Cyril says, looking into his coffee.

Cliff looks up at the ceiling. “Did y'all hear something?”

“They do say it's a haunted building,” Mahit nods, his eyebrows drawn together in a very convincing serious face. “Anyway, we should probably start—”

“How old are you, Eddie?” Leon interrupts, resting his chin on his hands, rings digging into his skin.

“Oh, um,” Eddie blinks, “thirty-four. Almost thirty-five.”

“Thank God,” Cyril says to the ceiling.

“A new baby!” Cliff grins. “When I was your age I hadn't even—”

“Okay, we want him to come back,” Mahit says, leaning forward, a little louder. His voice rings different, just this side of firm, a tone Eddie recognizes from Frank. “So let's show him what it is we do here.”

“f*ck around,” Leon whispers, but he straightens up and throws one leg over the other, turning to Mahit.

When no one's looking, Eddie shakes out his hands, changes the way he's sitting, straightens his spine. There's still something inside him that pokes and pokes at the walls of his chest, whispering to hunch and hide and make himself small, like maybe he can put this part of him back in the box and everyone in the room can forget he was ever here, but he thinks—

He looks at the sunlight that paints a rectangle on the opposite wall, casting a shadow of him over the food table, at all of their feet on the floor, the rounded tips of Eddie's boots and Leon's pointy ones, Cyril's beat-up sneakers and Max's dress shoes, all of them turned in the same direction, and he thinks it might be time to stop hiding.

It takes the group five entire sessions to find out about Buck.

Eddie hasn't been keeping him a secret, exactly, but he has been consciously biting off the ends of his sentences, stopping every time Buck's name appears on his tongue, somehow woven into every story he tells. There's just—something, something writhing and unwieldy that winds tight around Eddie's ribcage every time he thinks about Buck these days. Another one of those things he could but isn't brave enough to name.

So he keeps Buck quiet, because he's surrounded by men who've lived a lot more life than him, and they're not careful about calling him on his bullsh*t the way Frank is. He keeps Buck quiet for a little while, but then—

It starts in Eddie's second week, after they've gone through a full session of talking about shame that very pointedly turned in Eddie's direction more than once. They're just debriefing before they leave, talking about anything and everything, but Eddie's tongue is itchy in his mouth, because he hasn't spoken the words he carried in here with him an hour ago.

Shame, he thinks, turning the word around and around in his head until it loses shape. Shame, the kind of thing the world would have him feel.

“I felt uncomfortable,” he says when there's a lull, right after Cliff's finished a story about his husband Jason, because he always has one on the tip of his tongue. “Last week, when we all walked out of here together. I came out of a building covered in rainbows next to all of you, and I felt—I don't know. Ashamed, maybe? Like someone was going to jump out of the bushes and start calling me slurs and like—they'd somehow be right.”

He figures he owes it to them to look them in the eye, at least, so he does, meeting each person's gaze in turn as they graciously let him finish speaking, more than he deserves.

“I don't want to feel uncomfortable,” he says. “I want to be proud to be seen with you.”

Slowly, Mahit smiles. “Well,” he says, scratching his chin, “we can try exposure therapying you into that.”

Which is how Eddie finds himself leaving group every week flanked by Sandro and Leon, one arm each threaded through the crook of Eddie's elbows, pulling him along. He hates it, the first couple of times, because the two of them are loud in appearance and in volume, and they turn heads, strangers' eyes that inevitably land on Eddie before they move along. He feels pinned between them like a live butterfly, belly-up, all of his softest parts exposed.

But he makes it to the parking lot, that first time. He makes it to the parking lot, where Leon grabs his chin and smacks a kiss to his cheek, and Mahit gives him a hug with a thump on the back that reverberates through Eddie's entire body, and Max reaches out to squeeze his hand.

He's bright red when he gets in the truck and flips down the visor to look at himself, and it's only in the quiet of the car that he realizes his heart is racing, his hands shaking on the steering wheel; but he makes it to the parking lot and takes the same journey again the next week, and the week after that.

Four weeks, until they make plans to take Christopher to the movies and have to leave straight after group to get there on time.

“Can't hang out today,” is how Eddie tells everyone, distracted where he's pouring himself a cup of coffee. “Buck's picking me up.”

He only realizes what he said when the room is suddenly and completely silent.

“Buck,” Cliff repeats, rolling the name around in his mouth like he's savoring it.

Eddie sighs. He takes a long, scalding gulp of coffee that makes his throat scream in pain, then tops up the paper cup and turns around.

Unsurprisingly, they're all staring at him, and he does feel watched this time.

“Buck,” he shrugs, trying for nonchalant, as if he doesn't have a hand behind his back gripping the table so hard his fingers are tingling. “He's my best friend.”

All six of them say “ah” in perfect unison, in the exact same tone of voice.

“Okay, what—Mahit,” Eddie says, throwing his arms out to the sides, and if he splashes piping hot coffee over his hand in the process, that's his business, “intervene.”

Mahit flips his wrist to look at his nonexistent watch. “I don't know,” he says, and Eddie's positive the corner of his mouth is twitching under his mustache, “we technically haven't started yet.”

Sandro tilts their head backward over the back of their chair, looking at Eddie upside down with a dangerous, dangerous grin.

“Just enough time to hear about this Buck,” they say.

Eddie sighs. Crosses the room on legs that are somewhere in the neighborhood of steady, cursing himself for getting comfortable enough to just blurt out Buck's name when he knows, he knows he's as transparent as water to these people.

“He's my best friend,” he repeats as he settles into his chair and leans back, lifting his chin in a challenge, praying that he can keep it there. He almost keeps going, almost says he's just picking me up so we can take my kid to the movies, but that probably wouldn't help his case.

“We've all had one of those,” Cyril says, tapping the side of his nose. He's smiling the widest smile Eddie's ever seen on him.

“It's a rite of passage,” Leon nods. “There's something about straight boys that just breaks the gay brain. It's tragic, Eddie.”

“He's not—I'm not,” Eddie says, and has no idea how to finish the sentence. “It's not like that.”

Max raises an eyebrow at him.

“There's just something special about him, right?” Cliff says, crossing one leg over the other, fingers interlaced on his belly as he stares Eddie down. “You're realizing that other men are attractive, and maybe you're letting yourself look, but you're always comparing them to him. They're never exactly right. Nose is too long, or their eyes are the wrong shade of brown—”

“Blue,” Eddie interrupts, blinks, and looks down to see if the floor might be so kind as to open up and swallow him.

Cliff grins at him with all his teeth out.

“He's straight,” Eddie says, watching the trembling surface of his coffee, reflecting his own frown back at him. “And I'm not—I don't know what I feel. How I feel about him.”

“I think that's a lie,” Mahit says, in his therapist voice.

Eddie closes his eyes. “So?”

“So lying to yourself can be comforting, and believe me, I get that,” says Mahit, rustling like he's leaning forward to be closer, “but if you ever wanted to put it out there, this is the space to do that. Cyril's right, we've all been there.”

Eddie sets his cup on the ground, right between his feet where there's less risk of him kicking it over. He'd hit the afternoon slump on the way here, minutes from falling asleep in the passenger seat of Buck's Jeep, and had been looking forward to having some coffee, even if it was just the cheap stuff the Center buys for the group therapy rooms. But now his mouth tastes sour, and the smell is making him a little sick.

He sighs, rubs a hand over the back of his neck, and wishes it did anything to loosen the tension stuck between his vertebrae.

“What's the point?” he asks.

“Just to talk about it,” Max replies before Mahit can. Eddie trails his gaze over the floor to his white sneakers, pristine like he'd just taken them out of the box. “So you don't have to keep it all inside.”

Right. Therapy. Talking.

Eddie has been talking and talking and talking for months now, turning all sorts of spotlights onto the farthest corners of his brain that have been gathering dust for decades, and the worst thing is that he knows how much it helps, how much better he is. He appreciates all the ways it's helped him make sense of his own life up to this point.

It's just that—this is Buck. Buck, who is and always has been impossible.

“I don't know,” he says, and rubs a hand over his mouth. “Once it's out there, I can't take it back.”

And it's needlessly dramatic, maybe, but it really does feel that way: like everything he's been holding back is so big it's going to take on a life of its own, scatter on the wind, just waiting for Buck to breathe it in. It's safer behind Eddie's teeth, where Buck has no idea it exists.

“Would you want to?” Mahit asks. “Take it back? Are you—uncomfortable with it? Ashamed of it?”

Eddie straightens up. “No,” he says, too loud in the silence with everyone focused on him. Ashamed is the last thing he is. He has days when he thinks it might be one of the only salvageable parts of him, what he feels for Buck. “No. I'm just,” and he takes a breath, because it always comes back to this, somehow, “afraid. I'm afraid something in me will change and then he'll know.”

Leon tilts his head. “And he can't?”

“No,” Eddie says again, because that's a place he doesn't go, ever. He's not strong enough to contemplate the what ifs. “You don't know him, he'd feel bad. He'd feel bad that he can't reciprocate my feelings and it'd change what we have and—I can't. He can't know.”

They all look at him frowning, six sets of eyes full of varying levels of concern. Eddie's not sure what he's done to earn it.

“But I do,” he says, quieter, dropping his eyes back to his coffee. “I do—feel it. Feel everything. For him.”

Mahit sighs. “You know you can bring it up anytime,” he says. “If you change your mind. We're here to talk to each other and support each other, right?”

“Right,” Eddie clears his throat. “Right, I—yeah. Thanks.”

He keeps staring at his hands as they get started, trying to listen, zoning out and snapping back with a sharp pang of guilt.

But he's imagining it now, the idea of lifting his head and saying it out loud, I'm in love with him, no uncertainty. Imagines the way they'd listen, probably without judgment, because even though they call him on it, their tolerance for his bullsh*t is sky-high.

He's never told anybody. Never will tell anybody. But the idea is—maybe not the worst thing he's ever heard.

By the time their hour is up, nobody has brought it up again, but when Eddie stands to leave without their usual extra twenty minutes of sitting around and talking, he's surprised to find everybody else gathering their stuff, Leon and Sandro already waiting for him by the door. He's not about to say no to them again, so he offers up his elbows, and walks out of the building same as usual, flanked by these people who have improbably put up with him long enough to become his friends.

And then they round the corner into the parking lot, and Buck is just—there. Jeans, button up, his hair curling just a little, leaning back against the hood of the Jeep with his legs a mile long even at a distance. Eddie's heart flutters at the sight of him like it's high school again, the way it always does these days.

He looks at Buck, then very deliberately forces himself to look away a couple of seconds later, but he's not fast enough.

“No way,” Sandro says, pulling them to a stop. “That's Buck?”

Eddie blinks. “How did you—”

“Your whole face just changed, son,” Cliff chuckles, thumping him on the back, turning to look in Buck's direction. His eyes widen when he spots him, and he presses the back of his hand to his forehead, and then—

“Jesus Christ, Cliff,” Cyril barks as he catches him when he starts falling backwards. “Easy.”

Eddie reaches over to steady Cliff's other shoulder, waiting until he has his feet under him. He instinctively checks his pulse, looks at the size of his pupils, but everything seems completely fine. Cliff's waving a hand over his face, fanning himself, looking at Eddie like he's seeing him for the first time.

“You didn't say he looks like that,” he says.

And Eddie just— “Did you just pretend to pass out because of how hot Buck is?”

“I'm sixty-one,” Cliff says, shrugging off Mahit's careful hand on his shoulder. “I could've been actually collapsing.”

He looks again, and Eddie follows his gaze to Buck by the car, the length and breadth of him, all golden in the sun.

“Good God,” Cliff says.

“Honey,” Sandro says, wrapping an arm around Eddie's shoulder, digging a knuckle into his cheek, “you should have said you have feelings for the hottest man in the county.”

Eddie opens his mouth, but what is he going to say? That Buck isn't the hottest man in the county? Can he be sure of that?

“I like him for who he is,” is what comes out in the end. He starts flushing before it's even fully left his mouth, an acute heat in the tips of his ears and the apples of his cheeks that spreads down his neck to his chest.

“I'm sure he has a wonderful personality,” Mahit says, not really managing to hide a grin. “Better not keep him waiting.”

It's then that Eddie realizes Buck hasn't tried to get his attention, hasn't done the usual dorky wave high over his head, as if anyone could possibly miss him. He looks again, not at the way Buck's shoulders fill out his shirt but at the way they're curling inward, making him look smaller, at his knuckles a little too pronounced with the tight grip he has on his phone.

“Oh,” he says, and has to fight to take in a full breath.

“You okay?” Leon asks.

“No, yeah, I'm just—gonna be late” Eddie replies, reaching for Leon's elbow so they can exchange the usual cheek kiss, accepting hugs, reaching out to give Cyril a fistbump. “I'll see you next week.”

They wave him off, scattering across the parking lot to their own cars.

Eddie watches them go, and doesn't say it - doesn't tell them that Buck is pretending not to see him, just in case Eddie wants to keep him separate from this part of his life, as if Eddie doesn't want him everywhere. Instead, he puts his hands in his pockets, trying to be casual, and takes a couple more steps before he calls out Buck's name.

The speed with which Buck's head snaps up only confirms what Eddie already knew. The smile that spills over his face, though, is harder to anticipate in all its brightness.

Eddie stumbles over his own feet, but only a little.

“Hey,” Buck says, grinning, squinting against the sun. “Good session?”

And the answer to that, actually, is not really, because Eddie spent the entire time in his head; but with Buck looking at him like this, it doesn't matter anymore. Nothing matters except the fact that for the next three hours or so, he gets to pretend he can keep this forever, and if he's lucky, Buck might agree to stay the night and make breakfast in the morning.

Eddie's not sure what makes him keep walking past the point where he'd normally stop without answering Buck's question, what exactly has him reaching out to wrap an arm around Buck's waist where he's still leaning back on the hood. He only realizes when he finds himself already doing it, leaning into Buck, hugging him with his chin on Buck's shoulder.

Buck doesn't miss a beat. He moves his feet so Eddie can fit between his legs, and brings his arms up to hold him in place.

“Okay,” he says into Eddie's hair, quiet, serious. “I got you.”

And Eddie doesn't have the words to tell him that he's not upset, exactly, just rattled in a way he can't name. That he's wrapped around Buck because he's selfish, because he wants and wants and wants and has nowhere to put it.

They don't usually do this. They're comfortable with each other, have to be after everything they've been through: they hug and bump their knees together in the rig and on the couch at home, they squeeze each other's shoulders and wrap their fingers around the other's wrist to ground themselves, but. This isn't a hug. Buck's holding him, no patting, no swaying them side to side like he does when he's excited. He's just standing, firm, steady, his hands heavy and grounding on Eddie's back.

He smells like detergent and the fading heat of the day and Eddie's cologne - the one he'd asked to borrow when he showed up at Eddie's this morning, still there on the hinge of his jaw, that soft patch of skin behind his ear. Eddie would only need to turn his face to brush his nose against it, this spot where Buck smells like him.

Instead, he curls his fingers into the back of Buck's shirt, probably creasing it. Selfish.

“We're going to be late,” he says into Buck's shoulder.

Buck hums in response, a soft vibration that echoes in Eddie's own chest.

“We don't have to go,” he says, his hand moving, gentle, up and down Eddie's back. “If you don't feel like it. I'm sure we could figure out—”

“No, no,” Eddie interrupts, and he has to pull away then, because Buck needs to see his face to know he's serious. “We do have to go. Chris has been looking forward to it all week.”

A wrinkle appears between Buck's eyebrows. Eddie doesn't think when he reaches out to touch it, and a flash of goosebumps races down his back when it smooths out again under his fingertips.

“I've been looking forward to it all week,” he says, much quieter, and it feels like the words stay lodged in the bottom of his throat even after he says them.

It's the truth, though. As simple as he can make it.

“You sure?” Buck asks, and his hand is still on Eddie's hip, the lingering heat sinking under the skin. Eddie gives himself a second to imagine that his grip is tighter, possessive instead of feather-light, that Buck is about to drag him close and smile all heavy-lidded and kiss him—and then he shakes it off, buries the image, steps back until Buck's hand lands back on his own thigh.

“You're paying, remember?” he asks, and it has the intended effect of making Buck grin. He straightens up, opens the driver's side door so fast it bounces back and starts closing, still smiling as he climbs in and starts the car.

Eddie stands there for another second. He takes stock of the way his body feels, like he's about to burst through his skin and spill all over the blazing hot concrete, and desperately hopes that none of what he's thinking shows on his face.

Aiden shows up to group on an overcast Thursday in September.

He walks in wearing a hoodie two sizes too big, his arms in the front pocket up to his elbows, and the first thing he says is: “sh*t. You're all old, aren't you?”

He has a head of dark, curly hair that falls into his face, a nose piercing, and a kind of roundness to the edges of his jaw that betrays just how young he is. Eddie marvels a little at the way he carries himself when he stops just inside the doorway, back ramrod straight, his chin raised high.

“Hi, Aiden,” Mahit says, over the laughter from the rest of the room. “I already told you we have a youth group, too.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Aiden says, crossing the room in three big steps, pulling out the chair next to Eddie's and slotting right into the circle. “They tried to put me in the youth group.”

“But my legs were too long,” Eddie mutters absentmindedly.

“Oh my God, Eddie,” Sandro says. “I can't believe you know that song.”

“Um,” Eddie says. “I don't—I only know it off TikTok.”

Silence. Aiden tilts his head so far to the side it looks painful, blinking at Eddie in a way that makes the back of his neck itch.

“It's—one of my coworkers, or—I guess ex coworkers, and she's also my captain's stepdaughter, doesn't matter, she's nineteen. And we usually hung out on her lunch break, so. She showed me TikTok.”

Someone sighs. Eddie's blushing, for a reason he can't quite pinpoint, and he picks at the lip of his paper cup until it uncurls under his fingers.

“I changed my mind,” Aiden says, leaning back, spreading his legs wide so his knee knocks into Eddie's. “I like it here.”

It takes another fifteen minutes for them to get started, because Cliff demands a crash course on what TikTok is, and all of them apparently find it essential that Eddie hear Legs in its entirety.

As a result, he finds himself singing “all legs, no dairy” under his breath when he gets into his car and flips the visor down. He's not sure why it's become a habit long after he's stopped blushing just because he's in public with other gay people, but it's a familiar thing, fixing the collar of his shirt and making sure his eyes aren't too puffy if he ended up crying in the session. He also tries to do something about his hair, and it's not because Buck is at home helping Chris with his science homework, but it's also not not because of that.

He's not sure when he's started caring about what he looks like, either.

It takes a couple of minutes for him to be happy, to fix the top of his hair where it got squished against the ceiling of the car when he was getting in. He starts the engine, flips the visor back up, and—stops.

There, on the sh*tty bench on the side of the building that mostly gets used for staff smoke breaks, is Aiden.

Which would be fine, except Aiden said bye along with everybody else. Eddie specifically watched him walk away in the opposite direction.

He should probably, definitely, leave it alone. Why Aiden felt the need to lie is none of his business, because there's no rule saying he has to share everything all the time, and the way he walked in with his head held high like he was twice his age still makes Eddie feel kind of apprehensive, but—but.

He's slumped over now, with his elbows on his knees, tapping his foot, watching the ground and absently flipping his phone in his hand. His hair hides his face, but when Eddie stops in front of him and rolls down the window, he flinches and lifts his chin. He's clearly trying to school his expression into something smooth and defiant, the kind of face he showed up wearing, but he's not quite fast enough.

Aiden's twenty. Technically, he's an adult - but Eddie looks at him then, the tension in his jaw and the flint in his eyes, and knows he probably didn't want to become one quite so soon.

And he was loud, in today's session, in a way that reminds Eddie of someone: like he's afraid of what he's going to find in the silences.

So Eddie stops. Rolls down the driver's side window, and raises an eyebrow.

“Thought you said you were going home,” he says.

“Eh,” Aiden says, hitching his shoulders up, leaning backwards. He sprawls again, his legs taking up space. “Changed my mind. Think I'm going to go to McDonald's. Grab some food.”

Eddie raises his other eyebrow, too. “McDonald's isn't food.”

“Oh my God, what are you, fifty? It's food. A McChicken is a unique joy that cannot be replicated.”

Eddie fights a smile and loses. “I can't even remember when I last had a McChicken. It can't be that good.”

“You're a lost cause, Eddie,” Aiden says, but the corner of his mouth twitches, even as he rolls his eyes. “Move along.”

“I don't know,” Eddie tilts his head. He should move along; he has a kid at home who's waiting to tell him about his day at school, and Buck is there probably deciding what to start for dinner, and Aiden doesn't—need him. But he's rolled up his sleeves, and the way he's pinching the skin of his wrist with his fingers even as he tries to act casual stops Eddie from putting the truck in drive. “Maybe I just need to refresh my memory.”

Aiden sighs. “Okay, you're not—” he rubs a hand over his face, laughs a little, “I don't need, like—you don't need to take pity on me, or whatever. I'm fine. I'm gonna sit here for a while and then I'll go and have my sandwich and I'll be—”

“You want some company?” Eddie interrupts.

Aiden tilts his head again. “What?”

“Company,” Eddie says, and his voice softens without him noticing, grows careful. “Just someone to sit across the table. Might be nice.”

“Stranger danger,” Aiden says, squinting, but he scoots forward on the bench like he's going to get up. “I can fight, you know.”

“So can I,” Eddie grins. “But we're right under a security camera, and Mahit has all of my personal information.”

For a few seconds, Aiden sits, fingers wrapped around his own wrist, and considers him.

“I'll buy?” Eddie tries.

And those, apparently, are the magic words to get Aiden to run around the front of the truck and slide into the passenger seat.

“Just for that, I'm going to get two meals,” he says, buckling his seatbelt. He leans forward a little the entire drive, like he's expecting Eddie to open the door and throw him out into the road, but he relaxes when they pull up at the McDonald's, and he actually makes good on his promise, carrying his tray piled high with fries and two drinks with a bit of a smirk, like he's goading Eddie into saying something.

Eddie takes a seat across from him and unwraps his McChicken, contemplating the limp lettuce.

“It's good,” Aiden says, already chewing. He eats kind of like he's been starving for weeks. Eddie really hopes he hasn't been starving for weeks. “Seriously, you don't eat sh*tty fast food sandwiches? You got a house husband or something?”

Eddie chokes on his very first bite.

“I don't have—Christ,” he says, reaching for one of Aiden's co*kes, peeling up the lid so he can take a sip. “I don't have a house husband. Just know a lot of people who like making food. And I'm a decent cook.”

“Interesting,” Aiden says, pointing at Eddie with his handful of fries. “Noted.”

Eddie chews his sandwich, which really is surprisingly good, and watches Aiden attack his food with a meticulous focus, eyes down on his tray the entire time. It's not where he thought he'd be when he parked at the LGBT Center a few hours ago, and he's itchy with it, inexplicably nervous, but. He's almost sure Aiden needed someone. Almost sure he got this right.

He taps out a text with one hand - going to be a little late! eat without me if you want - while Aiden is off getting a shake, and he has just enough time to start berating himself for the inexplicable exclamation point when Buck's reply comes through, not a text, but a picture. It's Chris in his Chef Christopher apron, a gift from Buck, grinning at the camera with tomato sauce on his chin, sprinkling huge handfuls of cheese over himself, half the counter, and the top of something in a casserole dish.

Finished homework early, it's lasagna night!!! Buck texts just as Eddie reaches up to rub at his chest, where his heart feels like it's actually seizing. We'll wait for you :)

“No house husband, huh?” Aiden asks, dropping into the booth so heavily Eddie's bench shakes under him. “That a friend?”

Eddie presses his phone against his chest. “How do you know what I'm looking at?”

Aiden raises his eyebrows, taking a loud slurp of his shake before he answers: “Your face.”

“My face is fine,” Eddie says through his teeth. Unfortunately, he's seen enough pictures of himself around Buck to know what Aiden's talking about. “It was a sloth video.”

Aiden takes another sip, and his eyebrows almost hit his hairline. Eddie holds his gaze, unflinching, until Aiden screws up his face and pinches the bridge of his nose.

“sh*t,” he hisses.

“That's what you get for being a smartass,” Eddie says. “Push your tongue against the roof of your mouth.”

Aiden sighs behind his hand. “What.”

“Brain freeze, right?” Eddie asks. “Push your tongue against the roof of your mouth. It helps.”

Aiden squints at him.

“Or ride it out,” Eddie shrugs. “It's your headache.”

Tentatively, Aiden opens his mouth, presumably to give his tongue enough room, and goes a little cross-eyed as he does what Eddie told him.

After a few seconds, his face clears. He looks a little annoyed about it, which makes Eddie smile.

“Thanks,” he says, frowning at his cup, pushing it into the middle of the table. “Ugh, I shouldn't have eaten all of that. My uncle's gonna kill me if he made dinner.”

Eddie calls on every nonchalant bone in his body. “Your uncle,” he says, trying so, so hard for neutral, but Aiden immediately whips his head up and squints. “Hey, just trying to make conversation.”

“You're trying to therapize me,” Aiden says, picking the cup back up just so he can point the straw at Eddie.

“Or I'm just trying to make conversation,” Eddie says.

Aiden sighs, carefully setting his forehead down on the table. “This was a mistake.”

Eddie watches him for a minute, waiting to see if something might change after all, but Aiden just turns his face sideways, so it's his cheek resting on the table, looking out through the front window of the restaurant.

“Okay,” Eddie says, picking up his phone to wake it up. He pauses for a second to look at his lockscreen, as always, and then turns it toward Aiden. “Look.”

He does, though he first eyes s at Eddie all suspicious, and the way his eyebrows scrunch together makes him look younger. He stares for a minute, tilting his head, until the corner of his mouth twitches.

“There he is,” he says.

“This is my son, Christopher,” Eddie says, blindly pointing at where Christopher's happy face should be poking out from behind a giant lemur plush. “And that's Buck.”

Holding both Chris and the lemur up in mid-air, wearing a godawful floral print shirt open over a white undershirt, grinning so wide his sunglasses are askew. Eddie could probably draw the picture in his sleep.

Aiden's smirk softens. “I knew you had someone.”

“I don't,” Eddie says, quicker than he means to. He takes his phone back, locks it on the way so he doesn't look at it again. “Have him.”

Aiden hums. Tilts his head, looks down at the milkshake between them, sweating a ring of water onto the table. He brings up one of his hands to pinch his wrist, his nails leaving two pink half-moons in the pale skin there; Eddie's own hands twitch in his lap, but he doesn't reach out to stop him.

“I live with my uncle,” Aiden says, very slowly, almost drowned out by music from the speaker right above them. “Because my parents don't want a queer for a son.”

Eddie sucks in a breath that feels painfully loud.

“He's a good guy,” Aiden says, looking anywhere that isn't Eddie. “Really good, I mean—I keep trying to pay him rent and he keeps sneaking cash into my wallet. But he lived alone until a couple months ago, and I feel—I don't want to—”

“Be in the way,” Eddie fills in.

Aiden purses his lips. “Yeah.”

Finally, Eddie manages to uncramp his fingers, and he chances laying his hand over Aiden's on the tabletop, just for a second, squeezing.

“If he moved you into his house, he probably wants you there,” he says.

“He felt bad for me,” Aiden replies, pulling away, leaning back in the booth as he sticks his hands into his hoodie pocket. “It probably would've been better if I'd just blown him off. I was on my own for years before that anyway, I'm used to it.”

“How,” Eddie clears his throat, “how many years?”

“Eh,” Aiden shrugs, looking sideways, at a young family just getting settled at a table next to them, the dad with a pair of sunglasses perched on top of his head bouncing a baby on his knee. “Three or four.”

“You're twenty,” Eddie says, and his throat constricts so suddenly it brings tears into his eyes. He knows—God, of course he knows that people throw their children out of the house. He remembers kids, back in El Paso, who were packed up and out of the state overnight, and it was understood that the neighbors, the classmates, the community would keep silent. There was a part of him, a jagged thing shoved into the back of his mind he only allowed himself to touch in the middle of the night with everyone asleep, that worried the same thing might, inevitably, happen to him. But he kept turning it over until he wore it smooth, made it into something else, not a sharp pain but a dull pressure he could ignore.

And then he just—didn't think about it. Hasn't thought about it since before he had a son of his own, and now the only thing in his head as he looks across the table is, this is someone's child.

“Yep,” Aiden says, bringing one hand out of his pocket to tug on the string of his hoodie. He's spreading his legs again, bouncing his knee, desperately trying to take up space. “But I, you know. Figured it out. Drove away in my sh*tty car before they could take it away, got a job at a Dunkin'. It was fine.”

Fine is a word so familiar Eddie suspects they'll find it carved into his bones long after he's dead.

“Where did you live?”

Aiden frowns at him, but he sighs like he's given up trying to pretend. Eddie's familiar with that feeling, too.

“Just places,” he says, smiling a little. “Anyone who wouldn't rat me out to the guidance counselor at school. Couple of friends' basem*nts, that kind of thing. I had a,” he grimaces, sucks his bottom lip into his mouth, “boyfriend who let me stay at his place for a bit.”

Eddie sighs. He tenses, for a moment, with the urge to rip apart the world on Aiden's behalf, but it's a useless thing. Aiden's here, looking a little green around the edges after his two large meal combos, and the past is—Eddie's learning to not let the past weigh so much it warps the present out of shape.

“And your uncle—“

“He didn’t know,” Aiden interrupts, shaking his head. “He didn’t really keep in touch much, but he was in town and came to visit, and I was, y’know. Gone. They turned my room into a guest bedroom.”

“f*ck,” Eddie says to the McDonald's ceiling. The mom sitting next to them, probably younger than him, tuts in disapproval.

“It was fine,” Aiden repeats. “I don't—you know that line Mahit has about allowing people to know us?”

“He used that on you too, huh?” Eddie smiles, and it rings in his head as he looks at Aiden's hunched form on the other side of the booth: us.

Aiden stretches his legs out, accidentally bumping his shoe into Eddie's. “The world forces us to keep ourselves a secret,” he quotes.

“So the people we allow to know us should consider it a privilege,” Eddie nods. It's—certainly a way to think about things, and he's been strategically sidestepping it ever since he first heard it from Mahit at his assessment. He's thought of himself in the exact opposite terms since he was a kid, and he can't quite reconcile the world in which he grew up, all pushes and prods and disapproving words because he could never just be right, with—this. With the idea that maybe it's not him who needs to apologize for being this way.

“Yeah,” Aiden nods, so much younger than Eddie, so much closer to being unapologetic. “I don't want them to know me.”

He has the tell-tale look of someone who's stubbornly repeating something until they believe it, but Eddie's not so big a hypocrite as to point it out.

“I thought I was lying to them,” Aiden says, and produces a straw wrapper out of his pocket, twisting the paper between his fingers. “But I think they were lying to me. I f*cking—I'm trying so hard to hope that they were lying to me.”

And Eddie has no idea, no idea at all, what to say. What can he say, in the face of someone who took a look at his own jagged parts and let them slice him open?

“But it still feels like he'll change his mind,” Aiden goes on, like the floodgates have been opened. “Like—he's going to stop feeling bad for me, because I don't look like I haven't showered in a week anymore, and then he'll wake up and realize what he has under his roof.”

“He already knows,” Eddie says.

Aiden shrugs, turning his face into his shoulder. “Can never really be sure.”

At the next table, the baby gets into the ketchup. Eddie's eyes are pulled over there by the simultaneous gasps from the parents, the dad digging in the diaper bag, the mom reaching for napkins. The baby is smearing its face, unbothered, giggling as it closes its ketchupy hand into a fist.

Eddie's not quite sure what about the sight makes him ache.

“Listen,” he says, and Aiden puts the straw wrapper on the table, twisted into a thin paper ring. “I'm about to sound like a therapist.”

“Can't wait to hear this one,” says Aiden, but to his credit, he only rolls his eyes a little.

Eddie takes a breath. Intertwines his own fingers in his lap, and thinks—thinks of Buck, actually.

“You deserve a home,” he says.

The snark melts right off Aiden's face, and left behind blinking at Eddie in surprise is—a kid. Just a kid.

“Maybe your uncle's just trying to give you one?”

Slowly, Aiden shakes his head. He picks up the paper ring, slides it onto his middle finger, looks and looks and looks at his own hands like he doesn't quite recognize them.

“Okay” he says after a couple of minutes, and when he looks up, the lines of his face are a little sharper again. Eddie smiles at him without meaning to. “I need a ride.”

Eddie holds the door open for him on the way out of the restaurant, and hands his phone over for Aiden to type in his address without a word. He feels a little like he does after therapy with Frank, where they're still shoveling dirt every week to get to Eddie's roots, and the only thing he's capable of feeling afterward is exhaustion.

But when he looks to his right, he finds Aiden leaning back in the passenger seat, mashing the buttons on the radio.

He doesn't look like he's expecting to be kicked out of the car anymore.

“We should watch Brokeback Mountain,” Buck says one Friday night.

Eddie is halfway through the dining room, on his way from the kitchen holding two open bottles of beer, and he manages not to spill a single drop, for which he should be given an award.

“We should what?” he asks, just—standing there, watching Buck's back where he's curled up on the couch.

“Watch Brokeback Mountain,” Buck repeats, but this time, he's trying very, very hard to sound casual.

Eddie says nothing. He wants to say something, but the only thing his brain is supplying is a litany of I am so in love with yous, because he knows exactly what Buck's doing, and it's making him want to shake apart where he's standing.

He doesn't know what to do with this, with Buck, and he's a fool and a half for thinking that attending a goddamned self-empowerment group would make that part of him better, would help him figure out how to get over this. He's pretty sure he could come into that beige room and sit in the same chair for a century straight and still feel this way: undefined in the face of his best friend, like water, taking on the shape of whatever Buck needs him to be.

In the silence, Buck pulls his hood up over his head, curls in tighter on himself.

“Buck,” Eddie says.

“Eddie,” says Buck.

“Are your ears red right now?”

Buck coughs, reaching for the remote. Eddie finally comes into the living room proper and rounds the coffee table to take a seat, handing Buck his beer.

“No,” Buck says, but he pulls on his hoodie strings to make the hood close around his face. Eddie should make fun of him, but he mostly wants to kiss him instead. “I'm just—we should watch it. Right now. Movie night and all.”

Eddie stares at him. He doesn't really know what else to do.

“You do know it's like—tragic, right?” he asks, watching Buck's fingers wrapped around the bottle, one of his nails already burrowing under the edge of the label. “You're going to cry.”

“You're going to cry,” Buck grins, because that is a thing they do: spend Friday nights on the couch in sweats, sniffling over movies that Eddie's pretty sure aren't even meant to be tearjerkers. “But I did, like. Research. My sources say it's an essential gay movie.”

“Buck,” Eddie says, and there has to be something in his voice, because Buck ducks his head. Eddie curls his fingers into fists, just for a second, to push away the urge to reach out. “Are your sources named Henrietta, by any chance?”

Buck squawks. “f*ck you, I can Google,” he says. Then, slowly, like he has no idea what he's doing to Eddie, he bites his lip. “I did send her the list after I compiled it, though.”

Eddie leans into the couch, one shoulder pressed into the backrest, facing Buck with their knees so, so close to touching.

“You have a list,” he says, rubbing at the center of his chest, where the pain has settled.

For a minute, Buck doesn't say anything. He just blinks at Eddie, golden lashes over his eyes that are unfairly blue even in the half-light. Then, he pulls on the edge of his hood, loosening it again, tugging it back to let it fall on his shoulders.

His hair is a mess. Eddie doesn't reach out to fix it.

“I just,” Buck says, looking down at his beer, “I just don't want you to think—I want you to know that—you're my best friend.”

Eddie smiles, in that way he can never help around Buck. “I do know that.”

“No, that's not—” Buck starts, throwing out his free arm, scooting closer and jostling the entire couch, “I mean, you're my best friend. And I want you to know how happy I am for you, and that, um.”

Eddie waits him out. He already knows what Buck's trying to say, but he also knows what he's like when he decides that he needs to get something out. He knows all of it without having to so much as think.

“I got your back, you know?” Buck finally says, quiet, almost shy about it. “In everything.”

“I knew that, too,” Eddie replies, just as quiet, and blinks to make sure he doesn't accidentally start crying, because it's getting harder to breathe around the pain that lives curled up in his chest, his heart twisting on itself. “You're the only reason I didn't turn around and run going to my first group session.”

It feels—strange to say, like he's baring some part of him that had been out of Buck's sight until now, even though Eddie's pretty sure no such part exists. Buck doesn't know how Eddie feels about him, but he knows Eddie's hands trembling and broken open at the knuckles, knows the difference in how he takes his first and second coffee of the day, knows him stumbling through the house with parts of him still caught in the nightmare, fumbling in the dark for something that will feel real.

And he's expecting Buck to be surprised, maybe, but instead Buck gives him a smile, and this one is wide, content.

“No I'm not,” he shakes his head. “That was all—”

“It wasn't all me,” Eddie interrupts. “Seriously, I got up to leave just as you texted me.”

“Yeah,” Buck reaches out, poking Eddie's knee with a fingertip. “And you would've taken three steps and turned around.”

It's Eddie's turn to shake his head. “I don't,” he says, and doesn't know how to continue.

Doesn't know how to tell Buck that he can stand on his own two feet, most days; but he also needs Buck by his side with an intensity that scares him, more often than not.

Because Buck is—God, Buck is going above and beyond to be an ally, to accept Eddie, midlife sexuality crisis and all. He's looking up queer movies and went with Eddie to his first ever gay bar and bought a f*cking magnet for the fridge the other day, a little frog with a rainbow flag for a cape, because it reminded him of Eddie. He's doing what he always does, relentlessly showing up like he doesn't see the U-Haul's worth of baggage Eddie drags with him everywhere, like Eddie's worth his time and his trouble and all those unwavering, earnest looks across the kitchen table.

And Eddie has taken that and—fallen in love about it. Fallen for his best friend, who'll happily surround himself with rainbows on Eddie's behalf, because he's certain they're not for him.

Sometimes, when he gets in his head about it, it makes Eddie feel wrong. Like an ever-present itch, an energy under his skin goading him into clawing himself open, to figure out where this stops, when he'll quit taking and taking and taking, beyond what Buck is capable of giving him.

And then Buck tilts his head, smiles a little, squeezes his hand, and Eddie knows that this, Buck, is one of the few things he's managed to get right.

Buck doesn't know, and he's not going to, and Eddie can learn to live with that. With only asking for more in the minefield that is his head.

“You would have gone inside,” Buck says with absolute certainty. His fingers are still over Eddie's, their hands curled over the point of Eddie's knee. “You would've. You were meant to be there, I mean, I wish you could see—” but he bites his lip, then, goes quiet. “Nevermind.”

“Buck,” Eddie says, and knows his face is doing the thing, melting a little because he doesn't know how to do anything else.

Buck sighs. He stretches out to put his bottle on the coffee table and replaces it with the remote, turning on the TV that cools the warm lamplight bathing his face.

“You just look,” he tells the remote, “happier.”

And—oh. Oh.

“I am,” he says, squeezing Buck's calf, the closest part of him he can reach. “But you know this is still where I'm happiest, right?”

He wishes he could tell Buck the full truth: that half the time he's speaking in the group, he comes up in one context or another. Wishes he could say I'm never gonna leave you behind and make Buck understand exactly how true it is.

But maybe—maybe he doesn't need to, because Buck looks up through his lashes and smiles a quiet kind of smile, like he gets it.

“Even if I make you watch the tragic cowboy movie?”

Eddie smiles back. “You still want to watch it?”

“I'm the one who suggested it, Eddie,” Buck says, slowly, like Eddie's being dense. He's already pressing buttons on the remote Eddie's pretty sure he doesn't even know how to use, pulling up the movie.

“Okay,” Eddie says, poking Buck in the knee one more time before he turns to face the TV. He doesn't move any further away, Buck's thigh a perfect line of heat alongside Eddie's own. “If you're sure.”

Buck rests his head back against the couch and rolls it over, cheek to cushion, to look at Eddie in silence. It's all he has to do; Eddie recognizes the look. It's the same kind of awe that softened Buck's face when Eddie came out to him over a plate of gyoza they made from scratch one night, when Eddie told him he might try signing up for this group Frank recommended, when a dizzyingly tall stranger interrupted the beer they were having to compliment Eddie's shirt and Eddie fumbled for a response like he's never spoken a word in his life.

“Yeah, alright,” he says, rolling his eyes. Buck reaches out to squeeze his shoulder before he presses play, and that's the last time Eddie looks at him for a while, because—because.

The movie is a lot. It's full of silence to begin with, enough of it to make Eddie nervous, to make his skin feel stretched taut over his bones. He doesn't know when it happens, which silent, tense shot tips him over the edge, but it starts to feel like looking over at Buck would be revealing something.

He doesn't. He keeps his eyes on the movie, thinks he might forget to breathe when Jack says you know it could be like this, just like this, always and just never starts again, feeling out the shape of the ache right in the middle of his chest as it roils and changes. There's no way to stop himself imagining a different kind of life, all the paths he'd almost turned onto, full of so much pain for nothing gained in the end. No way to come away from the goddamned movie with anything other than a kind of gaping emptiness in the pit of his stomach, thinking about how close he was to settling for that, how he almost let himself become something unrecognizable under the pressure of what others wanted from him.

Thinking about all the people who came before him, who didn't even get the choices he was afraid to make.

He cries, of course he does, messy as he presses the edges of his sleeves to his eyes to catch the tears, because there's so much that's just bare bones f*cking unfair—

And then Buck makes a noise next to him, shifts a little where he'd been almost unnaturally still the whole time, and Eddie looks at him without thinking. On screen, in his periphery, Ennis is folding up the sleeve of Jack's found shirt, finding his own sleeve underneath stained with their blood.

Next to him, Buck is staring and staring and staring down at his hands, tears shimmering in his eyes.

“Okay, before anybody asks,” Aiden says as he walks through the door, voice muffled behind the sleeve he's pressing to his face, “I tripped.”

Eddie jumps up as soon as he sees the blood, steadily trickling out of Aiden's nose and smeared over his lips and staining his dark hoodie even darker.

“You tripped where?” he asks, steering Aiden into a chair, grabbing at his pocket for a pen light that isn't there.

“Outside,” Aiden mumbles. He doesn't roll his eyes, but it's implied. “On the sidewalk. Had to jump out of the way of some f*cking asshole on a scooter, and there was a curb, so.”

Eddie nods. “Mahit, do we have—” he starts, but Max is already pressing a roll of paper towels into his hand. “Okay, take your sleeve away, use this instead.”

Aiden takes the offered wad of paper like he doesn't trust it, pressing it against where the blood is still running in a steady stream.

“Did you fall on your face?” Eddie asks, turning Aiden's head one way then the other before he gets his phone out of his pocket to shine it into his eyes. He has a small scrape on his chin, but nothing else seems wrong. “Any pain or swelling in your nose?”

“Uh,” Aiden says, scrunching his face, looking away from Eddie and up at the ceiling as the rest of the group gathers around him, all but clucking. Leon comes up with wet wipes out of nowhere, and Cyril drops into the chair next to Aiden with a cold pack held triumphantly in his hands, chest heaving like he'd run somewhere quicker than they could notice him missing.

“Any pain?” Eddie asks again, and he can hear his voice slipping into work mode, guiding Aiden to focus on him, but he doesn't bother to correct it. Going by Aiden's overwhelmed blinks as he takes in the concern around him, it might come in useful.

“I don't think so,” Aiden replies, peeling off the now-soaked ball of paper towels and accepting another one. Mahit comes over to set the trash can by his feet. “I didn't fall, I just—kind of crashed into a wall.”

“It doesn't look broken,” Sandro says, pulling their glasses down the bridge of their own crooked nose to look closer. “I'd know.”

“Sandro got arrested seven times in 1989 alone,” Leon nods, pulling out a wet wipe to dab at where the blood has dried smeared halfway across Aiden's jaw. “For disorderly conduct.”

“That's code for fighting hom*ophobes,” Sandro says, their grin sunny. “With fists.”

Aiden pulls the paper towels away from his face again, squinting suspiciously at the misshapen blood stain, considerably smaller than the previous one.

“Be kind of cool if I got in a fight,” he says, and doesn't even protest when Leon wipes his chin with all the care of a loving grandparent. He draws the line at that, though, and takes the next wet wipe himself, carefully dabbing at the blood caked in the ridges around his nose. Eddie waits for him to be satisfied before he checks for swelling and tenderness, pressing gentle fingers to the bone. “Instead I almost fought a scooter.”

“Those things kill people, you know,” Cliff says, back in his chair, uncharacteristically stern. “I miss when they were banned.”

“The sweet security of walking down the sidewalk knowing you're not going to get run over,” Max says, his eyes closed like he's remembering it. “And not having to trip over the damn things every step? Someone left one in front of my open house the other day, and when I lifted it to move it it triggered a f*cking alarm. Fancy neighborhood, too.”

Cyril, passing behind him with a cup of coffee, pats him on the shoulder.

Aiden looks at them, one by one, his eyebrows steadily climbing higher. “You're all ancient,” he says - but as they settle in to start the session, he nudges his knee against Eddie's and mouths a thanks with a little smile that feels weirdly like Eddie just got a good grade in something.

Afterward, when they're the last two people lingering in the parking lot, Aiden waiting with his arms crossed for Eddie to leave first like a game of chicken, Eddie can't stop looking at his rolled-up sleeve, the same hoodie he wears every single time now smearing rust-colored remnants of blood in the crook of his elbow.

He looks around once, for—he doesn't really know. Someone else to take responsibility, someone who's better equipped for this than he is, but their therapist has gone home, and Eddie is the only one left.

So he leans back against the yellow stucco wall of the LGBT Center, takes a breath, and asks: “Do you need clothes?”

Aiden flinches.

“Not like—” Eddie pinches the bridge of his nose. “I don't know who ever let me use words.”

“I'm sure they're regretting it every day,” Aiden replies, but he snorts a little bit at the end, and most importantly, he's not running.

“I just meant,” Eddie says, focusing very, very hard, “that you've worn the same hoodie every time I've seen you so far. And now it's bloody, and I have this thing where I don't ever throw anything away, drives Buck crazy. So I have, like—clothes. If you need something to change into.”

Aiden squints - possibly against the sun, definitely at Eddie.

“I don't need charity,” he says, quiet.

“And I'm not offering you any,” Eddie shrugs. “You'd kind of be doing me a favor, actually.”

He's probably transparent, so see-through he wonders how it is that he's still casting a shadow on the sidewalk, but Aiden does need something to change into, and it's not like he's just going to say yes if Eddie says it outright: here's somewhere for you to go.

Slowly, Aiden pulls his bloody sleeve down. It looks like it's mostly dried, the fabric wavy and unnaturally stiff, flaking off rusty red when Aiden rubs it between his fingers.

“You got hoodies?” he asks.

“Definitely,” Eddie nods, because he's grown to dislike them, uncomfortable with the touch of fabric at the base of his throat where the weight of the hood pulls at it, with feeling the extra fabric move over his back. He pulled the strings out of some, vacuum packed the others in the back of the closet, and started stealing Buck's sweatshirts when he gets cold.

“Fine,” Aiden sighs. “Fine, just—are you sure it's not weird for you to just invite me to your house?”

Eddie blinks. “Is it weird? I'm not, like—I actually know a sergeant, you can look her up if you want—”

“You're so f*cking weird,” Aiden says, from where he's crossed the parking lot to Eddie's truck, standing with one hand curled around the passenger door handle. “Let's go.”

Eddie, what with the spontaneity and the nosebleed of it all, forgets that Buck's home.

He's not sure how he managed to forget; all he knows is that he pulls into his street and feels an actual thrill zing down his spine when he sees the Jeep parked in the driveway.

Aiden doesn't comment on it, but he does look at it with his head tilted like a curious dog when he gets out, lingering for a long while before he turns his eyes to the rest of Eddie's house. He stays a step behind on the walk up to the front door, and waits for Eddie to cross the threshold and toe his shoes off before he comes inside.

“Hey, you're home,” Buck's voice comes from somewhere in the direction of the kitchen. Eddie accidentally walks into a side table about it; then he shivers, because Buck said home like it belongs in his mouth. “Did you want—”

And he stops there, his giant frame suddenly filling the dining room doorway, looking at Aiden with his mouth still halfway open, frozen in surprise.

“No f*cking way,” is how Aiden chooses to introduce himself.

Eddie pinches the bridge of his nose, just for a second.

“Buck, this is Aiden, he's in my group,” he says, waving a hand between them, suddenly feeling overlarge and clumsy and awkward in his own hallway. “Aiden, this is Buck.”

“I know,” Aiden grins, which is when Eddie starts considering that this might have been a bad idea, but there's nothing he can do about it as Buck reaches out a hand for him to shake. “Eddie never shuts up about you.”

Eddie scours his surroundings for something heavy enough to knock him out.

“Really,” Buck says, but there's something about his tone. Eddie looks up in alarm, because he'd expected Buck to be laughing, delighted, to slip into teasing Eddie alongside Aiden like it's second nature. Instead, he sees Buck with his eyebrows furrowed just so, a concerned little crease between them, the wrinkles by the sides of his mouth pronounced as he looks down at Aiden, who's a solid head shorter than him, then Back at Eddie.

And—

“Oh my God,” Eddie says, seconds away from running into the backyard and digging himself a hole out there, “don't look at me like that, Buck, he's my friend.”

Aiden, for all of his talk about stranger danger, just laughs with his head thrown back.

“Yeah, I wouldn't sleep with Eddie if he was the last man on earth,” he says, says it to Buck like he thinks Buck might need to hear it. Then he turns to Eddie and adds: “No offense.”

“I—none taken?” Eddie says, his voice thinning to an embarrassing, squeaky kind of sound. He only barely notices, though, too busy staring at Buck's face as it clears, as an easy, friendly smile settles on his lips.

“Nice to meet you,” he says, a little belatedly, finally letting Aiden's hand go. Eddie feels kind of like he did that time Buck and Christopher made him watch four hours of a hawk nest livestream just to see the little birds hatch: like he's observing some kind of nature ritual, not sure what's going to happen next. “You said Eddie talks about me?”

“There we go,” Eddie rolls his eyes, ignoring how warm it makes him when Buck looks over at him with a spark of mischief in his eye. “I'm just gonna go figure out where I put the clothes.”

“Oh, wait,” Buck says. “I meant to ask if you want tomato sauce or carbonara.”

Eddie's so f*cking warm. “Either's fine,” he replies, “but I'm not sure if Chris—”

“Chris voted for tomato,” Buck says, waving the phone he's been holding in his hand the whole time. “But you know how Shawn's mom is about feeding him when he's over there, so if you wanted carbonara, he'd probably get over it.”

Eddie can't help looking at Aiden, whose eyes are bouncing between Buck and Eddie like he's doing some very quick math in his head. He's pretty sure he's about to start blushing, his face growing hot for no real reason, because this is normal for them. This is how most afternoons go when they're not at work: groceries, cooking, housework, picking up Chris from school and driving him to a friend's house or to PT or to surfing lessons with Buck behind the wheel; dinner, homework, a movie or a board game or, more and more often these days, Chris leaving them to their own devices to go to his room and shoot at things with his friends. It's how their afternoons have been going for as long as Buck has been single again, months now since he started showing up more often with a tentative look on his face like Eddie might send him away.

Eddie never has.

He shakes his head a little, presses a hand to the back of his neck in a misguided attempt to cool himself down, and takes a breath to say that tomato is fine, but Aiden speaks first.

“You're cooking?” he asks, head tipped back as he looks up at Buck, his expression one Eddie hasn't seen before. Curiosity, maybe.

“Yeah,” Buck smiles, stepping back from the doorway, bouncing on his heels a little. “I'm making pasta from scratch, you wanna see?”

Aiden's eyebrows fly up his forehead. “That's a thing?” he asks, and doesn't wait for an answer as he steps into the dining room and disappears into the kitchen, following the direction of Buck's outstretched arm.

Buck doesn't go after him right away. Instead, he looks back at Eddie with the question clear in his eyes.

The thing is that Eddie doesn't really have an explanation, per se. He just has a feeling.

“He's just a kid,” he shrugs, speaking under his breath so Aiden doesn't overhear. “He's had a rough time, so I figured, you know.”

Buck's face, bathed in the early afternoon light flooding the dining room, softens into something Eddie can't look at for too long.

“Eddie,” Buck says, gentle and serious and—Eddie has to go take a f*cking minute in the back of his closet, actually. Isn't that poetic.

“I promised him some of my clothes that I don't wear anymore,” he says, taking a step back, pointing over his shoulder in the direction of the bedroom as if Buck doesn't know where it is. “I'll only be a minute.”

Buck keeps looking at him. Thankfully, he doesn't say anything else, but he doesn't let Eddie out of his sight until he's through the door, closing it behind him, leaning back against it for a second to catch his breath.

It puts him face to face with where the holes used to be, gaping open for weeks on end. Eddie had felt like he needed the reminder, at first, and then it became important that he be the one to drive to Lowe's and get what they needed to patch them up, except leaving the house was a goddamned struggle for a while.

He can never look at the spots, not quite invisible when the light hits them just right, without thinking about those weeks. Can't think about those weeks without thinking about Buck, woven into the fabric of all that suffering, helping mend the mess Eddie left in his wake.

Blinking, he rubs a hand over his face to dislodge the memory of Buck standing a few steps away, pieces of tape on his sweatpants, hiding at Eddie's from what he knew he had to do but laughing with him anyway. It only half works, as usual, so he turns his back on it, crosses the room to open his closet and root inside.

Some of the clothes are rattier than he remembers, and he leaves those behind, pulling out a few nice-looking hoodies and some shirts, a tall enough stack that he has to hold it in place with his chin when he opens and closes the door again.

He finds Buck and Aiden in the kitchen, where the window is open and Buck's phone, forgotten, is babbling through some science podcast at double speed. All the counters are covered in flour.

“It's not that I never want to go to college,” Aiden is saying when Eddie steps into the room. “But it just feels like—I don't know, four years is a really long time, you know?”

“Oh yeah,” Buck nods, running a sheet of dough through the pasta machine. “I, uh. I dropped out.”

He folds the sheet and slides it over the counter, sending flour falling to the floor in a little cloud. Aiden catches it, re-folds it, and starts cutting it into wide noodles, moving with confidence like he's been doing it for hours. His sleeves are rolled up as far as they'll go, high over his elbows.

“I kind of kept dropping out of everything,” Buck shrugs, squeezing another dough ball between his fingers. “For a while. I felt kind of—I don't know how to describe it.”

“Itchy?” Aiden asks, holding up a noodle in front of his eyes. “Cause I feel itchy. I got so used to moving from place to place and now I—”

“Can't stop, right?” Buck says, carefully turning the crank. He's watching what he's doing, but the set of his shoulders is familiar: he's looking down on purpose. “It's like that thing Socrates said.”

Aiden snorts. Eddie finally sets his pile of clothes down on one of the kitchen chairs, not daring to breathe too loudly, because Aiden's just—talking. Buck gave him some dough and a knife and probably cracked one of those jokes that make even Eddie roll his eyes, and now he's effortlessly sharing parts of himself, the things he's so good at holding back when he wants to, with someone he met twenty minutes ago.

Because Aiden needs to talk. Because Buck sees the same things in him that Eddie does - or maybe sees something completely different, but has a feeling about this, too.

“No, I'm serious,” Buck says now, draping a sheet of dough over his hands. He's smiling a little, a quiet thing that hides in the very corner of his mouth. “What is it - I know that I know nothing? I'm probably missing a bunch of context—”

“Probably,” Aiden says, the same tone in which he gleefully tells Eddie he's old at any given opportunity.

“—but it's like—once you're used to knowing nothing about where your life is going, it's hard to accept when it starts feeling like something real, you know? First you run because you have to, and then you keep going in circles because you're so used to running being all you have.”

“Okay, Christ,” Aiden says, setting his knife down with a shaking hand. “The two of you should start a f*cking therapy double act.”

“Oh, does Eddie use the therapisms on you too?” Buck asks, at which point Eddie realizes that Buck knows full well he's standing in the room.

“It's like he's quoting from a self-help manual half the time,” Aiden grumbles, gently carding through the noodles on the counter in front of him, then laying them out, one by one, on a baking sheet.

“Yeah, well,” Buck shrugs, “it's been really good for him. He got me to go back, too, so you might want to listen to him.”

“You just told me, like, your entire life story,” Aiden says. “You didn't want to go to therapy?”

“My life story would take all day,” Buck snorts, leaning back against the floured counter. Eddie recognizes the self-deprecating way he ducks his head, and almost announces himself just so he can cross the room and lift Buck's chin back up. “What I'm trying to say is, this is the longest I've stuck around anywhere since I left Pennsylvania, and every day I wake up and want to stay, and if—I mean, you don't have to take my advice. But if I can give you some, then I would—”

“I notice you didn't pause for me to say yes or no,” Aiden interrupts.

Buck throws his head back to laugh, and the light catches a smear of flour on the underside of his jaw.

Beautiful, Eddie thinks, unbidden.

“Sorry,” Buck says, raising his hands. “I get it. No advice, just pasta.”

He meets Eddie's eyes, then, where he's still standing in the corner by the doorway, and inclines his head in Aiden's direction.

Eddie shrugs. You got this, is what he means to say, and Buck rolls his eyes with a grin, moves a couple of steps to check on the big pot of water on the stove.

Next to him, Aiden finishes cutting the last of the dough, shaking the noodles out between his fingers.

“Why do you?” he asks out of nowhere. Buck looks over at him with his head tilted, curious. “Want to stay, I mean. Why'd you stop running?”

“Oh,” Buck says. He looks over his shoulder at Eddie, for a moment so fleeting Eddie thinks he might have imagined it, and then smiles down at the steam coming off the boiling water, the corners of his eyes crinkling. “I, uh. I found people who need me here.”

Eddie takes a breath, and finds his mouth inexplicably dry. “Which you only figured out after you sued the city,” he says, mostly to see the outraged scrunched expression Buck puts on.

Aiden jumps where he's standing, but at least he's not holding a knife anymore. “You sued—”

“I got you clothes,” Eddie interrupts, saying that instead of the hundred things on the tip of his tongue, because he kind of suspects that Aiden's reached his daily limit for earnestness. He's familiar with the way his shoulders are rising bunch up by his ears. “Most of it will probably be a little big.”

“Are there any shirts?” Aiden asks, dusting off his hands as he crosses to the table to peer at the pile on the chair. “I need shorter sleeves if I'm going to help make the sauce, these keep falling.”

Eddie blinks at him. “So you're just—cooking our dinner.”

“Buck said I could eat with you,” Aiden says, carefully picking through the clothes until he comes up with a plain blue t-shirt. “So technically I'm also cooking my dinner. Bathroom?”

Silently, Eddie points him down the hallway, feeling a little astonished. It makes sense; God, of course it makes sense that Aiden had one conversation with Buck and stopped being self-conscious about whether him being at Eddie's house was weird, but.

Eddie's only one man, and he's so irreversibly, stupidly in love with his best friend. With the way Buck can look at someone and just accept them, whatever their flaws, the same way he accepted Eddie years and years ago, even that high-strung, twitchy, reticent version of him.

“You're such a dad,” Buck says in the here and now, standing in the middle of a kitchen they share, in clothes he keeps in Eddie's dresser.

“He's an adult,” Eddie grumbles back, watching the doorway.

“Course,” Buck replies. “And you're a dad.”

Eddie sighs, suddenly on the verge of exhausted, and pulls out a chair to sit in.

“Buck,” he says, his tone serious enough that Buck's grin fades into that soft, open concern Eddie knows so well by now. “Thank you.”

Buck wipes his hands on a dishtowel and pushes away from the counter. “Don't mention it,” he says as he crosses the room, like Eddie is in any way capable of doing that. “I'll help, okay? Whatever he needs, count me in, just—don't forget to take care of yourself too.”

And he stops behind Eddie's chair, then, his fingers landing with practiced ease at the spot between Eddie's shoulder and neck, right where he carries his tension.

Eddie's helpless against his touch. He melts as soon as Buck increases the pressure, curling his lips in to hold in a sigh of relief that verges on inappropriate.

“I am,” he says, because he is. He thinks.

“You're in the group for you,” Buck says, slowly rubbing the back of Eddie's neck. Eddie's entire body breaks out in goosebumps that Buck must be able to feel, but he gives no indication of it. “To work on your relationship with yourself. You're not trying to get out of that now, right?”

That's—God, Buck's evil. He knows exactly how to make Eddie putty in his hands, and then he asks this.

“Maybe a little bit,” Eddie replies, the truth, because there are things he's hiding from. He's still trying very hard to outrun his feelings for Buck whenever someone in the group brings them up. “But I think,” he tilts his head back then, opens his eyes so they're looking at each other, “I think I'm also there so I can build some kind of relationship to the—the community.”

He bites his lip when he stutters, irrationally embarrassed about still struggling to think himself part of something. “And Aiden's, you know. We have something in common, and he's so f*cking brave about it all, so I just want to make it easier on him.”

Buck squeezes Eddie's nape, runs a quick hand up into his hair, and then—God, then he holds Eddie's face in one of his palms, smiles at him upside down. He only lingers for a moment, a ghost of a touch, but Eddie shivers with it anyway, that and the look in Buck's eyes, gentle enough to stop Eddie's breath in his chest.

“Do you have any idea,” Buck starts, and Eddie licks his lips on instinct, nervous to hear the rest of the sentence—

And then Aiden ducks back into the room.

“Okay,” he says, his bloodied hoodie slung over his shoulder, “I'm good.”

Eddie looks at him, breaking away from the soft blue of Buck's eyes. His heart is beating all the way up in his throat.

Aiden blinks, slow, his forehead creasing into a frown as he actually takes in the two of them, Eddie leaning back, Buck so close Eddie can feel the heat radiating off him. Eddie's reminded uncomfortably of their conversation in the McDonald's, Aiden asking after his house husband, the way Eddie said it, final: I don't have him.

“Alright,” Buck says, squeezing Eddie's shoulders. His voice is light, different to just a second ago. “Let me show you Eddie's idea of an organized fridge.”

Immediately, Aiden's teeth poke out in a grin.

“I created a monster,” Eddie says, but neither of them hear him, too busy making fun of his little tupperware full of stray cheese singles.

“Are you okay to get out here?” Bobby asks, peering out through the windshield. “Do you need me to go around the building?”

“No, no, here's perfect,” Eddie replies, taking off his seatbelt. They're idling just off the front entrance to the Center, the same way he came in for his very first session. The flags are rippling in the wind, raised as high as ever, and someone's painted the slats on one of the benches in the colors of the rainbow. “Thank you so much for this.”

Bobby turns down the radio. “Anytime, Eddie,” he says, and when Eddie looks up at him, he's smiling one of those quiet, intense smiles.

“No, Bobby, don't—”

“I'm proud of you,” Bobby says, so earnest Eddie has to avert his eyes, landing instead on a group of people sitting in the grass outside. “You made me listen, now I'm making you listen. That's how this relationship works.”

“Is it,” Eddie huffs. He almost shakes with how badly he wants to cross his arms, just to keep Bobby's words away from that soft place they always manage to hit, but Frank has this look he gives Eddie when he crosses his arms during therapy, and he can almost see it floating in front of him.

He curls his fingers into the seat instead.

“It is now,” Bobby says. Going by his tone, he's probably grinning. Eddie watches the air vent instead of checking, knowing it's way too early for him to claim he's going to be late. Bobby's on his way to his own group a few streets away, taking a longer route than he normally would to drop Eddie off, so they set aside forty minutes for traffic that only ended up taking fifteen.

“I'm just gonna go sit in a room and talk to people,” Eddie says, shrugging.

“Mm,” Bobby says, still sounding amused. “And you, of all people, know how big of a deal that can be.”

Eddie tangles his fingers together, pinches the skin of his wrist for something to do, and suddenly remembers the way Aiden had done the same thing when he was trying to decide what to say.

“Bobby, look,” he starts, and then no other words come. It's—overwhelming, maybe, though it doesn't quite feel like the right word. A little too much, to be sitting here after everything Bobby's done for him, after everything they've said to each other. After Bobby got a little lost, too, and fought his way back with a tenacity that made Eddie feel like a fumbling little boy when he witnessed it.

“No, you look,” Bobby says, and Eddie hears it for the request it is. He raises his head, looks Bobby in the eye, finds nothing but kindness there. “When's the last time someone told you they were proud of you?”

Eddie opens his mouth.

“Buck doesn't count,” Bobby gets in before he can say anything. “You listen to him differently.”

“Bobby,” Eddie says, closing his eyes for just a second. He doesn't need to ask what he means about Buck, because it's—yeah. It's true. “I don't know, alright? Hen told me when she was helping me fill out the form for this, and then—maybe Frank, I'm not sure. It's been a while. Not like I'm doing anything revolutionary with my life these days.”

“You don't think so?” Bobby asks, fake light. Whoever's singing on his classic rock radio station quietly croons something about being alive, the voice fuzzy with static.

Another shrug. Eddie's right shoulder twinges, like some kind of f*cked up message from God. “I'm not a kid, you know? I don't need—I'm just getting my life together. It's nothing special.”

“Okay, well,” Bobby tilts his head, staring somewhere into the vicinity of Eddie's soul, “then I'm proud of you for doing nothing special. And for asking me to drive you. I heard you grinding your teeth on the phone.”

Eddie laughs a little, then. The Jeep is getting an oil change, and Buck took the truck to pick up Christopher after his half day and take him to the zoo as a surprise. Eddie was left to Uber or ask someone for a ride, and he knows what he'd expected himself to choose, so he's not really sure how it is that he ended up in Bobby's passenger seat.

“It's good to see you so much happier, Eddie,” Bobby says, smiling with his eyes. “That's all.”

And Eddie's not going to do something ridiculous like cry all over Bobby, because he's past those few weeks when every single thing made him tear up, decades of suppressed emotion clamoring to come to the surface, but that doesn't change the fact that the back of his throat stings.

“Probably wouldn't be here without you,” he says, blinks away to regain his composure, and catches Max walking around the side of the building from the parking lot, his shiny leather messenger bag gleaming in the sun.

It's true, and he's already told Bobby as much, but it overwhelms him sometimes. Where he might have been now if Bobby cared just a little less.

“Don't know that either of us would be here without each other,” Bobby replies, and when Eddie looks back at him, he's looking out through the windshield, one of his hands curled around the steering wheel. “Maybe that's the point of it all.”

“Hey Bobby,” Eddie says, and suddenly finds himself smiling. “I'm proud of you, too.”

Bobby laughs in response, and it settles into a grin as he reaches out to squeeze Eddie's shoulder.

“Get out of here.”

“Copy that,” Eddie smiles back, finally tripping out onto the pavement.

He stands there for a while, watching Bobby merge back into traffic and take the next turn, a hand over his forehead to shield his eyes from the sun.

As if on cue, Eddie's phone buzzes in his back pocket. He already knows what the text is, but he pulls it out anyway, opens his thread with Buck that's already full of zoo pictures. More come through every half an hour or so when they sit down to rest, Christopher grinning in front of the addaxes or holding an ice cream cone that's melted halfway down his arm, a couple of selfies of both of them with their faces squished together to fit in the frame, squinting at the sun.

The last message, though, is a text. The same thing Buck sends every week about ten minutes before group starts, just in case Eddie ever forgets: proud of you :)

“You do know you're not supposed to check your phone,” Cyril says, leaning back on his elbows.

They're settled on crumpled blankets in the patch of grass behind the Center that Mahit generously calls a garden, enduring the heat in the looming shadow of the building because the AC in their usual room is, apparently, broken. Eddie kind of likes it, enjoys the air on his face and being able to look up at the blue overhead instead of the usual pockmarked ceiling, but it does make him a little less—focused.

“We're basically done anyway,” Sandro says, lying with their head in Leon's lap.

“We are?” Aiden asks. “I thought we were still bullying Eddie about self-compassion.”

Mahit tuts around a smile. “We don't bully anybody here,” he says, but he can't even keep the frown on his face for two seconds. Eddie's noticed that Aiden kind of has that effect on all of them. “But yes. I don't think we were quite done.”

Eddie spends another second looking at the newest picture of Christopher in the gift shop that Buck sent, then locks his phone. His own face stares back at him in the shiny screen, a tight wrinkle in the corner of his mouth.

“I don't have anything else to say,” he tells the sky.

“We can work with what you already said,” Mahit replies, smiling a little. He squints like he's trying to remember Eddie's exact words; he doesn't take notes, which is a pleasant change from Frank, but it also gets Eddie into situations like this. He forgets that he's technically in therapy, and says something off the cuff that's meant to be a f*cking joke, and then they're suddenly all looking at him. “You said that you feel like you don't belong here sometimes. That's not a small thing.”

Eddie sighs. He crosses his legs, sits up straighter, but that just makes his back hurt.

“I mean,” he starts, picking at the shorn grass, “yeah? You're all just—I mean, Leon, you were just talking about protesting Reagan.”

“Long may he rot,” Leon says, raising his water bottle. Cliff reaches over and taps his can of co*ke against it.

“And all of you have—” he cuts himself off, trying to shape the loose thoughts pooling on his tongue into words. He does feel like belongs, most of the time. He feels it in all the moments he's struggling to explain something only to look up and realize everyone in the room knows the feeling; feels it when he accidentally calls himself too gay for something and realizes it gives him a little thrill to say it, when he spots a rainbow pin on a stranger's backpack in the produce aisle and shares a smile with them, when Sandro pulls him in and gives him a messy kiss on the cheek. There's something infinitely comforting about being able to look around and know that these are, in one way or another, his people. That he belongs with them, and did before he ever knew.

But it's been eating at him in the quiet moments, now that he doesn't hate himself for just existing, this feeling of being undeserving.

“I just feel a little pathetic when I look at all of you and think of all the times people have called me brave, you know?”

Eddie, somehow, finds it much easier to run into a burning building than to look at himself in the mirror without flinching, even now. Those moments, when he can barely stand up straight and think the words, I'm gay, when he takes his place in this circle of people who have all lost so much, sacrificed so much just to be who they are—

Yeah, of course he doesn't f*cking belong.

“I don't think I've even officially come out at work,” he goes on when none of them say anything, his mouth full of too many words for someone who has nothing to say. “I haven't—sometimes I feel like I don't deserve it.”

“Deserve what?” Mahit asks.

“To be here,” Eddie says, watching a bug climb over his knee. There's something solid and heavy sitting at the base of his throat. “It feels like I haven't earned it.”

“Like you haven't suffered for it,” Mahit supplies, the exact right words. Eddie nods.

In Eddie's periphery, Cyril gets off his elbows and sits up. “You know that's a good thing though, right?” he asks, his head tilted so far to the side it's almost resting on his shoulder. “Like—my entire town found out and I got the sh*t beat out of me—”

“I know,” Eddie says, and his face feels like it's burning.

“But that doesn't mean I want you to get the sh*t beat out of you too just so you know what it's like,” Cyril finishes. He raises an eyebrow, the one cut in half by a scar. His eyes are uncharacteristically gentle, and Eddie feels like dirt.

“I didn't mean,” he shakes his head. “I know you're not like—sitting around wishing ill on me, or whatever.”

But he thinks about it anyway, the younger Eddie he doesn't really like to remember, the one who hid and hid and hid - from others, and then from himself. Who never got in a fight because he backed down, looked away, kept walking, didn't want to show up at home with bloody knuckles or a busted face. That Eddie kissed Shannon behind the bleachers junior year, and one too many people saw them, and it made him feel both proud and ashamed, too big for his skin.

“If it's not us,” Mahit says, in that careful voice like Eddie's spun glass, “then who's telling you you have to suffer to belong with us? Why do you think you feel that way?”

“And who the f*ck is telling you you haven't suffered?” Aiden asks. Eddie's surprised enough to hear him speak that he raises his head, finds Aiden staring at him with a wild frown on his face. Mahit looks like he might want to chide him for interrupting, but then his expression softens, and he stays quiet.

“I guess,” Eddie says, swallows, finds his mouth bone-dry, “I guess just—me.”

But it's true, isn't it? Sandro and Leon lost everyone they knew when they were young. Cliff grew up small-town-religious, the son of a pastor, and is grieving a husband he took forty years to find. Max spent his whole life denying who he was, only to have his entire friend group call him confused and a traitor after he came out to them. Mahit hasn't spoken to his parents since he ran away from the woman he was supposed to marry. And Aiden gave up everything, everything, just to live true to himself.

And Eddie—what the f*ck has Eddie done? Lied. Run. Denied himself until he was worn so thin the truth broke free on its own.

"You know they broke this bone,” Cyril says, tapping the arch of his eyebrow. “Right here. It f*cking hurt, but it didn't hurt as bad as forcing myself to hide who I was. I could take the fists,” he shrugs. “The other thing, not so much.”

“I remember being your age,” Cliff says as he leans forward, an echo of the first time they met each other. “I had my big shot job out in New York, and I brought this girl I was dating home for Thanksgiving, and my mama pulled me into the kitchen halfway through dinner and asked me what I was doing leading on a girl I didn't love.”

Eddie's breath stutters a little around the familiarity of that story.

“And that feeling—there's nothing else like it, you know? You can't tell your own mother that you're doing it for her, so you don't break her heart, because you'll break her heart anyway. I knew she'd never understand, and I never told her. But it's always there, always with you, wishing you knew how to stop biting your tongue, and it hurts.”

He's still smiling a little, somehow, when he tilts his head and stares all the way into Eddie's soul.

“You're telling me you haven't felt that pain, Eddie?”

Eddie opens his mouth to say—he's not sure what. That it's different? That he buried it so well he didn't even know? That he cut part of himself away and cauterized the wound so he could breathe and feel and exist around it, ignore the dead spot in the middle of his chest where something used to be?

He wants to tell Cliff that he didn't feel it, not until recently, for the few weeks that he's been toying with the thought now that he actually speaks to his parents on the phone from time to time. Now that his dad asks how Eddie is and actually listens, now that his mother audibly swallows back the ends of her sentences. He's considered telling them; asking for the one thing they weren't willing to give him when he was a kid. He wants to take a breath and put the phone on speaker and squeeze Buck's hand tight and say it: see me. Know me.

So now, maybe, now he knows the pain of wishing he were just a little braver at every turn. How much it hurts to finally know who you are and have to make yourself hold steady, not flinch from the truth of it. It's the exact thing he's trying to get them to see: that they've been living with it for much longer than he has.

“It's not the same,” is what he ends up saying out loud. His voice sounds scraped raw.

“How so?” Mahit asks, tilting his head. Eddie still hasn't and never will understand how he makes himself sound so free of judgment.

“Just isn't,” Eddie says, and closes his eyes. It's easier that way to parse through the noise in his head, to focus on his breathing, which is getting dangerously shallow. “I—I lied. I married a woman, and I watched guys get discharged from the f*cking Army because someone found them out and I just sat there and—you can't tell me that's the same thing. I've been a coward my entire life.”

Without a word, Max scoots over from his blanket onto Eddie's, until the round points of their shoulders and the tips of their shoes are touching.

“Do you know when I first knew that I was a boy?” he asks, quiet, like it's just for the two of them.

Eddie shakes his head.

“I don't remember,” Max says. “I don't remember having a moment. I don't remember anything changing between when I was five and ten and fifteen, you know? For years I just whiteknuckled my way through life, and everything about it was wrong, but I buried the wrongness over and over and over until it boiled over and nearly killed me.”

Slowly, methodically, Eddie exhales. He leans into the points of contact, and tries to remind himself where he is. That he's sitting on the ground, that the breeze is still on his face. He's present, and breathing.

“I was lying, right?” Max asks. “I lied to my parents, I lied to my husband and kids. A good thirty years of lies.”

“I mean,” Eddie says, curling his hands into fists so they don't shake, desperate for something he can't name, “I don't think it's lying when—you had to, right? It wasn't safe.”

Max smiles, a heavy thing that pulls the corners of his mouth right back down.

“Were you safe?”

“Was I—” Eddie blinks. He remembers, again, those jagged edges he worked so hard to smooth out. The fear he swallowed to coat them over in the meantime, thick like honey; dulling the edges, helping him forget. “Was I safe?”

“Yes, Eddie,” Mahit says, elbows on his knees, watching Eddie without blinking. “The environment in which you grew up - was it a safe environment for exploring your sexuality? Was it safe to be a gay kid in El Paso in the early aughts?”

And the first thing Eddie thinks is, it wasn't even safe for me to be a kid. He was an honorary man as soon as he could walk; an official one from the age of ten. Raised to stand up straight, work hard, be honest, but his parents were only ever looking for a specific brand of honesty.

Was it—Christ, was it safe?

“One day, hopefully,” Mahit continues, “it will be safe, for everyone. I'd like to imagine we'll leave a world in which the generations that come after us can be stupid and hormonal in whatever way they like.” Aiden makes an indignant noise behind him, but it's half-hearted at best. There's a hush, a heaviness draped over all of them that wasn't there just a minute ago, Eddie's fault.

“But when you're a child,” Mahit says, “even if you're never told that gay people go to hell, even if it's just stupid jokes or people insinuating things or the fact that you never see people like you anywhere - it leaves a mark, Eddie. You don't realize what the world is doing to you until long after it's already done.”

There's a strange taste on the back of Eddie's tongue. When he closes his eyes, it takes him right back to long Sunday afternoons growing up, eating out on the deck if the weather was nice, neighbors or extended family or his father, if he was home, asking questions for which the answers were rehearsed. The things he'd kept back - they tasted like this.

And Eddie knows it now, familiar because he finally let it catch up to him not too long ago. Thinking about it, it doesn't taste like honey at all; it's bitter, crumbling on his tongue, stuck to the back of his throat: afraid afraid afraid.

Afraid of the kids on the baseball team, all of them his friends, who'd hoot and holler in the showers after practice, chasing each other with wet towels. Afraid of the tight set of his mother's mouth when Sophia asked for permission to date before Eddie ever brought a girl home. Afraid of Rafael from a few houses over, who came back from college in Austin for one Christmas, and then never again.

Afraid of homecoming and the sweaty hands and the back thumping the next day, the bases that were clear on the baseball field but confusing off it, afraid of the way it felt to kiss Shannon, warm and comfortable.

Afraid, all his life. He must have come out of the womb eyes covered and trembling.

“So don't—don't put blame on yourself,” Mahit says, and his voice wavers a little for the first time Eddie can remember. “Not like this. You're not a coward for only seeing the choices you were given.”

“It happens that way for all of us,” Leon says. “I mean—look at me now, and I used to be married too.”

Eddie shakes his head, fast enough to make him a little dizzy.

“I loved my wife,” he says, because it still aches and always will. There's a stutter in his breathing that he feels sometimes when he thinks about her, like the air snagging on the worn spot on the underside of his ribs, where he used to keep everything he felt for her.

It used to be him and Shannon against the world, once upon a time. They'd spend long afternoons at Janet's house, in Shannon's room with the door closed because Janet never cared about that sort of thing, the window cracked open, listening to music. They'd curl up in her little bed, and she'd trace her finger along the ceiling in lines and swirls, mapping out the roadtrip they were going to take the summer before she started college. She'd always smell like her apple shampoo and that perfume he got her for her birthday, the one that damn near cost him half a summer's wage.

Shannon was safety and silence, love and warmth, fun. The two of them against the world, until they let the world in. Until the ring pressed into his hand, still warm from where his mother had been worrying it; until the look his abuela gave him the night before the wedding with Shannon's dressed pooled pale in her lap, letting out the seams so it wouldn't pull so taut; until he was holding Shannon's hands, trembling as the good father bound them together, and looked up to kiss her only to see tears in her eyes.

Eddie went off to kill people - and heal them, where he was allowed - and she crumpled under all the pressure he left her to shoulder like anyone would.

But the running. The running.

Eddie used to think he understood. It was simple: he'd just failed at being the kind of man his father wanted him to be, steadfast and unwavering. The responsibility had been too much for someone as weak as him to handle, and of the many things he could never do right, providing for his family turned out to be at the very top of the list. It made perfect sense, but then—

Shannon kissed him, the night before he re-enlisted, like she hadn't kissed him since they were kids. Like she was chasing the magic both of them had long given up on recapturing, searching for it somewhere behind Eddie's teeth, hoping it would erase all the words they'd been firing at each other.

“Why can't you stay?” she'd asked, barely a whisper, holding Eddie's face in her hands, and the way she dug her fingers in broke something inside him that never healed again.

He made all the wrong choices. Frank has talked through the thought process with him at least three times, and Eddie has tried even more times than that to make him understand that this is one thing he'll never quite forgive himself for, but—the running.

Eddie's in love with Buck. He's only handling it just so, and what they've gone through together is the dictionary definition of complicated.

But he has never, never wanted to run from any of it.

He can only see it in retrospect, feels indescribably dirty admitting it, but he thinks that was what he might have been so, so afraid of on that summer night all those years ago: that this was all the love he was ever going to be able to give.

Still: “I loved her,” he says, and breathes around the lump in his throat, the memory of seeing Shannon's eyes close for the last time with the last remnants of their life together unraveled at his feet. “And I—I miss her, God.”

“I loved mine, too,” Leon smiles, lifting his sunglasses off his nose. “Before I broke her heart, she was the best friend I'd ever had.”

Eddie nods. “But,” he wipes at his eyes with clumsy fingers, and Cyril passes over the tissue box they always have on hand, “this is something different, isn't it. God, I—she's gone, but I don't want that for her. To have loved me, when I couldn't have—”

“You didn't know that you couldn't,” Cliff breaks in, his usual booming voice dialed back. “Just like you didn't choose to realize you were gay in your thirties. It's like Mahit said.”

“You're not a coward for that,” Mahit says, again, like Eddie will find it any less unbelievable the second time around. “Especially not to any of us. You have a story like all of us have a story, and we all come from pain, because the world likes to makes us cut off parts of ourselves to fit into their little boxes.” He smiles, then; it's not the usual infectious grin, but something softer that snags and pulls somewhere behind Eddie's navel. “That's why we're here. To regrow them.”

Carefully, carefully, Eddie uncurls his hands. His palms are dotted with dark red indents made by his nails, slow to fade as Eddie watches.

“Eddie,” Sandro says, in a tone that demands Eddie look up at them. “You belong here.”

Eddie's suddenly exhausted, because—how can he? How can he deserve something this good?

“I mean,” Cyril shrugs, the tips of his fingers green from where he's been pulling up the grass, “you've spent most of your life trying to be what other people wanted you to be, right?”

“I guess,” Eddie frowns.

“Well, we don't want you to be anything,” Mahit says.

Sandro nods. “That's the whole goddamn point, honey.”

“And,” Aiden leans forward, determined as Eddie opens his mouth to say something, to tell them there has to be a difference between him and them, “being out or loud about it isn't what makes you queer.”

Eddie feels his own mouth twist. He's only just gotten used to hearing that word with a positive connotation, and Aiden - who's twenty, who's been going life on his own for years already - is just watching him, intense but guileless, like that's the truth. LIke he looks at Eddie and doesn't see a liar.

“Existing does,” he says, pointing a finger at Eddie like Eddie has caught himself doing to him a few times. “That's all you're gonna do. Just be. Take a f*cking breather. You're gay.”

“I'm gay,” Eddie repeats, the words zinging down his spine still, even after months.

“It's easier to say than it used to be, right?” Leon asks. “It's easier to live it.”

Eddie bites his lip. Thinks about how close he was to asking his parents to talk, the last couple of times they caught up; thinks about sitting Christopher down in the kitchen the other week while Buck moved around them making dinner - nervous, but his voice didn't shake.

Chris had given him a hug, had said “that's really cool”, had told Eddie about his classmate Benji with the two dads. He didn't pick up on any of the pain, decades of it, and Eddie had thought he'd just managed to hide it well, but maybe—maybe it's that he's been leaving the pain behind, little by little. That he can say I'm gay and meant it not as an apology, not as an explanation, just a fact. Something he'll be proud of, one of these days.

Buck, as if he was standing around the corner somewhere listening in, sends another set of pictures. Eddie tries to wait until Mahit officially declares the session over to open the message, but he's still shaking a little, wobbly enough that nobody will point it out again, hopefully.

The picture on the top of the stack is one Chris must have taken, of Buck standing some ways away from the giraffe exhibit and pretending to hold one of the giraffes up in the palm of his hand. The angle's terrible, and his eyes are squinted almost all the way shut because he's standing facing the sun.

For the first time in a minute, Eddie feels like he can breathe.