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“Buck.”
“Not now,” Buck says, holding his pen up in the air like it could stop Eddie coming closer. “I’m working.”
It’s almost nighttime. The last of the orange daylight is dallying on the windowsill, creeping out of the room, leaving Buck little more than a suggestion in the darkness. Even so, Eddie recognizes the familiar shape of his spine where he’s bent over his paper, curls falling into his forehead, nose almost touching the words he’s putting down.
It’s been half an hour since they last spoke, and Eddie misses him.
“What number draft is this?” he asks, approaching the couch anyway, grabbing the hand brandishing the pen by the wrist and pressing a kiss to Buck’s knuckles. “I feel like you’re in the double digits by now.”
He reaches over and turns the standing lamp on, blinking in the gentle light that spills around them. Buck slaps a hand over the legal pad in his lap, obscuring all but the occasional curly end of a letter.
“It may be fifteen,” he says, looking up at Eddie with the slightest suggestion of a pout. Eddie still hasn’t let go of his hand, so he uses that to his advantage and plucks the pen out of Buck’s grip to set it on the coffee table. “Or it may be in the low twenties, depending on when you start counting.”
Eddie’s heart does a stupid little flip in his chest, because he’s only one man, and it never does get less overwhelming to be loved so much.
“Do I want to know what that means?”
Buck sighs. He’s teetering right on the edge of genuinely annoyed, so Eddie keeps holding on to him, counting time away not in seconds but in the beats of Buck’s heart under his fingertips.
“I mean, I’ve been writing them for a few months, unofficially. I wrote a draft the morning after you proposed to me,” he says, his bottom lip caught between his teeth.
Eddie sinks down onto the armrest. “You wrote a draft of your wedding vows after we got home from a five-alarm fire?”
“I got proposed to in the middle of one!” Buck says, indignant. “So the timing is a you problem.”
“You made it a me problem when you stepped in a hole and fell three stories,” Eddie points out.
“Okay, by that logic it was the building manager who made it a you problem—“
“Oh my God,” Christopher says, the shadowy shape of him emerging from his room and heading straight for the kitchen. “Get married already.”
“I’m trying!” Buck yells after him, but the tension in his shoulders has broken, and he grins when he looks up at Eddie. “Your father is being difficult.”
“That’s a you problem,” Christopher mumbles, already on his way back with a packet of kale chips in his teeth. A few seconds later, his door closes with a bang.
“God, he’s right,” Buck sighs, leaning back into the couch, tipping his head back and exposing the long, ridiculously distracting line of his neck. “I have to deal with this for the rest of my life. I’m gonna put it in my vows, actually, do you know how to spell recalcitrant?”
He stretches forward to sit back up. Eddie, holding back a ridiculous laugh, puts a hand into the middle of his chest, pushing him backwards.
“You know,” he says, moving the pad off Buck’s lap without looking at it and replacing it with—well, himself, “we could just—“
“We are not doing generic vows,” Buck says, frowning wildly, but he still puts his hands on Eddie’s hips to steady him. “I can’t believe you would say that to me. Is this who I’m marrying? Is there still time for me to—“
Eddie kisses him and swallows the rest of the sentence. Buck makes the tiniest noise of protest, but he still leans in as always, his fingers sneaking under the hem of Eddie’s t-shirt.
“That’s not what I was going to say,” Eddie says, his lips brushing Buck’s with every word. As expected, Buck chases him when he pulls back, already kiss-drunk and disheveled and half-lidded. “I was going to say we could just go to bed, so I can demonstrate some perks of dealing with me for the rest of your life, but if you’re not interested…“
“Our kid is literally right over there,” Buck says, dragging Eddie back in by the back of his neck, kissing his cheekbone and the corner of his lips and the tip of his chin, because he knows exactly how to make Eddie putty in his hands. “And you’re just trying to distract me because you’re chronically competitive and you want to show up at the altar and somehow adlib the most romantic vows I’ve ever heard and then watch me stand there struggling to put two sentences together. I need to prepare, Eddie.”
“God, I love you,” Eddie laughs, running a thumb over the gentle curve of bone under his eye. “You don’t need to prepare. You just show up and marry me, and then we both win.”
Buck opens his mouth to protest. Before he can say anything, Eddie kisses him again, because that’s another thing that he just doesn’t get used to: the overwhelming rightness, the relief, the security that is Buck being close, on his lips, in his arms, in his bed.
And Eddie’s going to have him forever. In two weeks’ time, he’s going to go pick Christopher up from school and find the English teacher who’s always scoffing when he calls Buck his fiancé and blind her with his fucking wedding ring. In two weeks’ time, Bobby’s going to gift them their new uniforms with the names on as if they haven’t both seen them waiting, pride of place, on the shelf in his office.
In two weeks’ time, he’ll wake up and it’ll be a morning that looks just like any other, and that’s the best part.
“No, I need to prepare,” Buck says, pulling back, grinning because he’s just as competitive as Eddie is. His eyes look almost green in the lamplight. “But I could be persuaded to take a break. If you promise not to adlib your vows.”
“Kiss me for another ten minutes and you’ve got yourself a deal,” Eddie replies, and he’s barely done speaking before Buck is lunging forward, laughing, toppling him down onto the couch cushions.
*
Eddie doesn’t adlib his vows, exactly. He prepares ahead of time, but he doesn’t write them down, because memorizing things is needlessly stressful – and, as always, he only needs to look at Buck to find the words.
Everyone cries. Everyone cries more than they were expecting, to a point where people are discreetly blowing their noses in the silent moments. Bobby’s just—weeping where he’s standing behind Buck, and Eddie feels a little bad, but this is the last wedding he’s ever going to have, and he’s going to do it right.
So he promises the everyday: to dry and put away the dishes because Buck hates doing it, to open his mouth and talk when words are necessary, to share his fries, to run into every fire right at Buck’s heels. He promises to call a professional the next time he thinks he can fix the washing machine without help. He promises himself, for as long as there is air in his lungs. He promises what he’s been promising in every touch they’ve shared since the first time they kissed up against the cool metal of Eddie’s fridge: to have, to hold, and to never forget how close he came to not having this at all.
When it’s Buck’s turn, he wipes both hands over his face, getting rid of tears that are immediately replaced by new ones.
“Okay,” he says, red-eyed and beaming, and Eddie probably isn’t any better. “Okay, before I do this, I just want you to know that I love you, and I kept all the drafts I wrote, and they’re in a little pile on your nightstand at home so you can read every half-formed thought I’ve ever had about how lucky I am to get to share my life with you.”
He wipes away his tears. Eddie wipes away his tears. Everyone in Eddie’s line of sight dabs at their eyes.
“But, as you know, I was struggling with my vows. So I, uh. Outsourced them.”
Eddie blinks. A whisper goes through the small crowd gathered in front of them, and Eddie looks over Buck’s shoulder at Maddie, who raises her hands in innocence.
Buck pulls out a folded piece of paper from the inside pocket of his tux. His hands are shaking, blurring the backwards handwriting that shows up in the sun.
Buck clears his throat, and looks at Eddie with so much feeling in his eyes it makes Eddie dizzy.
“My name is Christopher Diaz,” he starts. Eddie immediately tries and fails to swallow a sob. He looks at Christopher, who is possibly the only dry-eyed person in the room and grinning as wide as Eddie has ever seen. “And I want you to get married faster so I can go have cake, so this is going to be short.”
Soft, surprised laughter ripples through the room. Chimney, the last holdout, finally puts a hand over his eyes.
“Dad, Buck makes you so happy that it’s annoying sometimes. He told me he’s bad with words, which is a lie because he always knows what to say, but he wants you to know that you make him so happy that he annoys himself sometimes too. Also aunt Maddie, she told me.”
Eddie dabs at his face with the underside of his ridiculously expensive sleeve, because he can’t even see what’s happening anymore. He reaches out a hand to Christopher, who’s standing right by his side, squeezes his shoulder, ruffles his hair, looking at him for a breath and then pulled right back to Buck, who is snotty and a little pink-cheeked and looks like a fucking dream.
“Buck said one time that he wasn’t going anywhere, and he hasn’t and he won’t, so if you don’t keep him, I will. Get married already, bye.”
A second of perfect, frozen silence, of Eddie looking at Buck and Buck looking back with this stunning, infinite light in his eyes.
Someone blows their noise.
“You’re twelve,” Eddie croaks at Christopher, and then everyone’s laughing, and they almost drop the rings between the two of them, shaking with the impossibility and the joy and the forever of it all.
Eddie doesn’t even remember being told they’re married, or that he can kiss Buck.
He just remembers doing it: their faces wet, the crease by Buck’s mouth sticky with drying tears, the kiss itself too slippery and still movie-perfect; his arms around Buck’s neck, Buck’s around his waist, and someone wolf-whistling to get them to break apart.
In front of the altar, at the reception, on the dance floor with Buck’s hand in his, Eddie’s heart is beating right on his tongue, beaching itself against his teeth because it wants to keep speaking, to split right open and drown everybody in all the things he doesn’t want to hold inside anymore.
He wants to scream it at the sky, to tell everyone who will listen: that he's realized there are things he needs, and wants, and deserves.
And they look a lot like twenty pages of vows on his bedside table, weighed down with his morning cup of coffee.