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They manage to avoid each other for a little over a year.
It’s a miracle they haven’t run into each other before, considering they both still hang out with Eddie regularly. Still, time goes on and they don’t cross paths, neither on calls nor at the coffee shops they both like.
A life without Evan Buckley is an incredibly dull one, one that Tommy takes a while getting used to again. He pours himself into his work to take his mind off that night. Months later, he still finds himself looking at passing firetrucks, hoping to catch a glimpse of a blonde head of curls through one of the windows. His heart races when he hears a laugh that sounds too familiar, only to turn around and meet a stranger’s eyes.
But a life alone is a safe one. He’s only ever been disappointed, and he’s always had the strength to get back up. He’s not sure he’d have had the strength to go on if Buck had played with his heart.
(The way he did, he reminds himself. Buck’s eyes follow him everywhere. He can’t wash the betrayal from his skin.)
Christopher’s coming home celebration looks a lot like his 14th birthday party, if not for the amount of people present to welcome him back and the overall atmosphere, like spring after a long, harsh winter. Eddie is happy. There’s a smile on everyone’s faces. It feels good to be surrounded with unrestrained joy for once.
And then he sees him, and his world collapses all over again.
Because Buck looks good. He laughs at a joke Tommy couldn’t hear from the other side of the room and his whole face lights up like streetlights illuminating the stormy night that’s been Tommy’s life until now. He wants to retreat with the excuse to get more cake, his plate still half-full, but Buck looks up, looks at him, and his smile falters.
Over the sounds of the music and chatter combined, there is nothing but the silence between them and the frantic beating of Tommy’s heart in his own ears. They’re as far apart as they can be in Eddie’s living room, yet the pull is still there, the instinctive urge to step closer, to reach out, to touch again. Buck’s mouth is ajar, his lips are pink, there’s icing at the corners, and Tommy clenches his jaw against the memories of those same lips against his own, tracing his skin, his for the taking.
He blinks, inhales sharply, and blinks again, as though trying to convince himself he’s imagining Buck’s presence at his best friend’s party. Then he breaks the contact between them, looks down, away. Takes one step back, then two, collides with another guest. With a muttered apology, he walks out of the house.
(A familiar scene, a movie he knows the ending to all too well. He always runs away in the end.)
His phone chimes a week later. He digs into his duffel bag to get it and congratulates himself when it doesn’t slip from his grasp at the sight of Buck’s name on the screen. He never deleted his number.
They meet up in front of a coffee shop they curtly agree to beforehand. Tommy holds the door for Buck on the way in and Buck orders Tommy’s coffee for him. They sit outside, where the sun is shrouded by heavy grey clouds. It’s silent between them. What’s there to say? Too much for two simple cups of coffee.
The pleasantries they exchange feel unnatural. Tommy wants to ask if Buck misses him, if he kept his hoodies the way Tommy kept his shirts, if he wishes things had gone differently, if he’s managed to give a chance to anybody else. He lost the right to ask these questions the moment he walked out of the loft, so he holds his tongue. Puts on a tight smile and nods, comments on the weather, on the calls he’s been on last week, on Christopher’s return in California. The breakup hangs over their heads like a guillotine that neither of them addresses.
Despite the awkwardness, they see each other again the following week, then the one after that. Between a word and the next, the blade inches ever closer to their necks.
Eddie invites him over for a boys’ night and Buck’s there, sitting on the couch with a beer pinched between his fingers. It’s weird, being together again after all this time, all three of them. Sometimes, Tommy forgets that, before Buck, there was Eddie; that, before the heartbreak, there were moments like these, with the three of them at Eddie’s place, drinking and talking and laughing.
Traces of their old dynamic come back in Buck’s rambling and Eddie’s friendly mockery, in the way Eddie pats Tommy’s back and Buck tentatively smiles at him after a joke. There’s a long way to go before their interactions can be considered anywhere near normal, but it’s a nice start. Baby steps.
It becomes a thing whenever their schedules align. Tommy’s glad he’s got this again, something to look forward to that doesn’t have anything to do with work or the comfort of his bed. He’s glad he gets to have it at all. Tommy feels the sharp edge of the guillotine about to draw blood whenever he looks at Buck and finds him looking back.
He doubts he’s got anything left to bleed. Yet, when Buck’s fingers graze his over the neck of a bottle, the barely-healed wound in his chest opens right up again, spills its content all over his ribs. He looks away, feels Buck’s eyes remain firmly planted on him for a few seconds more before their weight disappears and a new conversation is promptly started.
Sleep evades him more and more. Buck’s shirts have stopped smelling like him months ago, yet Tommy still holds onto the one on the pillow next to the one his head is propped onto. Buck’s side of the bed has been cold for a year. Tommy still makes sure to keep it clean and neat, like the ghost of him might come back to warm him up at night. He’s always alone when he wakes up.
They text each other once in a while. Meaningless little things, Buck sending pictures of dogs he meets on calls, Tommy sending back articles he thinks might interest the other. If he scrolled up just a little, he’d see the last messages they sent each other, Buck’s invitation to come over with a red heart emoji. He resolutely doesn’t look back at these messages. His fingers shake with the desire to do it anyway.
He’s terrified. For all his bravado, he’s always been this scared little thing, cowering in a corner, waiting for the inevitable kick of a boot, flinching at the hands reaching for him, whether they mean to help or hurt him. He’s been damaged beyond repair, long before Buck came into his life. The loss of him has shattered what little pieces of him remained intact, and his return makes Tommy want to bolt, to book tickets right out of LA and never look back.
Because he still gets butterflies when Buck laughs. He still stares a little too long at Buck’s lips when he smiles. He still itches to touch the birth mark on his brow. Because, a year or so after Tommy broke both their hearts, he’s still irrevocably in love with Evan Buckley.
And it’s scary, how naturally it comes to him after all this time, like coming home after being away, like breathing after months of keeping his head under water. It’s scary, finally acknowledging how deeply Buck has changed him in only six months of dating, in such a way that being separated from him only leaves him with a gaping hole in his chest that no amount of time could ever fill.
Christopher’s having a sleepover and Eddie goes to Buck’s loft to give his kid some room. An invitation is extended to Tommy. He accepts, of course, because he enjoys spending time with the two men.
He stands in front of the door for a long time before he has the courage to knock. Buck opens the door and Tommy remembers a time when he’d have walked in and kissed him on the cheek, made himself comfortable in his partner’s space. Tonight, he waits for Buck to step aside so he can come in and ignore the gaze he feels burning his neck as he puts the pack of beers on the countertop.
It’s a nice evening, one that ends all too quickly when Eddie yawns and announces he’s going back home. Then he’s gone, and Tommy’s alone with Buck for the first time in over a year.
The exit calls to him. It’d be so easy to pretend he’s got somewhere to be, that he’s got an early shift in the morning. It’d be so easy to run again.
Except Buck takes another beer from the pack and hands it to him, hope oozing from the tight edges of his face, and Tommy doesn’t control the hand that accepts the silent offer, doesn’t think when he sits at the table. Buck steps behind the kitchen island and leans against it, slowly sipping from his own drink.
And it’s silent again, though only for a heavy few seconds before Buck takes a deep breath and deals a lethal blow to Tommy’s already fragile heart.
“Is it because I wasn’t good enough?” he asks, his voice small, and Tommy has half a mind to fall to his knees and crawl, to grab onto Buck’s legs and weep, because there’s nothing quite as heartbreaking as seeing Buck blame himself for something that was entirely out of his control.
“Buck–”
“Don’t.” Tommy’s mouth snaps shut. Buck’s hand, raised in front of him to keep him quiet, shakes ever so slightly. He closes his eyes. There’s pain written all over his expression. Tommy hates that he’s the sole reason for it. “You don’t call me that.” Then, quietly, pleadingly: “Not you.”
God, how Tommy wants to say his name. Evan, Evan, Evan. Tongue twitching in his mouth, muscle memory begging for the word to be spelled out, to be uttered like a prayer in the dim lights of the loft. But Tommy stays quiet, and Buck takes that silence, this moment of stillness between them, as an invitation to pour his heart out; the guillotine’s blade comes down and Tommy is powerless to stop it, so he listens.
“You said you were my first, but not my last,” Buck starts, an ounce of caution in his words, as if he’s carefully picking them out as to not hurt the other, and Tommy’s heart breaks a little more, each piece begging for Buck to hurt him, to give him what he deserves, to finish him off and leave him for dead the way Tommy did to him months ago. But Buck doesn’t do that. No, Buck’s body is trembling, tears glisten in his eyes, but he remains calm, as calm as he can be. “But you were. My last. There couldn’t be anyone after you.”
Buck was Tommy’s last, too. Others had shown interest, after, but he’d brushed them all off. There was no after Buck, only an endless limbo, an in-between, a space between Buck and his absence. No one would ever fit the part of Tommy he’d carved himself into.
He should say something back, something like I missed you and I’m sorry, but he sits there, quiet, his words stuck in his throat under a sob that’s crawling its way under his tongue. When he looks up at Buck again, there’s anger etched in the tight lines of his face. Tommy wishes he still had the right to smooth these lines away with his thumb, to kiss the worry and frustration and hurt from his skin.
He can’t, so he inhales, leans back against the chair, and waits for the coup de grâce.
“I hate you.” Sharp words that sound foreign coming from Buck’s lips. There’s a tremor in his voice and he falls a little, tears digging into his cheeks, something akin to desperation in his eyes. “But I love you. I never stopped.”
The remains of Tommy’s heart scream and wail, I love you, I love you, I love you, the words like a song in the cavity of his chest, both an echo of Buck’s words and a confession of his own. Blood pumps in his ears to the rhythm of the tears drumming against his thighs as they curl off the edge of his chin.
Buck is quiet, now, waiting for an answer, and Tommy is frozen in place by fear. The same fear that got the best of him and ruined the one good thing he had. The same fear he allowed to take everything from him.
He opens his mouth, he’s ready to say something, after a year of silence, he’s ready to explain himself, maybe to beg for forgiveness, he’s not sure of it himself. But he can’t stay quiet anymore, can’t swallow the words that weigh heavy on his shoulders.
“ Evan… ”
It comes out as a whisper, distorted by a raw sob that claws its way to freedom, and it’s not what he meant to say, but it’s all Evan needs. It’s all he needs because, from one second to the next, he’s standing right next to Tommy, the closest they’ve been since they met again, and his face is wet from his tears and contorted with the effort to bite back his own cries, and he’s never been so beautiful.
His hands are clenched into fists at his sides and he speaks again, despair dripping from each word like Evan’s filled to the brim with it.
“Say it back,” he says, with an uptilt to his voice that suggests it’s a question. He clears his throat and starts again, this time with more confidence; no longer asking, but rather demanding. “Say you love me too, Tommy.”
It sounds so simple when Evan says it, as if voicing these words wouldn’t destroy what little life Tommy has left in him. He’s said it all before, in the small touches and deeper, harder ones, in the caring gestures and dates that ended in long nights of listening to Evan talk. He’s said it all before, yet actually saying it has dread pooling in his stomach, threatening to have him retching
Long fingers find his wrist and he looks up again. Evan is closer now, as close as he can be without straddling him on the chair. He looks pitiful.
“ Please.”
And the dam breaks.
“I love you,” Tommy chokes out, surprised when the confession doesn’t come with blood. Evan’s breath hitches and Tommy sighs, a long exhale that’s both relieved and dejected. “I always did, Evan, I just–”
“You were scared,” Evan finishes for him, and Tommy can only nod. The fingers on his skin are shaking, but they don’t let go. “You hurt me.”
“I know.” It’d be so easy to pull him the rest of the way against him, to hold him close and never let go, never again, but Tommy simply turns his palm up so he can trace Evan’s with his own fingertips. When Evan doesn’t shy away from the touch, he goes on. “I’m so sorry.”
“I know,” Evan echoes, and the acceptance in his voice causes something to settle in Tommy’s chest. It’s small, inconsequential, but it’s there, lodged somewhere between two ribs. “I don’t think I can forgive you.”
“You don’t have to.” He doesn’t deserve forgiveness, no matter how much he wants to kneel and beg for it.
But Evan has always been a merciful man, more than Tommy’s ever been deserving of.
“I can’t forgive you yet.” A pause, then, hesitantly: “But if– if we tried again–”
“Yes.” The word is out of Tommy’s mouth before he can even think of quelling it. He doesn’t think he had any intention to do so. As soon as Evan puts the offer on the table, Tommy throws himself at it, body and soul: sits at the edge of the chair, takes Evan’s other hand in his own and looks up like a believer to the cross. “God, please–”
“If we tried again,” Evan starts again, so calm in contrast to Tommy’s fervour, yet still trembling, still so insecure, so hurt . But he’s so brave, much braver than Tommy’s ever been, so he keeps going. “We’ll take it slow.” Tommy nods. Slow is good. He can go through the whole courting phase all over again, learn every single inch of Evan’s body and mind again and again and again until he can rebuild him by heart. “And we’ll communicate. When you’re scared– you tell me. We talk. You don’t just– dump me.”
“I won’t.” He’ll be caught dead before he makes the same mistake again. “I’ll tell you. I promise.” His word isn’t worth much after everything, but Evan, sweet Evan, takes it in stride. Allows a smile to curl his lips at the corners. The blade stuck in Tommy’s throat gently slides out.
“Good.”
There’s another silence between them and, while it’s not comfortable, it’s miles from the tension that had been hanging around them like a shadow beforehand. They hold each other’s hands, fingers soothingly rubbing against calloused skin, and simply take each other in, eyes never straying from the other’s. Like this, wet with tears and snot, face red and eyes puffy, curls in a mess and pink lips stretched into a shy smile, Evan is the most breathtaking sight Tommy’s ever had the chance to see, like seeing colour for the first time since he left him.
“So let’s try again.”