Archive of Our Own ^beta

Buck has known Eddie Diaz is attractive for approximately seven and a half years, give or take a few weeks he refuses to nail down because that would make him a person who keeps track of these things and he is not that person. He's not. He has simply been in possession of functioning eyeballs this entire time and Eddie has simply been in possession of a face and a body and an everything, and Buck has absorbed this information the same way he's absorbed other objective truths like "the sky is blue" and "Chimney cannot be trusted."

It's not a thing. It has never been a thing.

Eddie shoves Blue and it becomes a thing.

It happens fast. Buck says the nepo baby comment — which, in his defense, was hilarious and also accurate — and Blue's hands are on his chest before the last sarcastic syllable can roll off his tongue, shoving him backward hard enough to make him stumble. 

That in itself was fine. Buck's been shoved before. Buck's been shoved by people far more intimidating than a twenty-something-year-old with daddy issues. 

He can handle a shove.

What he cannot handle, apparently, is Eddie, who was already right beside him — who is always right beside him, has been right beside him for seven and a half goddamn years like it's his assigned post — seeing Buck stumble and putting both hands on Blue's chest, launching him backward so hard the kid's feet nearly left the ground.

There was no windup, no hesitation. Eddie didn't even have to close a gap because there was no gap to close. He was already there, every ounce of force directed into making Blue wish he'd kept his hands to himself.

Ryan stepped up because of course he did, because Buck insulted him first and now Eddie just ragdolled his brother across the staging area and these Nashville boys apparently operate on a shared defense system. 

So now it's Eddie squaring up against two guys, his shoulders set and his chin dropped, his voice hitting that basement-level register that makes the back of Buck's neck prickle.

"Don't fucking touch him."

Four words. Eddie doesn’t yell them. He doesn’t need to. He says them staring down both brothers like the math of two-on-one doesn't concern him even slightly, which — and Buck cannot stress this enough — is not helping the situation currently developing in his pants. 

Blue's got four inches on Eddie and Ryan's got the hometown advantage and Eddie looks like he'd take them both apart without breaking a sweat.

It probably would've gone further if Carl from Kenosha — bless his enormous, sportsmanship-loving heart — hadn't wedged himself between them with the urgency of a kindergarten teacher breaking up a sandbox fight. 

"Hey, hey, hey. C’mon guys. This is not the spirit of the games." And he's so sincere about it, so genuinely distressed that the sacred tradition of the American Firefighting Games is being sullied by interpersonal conflict, that everyone kind of has to stop. You can't keep posturing when a scrawny Midwesterner is looking at you with real disappointment in his eyes. It's like getting scolded by a golden retriever.

Eddie holds Ryan's stare for one more second before stepping back, and Ryan and Blue drift off to the other side of the staging area, putting as much distance as possible between themselves and Buck's own personal attack dog. Who is currently rolling his shoulders loose and cracking his neck like he's disappointed he didn't get to finish what he started.

Carl gives everyone a firm nod and a "that's more like it" and lumbers back to his partner Karl, who Buck is fairly certain has been filming the entire thing on his phone.

And Buck — Buck, who should be experiencing literally any normal emotion right now like annoyance or adrenaline or maybe a casual thanks-bro — instead feels every drop of blood in his body rush south with so much speed and enthusiasm, Buck is dizzy with it.

Oh no.

Oh, this is bad.

This is very, very bad, because Buck was not looking at Eddie's hands on Blue's chest and thinking "what a good friend I have." He was looking at Eddie's hands on Blue's chest and thinking about those hands on other surfaces. Specifically his surfaces. Surfaces that are currently overheating and would very much like Eddie's attention directed toward them instead of a kid who doesn't know when to back off.

Eddie hasn't moved and his arms are still right there. Buck has seen his arms ten thousand times. He's watched them operate the jaws of life and grip a ladder and pour coffee at six in the morning. But right now, after watching them throw a grown man back by the chest without so much as a stutter, they look different. 

Right now Buck has developed a Pavlovian response to these arms in under five seconds and he doesn't know how to undo that.

The thing is — and Buck needs to be very clear about this to whatever higher power is currently orchestrating his humiliation — he has always known Eddie was hot. 

This is not news. 

The man showed up to the 118 on his first day looking like a recruiting poster gained sentience and Buck noticed it immediately and moved on like a mature adult who doesn't develop debilitating fixations on coworkers. 

He’s aware of Eddie's street fighting era. He knew Eddie drove to undisclosed locations after shift to let strangers beat the grief out of him, and it terrified him and pissed him off and kept him up at night. But he never actually saw it. Never watched Eddie's fists connect with someone, never got to witness firsthand what Eddie looks like when the leash comes off and his body runs on pure instinct. 

He made note of all of this and stuck it right next to "can field strip a rifle in under sixty seconds" and "does not know what TikTok is" in the growing encyclopedia of Eddie trivia he pretends he doesn't maintain.

But hearing about it and watching it happen for you are two completely different animals. 

Hearing about it is a fun anecdote over beers. 

Watching it happen for him — watching Eddie step forward without a microsecond of hesitation because someone put their hands on Buck — is standing with a dry mouth and a racing pulse while his brain sends him a push notification that says, in very clear terms: you would let this man do whatever he wanted to you.

Buck takes a long, slow breath, adjusts his stance, and prays to every deity he can name that his pants are loose enough to be forgiving.

Eddie turns around and the tension drops out of his shoulders, replaced by concern so fast it nearly gives Buck whiplash. His hand lands on Buck's arm and he says "you good?" with that little furrow between his eyebrows, Buck has to physically stop himself from grabbing Eddie's face and doing something catastrophic.

"Yeah," Buck says. His voice comes out normal and he deserves a standing ovation for it. An Emmy. A star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. A congressional medal for the heroic act of sounding totally fine while his best friend's hand is on his arm and his best friend's knuckles are still white from launching a man into orbit on his behalf and his best friend is looking at him with those stupid brown concerned cow eyes and Buck's entire body is screaming at him to do something he absolutely cannot do. "Yeah, I'm good."

Eddie squeezes his arm once, then lets go, walking back toward where the rest of the competitors are. 

Buck watches him go. Watches the way he shakes off the confrontation like it cost him nothing, and thinks with resigned acceptance, I am so fucked.

The rest of the firefighter games are a write-off. Buck competes. He assumes he competes. His body goes through the motions of climbing and dragging and hauling because muscle memory is a beautiful thing and it's carrying him right now since his brain has dedicated every available resource to an increasingly detailed study of Eddie Diaz's physicality.

Eddie wins the firetruck pull and Buck feels his stomach lurch.

Eddie braces against a training wall and the muscles in his back shift under his shirt and Buck's mouth goes dry so fast he nearly chokes on his own tongue. 

Eddie finishes a drill and jogs back over, breathing hard, grinning, sweat tracking down his temple, and claps Buck on the shoulder and says "your turn, let's go" and Buck has to physically force himself to move.

He's in trouble. 

He is in so much trouble and nobody knows it yet and if he has anything to say about it nobody will ever know because he is going to take this realization and shove it so far down it hits bedrock.

This resolution lasts approximately forty-five minutes.

Forty-five minutes. That's how long Buck's resolve holds before it crumbles like wet drywall.

In his defense — and he's going to be saying "in his defense" a lot tonight, he can already tell — it's not entirely his fault. It's Nashville's fault for being cold and full of bars. It's the firefighter games' fault for putting Eddie in a tight shirt and making him do physical things all day. 

It's Bobby's fault, honestly, for submitting their names in the first place, because Buck was doing perfectly fine not confronting his feelings in Los Angeles where there were plenty of distractions and an entire firehouse buffer zone where he could put at least three walls between him and Eddie at any given time. 

But Bobby, from beyond the goddamn grave, decided Buck and Eddie needed a road trip to Tennessee together, and if that isn't the most Bobby Nash move of all time then Buck doesn't know what is.

(Bobby, if you can hear Buck right now, he misses you.)

The post-games gathering is at some bar two blocks from the competition venue. It's loud and crowded and full of firefighters from all over the country, comparing calluses and bench press numbers; Buck should be in his element. This is his scene. He's great at this. 

Evan Buckley, social butterfly, charmer of strangers, the guy who's never met a room he couldn't work.

Except Eddie is leaning against the bar three feet away with his sleeves pushed up to his elbows and Buck can see the veins in his forearms and whatever higher power cursed him with this affliction needs to know that he is suffering.

He spots her across the room. 

Blonde, pretty, laughing at something her friend said. She's standing near one of the Nashville crews and she's been glancing Buck's way for the last ten minutes, which he knows because he's been keeping track while pretending to listen to Carl from Kenosha explain his training regimen for the hose drag event. 

Under normal circumstances, Buck would either flirt with her because he wanted to or ignore her entirely because he didn't. 

But these are not normal circumstances. 

These are circumstances in which Buck's brain has been completely rewired by a single act of violence and he needs to know — needs to confirm, needs empirical proof — whether what he felt during the shove was a fluke or a permanent condition.

So he does what any rational person would do. He excuses himself from Carl's monologue, walks over to the blonde, and turns on every watt of charm he has.

She's receptive, which is unsurprising. Buck is good at this part, the smiling and the leaning in and the casual touch on the arm. He doesn't actually care about the conversation. He's barely listening to what she's saying — her name might be Ashley or possibly Ashlyn and she does something with horses, maybe — because ninety percent of his attention is aimed over her shoulder at Eddie, who is still at the bar, watching.

Eddie takes a sip of his beer, his lips closing around it, and Buck almost misses how his jaw tightens because he’s so transfixed by the sight of Eddie’s Adam's apple bobbing as he swallows. But it does. Tighten, that is. Just barely, just enough that you'd have to know his face as well as Buck knows his face to catch it, but Buck catches it. And his stomach drops straight through the floor.

There it is.

He leans in closer to maybe-Ashley. Laughs louder than her joke warrants. Puts his hand on the bar behind her, bracketing her in, the full Buck playbook deployed at maximum efficiency. 

He feels Eddie's stare on the side of his neck like a sunburn.

This is so stupid. This is so profoundly stupid, and he's doing it anyway because apparently today’s events have broken something fundamental in his decision-making apparatus and now he's flirting with a stranger he doesn't want to impress a man he can't have. 

If Maddie could see him right now she'd scold him. If Hen could see him right now, she’d say I told you so and smack him upside the head. If Bobby could see him right now he'd —

Actually, Bobby would probably just give him that look. The patient one. The one that said I know what you're doing and I'm going to let you figure out why on your own. 

Bobby always knew. 

Bobby always fucking knew.

He's mid-laugh at something horse-Ashley said when a hand clamps down on his shoulder and spins him around, and suddenly there's a guy in his face, red-cheeked and furious, saying something about "that's my girlfriend, asshole" and Buck has just enough time to think oh this is perfect before the guy shoves him.

The shove isn’t hard. The guy is more drunk than dangerous and his center of gravity is compromised by whatever he's been drinking since noon. Buck rocks back on his heels and grins with his whole face, because he can already feel Eddie moving beside him. 

He doesn't have to look. Just knows, the same way he knows his own heartbeat, that Eddie is closing the distance.

Eddie doesn't shove this one. Eddie steps between them and puts one hand on the guy's chest and holds him there, arm locked straight, keeping him at distance like the drunk boyfriend is about as threatening to Eddie as a stiff breeze. His other hand is behind him, palm open and flat against Buck's sternum, pressing him back, too. Protective on both fronts. Buck's heart slams against Eddie's fingers and he prays Eddie can't feel it. Or maybe he prays Eddie can feel it. He isn’t sure yet.

"Walk away, man." Eddie's voice is even and low and bored, almost, like this is an inconvenience and not a confrontation. 

The boyfriend looks at Eddie's arm, looks at Eddie's face, does whatever math drunk people do when they're deciding whether a fight is worth it, and somehow arrives at the correct answer. He grabs maybe-horse-Ashley by the elbow and pulls her away, muttering something about firefighters that Buck doesn't catch because he's too busy trying not to pass out.

Eddie turns around. His hand is still on Buck's chest.

"Seriously?" One eyebrow up. Not angry yet, but getting there. "We've been here an hour."

"He came at me!" Buck throws his hands up. Outraged. Innocent. An absolute victim of circumstance and nothing more. "I was just talking to her."

"You were practically on top of her."

"That's just how I talk to people, Eddie. I'm a leaner. It's my thing."

Eddie stares at him for a second. His hand drops from Buck's chest and he shakes his head, turning back to the bar.

"Get yourself a drink," Eddie says over his shoulder. "And stay out of trouble for five minutes."

Buck watches him walk away. Watches him settle back against the bar and pick up his beer and take a long pull, his throat working, his jaw still carrying that tension from earlier. Buck's blood is singing. His whole body is lit up, buzzing, every nerve ending awake and pointed in Eddie's direction like a compass needle swinging north.

That wasn't a fluke. That was confirmation.

He makes it roughly eleven minutes before he does something stupid again.

The thing about Buck is that he has never once in his life learned a lesson the first time. Maddie says it's stubbornness. His therapist says it's a pattern rooted in childhood neglect. Buck says it's called being thorough.

The guy's name is either Derek or Derrick — two very different energies but Buck can't tell which one he's dealing with — and he's from a station in Memphis and he's been buying Buck drinks for the last twenty minutes. 

Buck didn't start this one on purpose. Or, he didn't start it entirely on purpose. 

He positioned himself at the bar, alone, looking approachable, and let nature take its course, and nature took the form of a six-foot-two firefighter from Tennessee with a nice smile and an obvious agenda.

Derek-or-Derrick is fine. He's good-looking in a generic, could-be-a-model-for-a-regional-credit-union kind of way. Good arms. Nice teeth. Laughs at Buck's jokes. Under literally any other circumstances Buck might even be interested because Buck is bisexual and, once again, has functioning eyes, and this man is objectively attractive. 

But Buck's eyes are broken now. Eddie’s arms ruined them for other people, which is a devastating realization to have while a perfectly nice man is buying you whiskey and leaning into your space.

He doesn't move away when Derek-or-Derrick's knee presses against his under the bar. Doesn't flinch when a hand lands on his thigh, casual, testing. He should. He knows he should. This is cruel to Derek-or-Derrick, who is being perfectly pleasant and doesn't deserve to be a pawn in whatever unhinged experiment Buck is running tonight. But Eddie is four seats down and Buck can feel him watching without looking and his skin is electric with it, crackling, every hair standing up.

Derek-or-Derrick leans in close, breath warm on Buck's neck. "You want to get out of here?"

Eddie doesn't rush. Eddie never rushes, he moves like the outcome is already decided and he’s just walking toward it, all while Buck is over here losing his mind at a hundred miles an hour. 

Eddie just walks over like he's got all the time in the world, like there's no version of this where he doesn't get exactly what he wants. 

His hand finds the back of Buck's neck and every coherent thought Buck has ever had exits his skull through the point of contact. He squeezes once and Buck nearly falls off his stool.

"We're heading out." Eddie says it to Derek-or-Derrick, but he's looking at Buck. His eyes are dark and his thumb is pressing into the muscle at the base of Buck's skull and Buck would agree to literally anything Eddie said to him right now. Move to Antarctica. Commit a felony. Walk into traffic.

Derek-or-Derrick looks at Eddie's hand on Buck's neck, then at Eddie's face, and, to his credit, puts it together faster than the drunk boyfriend did.

"Oh." He leans back, palms up. "My bad, man. Didn't realize."

Eddie doesn't correct him. And Buck is standing there bracing for it, fully expecting the usual 'oh, it's not like that, man' that would put everything back in its neat little box and let Buck keep pretending. But Eddie just presses his thumb in harder against the base of Buck's skull and Buck's brain whites out for a full three seconds.

Eddie steers him away from the bar with that hand still on his neck, guiding him through the crowd, and Buck goes wherever Eddie puts him because whatever is happening right now between them is a thread he refuses to pull and equally refuses to let go of.

When they're far enough away Eddie drops his hand and says, "What the hell was that?"

"What was what?" 

Buck's face is a masterpiece of confusion. Bambi eyes. Furrowed brow. He should teach a class.

"That guy had his hand on your leg."

"Yes, Eddie. We were having a conversation. People touch each other during conversations. It's a social norm."

"That wasn't a social norm. That was a proposition."

"And you felt the need to intervene because...?" Buck tilts his head, all faux curiosity, like he genuinely cannot fathom why Eddie is standing here upset over a stranger's hand on Buck's thigh. "I'm bisexual, Eddie. I like men. He was hot. I was fully aware of where that was going."

Something shifts behind Eddie's eyes, quick and unreadable, and his jaw works for a second like he's chewing on a response he doesn't want to swallow but can't quite spit out either. He settles on, "Because you've had too much to drink."

Buck has had two beers and a whiskey. 

He's nowhere close to drunk. They both know this. Eddie knows this. Buck knows Eddie knows this. And the fact that Eddie reached for that excuse instead of any of the dozen honest answers he could've given is doing more for Buck's theory than any of tonight's experiments combined.

"Sure," Buck says, and takes a slow sip of the drink he carried with him from the bar before leaning in and pressing a kiss to Eddie's cheek. Quick and casual, like it's nothing, like he does this all the time, like his lips aren't burning from the contact with Eddie's stubble. He pulls back and grins. "My hero. Thanks for looking out for me, Eds."

Eddie goes completely still, staring at him. Buck stares back, watching the flush crawl up Eddie’s neck, being sure to memorialize this moment as the single greatest achievement of his life, surpassing the time he helped pull a baby out of a drainpipe.

"Stay out of trouble," Eddie rasps.

Buck doesn't answer. They both know he won't.

The smart thing to do — the objectively, inarguably, by-every-metric-of-human-intelligence smart thing to do — would be to stop. To take Eddie's advice and stay out of trouble and nurse his drink and let the rest of the night unfold like a normal evening between two friends at a bar in Nashville who are definitely, absolutely, one hundred percent just friends. 

Buck could do that. 

Buck is capable of making good decisions. He has evidence of this somewhere, probably, if he dug through enough years of terrible ones to find it.

Buck does not do the smart thing.

In his defense — there it is again, he told you — the opportunity basically falls into his lap. 

He's standing near the pool tables watching a couple of guys from a Dallas crew play a sloppy game of eight ball when one of them checks him with an elbow on a backswing, hard, right between the shoulder blades. Beer sloshes down Buck's shirt and the guy doesn't even turn around.

"Hey." Buck taps his shoulder. "You just spilled your drink all over me."

The guy glances back, looks Buck up and down, and shrugs. "Shouldn't have been standing there."

And look — Buck was fully prepared to be the bigger person tonight. He really was. He'd made a mental pact with himself after Beat 2 (he's calling them beats now, like this is a screenplay of his own bad decisions) that he was going to cool it. Rein it in. Stop using strangers as pawns in his deeply unethical experiment on Eddie’s protective instincts. 

But this guy just elbowed him in the spine and told him it was his fault and that's not Buck making something out of nothing. That's a genuine asshole standing in front of him and Buck has never in his life been able to let a genuine asshole go unchecked. 

It's a character flaw. Or a character feature. Depends who you ask.

"You wanna try that again?" Buck asks, and he's smiling but it's the wrong smile, the one Chimney calls his "oh no, he's about to make this everyone's problem" smile.

"I said," the guy steps closer and he's big, wide through the shoulders, clearly one of those guys who thinks being a firefighter and being a bouncer are interchangeable personality traits, "you shouldn't have been standing there. So move."

"Or what?"

Buck doesn't even know what he's doing. Or he does know what he's doing, which is worse, because part of him — a loud, reckless, deeply stupid part — noticed Eddie standing a couple paces behind him about six seconds ago and knows exactly how this ends. 

But there's a bigger part, a part that doesn't have anything to do with Eddie, that genuinely just wants to hit this guy. Because Buck can handle a lot. He can handle getting shoved by nepo babies and getting beer spilled on him by drunk strangers. He has a high tolerance for bullshit. But he does not tolerate people who check you with an elbow and then act like you owe them an apology for having a body in their general vicinity.

"Or I'll move you," the guy says, shoving Buck's chest with one hand.

Buck rocks back, catching himself, and something lights up behind his eyes because he's a good person and a mostly responsible adult but he grew up Evan Buckley and Evan Buckley was throwing punches on the playground at six years old and some reflexes never really go away, they just go dormant.

He's about to do something profoundly ill-advised when a hand grabs the back of his shirt and yanks him backward so hard he stumbles. Then, Eddie is stepping past him and into the guy's space, his energy dropping the temperature of the entire room.

Buck has been poking this bear all night. 

He's been provoking Eddie, testing limits, cataloguing — no, not cataloguing, absorbing, experiencing, drowning in — Eddie's responses to perceived threats. But every other time tonight Eddie was controlled. Measured. Annoyed, sure, maybe even frustrated, but always composed, always that steady hand-on-the-wheel Eddie energy that makes him so good at his job and so impossible to crack.

This is different.

This is Eddie looking at this guy like he's deciding where to put him, not whether to. 

This is the Eddie that Buck heard about in hushed tones from Lena Bosko. The Eddie that went to parking lots and warehouses after Shannon died, after the lawsuit, after everything fell apart. The Eddie that makes Buck's stomach clench even thinking about that version of him. 

This is that Eddie, live, in person, three feet away, and Buck can't breathe.

"Touch him again." Eddie says it quietly. Almost conversational. And it’s worse than yelling, so much worse, because yelling means someone's out of control and this isn't out of control. This is a man who knows exactly how much damage he can do and is giving you one chance to avoid finding out. "Go ahead. See what happens."

The guy from Dallas has maybe four inches and forty pounds on Eddie. 

It doesn't matter. 

Buck watches the calculation happen in real time on his face — the initial puffed-up bravado deflating as he registers that Eddie isn't posturing, or bluffing, not doing any of the things drunk guys do when they want to look tough in front of their friends. 

Eddie is standing perfectly still and perfectly relaxed and that is the scariest thing (and possibly the sexiest) Buck has ever seen because relaxed means ready and ready means Eddie has done this before and come out the other side victorious.

The guy's buddy reaches for his shoulder but Buck is faster, grabbing the back of Eddie's shirt and pulling, his hand fisting the fabric between Eddie's shoulder blades and tugging once while saying "Eddie" in a voice he barely recognizes as his own.

Buck pulls and Eddie follows and it's that simple, it's always been that simple. Eddie, who has never backed down from a fight in his life, who went looking for them when the world took too much from him, is backing down from a fight because Buck asked him to with one hand and two syllables. 

He turns and his shoulders are still coiled tight and his hands are still flexed at his sides and Buck can see the adrenaline thrumming under his skin but his eyes find Buck's face and he settles. Not all the way, but enough.

Buck does not think about the fact that he just leashed Eddie Diaz. He does not think about how fast Eddie obeyed or how good it felt to have Eddie's obedience pooling warm in the palm of his hand or how badly he wants to test exactly how far that obedience extends. 

He does not think about any of these things because if he does he will die right here in this bar, cause of death: terminal horniness.

They end up sitting at the bar. Buck has no memory of getting here. He might have teleported. He might have astral projected. All he knows is that they're sitting on two stools at the far end of the counter and Eddie's beside him and their elbows are touching and neither of them has mentioned what just happened. 

Buck's arm is tingling where it's pressed against Eddie's and he is losing his absolute mind over an elbow. An elbow, a bony joint that exists on literally every human being on the planet and is not inherently sexual in any capacity but apparently Buck's body didn't get that memo because Eddie's elbow is touching his and his stomach is doing backflips like a fourteen-year-old at a school dance.

This was his idea. He needs to remember that. He started this. He poked the bear and provoked the bear and kissed the bear on its stupid handsome cheek and now the bear is sitting next to him smelling like cologne and sweat and Buck is reaping exactly what he sowed and it is destroying him from the inside out.

For a few minutes, though, it almost feels normal. 

Eddie tells a story about Christopher's latest attempt at cooking dinner and Buck wheezes into his beer so hard it comes out his nose, which is disgusting and also Eddie laughs at him for it and Eddie's laugh is a full-body thing that crinkles his eyes and shows his teeth and Buck has to wipe beer off his face just to have an excuse to cover the expression he's making. 

Buck does an impression of Chimney trying to give a motivational captain speech and Eddie drops his head onto his folded arms laughing and his shoulders shake and the back of his neck is right there, tan and flushed, and Buck sits on his hands. 

Literally sits on his hands. Like a child in church. Because the alternative is touching Eddie's neck and he is not going to survive touching Eddie's neck right now, he barely survived Eddie touching his.

They argue about whether Nashville hot chicken is actually good or just pain marketed as flavor, and Eddie is wrong but he's wrong in that stubborn, narrow-eyed way where he leans forward on his stool and jabs a finger at Buck's chest to emphasize his points and Buck's entire train of thought derails and bursts into flames every time Eddie's fingertip makes contact because his nerve endings have apparently decided that any touch from Eddie, no matter how casual, is now a full-body event requiring all hands on deck and most of his blood supply rerouted below the belt.

This is a nightmare. 

This is a waking, living, breathing nightmare of his own creation and the worst part — the absolute worst part, the part that makes Buck want to crawl under this bar and live there forever — is that he can't stop escalating it in his own head. 

Eddie takes a sip of beer and Buck watches his throat work and imagines licking the hollow of it. 

Eddie rolls his sleeves up another inch and Buck nearly blacks out because there's more arm now, just more of it, like Eddie is doing this on purpose except he's obviously not doing it on purpose because Eddie doesn't know that Buck has lost his entire mind over his arms tonight, or at least Buck hopes Eddie doesn't know, because if Eddie does know then Buck needs to relocate to another continent immediately.

And Eddie keeps touching him. 

That's what’s really going to kill Buck, what’s going to put him in the ground, because Eddie is a tactile person in ways he doesn't even realize and tonight every unconscious touch is landing on Buck's skin like a lit match on gasoline. 

Eddie bumps their knees together under the bar and leaves them pressed together and Buck's thigh burns where they're touching. Eddie leans in to hear him over the music and his shoulder slots against Buck's chest and his breath ghosts across Buck's cheek and Buck has to clench every muscle in his body to keep from shivering visibly. Eddie reaches past him for a napkin and his forearm drags across Buck's stomach, lazy and incidental and completely devastating, and Buck grips the edge of the bar so hard he's surprised it doesn't splinter.

He's hard. 

He's been half-hard for the last twenty minutes and it's getting worse, not better, because every time he talks himself down Eddie does another mundane, innocent, completely nonsexual thing and Buck's dick interprets it as a personal invitation. 

Eddie is telling him about Christopher burning pasta and Buck is sitting here with an erection on a barstool in Nashville, Tennessee, at eight o'clock, and he did this to himself. He literally engineered this entire evening with his own two hands and his own terrible judgment and now those hands are gripping a bar top because he can't trust them anywhere else and his terrible judgment is telling him to lean over and bite Eddie's earlobe and he is going to go insane. 

He is going to lose his mind entirely. 

They're going to find him rocking in a corner somewhere muttering about Eddie’s arms and Pavlovian responses and protective instincts and someone will call Maddie and Maddie will sigh because she always knew it would end this way.

Buck sets his beer down. His heart is hammering so hard he can hear his own pulse but his voice comes out steady, offensively casual, and he has no idea how he manages it because he feels like he’s dying. "Wanna get out of here?"

Eddie looks at him. For one second — one perfect, terrifying, airless second — his eyes go dark and his lips part and Buck's pulse rockets into his throat because that's a yes, that is unmistakably a yes forming on Eddie's mouth, he can see it taking shape, can practically taste it, and his body braces for impact because this is it, this is the cliff edge, this is seven and a half years of plausible deniability about to go up in—

Eddie's gaze snags past Buck's shoulder. The heat evaporates.

"Which one of you boys is gonna buy me a drink tonight?"

Buck is going to commit a crime. 

He isn't sure which crime yet but it's going to be spectacular and Athena is going to have to arrest him personally because a woman has just materialized at his elbow like the universe reached into Buck's chest, found the most fragile, tender, exposed part of his entire emotional landscape, and dispatched a blonde milf in red lipstick to step on it with a stiletto. 

She's gorgeous. She's charming. She's beaming at him with a smile that could sell out stadiums and under literally any other circumstances on any other night in any other universe Buck would be thrilled because a beautiful woman is hitting on him and that is objectively flattering.

He is not thrilled. 

He is the opposite of thrilled. 

He is homicidal with frustration because Eddie's yes was right there, it was right there, and now Eddie's hand is on his back pushing him toward this woman and the yes is gone and Buck wants to throw this barstool through a window.

He turns to look at Eddie and his face must be doing a terrible job of hiding what he's feeling because Eddie won't meet his eyes, just keeps that gentle pressure on Buck's back, steering him toward this beautiful woman with the same hand that was on Buck's neck an hour ago, the same hand that shoved Blue this afternoon, and Buck cannot reconcile the Eddie who did those things with the Eddie who is currently gift-wrapping Buck and handing him to another person.

"We were actually—" Buck starts.

"I was just leaving." Light. Breezy. Practiced. Eddie tips his hat at the woman and Buck's heart cracks right down the middle because Eddie is charming when he wants to be, devastatingly so, and right now he's wielding that charm like a shield. He turns and meets Buck's eyes and his smile doesn't touch a single part of his face above his mouth. "Goodnight, brother."

Brother. Brother. The word hits Buck like a freight train full of ice water because Eddie has only called him that a handful of times, and the fact that he’s choosing that specific word now, tonight, after everything, is so cruel and so cowardly and so deeply, fundamentally Eddie that Buck wants to shake him. Brother is a cage. Brother is a muzzle. Brother is Eddie slamming a door in both their faces because he'd rather suffocate in a burning room than admit he smells smoke.

Buck can see through it. He can see through every syllable of it because Eddie's jaw is a steel trap and his hand is still on Buck's back, lingering, not letting go, betraying every word coming out of his mouth. His eyes are loud. His eyes are deafening. His eyes are saying please don't let me do this, please don't make me walk away, please tell me to stay.

Buck opens his mouth and nothing comes out. Eddie drops his hand and turns and walks toward the exit and Buck watches him leave and does nothing and hates himself so immediately and so completely that it takes his breath away.

“So.” The woman claims Eddie’s stool, crosses her legs, and looks at Buck like he’s the most entertaining thing she’s seen all week. “I’m Dixie. What’s your name, cowboy?”

"Buck." 

Eddie's handprint is still seared into his back. His erection has not fully gone away, which feels like a personal betrayal given that his heart just got ripped out through his chest, but apparently his body operates on two completely independent tracks and the horny track did not get the memo about the devastation track. He's heartbroken and turned on at the same time and honestly that might be the most Buck thing that has ever happened. 

"Well, Buck." Two fingers at the bartender, a stadium-leveling smile. "You gonna stare at that door all night or be a gentleman and buy me a drink?”

Buck tries. 

He tries so hard it physically hurts and he still fails because Dixie is charming and funny and smart and none of it penetrates the Eddie-shaped crater in his chest. 

He asks her questions and nods at her answers and laughs when she pauses and hopes to God he's laughing at the right parts because he has not absorbed a single word.

He keeps looking at the door. He can't stop looking at the door. His eyes drift there every thirty seconds like a compass needle swinging to magnetic north except magnetic north walked out of a bar ten minutes ago and took every ounce of Buck's composure and attention span and will to live with him.

"Honey." Dixie sets her drink down and the amusement on her face has curdled into pity, which is somehow worse. “I know when someone's not really here. And sweetheart, you left the second that man walked out the door."

"I'm listening, I swear, you were talking about—"

"You could not tell me what I was talking about if your life depended on it." She's laughing at him, kind but ruthless. "You've been staring at that door like your whole world walked through it, and while I appreciate a good lovelorn disaster as much as the next girl, this is getting genuinely pathetic, Buck."

"Eddie and I are friends." The words taste like cardboard. "We work together."

"Oh, baby." She laughs warmly, delighted in his misery. "I watched you two at that bar for twenty minutes before I came over. I saw your face when I walked up and honey, you looked at me like I'd just kicked your puppy. I saw his face when he said goodnight and I have never seen anything more transparent than whatever is going on between you and that man." She leans forward, pins him with eyes that have clearly seen every variation of this story before and found them all equally ridiculous. "That is not your brother."

Buck's throat closes. The denial he's constructing collapses in on itself because she's right, she is so humiliatingly right that arguing would insult both of their intelligences and Dixie does not seem like a woman who forgives insults to her intelligence.

"It's complicated." Even as it leaves his mouth he wants to slap himself.

"It always is with the stubborn ones." Another sip, studying him over the rim. "But here's what's not complicated. You're sitting here with a woman who, and I need you to really hear this, is phenomenal company. And you'd rather be wherever he is." She tips her glass toward the door. "That's not complicated, Buck. That's a man who knows what he wants and is too chickenshit to go get it."

She holds his stare, raising her glass one more time.

"Go get your boy."

Buck doesn't remember the walk to the hotel. 

He doesn't remember the elevator or the hallway or which floor Eddie's room is even on. 

He just knows he's standing in front of room 412 with his heart trying to evacuate through his throat and his hand raised to knock and absolutely zero plan for what comes next because a woman he met fifteen minutes ago told him to "go get his boy" and he obeyed like a dog who heard a can opener. 

This is a terrible idea. 

This is, by a considerable margin, the worst idea Buck has ever had, and he once let a teenager talk him into backflipping off a fire truck at a community outreach event, so the bar for bad decisions is basically underground and he is somehow tunneling beneath it. 

He doesn't have a speech prepared or an excuse for why he's standing in this hallway instead of in his own room doing the smart thing, which would be sleeping, or the second smartest thing, which would be taking a cold shower and never speaking of this night again. 

All he has is a pounding heart and a half-hard dick that has not fully stood down since this afternoon and the lingering echo of Dixie's voice rattling around his skull like a pinball in a machine that's been tilted.

He should leave. 

He should absolutely, unequivocally, for the sake of his dignity and his friendship and his continued ability to make eye contact with Eddie at work for the next however many years they're both alive, turn around and walk back to his room and get in bed and stare at the ceiling and deal with this like an adult who has health insurance and the baseline emotional regulation to know that knocking on this door will change everything. 

And "everything" includes the single most important relationship he has ever had with another person on this planet and he cannot afford to lose it. He would rather spend the rest of his life jerking off to the memory of Eddie shoving Blue than risk one conversation that ends with Eddie looking at him differently.

He knocks. Because he is Buck and Buck has never once in his life chosen the safe option when the reckless one is available.

Silence follows, then footsteps, soft and reluctant, and the lock clicking, and the door swinging open, and every remaining thought in Buck's head evaporating like water on a hot skillet.

Eddie is in sweats. 

Gray, low-slung, soft, sitting crooked on his hips, combined with a white t-shirt that's been washed so many times it's basically transparent and Buck can see the outline of Eddie's chest through the cotton, can see the shift of muscle when Eddie leans against the doorframe, and his mouth floods with saliva so fast he has to swallow twice just to keep from drooling on himself like a broken faucet. 

Eddie's cowboy hat is gone and his hair is a wreck, shoved in every direction like he's been running his hands through it nervously since he left the bar, and his eyes are red-rimmed and glassy and he looks gutted and furious and exhausted.

He also looks like sex. 

He looks like sex standing in a doorway with bare feet and Buck’s brain, which should be focused on the emotional complexity of this moment and the fact that Eddie has clearly been upset and the fact that Buck is the reason Eddie is upset, instead takes one look at the strip of skin visible between Eddie's waistband and the rucked-up hem of his t-shirt and sends a pulse of heat straight to Buck's groin so aggressive that his vision actually blurs for a second. 

This is inappropriate. 

This is deeply, profoundly inappropriate and Buck is a terrible person because his best friend has obviously been sad and alone in his hotel room and Buck's primary biological response to this information is arousal, his dick going from half-hard to fully committed to the cause in the time it takes Eddie to cross his arms and lean against the doorframe and look at Buck with those wrecked brown eyes.

"What are you doing here?" 

Eddie's voice is tired and walled-off and Buck wants to climb him. Buck wants to put his hands on the tantalizing strip of skin above Eddie's waistband and push him backward into the room and press him into the mattress and find out what sounds Eddie makes when he stops holding everything in and Buck needs to get a grip, he needs to get a grip immediately, because Eddie just asked him a question and Buck is standing in a hotel corridor with a visible erection and a blank stare and if he doesn't say words in the next three seconds this is going to become the most uncomfortable silence in the history of human interaction.

"Dixie says hi." 

It falls out of his mouth like a brick off a ledge because apparently Buck's defense mechanism when faced with emotional vulnerability is to say the single dumbest thing his brain can come up with on short notice.

Eddie stares at him. Buck stares back. The hallway hums with light and the muffled bass of someone's TV three doors down and the sound of Buck's dignity hitting the floor.

"You came to my hotel room to tell me Dixie says hi."

"She didn't actually say hi. I panicked. Can I come in?"

Eddie doesn't move, he stays in the doorway with his arms crossed and those sweats slung criminally low on his hips and Buck is trying to have a serious emotional moment here but his eyes keep dropping to Eddie's hip bones and he keeps having to drag them back up and it's a workout, it's cardio, maintaining eye contact with Eddie right now is the most physically demanding thing Buck has done all day and he won an actual firefighter competition this afternoon.

"Eddie. Come on. Let me in."

"Why?"

"Because I want to talk to you."

"So talk."

"In the hallway? Where anyone could—"

"You're the one who knocked on my door, Buck." Eddie is quiet and Buck's own name in Eddie's mouth after hearing brother an hour ago hits him right behind the sternum, a bloom of hope and hurt tangled together so tightly he can't separate them. "You apparently walked away from a gorgeous woman to come stand in a hallway and tell me that same gorgeous woman says hi. So either say what you actually came to say or go back to your room."

Gorgeous woman. Eddie says it through his teeth, pushes it past like it's painful for him, and Buck hears everything underneath it loud and clear. 

Why are you here instead of with her? Why did you follow me? Why can't you just let me have this, let me pretend, let me put you on the other side of a word like "brother" so I can stop wanting what I can't have?

"I didn't want to talk to her." Buck's voice drops before he can stop it, the humor bleeding out, the deflection falling away, and what's left is raw and honest and scares him more than anything else. "I didn't want to be there, Eddie."

"Then go to bed."

"I don't want to do that either." 

Eddie's arms loosen a fraction across his chest and his lips have parted and his eyes are doing the thing, the thing from the bar, the crack forming in the wall he built thirty minutes ago, thin and bright, and Buck can see the want bleeding through it.

"Then what do you want, Buck?" Eddie sounds wrecked. Eddie sounds like a man standing on a trap door asking someone to either open it or bolt it shut and Buck has never heard Eddie sound like this, this unguarded, this close to the edge. It makes his chest burn and his blood pound and his hands shake at his sides.

And Buck — Buck who has been running his mouth nonstop all day, Buck who flirted with a stranger and kissed Eddie's cheek and called him "my hero" and treated this entire night like a game he was winning — goes completely silent. Because the truth is enormous. 

The truth is that he wants Eddie's hands on him and Eddie's mouth on him and Eddie's weight on top of him and Eddie saying his name in the dark and Eddie in the morning and Eddie always, every day, forever, in every way a person can want another person, and also specifically in the way where Eddie pins him against a door and makes him forget how to speak, and the truth is too much for a random hallway and too much for a sentence and too much for his voice to carry without breaking apart.

So he stops trying to carry it with words. He steps forward and grabs Eddie's face with both hands and kisses him.

It's graceless and off-center and their noses bump and Buck's hands are trembling against Eddie's face and it's terrible, honestly, as far as kisses go this one is a disaster. But Eddie's lips are soft and his stubble bites into Buck's palms and he tastes like toothpaste, which means Eddie brushed his teeth when he got back to his room, which means Eddie was trying to go to sleep, which means Eddie was going to lie in his bed ten feet away and close his eyes and pretend tonight didn't happen and that thought makes Buck kiss him harder.

Then his brain catches up to his mouth. And the panic arrives like a flash flood.

He jerks backward. 

Eddie's face is frozen. His eyes blown wide, lips parted and wet, hands still at his sides. The shock is registering in slow, ruinous waves and Buck's stomach drops through the floor and keeps going because Eddie didn't kiss him back. 

Eddie didn't move. 

Eddie is standing in this doorway looking at Buck like he just detonated a bomb between them and Buck can feel every single thing he's ever been afraid of condensing into this one moment, this one horrible suspended second where Eddie's silence says everything Buck never wanted to hear.

"I'm sorry." It erupts out of him, frantic and tripping over itself. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have done that, I've been drinking and I wasn't thinking and that was so far out of line, Eddie, I'm so sorry, I don't— I mean I do know why I did it, I've known all night, I've probably known for years honestly but that doesn't mean I should have— you called me your brother and it fucked me up and then Dixie told me to come find you and I just— but that's my problem, not yours, I should have dealt with it on my own, I should have gone to bed like you said and I'm sorry, I'll go, I'm going right now, we can pretend this didn't—"

"Shut up." Eddie breathes. His eyes are on Buck's mouth and his hands are shaking at his sides and Buck is confused and still fucking hard, but he shuts up. Because Eddie told him to. "Buck, shut up. Just— fuck."

Eddie grabs the front of Buck's shirt with both fists and hauls him through the doorway. The door slams shut behind them and Eddie shoves him against it and crushes his mouth against Buck's so hard their teeth knock together and Buck groans, a desperate, shocked sound that gets swallowed whole by Eddie's mouth.

Eddie kisses him like he's trying to take back every minute he spent walking away, like the distance between the bar and this hotel room was the longest he's ever covered and he's making up for every single step.

His fists twist tighter in Buck's shirt and drag him closer and his mouth is hot and open and furious and relieved all at the same time and Buck can still taste the hint of toothpaste but now it’s mixed with want and need and every word Eddie bit back tonight.

Buck's spine hits the door and Eddie pins him there with his full weight and Buck gasps because Eddie is hot and solid and everywhere, chest to chest, hips to hips. Buck can feel him through those thin gray sweats, hard against his thigh, and Buck's brain — his loud, spiraling, overworked, disastrous brain that has been narrating his own downfall all night — finally, mercifully, blessedly shuts the fuck up.

Buck's back is against the door and Eddie's tongue is in his mouth and Buck's brain is attempting to process roughly four hundred sensory inputs simultaneously and failing at every single one because Eddie kisses thoroughly, competently, with an intensity that suggests he has been thinking about this for a lot longer than he will ever willingly admit. 

His hands are still fisted in Buck's shirt, knuckles pressing into Buck's chest, crowding Buck against the wood with his full weight and Buck can feel every inch of him, every line of muscle through that threadbare t-shirt, the heat of his skin radiating through the cotton, and the hard press of his cock against Buck's thigh that makes Buck's hips jerk forward entirely without his permission.

Eddie makes a bitten-off sound, one Buck is pretty sure he didn’t mean to let loose, and Buck — Buck, who has been slowly losing his mind all night, who has been chasing this exact moment since Eddie catapulted a man on his behalf — hears that sound and every remaining synapse in his brain fires at once and then goes dark.

"Off." Buck gets his hands under the hem of Eddie's t-shirt and pushes it up and his fingers find the scorching skin over hard muscle and Eddie's stomach tenses under his palms. Eddie's ribs expand against his fingers on a sharp inhale. Eddie's skin is so hot it feels like a fever and Buck wants to put his mouth on every degree of it. "Eddie, off, take this off, I need—"

Eddie breaks the kiss long enough to yank his shirt over his head and Buck has seen Eddie shirtless before, has seen it hundreds of times, in the locker room and at the beach and earlier that day, even, and once memorably in Buck's own kitchen when Eddie spilled coffee down his front at six in the morning, but he has never seen Eddie shirtless while Eddie's mouth is swollen from kissing him and Eddie's chest is heaving and Eddie's eyes are black with want and locked on Buck's face with an intensity that makes Buck's knees actually buckle, like physically give out, and he's grateful for the door behind him because without it he'd be on the floor.

"You too." 

Eddie's voice is wrecked, scraped raw, and his hands grab Buck's shirt and pull it over his head, sending a button skittering across the hotel room floor. 

Buck would mourn the shirt but Eddie's hands land on his bare chest and slide up and his thumbs drag over Buck's collarbones and every thought Buck has ever had about shirts or buttons or any piece of clothing that isn't currently standing between him and Eddie's skin becomes completely irrelevant.

Buck grabs Eddie's hips and walks Eddie backward toward the bed because he has waited long enough for this and he'll be damned if it happens against a hotel door like two teenagers at prom, except Eddie apparently has different plans. About halfway across the room Eddie plants his feet and reverses them and shoves Buck down onto the mattress, climbing on top of him. 

Buck is so fucking done for. 

Eddie on top of him is a religious experience. 

Buck is not a particularly spiritual person but Eddie Diaz settling his weight across Buck's hips, pinning him to a hotel mattress with his thighs bracketing Buck's waist and his hands flat on Buck's chest and his hair falling across his forehead — this is the closest Buck has ever come to understanding why people find God. 

His hips roll down once and Buck groans so loud that if anyone is in the room next door they now have a very detailed understanding of Buck's current situation.

"You've been doing this on purpose." Eddie's hips grind down again, slow and deliberate, and Buck arches off the bed and grabs Eddie's thighs, digging his fingers in hard enough to leave marks. "All night. The girl, the guy at the bar, the guys at the pool table. You were trying to get a reaction."

"I don't know what you're— oh fuck." Eddie rolls his hips again and Buck loses the back half of his sentence to a sound that is embarrassing and involuntary and he does not care even slightly. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"You're a terrible liar." 

Eddie leans down and his mouth finds Buck's neck, his teeth scraping the tendon. Buck's hands fly to Eddie's back and drag down, pulling a moan out of Eddie, the sound vibrating against Buck’s throat and through his entire body. 

"You've been pushing me all night. Wanted to see what I'd do."

"And what—" Buck swallows hard because Eddie's tongue is tracing the line of his collarbone and he is rapidly approaching a point of no return. "What are you gonna do about it?"

Eddie lifts his head to look Buck dead in the eyes, and smiles. 

Slow, dark, wicked. The kind of smile that rewrites your understanding of a person entirely because Buck has seen Eddie smile a thousand different ways — fond, amused, exasperated, surprised — and he has never once seen this one. 

This one is new. This one belongs to the Eddie who fought in makeshift rings, the Eddie who pinned a man against a bar with one hand and looked bored doing it, the Eddie who has apparently been keeping this entire side of himself locked away this entire time and has just decided, here in this hotel room, to let Buck see it.

"I think you already know." Eddie murmurs against Buck's jaw and Buck whimpers. Like a sound from a movie, from someone else's body, except it's his body and his throat and Eddie heard it and Eddie's smile widens against his skin and Buck is never going to recover from this. 

Eddie's hand slides down Buck's stomach, past his waistband, wrapping around the base of his cock. 

Buck's spine arches off the bed so hard he nearly headbutts Eddie in the chin, which would have been a mortifying way to end this but Eddie pulls back just in time and laughs — actually laughs, the fucker, fond and breathless against Buck's cheek — and says "easy, tiger" in that low voice and Buck thinks he might actually die here.

"Don't say easy to me when your hand is on my dick, Eddie, that is a— fuck— that is a mixed signal of the highest—" 

Eddie's thumb swipes over the head and the rest of Buck's sentence ceases to exist. His hips chase Eddie's fist and his hands scrabble at Eddie's shoulders and he's babbling, he can hear himself babbling, a stream of profanity and Eddie's name and fragments of sentences that don't connect to anything because language has left him, higher brain function has left him, he is operating on pure desire and Eddie's hand and the drag of Eddie's calloused fingers and the sound of Eddie’s labored breathing above him.

"Buck." Eddie’s forehead drops against Buck's and their breath mingles. Buck opens his eyes and Eddie is right there, an inch away, pupils blown, looking at Buck like he's precious and wanted and worth ruining your whole life over. "I need—"

"Yeah." Buck doesn't even know what Eddie's asking for. Doesn't care. "Yeah, anything, whatever you need, the answer is yes."

They get the rest of their clothes off in a graceless tangle of limbs and elastic. Buck kicks his jeans off the side of the bed, hearing them knock something off the nightstand and neither of them stops to check what it was because Eddie is naked and on top of him and Buck's hands are finally, finally on all the skin he's been staring at all night and he is trying to be everywhere at once — Eddie's shoulders, Eddie's back, the dip of his spine, the cut of his hips, the flex of his ass under Buck's palms when Buck pulls him closer and their hips slot together and they both groan at the contact, loud enough that someone in the next room bangs on the wall twice and neither of them acknowledges it.

"You're so—" Buck starts and can't finish because Eddie spits in his hand and wraps it around both of them, stroking, a fast, merciless rhythm from the start. 

Buck's vocabulary reduces to a single syllable that he repeats into Eddie's neck with increasing urgency. Eddie is gasping above him, forehead pressed into the pillow beside Buck's head, and his composure — that ironclad, unshakeable Eddie Diaz composure that Buck has been trying to crack all night — is finally, finally gone. 

Shattered. Scattered across this hotel room along with their clothes and Buck's dignity and whatever was on the nightstand.

Eddie is loud when he lets himself be. 

That's a discovery that is going to haunt Buck for the rest of his waking life. 

Eddie, who is so controlled, so measured, so careful with everything he gives the world, is loud and desperate and shaking in Buck's arms. 

Buck hooks a leg around Eddie's hip and pulls him in tighter, making Eddie choke on a moan and bite down on Buck's shoulder. The sharp, bright spark of pain snaps through Buck's body like electricity and hurtles him toward the edge embarrassingly fast.

"Eddie— I'm gonna— fuck, I'm close, I'm—"

"Me too." 

Barely a whisper. Eddie lifts his head and finds Buck's mouth and kisses him, sloppy and off-center, nothing like a kiss should be except Buck wouldn't trade it for the most technically perfect kiss in the world because Eddie is trembling and his hand is shaking between them and his breath hitches on every stroke and Buck has never in his life felt this wanted by another human being.

Buck comes first. It tears through him like a riptide and he breaks the kiss because he has to, because the sound that comes out of him requires a lot of air that he can’t get with Eddie’s tongue down his throat. 

He buries it in Eddie's neck and grabs his shoulders, holding on, feeling Eddie's hand stutter and then speed up. Eddie is right behind him, gasping Buck's name into his hair, body going taut and then boneless, collapsing onto Buck's chest.

They lie there, breathing. Hearts slamming. Sticky and sweaty and tangled together with the distant thump of music somewhere outside bleeding through the walls and the faint outraged knocking of their neighbor who has clearly given up on sleep.

Buck stares at the ceiling. Eddie's face is buried in his neck and his breathing is slowing and his hand is resting on Buck's ribs, thumb tracing a lazy, absent circle that makes Buck's chest hurt with how tender it is.

Buck's brain, which has been blissfully silent for the first time all night, flickers back to life. Tentative. Testing the waters. Like a possum checking if it's safe to stop playing dead.

So. That happened.

They should probably clean up. 

Buck is aware of this on an intellectual level, the way he's aware that flossing is important and that he should dust his floorboards more often — technically true, theoretically urgent, absolutely not happening right now. 

Eddie is still lying on top of him and his weight should be uncomfortable but instead it's the most grounding thing Buck has ever felt, like a weighted blanket that has a heartbeat and smells incredible and just gave him the best orgasm of his life.

Eddie’s face is still in Buck's neck and his breathing has gone slow and even and his thumb is still tracing that circle on Buck's ribs and Buck is terrified that if he speaks he'll break whatever this is. That the spell will crack and Eddie will roll off him and clear his throat and say something horrifying like "we should probably talk about this" in his Responsible Adult Voice and Buck will have to have a mature conversation about feelings while covered in cum and that is simply not a thing he is equipped for right now or possibly ever.

But the silence is getting long. And Buck has never in his life been capable of leaving a silence unfilled. It's a pathological condition. 

"So," Buck says to the ceiling. "That was..."

Eddie lifts his head. His hair is destroyed. His eyes are half-lidded and soft and his cheek has a red mark from being pressed against Buck's skin and he looks so gorgeous that Buck's brain stumbles mid-sentence and has to restart.

"That was...?" Eddie prompts, and there's a flicker of uncertainty behind his eyes, a vulnerability he's trying to hide and failing miserably at. Buck realizes with a sudden, fierce clarity that Eddie is scared. Eddie is lying here on Buck's chest with his heart laid open and he's terrified that Buck is about to make a joke and pack this whole night into a box labeled "things we don't talk about" and Buck would rather swallow his own tongue than let Eddie feel like that for one more second.

"Really, really good." Buck says it quietly. No joke or deflection. 

He brushes Eddie's hair off his forehead because he can do that now, apparently, he can just touch Eddie whenever he wants and Eddie will let him and this is going to take some getting used to. 

"Like, alarmingly good. Like, I'm going to have to rethink my entire scale for what sex is supposed to feel like, which is actually very inconvenient for me because my scale was already pretty generous."

Eddie laughs. Soft and surprised and so happy it fills the entire room and settles into Buck's chest like sunlight. "Yeah?"

"Yeah." Buck runs his fingers through Eddie's hair and Eddie's eyes flutter shut. He leans into it and Buck's heart leaps. "Eddie."

"Hm."

"I wasn't— tonight wasn't just..." Buck trails off because words are failing him again but for a different reason this time. Eddie opens his eyes to look at him and waits with that patient steadiness that has been Buck's anchor for seven and a half years. "It's not just physical. You know that, right? This isn't me being drunk and impulsive and stupid. I mean I am drunk and impulsive and stupid but that's not why I kissed you."

Eddie is quiet for a long time. His thumb stills on Buck's ribs. Then he exhales shakily, and his forehead drops against Buck's chest and his voice comes out muffled against Buck's skin. "I don't have it all figured out yet. The— what this means, for me, who I— I haven't worked that out. I don't have the words for it."

"That's okay."

"But I know what I felt when I said goodnight to you at that bar." Eddie lifts his head again and meets Buck's eyes, his jaw is tight and his voice is raw and honest in that way Eddie only allows himself to be when he's been stripped down past every defense he has. "I felt like I was leaving part of myself behind. And I've only felt that one other time in my life and it was when Christopher left for El Paso."

Buck's eyes sting. He pulls Eddie closer and presses his mouth to Eddie's temple, breathing him in. He doesn't say anything because there are no words big enough for what Eddie just gave him. Except for the obvious, I’m in love with you, but Buck is almost certain Eddie might spontaneously combust if Buck lets that slip right now, so he’s going to give that particular confession a little bit more time.

Eddie's hand finds Buck's, lacing their fingers together, and it's so simple and mundane, such a tiny gesture, yet it feels huge. The music outside has faded and the hallway is quiet and somewhere outside the world keeps going without them.

"Bobby knew." Buck says it to the ceiling but he feels Eddie's fingers tighten around his. "He knew before either of us did. He's the one who signed us up for these stupid games. He submitted our names a year ago, Eddie. Before you even moved back."

"Yeah," Eddie rasps. 

"He sent us here. Together. On purpose." Buck's voice wavers and he lets it. "He always saw it. He always saw us."

Eddie doesn't respond with words. He turns his face into Buck's neck and breathes, his grip on Buck's hand tightening until it almost hurts. 

Buck holds on and stares at the ceiling and thinks, for the first time tonight without any panic or humor or deflection, thank you, Bobby. Followed by the more frequent thought of, I miss you everyday. I wish you were here to see this. 

The room gets quieter as Eddie's breathing evens out. Buck thinks he might be falling asleep, which is probably the highest compliment Eddie is capable of giving another person, trusting them enough to go unconscious, feeling safe. 

Buck should sleep too. His body is heavy and wrung out and the man he loves is breathing against his neck and there's absolutely nothing in the world that needs his attention right now.

His brain flickers one last time. 

You're in love with him. You're in love with Eddie, your best friend.

Yeah. He knows. He's known all night. He's probably known for years. He presses his lips to Eddie's hair and closes his eyes.

Buck wakes up to the aggressive Nashville sun cutting through hotel blinds that neither of them thought to close last night because they were busy doing other things and the first thing he registers is heat. There is a furnace pressed against his back. A furnace with arms and stubble and a hand splayed across Buck's stomach, possessive even in sleep, and Buck's brain boots up and immediately tries to spiral — that happened, that actually happened, you kissed your best friend and then you had sex with your best friend and now your best friend is spooning you and you—

The spiral stalls out. Sputters. Fizzles like a sparkler dropped in a puddle. Because Eddie's thumb is moving against his stomach, slow and lazy, and Eddie's nose is pressed behind his ear, and Eddie's breath is warm against his neck, and Buck's brain reaches for the panic and finds something else entirely in the place where the panic usually lives. 

Oh. That's what that feels like.

"Stop thinking so loud." Eddie's voice is gravel and sleep and his arm tightens around Buck's waist, pulling him closer. Buck goes, easy, settling back against Eddie's chest like his body has been rehearsing for this specific position his whole life. "I can hear you from here."

"I wasn't thinking."

"You're always thinking." Eddie yawns into his shoulder. "Your brain has never once been quiet. It's one of the most exhausting things about you."

Buck scoffs, mock offended. "One of?"

"I have a list."

Buck grins at the wall. Eddie's spooning him and the sun is pouring in and the world is waking up and they have to go back to LA today. Back to the 118. Back to real life and Chimney and the firehouse and Christopher and the beautifully complicated mess of their lives that is now different in a way that Buck can feel in his bones.

But that's later. Right now Eddie is drawing lazy patterns on his skin and Buck can feel him smiling into his shoulder.

"We're going to have to talk about this," Buck says.

"Later."

"And tell people."

"Later."

"Chimney is going to be insufferable."

"Chimney is always insufferable. Later." Eddie presses a kiss to the back of Buck's neck, soft and certain, and Buck's whole body lights up with it. "We don't have to check out until eleven."

"It's nine-thirty."

"Then you have ninety minutes to shut up." Eddie pulls him closer. Buck lets himself be pulled. "Think you can manage that?"

Buck laughs. It comes out bright and free in a way that surprises him because nothing about last night should feel so easy, it should feel complicated and terrifying and world-altering and it is all of those things but right now, in this bed, wrapped up in Eddie and the whole sprawling future of them stretching out ahead like a highway they haven't driven yet, it mostly just feels like the start of everything.

"Bobby would be so smug right now," Buck says. "You know that, right? He'd have that look. The one where he pretends he's not taking credit for everything."

Eddie laughs into his shoulder, his arm tightening around Buck as he says, "Yeah. He would. Smug and proud of us, for finally figuring it out."

They don't get out of bed for another hour.