Work Text:
Eddie has a speech.
He’s been building it for the better part of six weeks, adding to it the way you add to a grocery list — a line here, a better word there, something he thought of at a red light that felt important enough to repeat out loud to make sure it held up. He’s delivered it to his shower wall, to the highway, to the ceiling of his bedroom at two in the morning when his brain decides sleep is optional. He knows it well enough now that it has weight to it, a shape he can hold. Beginning, middle, end. It starts matter of fact and goes somewhere else by the finish, and he’s made his peace with that.
* * * * *
He’d told Christopher first.
That part wasn’t planned. It had come out one night after dinner, the two of them on the couch the way they always ended up; the comfortable quiet of a house that knew them both well. Christopher was playing video games, Eddie was watching. And underneath all of it, that constant, low hum that had been living in his chest for weeks. Buck, Buck, Buck. He put his hand on Christopher’s knee. Looked at his kid. Decided it was time.
“Mijo–” Eddie paused, like the words had been waiting a long time and he wanted to get them right. “I’m gay. I think I always have been.” He exhaled slowly. “I loved your mom with everything I had, and I always will. That’s not something that changes. That’s not something I’d ever want to change.”
Another breath.
“But there’s always been something missing. Something I couldn’t name for a long time.” His jaw worked for a moment. “And then Buck—” Eddie shook his head, almost like he was still getting used to the weight of it. “I love him, Chris. Not just as my best friend. I love him in a way I don’t have another word for.” He met his son’s eyes. “And I want to tell him that. But I needed to tell you first. I need to know that was okay with you.”
Christopher had looked at him for a long moment with those careful eyes that missed absolutely nothing—an inherited quality that he adopted from Buck, as far as Eddie could tell.
“Dad,” he’d said, with the specific patience of a fifteen-year-old who has been waiting on an adult to catch up. “Finally…”
He let that land for exactly one second before his mouth curved.
“I’ve been watching you two make googly eyes at each other since I was, like, seven. Tiá Pepa owes me twenty dollars.” He paused, tilting his head. “Also, Buck is basically already my other dad, so. Yeah. It’s okay with me.”
He picked his controller back up, which Eddie recognized as the teenage equivalent of we’re good, you can stop looking at me like that now.
“You should probably tell him soon, though,” Christopher added, eyes back on the screen. “Before he does something dumb like start dating someone else again.”
And that was that.
* * * * *
He runs it one more time on the drive over.
So I’ve been doing some thinking.
That’s the opener. Neutral, calm. Very Eddie. He’s been doing some thinking, and in the course of that thinking he’s arrived at a few conclusions he wants to lay out clearly the way he’d brief a situation at work.
Organized. Sequential.
I’ve spent a lot of my life checking boxes.
That’s the bridge. The part he’s most proud of, structurally. Because it’s true, and it’s the most honest way he knows to explain how something can be true for your whole life without you ever having a name for it.
He ticks them off in his head the way he has a hundred times.
Father: He checked that box the moment Christopher was placed in his arms, seven pounds of everything that would ever matter, and he has never once put it down.
Catholic: Checked before he was old enough to understand what he was agreeing to, pressed into him like a thumbprint, Ramon and Helena making sure it took. It did. Even when he’s argued with it, even when he’s sat in the pew and felt the weight of everything he owed pressing down on his shoulders; it’s part of the architecture of Eddie Diaz. He doesn’t always like it. It’s still there.
Firefighter: Checked the day he walked into the academy and understood, for the first time, that his hands and his skills and his inherent need to save could be useful here, on American soil. That his particular brand of stupid bravery might actually be useful to someone..He’s never checked a box more willingly.
He pulls up to a red light. Drums his fingers on the steering wheel.
But there’s one box I never checked.
That’s where the matter-of-fact part starts giving way to something else. Because he’s practiced this line dozens of times and it still does something to his breathing when he gets to it.
He didn’t check the straight box.
Not for lack of opportunity. The world hands you that box early and often, assumes you’ll take it, builds entire scaffolding around the assumption. And Eddie took the scaffolding. Built a life on it. Married a woman he genuinely loved, in the particular way that two people who chose each other can love each other, real and true and not a lie. But underneath the scaffolding, in the space he never looked at directly, the box sat empty.
He looked at it eventually.
And then he looked at Buck.
I think I’ve always known, is how the speech continues. I just didn’t have a word for it. And then I did, and the word was you.
He’s workshopped that line the most. It’s the one that costs the most to say, even in his head. But it’s the most accurate thing he’s ever put into language, so it stays.
I’m gay, Buck. And I’m in love with you. And I know this is a lot, and I know it might change things, and I’m ready for whatever that looks like, but I just — I needed you to know.
That’s the end.
He’s been over it enough times that it mostly doesn’t terrify him anymore.
Mostly.
He pulls onto Buck’s street, cuts the engine in the driveway, and sits for a moment with his hands in his lap.
I’m gay, Buck. And I’m in love with you.
He can do this.
He gets out of the truck.
* * * * *
Buck opens the door before Eddie gets to the porch, because Buck has always had some kind of radar where Eddie is concerned, some internal alert that goes off when Eddie is within proximity. He’s in worn jeans and a faded henley with the sleeves shoved up, and he’s grinning because he’s always grinning when he opens the door to Eddie, like Eddie showing up is still something that surprises him in the best possible way.
He’s wearing a hat.
A black trucker hat, structured brim in mocha, the kind of hat that looks like it belongs on someone who doesn’t think too hard about what they put on their head. Buck has clearly not thought too hard about it. It’s sitting slightly pushed back, curls escaping out the front, and Eddie’s eyes find the front panel before he can stop them.
Embroidered in bone, capital letters, very clear:
I’M NOT FOR EVERYBODY
Eddie looks at it for exactly one second.
Then he looks at Buck’s face, open and warm and already asking you good? without saying it, and he thinks: no, you’re not for everybody.
You’re for me.
He doesn’t say that. He says, “Hey,” and follows Buck inside.
“Pizza’s about an hour out,” Buck says, heading toward the kitchen. “You want a beer while we wait?”
“Sure.”
“I’ve got that Pilsner you said you didn’t like and then drank three of.”
“It grew on me.”
“That’s the same thing as liking it, Eddie.”
Eddie sits in his spot on the couch. His spot, because that’s what it is now — the cushions have simply accepted the shape of him at some point, and there’s nowhere else in the room that feels like his the same way. Buck’s house is like that broadly. It absorbed him gradually, without announcement, until one day the coffee the way he takes it was just known, and there was a chair in the dining room that was just his, and the couch had a spot. His spot.
He’s thought about what that means.
He’s been thinking about it for six weeks.
Buck comes back with two beers and drops down beside him, close, the way he always sits, the particular nearness that has always been a feature of Buck and not something Eddie has ever had to ask for. The hat is still on. I’M NOT FOR EVERYBODY faces the room, and Eddie makes himself look at the TV instead.
Buck is talking about the movie they agreed on. Whether to actually watch it or bail in favor of the game, because apparently there’s a good matchup tonight and he’d been keeping an eye on it. Eddie listens. He’s good at listening to Buck; he has had years of practice at looking like he’s doing something ordinary while doing something else entirely underneath it.
The something else, currently, is trying to locate the beginning of his speech.
So I’ve been doing some thinking.
“You’ve got your face on,” Buck says.
“I do not have a face.”
“Everybody has a face. Yours is the one where you’re working something out and trying not to look like you are.” Buck tilts his head, studying him. “You’ve had it since you walked in.”
Eddie opens his mouth.
I’ve spent a lot of my life checking boxes—
Buck reaches up and turns his hat around.
Backwards.
It’s nothing. It’s a casual, thoughtless adjustment, the brim swinging to the back, the front panel disappearing. The words disappear with it. And suddenly Buck is looking at him with his whole face open, chin slightly dipped, curls loose without the brim to redirect them, and the hat means something different backwards, it means something about the specific tilt of his jaw and the blue of his eyes, the reddish pink hue of his birthmark and the fact that he is looking at Eddie the way he always looks at Eddie, like Eddie is something he has decided to pay attention to above all other available options.
Eddie’s speech leaves his body entirely.
Fuck it.
He surges forward, cradles Buck’s face with both hands and kisses him.
Buck tastes like strawberry chapstick and Pilsner and something underneath both of those things that Eddie has no name for, something that is just Buck, specific and unmistakable, the kind of thing you don’t know you’ve been looking for until your mouth finds it and your whole body goes oh.
His lips are softer than Eddie could have imagined. And Eddie has — he’s not going to pretend he hasn’t — imagined.
Nothing prepared him for the reality of it.
There’s a half second where Buck doesn’t move; pure surprise, eyes wide, his whole system catching up — and then his hands come up, cradling the back of Eddie’s head, and he’s kissing Eddie back, and something in Eddie’s chest cracks open so completely and so quietly that he almost doesn’t notice it happening. He has his fist in Buck’s collar. His other hand finds the side of Buck’s neck, thumb pressed to his jaw, and he can feel Buck’s pulse there, rapid and real, and that — that is what undoes him entirely.
Because Eddie has spent years living in a world that felt muted in a way he couldn’t explain, colors slightly wrong, sounds slightly flat, like he was always watching his own life through fogged glass. And now, with Buck’s hands coming up to grip his shirt and Buck’s mouth opening under his — it’s like someone turned every dial up at once. Like he’s seeing the world for the first time in vivid, overwhelming technicolor, and the world looks like this.
Looks like Buck.
He doesn’t know what he expected this to feel like. Not this. Not this immediate. This obvious. Like something that was always going to happen has simply decided that now is when it gets to.
Buck makes a sound against his mouth that Eddie is going to think about for the rest of their lives.
They pull apart by a fraction of an inch. Both breathing differently than thirty seconds ago. Buck’s hands are on Eddie’s jaw, thumbs at the hinge of it, holding on like he’s taking inventory. Eddie stays close, foreheads almost touching, because he’s not ready. He’s not sure he’ll ever be ready to be further away from this than he has to be.
“Eddie,” Buck says. Low, careful.
“I had a speech,” Eddie says.
Buck stares at him.
“I’ve been working on it for six weeks. It had a structure. It was good.”
“What happened to it?”
“You turned your hat around.”
Buck looks at him for a long moment. Then something in his face shifts, something enormous that doesn’t quite have the composure to stay contained, and he says quietly, “Tell me anyway.”
Eddie exhales.
“I’ve spent my whole life checking boxes,” he starts, and his voice does something he didn’t plan for — it cracks, right down the middle, and he doesn’t try to cover it. “Father. Catholic. Firefighter. Every box the world handed me, I checked it. Didn’t ask questions. Just, kept going.” He watches Buck’s face, which is very still and very open, and that stillness is the only reason Eddie is still talking. “There was one I never checked.”
Buck waits. He doesn’t fill the silence. Doesn’t rush it. Just listens.
Eddie’s jaw works for a second. He looks down at his hands, then back up.
“I’m gay,” he says. Simple. Direct. The most factual sentence he has ever said out loud, and also the one that has lived the longest in the dark. His eyes sting, and he blinks it back, mostly. “I’ve known for a long time. I just didn’t let myself look at it directly. It was easier not to, and then I did. And I started to understand a lot of things about myself that I hadn’t wanted to understand before.”
He feels it then, the specific weight of years of pretending, of boxes, of mornings he woke up and put the armor back on without even thinking about it.
“And I realized it wasn’t just —” He stops. Finds the line he worked the hardest on, the one he almost didn’t let himself say. “I think I’ve always known it was you. Before I had a word for any of it, the word was you.”
His voice doesn’t crack on that part. It comes out clear, and certain, and he means every syllable of it.
The room is very quiet.
“I’m in love with you, Buck,” he says, matter of fact. The grass is green, the sky is blue and Eddie Diaz is in love with Evan Buckley. He exhales something that almost passes for a laugh. “That’s the end of the speech.”
Their eyes meet, and there's a moment of silence that feels too long.
But this time, Buck surges forward and kisses him.
Not surprised anymore. Deliberate. Both hands still on Eddie’s face, thumbs pressed to his cheekbones like he’s something fragile and precious and Buck is not willing to let go of him, the kind of kiss that says I have wanted to do this and I know exactly what you just handed me and I would have waited forever but I’m so glad I didn’t have to — all before either of them has said a single word out loud.
Eddie’s hands find Buck’s waist and hold on.
“I love you too,” Buck says, when they finally come up for air.
His voice does something complicated on the last word, like it’s carrying more weight than four syllables should reasonably hold. He pulls back just far enough to look at Eddie, really look at him, and his eyes are doing that thing; that thing where they go glassy and bright at the same time, where Evan Buckley is feeling everything at once and not running from a single bit of it.
“I’ve been —” he stops. Exhales. Tries again. “Eddie.” The way he says it lands like a confession all on its own. “God. I’ve been in love with you for years.”
He lets out a breath that might be a laugh, might be something closer to relief, the kind that only comes after you’ve been holding something so long your arms have forgotten what it feels like to put it down.
“I just never thought I was allowed to.” His voice is quieter now, rougher at the edges. “You were straight. And I — I made my peace with it. I had to.” He swallows. “I decided that whatever I could have of you, I’d take it. Every shift, every night on your couch, every stupid Tuesday where nothing happened and you were just there —” his throat works, “— I thought if that’s all I ever get, it’s still more than most people get in a lifetime. I was going to love you for the rest of my life and just — carry it.”
The words land in the room and stay there.
“I didn’t know,” Buck says, and it comes out a little broken. “I didn’t know you felt it too.”
Eddie reaches out and brushes his thumb across Buck’s cheekbone, catching a stray tear.
“Does Chris know?” Buck asks after a moment, blinking.
“Yeah,” Eddie says. “I told him first.”
Buck’s breath hitches slightly. “Is he — is he okay with it?”
Eddie’s mouth curves, soft and certain. “He said you’re basically already his other dad.” It makes Buck smile. “And that Tía Pepa owes him twenty dollars.”
Buck makes a sound that’s half laugh, half something that isn’t a laugh at all, and he has to press his lips together for a second, chin dipping, collecting himself. When he looks back up, his eyes are full.
“Yeah?” he manages.
“Yeah,” Eddie says simply. “He’s been waiting on us to catch up.”
The room holds them both for a moment, quiet and warm and full of something that has finally, after years of circling, found its way home.
They look at one another, both of their expressions saying finally.
Eddie pulls Buck back in.
It starts slow and doesn’t stay that way.
Eddie gets both hands in Buck’s henley and there’s a fraction of a second where his brain catches up to what they're are doing — this is happening, this is real, I'm touching Buck — and something in his chest pulls tight with the specific disbelief of a man receiving something he had completely stopped expecting. He’s waited long enough. He’s not going to let nerves take that from him now.
He pulls back just far enough to get the henley over Buck’s head, Buck lifting his arms cooperatively, easy, like he’s been doing this forever, like there was never any other version of this moment. The hat tumbles off somewhere into the couch cushions in the process.
Eddie doesn’t let it get far.
He finds it without looking and places it back on Buck’s head, backwards, of course, with both hands — deliberately, like punctuation.
Buck blinks at him, a smile pulling at the corner of his mouth.
Eddie looks at him. Buck; chest bare, hat on backwards, looking at Eddie like he’s trying to take a mental snapshot of the moment.
“The hat stays on,” Eddie says.
Something shifts in Buck’s expression. The warmth is still there, it never goes anywhere, but it cedes ground to something that makes every system. Eddie has come fully online.
“Yeah,” Buck says. Low. “Okay.”
Eddie gets his hands on Buck’s chest and has to take a second to exist in the fact that he’s allowed to do this now.
The scatter of hair. The warmth of skin. The ink that maps him – Use Me for Shade plastered on his pec, xxxx under the other, all the pieces Buck has added over the years that Eddie quietly cataloged over years of shared spaces and stolen glances and mornings after shift when Buck would pull his shirt off without thinking and Eddie would find somewhere else to look.
He doesn't have to find somewhere else to look anymore.
Eddie runs his thumb slowly along the line of a tattoo, following it like a question he already knows the answer to. He’s thought about this, about Buck — about his hands on Buck’s skin — with more frequency and more specificity than he will ever admit to anyone. The reality of it is so much better it almost makes him angry.
He presses his mouth to Buck’s throat and feels the pull of a breath underneath his lips, feels the way Buck’s chest rises and his whole body stills, like he's trying to stay in the moment forever. Eddie understands the impulse completely.
Eddie takes his time. They have time now. That's new, and he intends to use every second of it.
His hands work their way down.
He has been thinking about this. About the particular reputation that preceded Buck when Eddie first showed up at the 118, the way everyone had talked about Buck 1.0 with a kind of reverent, slightly horrified affection, the word firehose deployed in a tone that Eddie had absolutely filed away and absolutely not thought about again. Except, he had thought about it again. Recently. In detail. And now he has his mouth on Buck’s collarbone and his hands on his belt buckle and when he looks up, the backwards hat is slightly askew and Buck’s eyes are very dark.
“Eddie,” Buck says, a note in it that isn’t quite warning and isn’t quite please and is entirely Buck.
Buck’s hands come up to his back, steadying, unhurried. He’s taking this in, Eddie can tell. Storing it the way Buck stores everything about Eddie — carefully, completely, with full intent to use it.
“Hey,” Buck says, low, into his hair. “We don’t have to—”
“I know,” Eddie says. “I want to.”
A pause. Buck’s hands tighten fractionally.“Yeah?”
“I’ve been thinking about it,” Eddie says, against his collarbone. “For a while.”
He doesn’t explain how long. He doesn’t say that a while means every late shift and every 2AM and every time Buck laughed at something Eddie said and Eddie had to find somewhere else to look. He doesn’t say that thinking about it means he has done research, deliberate and specific, alone in the dark of his bedroom with his phone screen too bright, watching things he’d been too afraid to watch before and feeling something unlock in him with each one. He doesn’t say that the research eventually became something more personal — his own hands, his own body, learning himself in a new way, slow and careful and completely alone, thinking about Buck the entire time.
He’s not saying any of that out loud.
But Buck seems to understand enough, because he tips Eddie’s chin up and looks at him for a moment — really looks, the way he does when he wants to make sure Eddie knows he’s being seen — and then he kisses him slow and thorough and takes over.
Which is exactly what Eddie wanted.
Buck, quiet easily, lifts Eddie up and off the couch, walks him back toward the bedroom with both hands on him, not rushing, kissing him between steps, stumbling into walls, and the hat stays on — brim backward, slightly askew — and Eddie keeps finding it with his hands, keeps grounding himself against the brim, the worn fabric, the solid reality of it.
The backs of his knees hit the bed.
Buck pulls back and looks at him. Takes him in. Eyes dark, the hat framing his face in a way that makes Eddie want to do things he doesn’t have the vocabulary for yet.
“This okay?” Buck asks, getting his hands on Eddie’s shirt.
“Yes,” Eddie says. “More than.”
Buck gets the shirt over Eddie's head. Takes a moment with what’s underneath, his hands moving over Eddie’s shoulders, his chest, the flat of his stomach, learning the topography of him with the same unhurried attention he gives to everything he decides matters. Eddie stands there and lets himself be looked at. It’s not a thing he’s ever been particularly good at — being seen, just standing still and letting someone take stock. But this is Buck, and with Buck it has always been different.
Buck leans in and puts his mouth to Eddie’s shoulder. Drags slowly across his collarbone. Down the center of his chest. And Eddie puts his hand on the backwards brim of the hat and holds on.
“Lie down,” Buck says against his sternum.
Eddie lies down.
What follows is Buck taking him apart methodically and without mercy. He works his way down Eddie’s body with his mouth — the line of his ribs, the jut of his hip, and Eddie’s hands move between the sheets and the back of Buck’s head and the brim of that goddamn hat depending on where the urgency is. Buck’s hands are always moving, always certain, always a few seconds ahead of where Eddie’s attention is, which means Eddie is continuously blindsided by what comes next and continuously prepared for it.
He gets Eddie’s jeans off. Runs his palms back up the inside of his thighs and sits back and just looks.
Buck hooks his fingers into the waistband of Eddie’s boxer briefs, “Is this okay?” Buck asks.
Eddie, currently at a loss for words, nods yes.
The boxers hit the ground and Buck lets out a deep breath. Eddie’s painfully hard cock, sheen with pre-cum, snaps back against his abs before resting at attention.
“You’re staring,” Eddie says. His voice is already different. Lower. Rougher than he intended.
“Yeah,” Buck says simply. “I am.”
He’s not apologetic about it. He’s not going to pretend he hasn’t wanted this, and Eddie finds that easier to be with than he expected — the directness of it, the way Buck doesn’t perform modesty he doesn’t feel. Eddie has always appreciated that about him. The honesty. The way he loves things completely and without shame.
Buck gets his hand around him and Eddie’s hips lift without asking permission.
“Buck—”
“I’ve got you,” Buck says.
He does. He always has. Eddie knows this, has always known it, and having it be literally true in this specific moment makes something in his chest do something complicated that he decides to think about later, when he’s capable of sustained thought.
Buck works Eddie’s cock until he’s leaking and flushed and gripping the sheets with both hands, until his hips are pushing up without permission and he’s stopped pretending he has any composure left to protect.
And then Buck stops.
Eddie makes a noise that is not dignified. At all.
“Your turn’s coming,” Buck says, the small smile at the corner of his mouth deeply, personally offensive. “We’re just going to stay here for a minute.”
“Here is cruel,” Eddie grits out.
“Here is where I want you.” Buck looks at him, unhurried, like he has all the time in the world and intends to use every second of it. “Here is where I’ve wanted you.”
Which is — a lot to say. Eddie files it away.
Then Buck leans back down and wraps his mouth around the head of Eddie’s cock and all filing systems shut down entirely.
He takes his time. That’s the thing about Buck that Eddie should have anticipated and didn’t — he takes his time with everything, gives his full attention to whatever is in front of him, and what is in front of him right now is Eddie, so Eddie gets all of it. The slow drag of his tongue along the underside. The heat of his mouth sinking down and then pulling back, a rhythm that has Eddie’s hand moving to Buck’s hair without deciding to. Buck’s hands are on his hips, not holding him down, just resting there, anchoring him.
Eddie is going to lose his mind. He is already losing it. He can feel it going. “Buck,” he says, because he has to say something and that’s the only word available.
Buck hums around him and Eddie’s hips jerk and Buck’s hands tighten fractionally and hold on, steady and certain, and he keeps going. He’s learning Eddie the way he learns everything — completely, cataloguing what makes Eddie’s breathing change, what makes his hand tighten in Buck’s hair, what makes him make the specific sound he just made that he’s fairly certain has never come out of him before in his life.
He’s leaking into Buck’s mouth and Buck is taking it and making it very, very clear that he has no complaints about this.
“I need—” Eddie starts.
Buck pulls off. Looks up at him with dark eyes and swollen lips and the backwards hat slightly askew and Eddie’s whole chest caves inward.
“Tell me,” Buck says.
“You,” Eddie says. The simplest sentence he’s ever said. “I need you. I’ve needed — Buck, please, I need you to—”
He doesn’t finish the sentence. He doesn’t need to.
Buck kisses the inside of his thigh, once, deliberate, like a punctuation mark.
Then he straightens.
Eddie sits up. Gets his hands on Buck’s shoulders. Pushes.
“There,” Eddie says. “I want you to lie back.”
Buck raises an eyebrow. Then he lets himself be pushed onto his back, because Buck has always understood when Eddie has made a decision that isn’t up for discussion.
Eddie gets his hands on Buck’s jeans, and, along with his boxer briefs, gets them off in one fell swoop.
He stops.
Eddie knew. He has done the research — deliberate, specific research, alone in the dark, with his phone too bright and his own hand not quite cutting it anymore. He has a working theoretical understanding of what he’s dealing with. He thought he was prepared to see Buck’s dick.
He was not prepared.
Buck is — he is big. Not in the abstract sense Eddie had allowed himself to imagine in careful, deniable increments over the last six weeks, but concretely, immediately, undeniably big — thick in a way that makes Eddie’s mouth go dry and his brain go somewhere it has never technically been before.
He’s fully hard, flushed a deep angry pink at the base giving way to red at the swollen head, the veins running the length of him visible and pronounced in a way that Eddie’s eyes trace without asking permission. And he is leaking — not a bead, not a hint, but a genuine, steady, copious flow of precum that has already made the head of him slick and is running in a slow rivulet down the shaft, and Eddie watches it track all the way down and something in his hindbrain completely disconnects from rational thought.
He wraps his hand around the base and Buck pulls in a sharp breath.
Eddie can’t close his hand all the way around him. He tries. He registers this fact and stores it in the same place he’s storing everything else happening to him right now, in the folder labeled things I will be thinking about for the rest of my natural life.
“You okay?” Buck asks, propped on his elbows, watching him with an expression that is trying very hard to be neutral and not entirely succeeding.
“Perfect,” Eddie says. Meaning it completely.
His voice comes out lower than he intended. Rougher. Like something has shifted in his register and isn’t going back.
He runs his thumb slowly through the slick at the tip — the sheer quantity of it, warm and viscous, spreading easily — and Buck makes a sound that starts controlled and doesn’t end that way. His hips push up fractionally, just barely, immediately stopped, and the muscle in his jaw tightens.
“Eddie,” he says. Low. Warning. Please.
Eddie does it again, slower this time, spreading the slick down the head with his thumb, watching Buck’s cock throb visibly in his hand, heavy and urgent, leaking more with each second like Buck has been waiting for this and his body has decided to make that fact absolutely unambiguous.
“Fuck,” Buck says, less controlled.
Eddie lowers his head.
He takes his time with the approach. Runs his tongue along the underside first, learning the weight of him, the heat, the specific geography. Buck makes a sound above him that is careful and controlled and not going to stay that way. Eddie reaches the head, wraps his lips around it, and Buck’s hand finds his hair immediately — not pushing, just landing there, needing something to hold.
Eddie takes him deeper.
“Jesus Christ,” Buck says. Quiet. Involuntary. The first thing he’s said that he clearly didn’t plan.
Eddie works his way down, taking as much as he can, which is to say, is a pretty decent amount, though he knows he can swallow it all if he just gives himself some more time to open up. He can feel Buck trying to stay still, the tension of it in his thighs and his stomach, the deliberate control of someone who has decided to let Eddie set the pace and is finding it genuinely, physically difficult.
He pulls back. Swirls his tongue. Sinks back down.
“Eddie,” Buck says, rougher. “Jesus — you don’t — you’ve never—” He seems to be having trouble completing sentences, which Eddie observes with deep satisfaction.
Eddie pulls off. Looks up at him. “Tell me if I’m doing something wrong.”
Buck stares at him. His chest is heaving. His cock is slick and dark and absolutely throbbing between them.
“You’re not doing anything wrong,” Buck says, with visible effort. “There is nothing you could do that wouldn’t—” He stops. Exhales. “Eddie. There is nothing you can do with your mouth that won’t make me feel good. Nothing. Do you understand that?”
“I want to do it right,” Eddie says.
“You are doing it right. You’ve been doing it right. The problem is you’re doing it too right and I’m trying not to—” Buck stops again. Closes his eyes briefly. “Just, please keep going.”
Eddie keeps going.
He takes Buck deeper this time, finding the angle, working into a rhythm that has Buck’s thighs tightening on either side of him and his hand flexing in Eddie’s hair. He’s vocal now, past trying to keep it in — a low running commentary of fuck and right there and Eddie’s name in three different registers, and Eddie looks up at him through it all because this is what he thought about. This exact thing. Buck completely undone, hat askew, chest rising and falling too fast, one hand in Eddie’s hair and the other gripping the sheets, saying Eddie’s name like a thing he’s been saving up.
“Eddie — I’m going to,” Buck’s grip tightens. “Stop, or I’m going to—”
Eddie pulls off.
Buck’s head drops back. He exhales for what feels like a very long time.
“You,” he says, to the ceiling, “are going to be the death of me.”
“Good,” Eddie says.
He kisses his way back up Buck’s stomach, his chest, his throat, and when their mouths meet again Buck kisses him like he means it, like he has always meant it, which Eddie knows by now is the truth.
“What do you want?” Buck asks against his mouth.
“I already told you,” Eddie says.
“What. Do. You. Want.”
“I want you to fuck me.” Eddie says, steady, direct, looking Buck in the eyes
Buck’s exhale is controlled and slow and says everything.
“Okay,” he says. Low. “Turn over.”
Eddie turns over.
Buck’s hands land on him immediately. Both of them, warm and sure, sliding from the backs of his thighs up over the curve of his ass, and Eddie hears him exhale — slow, controlled, the sound of someone taking a moment to appreciate something they’ve been thinking about.
“God,” Buck says quietly. To himself, mostly. Not performing it. His hands move over Eddie with frank appreciation, palming the curve of him, squeezing once with both hands like he needs to know it’s real. Eddie’s face is in the pillow and he is absolutely not going to say anything about the fact that his ass being in Buck’s hands is making him feel things he doesn’t have clinical language for.
Buck leans down and puts his mouth to the small of Eddie’s back. Just once.
Warm and deliberate.
Then he pulls back and says, low and even, “Open your mouth.”
Eddie turns his head. Looks at Buck over his shoulder.
Buck is watching him with dark eyes and complete composure, two fingers extended, waiting.
Eddie opens his mouth.
Buck slides his fingers in, slow, and Eddie closes his lips around them without being asked. Works them the way Buck is silently inviting him to, tongue moving over the pads of his fingers, getting them wet and slick, and Buck watches him do it with an expression that is barely contained and getting less contained by the second.
“Good boy,” Buck says quietly.
It does something to Eddie that he will never in his life be discussing with anyone.
Buck withdraws his fingers slowly. Gets both hands back on Eddie’s ass and spreads him open and the exposure of it, the cool air and Buck’s eyes on him in that specific, purposeful way, makes Eddie’s whole body flush from the back of his neck to his thighs.
He’s twitching. He can feel himself twitching, hole clenching on nothing, body already anticipating what’s coming, and Buck makes a low sound that is not accidental.
“Look at you,” Buck says, very quietly.
And then he leans in and spits directly on him; warm, slick, landing right on his hole — and Eddie makes a noise into the pillow that he could not have predicted or prevented. His hips push back on instinct and Buck’s hand comes down flat on the curve of his ass, steadying, not stopping him, just grounding him.
“Stay,” Buck says.
Eddie stays.
Buck works the spit into him with the pad of one finger, slow circles, not pushing in yet, just learning the outside of him, and Eddie is gripping the pillow case with both hands and doing serious damage to it.
Then Buck pushes in.
One thick finger, slow and steady, and Eddie breathes through the stretch of it, the specific unfamiliarity of being opened this way by someone else’s hands — so different from his own, so much more deliberate, so much more present. Buck takes his time, working the first knuckle, then the second, letting Eddie feel the full length of it.
“Okay?” Buck asks.
“Yeah,” Eddie manages. “Yeah. More.”
“Not yet.”
“Buck—”
“Not yet, Eddie.”
Eddie makes a noise into the pillow. Buck keeps going at his own pace, steady and thorough, and Eddie learns to breathe through it — to let his body open around what’s being offered, to stop fighting the instinct to tense. His hips want to push back but Buck’s free hand is on the small of his back, light but present, a reminder to stay, I’ve got you, let me do this.
And then Buck crooks his finger and finds something and Eddie’s hips jerk forward and the sound that comes out of him belongs to a completely different person.
“There,” Buck says. Quiet. Certain.
“Again,” Eddie manages.
Buck does it again. Deliberately. Again. Watching Eddie come apart over a single finger with the focused attention of someone who has full intentions of making this thorough.
“More,” Eddie says. “Please. Buck, please…”
Buck gives him more.
He pulls almost all the way out, spits again — Eddie makes another sound at that, mortifying, unstoppable — and pushes back in with two fingers. The stretch is wider now, a burn that sits right at the edge of too much and stays there, Buck reading that line with complete accuracy, refusing to cross it. He scissors his fingers slowly, working Eddie open, and the sounds Eddie is making into the pillow have moved well past any attempt at control. They’re just; coming out. Honest and continuous and completely beyond him.
“More,” Eddie says. “Buck, I can take it — more…”
“I know you can,” Buck says. Even. Certain. Like he has never doubted this. “I’m going to give it to you. Just let me—”
He curls his fingers again and Eddie sees stars.
By the time Buck works up to three, Eddie is shaking. Slick and open and so strung out on the push and drag of Buck’s fingers that he’s lost the thread of every thought that isn’t more or Buck or the specific ache of needing to be filled by something much, much bigger.
“Buck,” he says. Wrecked. “I’m ready. I’m — I need — please—”
“Yeah,” Buck says, rough. “Yeah, I’ve got you.”
The hat is still on, brim backward, slightly askew from everything, and Buck is above him with dark eyes and flushed skin and the particular expression of someone who cannot believe they get to be here and intends to make the most of it.
Buck turns Eddie over so he’s on his back, looking into his eyes.
Buck lines up between him.
Eddie can feel the heat of him before there’s even contact — the thick, blunt press of the head of Buck’s cock nudging against his hole, slick and swollen and enormous compared to everything Eddie’s taken before, and his body does something involuntary, clenching around nothing, trying to accommodate something that isn’t even inside him yet.
“Breathe,” Buck says.
Eddie breathes.
Buck pushes in.
Just the head first. Just the broad, flushed tip pressing insistently against Eddie’s hole, and Eddie can feel himself opening around it, feel the slow stretch as his body is coaxed apart, the rim of him pulled wide to accommodate the sheer size of Buck.
Buck’s leaking so much that it eases the way, slick and warm, and Eddie’s hands fist in the sheets as the widest part of the head breaches him fully and his hole closes tight behind it, gripping Buck like it doesn’t intend to let go.
“Fuck,” Buck breathes. Low. Private. His grip on Eddie’s hip tightens.
Eddie can feel everything. Every ridge, every throb of Buck’s pulse through the thick heat of him, the stretch of his own body pulled open wider than he’s ever managed alone, his hole fluttering helplessly around Buck’s cock like it’s trying to draw him deeper and resist him at the same time.
Buck gives him an inch. Then another. Slow, steady, inexorable, and Eddie turns his face into the pillow and breathes through it — the specific burn of being opened this wide, his body working to accommodate all of Buck, his hole stretching further with every careful push forward. He can feel the drag of every vein, every ridge, the obscene thickness of him splitting Eddie open with devastating patience.
“Look,” Buck says softly. “Look down.”
Eddie doesn’t know why he obeys. But he drops his chin and looks between his own legs and — God. He can see it. Can see the thick base of Buck’s cock disappearing into him, his ass gripping Buck’s cock like a vice, pulling tight every time Buck nudges forward another fraction of an inch.
“You’re taking me so well,” Buck says. Rough. Genuine. His thumb moves over the stretched skin where Eddie’s hole grips him, gentle, almost reverent, and Eddie makes a sound that starts in his chest and ends somewhere else entirely. “Look at how well you’re taking me.”
Eddie stops looking because if he keeps looking he is going to lose consciousness.
Buck keeps pushing forward. Inch by slow inch, letting Eddie feel every centimeter of the thick slide of him, and Eddie’s breath is coming in pieces now — short, broken exhales every time Buck sinks deeper, his body accommodating him in real time, his hole stretched so full and so tight that he can feel the faint throb of Buck’s pulse inside him.
And then Buck bottoms out.
Fully seated. All of him. The base of his cock flush against Eddie’s ass, his hips pressed forward, and Eddie is so full that the fullness has its own specific texture — dense and complete and everywhere, Buck’s cock thick and throbbing and buried to the hilt inside him, and Eddie can feel the head of him impossibly deep, pressed against something that makes his eyes go unfocused.
Buck holds there. Still. Breathing.
“Okay?” Buck manages. The control in his voice is the thinnest it’s been all night.
“Don’t,” Eddie grits out. “Don’t move. Just, give me a second.”
Buck gives him a second.
He doesn’t move. But Eddie can feel him — the thick pulse of him, the steady throb of blood and heat, his cock leaking inside Eddie in a way that Eddie is aware of with every nerve ending he has. His hole is gripping Buck like it was made for this, clenching and releasing in involuntary waves, his body trying to adjust to being this full, this completely, thoroughly claimed.
“Okay,” Eddie says finally. Wrecked. “Move. Please. Now.”
“Are you sure?” Buck asks sincerely.
“Don’t stop,” Eddie grits out. “I’m fine. Don’t you dare fucking stop.”
“You’re sure.” Buck asks, teasing this time.
“Buck, I swear to God—”
Buck moves.
He starts slow, pulling back and pushing forward in long measured strokes, and Eddie’s hands find his back and hold on. The drag of it — the obscene, slick pull of Buck’s cock drawing back through his stretched hole and then driving forward again, thick and relentless and perfect — is unlike anything Eddie prepared himself for. He can feel every ridge on the slide out and every vein on the push back in. His hole grips Buck every time he pulls back like his body has decided it isn’t willing to let go, and the sound of it, the wet filthy drag of Buck working through him, has completely short circuited whatever was left of Eddie’s capacity for higher thought.
He is being taken apart, slowly and deliberately, and he is enthusiastically inviting it.
“God,” Buck says above him, rhythm deepening. His voice is already rougher than it was. “Eddie, you’re so, you feel so—” He doesn’t finish the sentence. He doesn’t need to. His hips push forward and Eddie’s whole body rocks up the bed with the force of it and he pulls him back by the hips and does it again.
The pace builds.
Buck, Buck, Buck.
Eddie loses track of time the way you lose track of time when everything has collapsed to a single point. There is only Buck above him — the backwards hat now completely askew, the flush of his chest, the specific sounds he’s making that have gone from controlled to completely gone and Eddie’s name in his mouth like something he’s been holding onto for years and is finally, finally saying out loud.
“Harder,” Eddie hears himself say. “Buck right there, don’t stop—”
Buck doesn’t stop.
He drives deeper, changes his angle by degrees, and finds something that makes Eddie’s vision white at the edges and his whole body seize. Does it again. Skin snapping against skin. Eddie makes a sound that has never come out of him before and will never require an explanation because Buck is already doing it again, again, again, and Eddie can feel the head of Buck’s cock pressing into that spot with every thrust, relentless and precise, and his own cock is so hard it’s aching, leaking steadily against his stomach, and he hasn’t even touched himself.
“There,” Buck says, with the absolute certainty of a man who has found exactly what he was looking for. “Yeah?”
“Yes,” Eddie manages. “Yes, there — Buck, please…”
Buck gives him there. Stays right there, angle locked in, driving into that spot with focused, punishing rhythm, and Eddie’s hands leave his back and fist in the sheets because he needs to hold onto something while Buck takes him apart from the inside. He can feel pressure building low and deep, different from anything he’s felt before, his cock untouched and somehow already at the edge of something, his balls drawing up, his whole body wound impossibly tight around Buck’s cock.
“Buck,” he grits out, “I’m gonna —”
“I know,” Buck says, rough, breathless, not slowing down. “I know. Let it happen. Let me feel it.”
Buck’s rhythm is changing — deeper, harder, the last of his control abandoned, his hips snapping forward with a force that sends Eddie sliding up the bed and drives the breath out of him in a sharp exhale every single time. “I’m close. Where — tell me where you want it—”
“Inside,” Eddie says. No hesitation. Not a thought required. “Inside me — I want — Buck, please, cum inside me, I want to feel it — I want to feel you—”
“Yeah,” Buck grits out, wrecked, gone. “Yeah. Fuck. Yeah, okay—”
He drives forward hard, once, twice — and then he buries himself to the base and shudders, and Eddie feels it; the first pulse of him, thick and deep, heat flooding into him in waves as Buck comes apart completely, shaking above him, saying Eddie’s name with his face pressed to his throat. He spills into him in long, shuddering pulses, so much of it, deep and hot, and Eddie can feel his hole being filled, stretched and clenching around Buck through every wave.
And Eddie cums.
Completely hands free. Untouched. His cock pulses between them without warning and he spills across his own stomach and chest in thick, hot streaks, his hole clamping down so hard around Buck’s cock that Buck groans into his neck and shudders through another pulse of his own, fucking him through both of their orgasms until Eddie is striped with his own cum across his abs and Buck’s cum is leaking out around his cock where it’s still buried inside him, too much of it, seeping hot against the stretched rim of Eddie’s hole.
Both of them are completely still.
Breathing.
Buck lifts his head
He looks at Eddie — really looks at him, flushed and wrecked and covered in sweat and cum, and something in his expression is so undone that Eddie’s chest does something complicated even now, even like this.
Then Buck leans down and kisses him.
It’s slow, and deep, and Buck’s chest comes down against Eddie’s, dragging through the mess between them, smearing it between their bodies — sweat and cum and heat all pressed together and Eddie gets both hands in Buck’s curls, knocking the hat off, and kisses him back and doesn’t care about any of it, not even slightly. Buck’s cock is softening inside him, still seated, and when he shifts it draws a sound from both of them, and his cum runs hot down the inside of Eddie’s thigh.
Buck presses his forehead to Eddie’s.
They breathe.
“Hi,” Buck says. Barely a whisper.
“Hi,” Eddie says back breathlessly.
Afterward the room is quiet and warm and completely wrecked in all the best ways. They’re tangled together in the sheets, neither of them going anywhere, breathing their way back to something resembling functional. Buck’s hand moves slowly up and down Eddie’s back. The ceiling fan turns.
The pizza, wherever it is, has long since stopped being anyone’s problem.
The hat is on the floor.
Buck finds it eventually, leaning over the edge of the bed, coming back with it and looking at the front panel for a moment — the embroidered letters, bone thread on black, sitting there the same as they’ve been all night.
I’M NOT FOR EVERYBODY.
He turns it backwards — the way it’s been all night — and places it on Eddie’s head.
Eddie doesn’t move it. He stares at the ceiling. He is sweaty and wrecked and smiling and not doing a single thing to stop any of it.
“So,” Buck says.
“So,” Eddie echoes.
A comfortable silence. The kind that only exists between two people who have known each other long enough that silence stopped being awkward somewhere around day one.
“The speech,” Buck says. “Was there more? After the boxes?”
“That was basically it.”
“I feel like there was a middle part.”
“There was a middle part I was never totally happy with.” Eddie turns his head to look at him. “I improvised.”
Buck is smiling. The enormous one, the unguarded one, the one that takes up his whole face and has been Eddie’s undoing since long before he had language for why. “I think the improvisation worked out.”
“Yeah,” Eddie says. “It really did.”
He sits up a little. Takes the hat off his own head, turns it around so the front faces them, and looks at it for a moment. The structured brim. The mocha visor. The bone thread letters that have been sitting on Buck’s head all evening saying something that was true long before tonight, long before the speech, long before Eddie had the nerve to say it out loud.
I’M NOT FOR EVERYBODY.
He looks at Buck.
“No,” Eddie says quietly. “You’re not.”
Buck furrows his brows.
Eddie sets the hat back on Buck’s head, brim forward this time, straight.
Smooths it down once with his palm.
“You’re just for me.”
Buck looks at him. Something moves through his face that doesn’t have a name and doesn’t need one — something that has been there for years, probably, waiting for exactly this. His hand comes up and covers Eddie’s where it’s still resting on the brim.
Then he lifts the hat off his own head and places it on Eddie’s.
Backwards.
“Keep it,” he says.
Eddie looks at him for a long moment. At this man — this specific, ridiculous, irreplaceable man — who opened his door tonight in a trucker hat and unwittingly ended six weeks of carefully constructed speeches with a single, thoughtless gesture. Who kissed him back without hesitation. Who held him like something worth holding and meant every second of it.
He settles back into the pillow. The hat sits crooked on his head. Buck reaches over and takes his hand, threading their fingers together slowly, like he has all the time in the world. Like he’s been waiting to do exactly this.
He lifts Eddie’s knuckles to his mouth and presses a kiss there.
Quiet. Deliberate.
The room is warm around them, wrecked in all the ways that matter, entirely theirs.
“I love you,” Buck says. Against his hand. Simple and certain, the way Buck says everything he actually means.
Eddie opens his eyes and looks at him.
Eight years. Eight years of standing next to this person, of choosing him in every way that didn’t require saying it out loud, of checking every box the world handed him and leaving the most important one blank because he wasn’t ready, because the word was too big, because some truths take time to earn.
“I love you too,” Eddie says.
And means it in every direction. Backward and forward. Past and present. All the versions of himself that got him here, and every version still to come.
Buck squeezes his hand.
Outside, LA does what LA always does; indifferent, ongoing, completely unaware that something important just happened in this house on this street on this otherwise unremarkable evening.
In here, everything is exactly right.
The doorbell rings, bringing them out of their blissful stupor.
“Probably the pizza,” Buck says as he gets up, wiping his chest with his shirt. “You stay put, I’ll be right back.” Buck says as he haphazardly pulls up his jeans, making his way through the bedroom door.
“Wait,” Eddie says as he takes the hat off and tosses it to Buck, who catches it mid-air.
“The hat stays on.” Eddie says with a smirk.
Buck smiles, puts the hat on backwards and walks to the front door. He opens it to an extremely unimpressed delivery boy who takes one look at him — bare chested, backwards hat, jeans half done — and simply holds out the pizza without a word.
Buck tips generously.
Eddie, still in the bedroom, drops his head back against the pillow and stares at the ceiling with the particular expression of a man who cannot believe this is his life and intends to be grateful about it every single day.