Archive of Our Own ^beta

Eddie doesn't mean to keep the sticker on his nightstand. It just… stays there. Right next to his phone and his watch, tucked between the lamp base and a half-empty glass of water he keeps forgetting to bring to the kitchen. Every morning it's the first thing he sees when he rolls over to slap his alarm off, and every morning he thinks, I should move that, and every morning he doesn't.

It becomes part of the furniture. Part of the routine. Wake up, see turtle, contemplate existence, get dressed. He doesn't think about why he likes it there. That would require a level of self-examination he's simply not interested in pursuing at this time, thank you.

It migrates, eventually. Not on purpose. He picks it up one morning while grabbing his phone and shoves both into his pocket without thinking, and then it's just… in his pocket. At the station, at the grocery store, at Christopher's school pickup. His thumb finds it during lulls, tracing the edge of the cartoon shell while he waits for coffee to brew or sits in the truck between calls, and each time, his shoulders come down from wherever they've been living near his ears. It's a reflex. Pavlovian, almost. Touch turtle, feel calm. He doesn't analyze it further than that, because analyzing it further than that would involve asking himself why a sticker from an aquarium gift shop has become his emotional support object, and that question has a follow-up question he's not prepared to answer.

So he doesn't.

He does, however, dream about Buck.

Not on purpose. Obviously. Eddie doesn't decide to dream about Buck the same way he doesn't decide to sneeze or to find a song stuck in his head. It just happens, and he has to deal with the aftermath, which is to say he has to deal with waking up at five a.m. feeling flushed and confused and vaguely pissed off at his own subconscious for going rogue.

The first dream is innocuous enough. They're at a restaurant. Not one Eddie recognizes, just a generic dream-restaurant with warm lighting and menus that don't have any words on them. Buck's sitting across from him talking with his hands about God knows what. Eddie can't hear him, but he can see his mouth moving, can see him gesturing wildly enough to almost knock over his water glass, and dream-Eddie is just sitting there watching him with this dopey, tranquil smile on his face that real-Eddie would never, in a million years, allow himself to wear in public when looking at another man.

He wakes up from that one and stares at the ceiling for ten minutes.

The second dream is worse. They're walking somewhere together, shoulder to shoulder, and Buck reaches over and takes his hand. Fingers lacing together with zero hesitation, and dream-Eddie doesn't flinch or pull away or have a crisis about it. Dream-Eddie just holds on, adjusting his grip and letting his thumb drag across Buck's knuckles while they walk.

Eddie wakes up from that one with his hand curled around the sticker, which had apparently been on the pillow next to him. He has to force himself to get out of bed and go stand in the kitchen with the lights on because he doesn't trust himself to lie there in the dark with the echo of Buck's fingers between his.

And the thing is, Eddie knows this is insane. He's aware. He met this person once, for a collective total of maybe ninety minutes if he's being generous with the math, most of which was spent in the company of schoolchildren and marine wildlife. He doesn't know Buck's full name. He doesn't know where he lives, what he drives, whether he's single, whether he even meant any of it or if Eddie just hallucinated the flirting because he was dehydrated and emotionally vulnerable. He knows Buck is good with kids and enthusiastic about stingrays and looks unfairly good when wet, and that is simply not enough information to be dreaming about a person with this level of commitment.

Eddie doesn't believe in fate or cosmic signals, doesn't believe the universe arranges meet-cutes at aquariums for exhausted firefighters. He believes in logic, evidence, things that make sense when you line them up.

None of this makes any sense. His stupid, traitorous brain doesn’t seem to care. 

Buck probably doesn't even remember him. That's the real kicker. Eddie's over here constructing an entire alternate reality around a guy who probably went home that night, ate dinner, watched TV, and never once thought about the grumpy dad who rolled his eyes at him in the parking lot. Buck talks to hundreds of people a week. Eddie was a Saturday. A blip. A mildly rude customer who got softened up by how Buck interacted with his kid.

It gets more elaborate. His brain, having discovered this fun new hobby, goes absolutely feral with it. Buck, on his couch with his feet on the coffee table, laughing at Christopher while Eddie hands him a beer from the kitchen. Buck, leaning against the counter while Eddie cooks, stealing bites and getting his hand swatted away. Buck, asleep next to him. Buck's head on his shoulder during a movie. Buck holding his face with both hands and looking at him with those stupid blue eyes and Eddie is going to lose his mind.

He can't control it. He's tried going to bed thinking about literally anything else: work, bills, the Dodgers' bullpen situation, the weird noise his truck's been making. Doesn't matter. The second he falls asleep, his brain boots up the Buck Cinematic Universe and Eddie's got front row seats to a life he hasn't admitted he wants, playing on a loop behind his eyelids.

The worst part isn't the dreams themselves. The worst part is the three or four seconds after waking up, when the feeling hasn't faded yet and the wanting is still right there, honest and enormous, before his brain catches up and the ever-steady walls go back into place. Those seconds are brutal. Those seconds, Eddie's starting to suspect, are the most truthful he's been with himself in years.

But mornings are for coffee and denial, so.

The daydreams are trickier because they happen while he's conscious, which means they're technically his fault.

He zones out at work. Mid-sentence, mid-meal, mid-hose drill. His body stays at the 118 and his brain takes a field trip to a parallel universe where Buck is apparently a recurring character. He'll be restocking the truck and suddenly he's imagining Buck showing up at the station with coffee, grinning, leaning against the bumper with his arms crossed and that head-tilt he does when he's about to say whatever devastating thing is going to ruin Eddie's entire day. He'll be eating lunch and his mind will wander to a kitchen that isn't his, Buck crowding him at the stove, chin on his shoulder, asking what's for dinner even though he can clearly see the pan. He'll be filling out an incident report and accidentally spend four minutes constructing an elaborate fantasy about holding Buck's hand in a parking lot before he snaps back and realizes he wrote "Buck" instead of "battery" on a medical supply form.

That one takes a minute to recover from.

He catches himself smiling at nothing and has to pointedly rearrange his face, which Bobby definitely notices because Bobby notices everything. But thankfully, Bobby also has tact, and restraint, and can tell that pushing Eddie toward a feeling before he's ready is approximately as productive as pushing a boulder uphill during an earthquake.

Hen does not have this restraint.

"You're doing it again," she says, dropping into the chair across from him at the kitchen table.

Eddie blinks. "Doing what?"

"The face."

"What face?"

"The face where your brain leaves the building and your mouth does this—" She mimics a soft, distant half-smile that Eddie finds to be a gross exaggeration. There is no way he looks like that. "That face."

"I don't make that face."

"You make that face constantly. You're making it right now."

"I'm making a normal face."

"Eddie, your normal face is a clenched jaw and vague disapproval. That—" she gestures at him, "—is not normal. That is a man who is thinking about someone."

"I'm thinking about lunch."

"Must be a hell of a sandwich."

Chimney, because he has the self-preservation instincts of a lemming, chooses this exact moment to wander over. "Are we talking about Eddie's mystery woman?"

"There is no mystery woman," Eddie says flatly.

"See, you say that, but you've been walking around here for weeks looking like you just remembered a really good dream and it's getting weird."

"I don't look like—what does that even mean?"

"It means you're into someone," Chimney says, dropping into the seat next to Hen, an air of confidence to him. Eddie doesn’t think Chimney has ever been punched for his commentary before, though the day is young. "It's fine. It's healthy. Who is she?"

Eddie's jaw tightens. "There's no she."

He says it too fast. Hen and Chimney exchange a glance, and Eddie can see them putting it aside, labeled "touchy subject, revisit later" instead of hearing what he actually said, which is fine. That's fine. He didn't mean anything by it anyway. It was just a denial, a blanket statement, a refusal to engage. Not a confession. Definitely not a confession.

Under the table, his hand is in his pocket, thumb mindlessly running the same circuit over the sticker it’s been running for weeks. Corner, edge, shell, corner, edge, shell. He doesn’t realize he’s doing it until Hen’s eyes drop to his arm and he forces himself to stop, pulling his hand out and laying it flat on the table with what he hopes isn’t an excessive amount of force. 

He changes the subject.

Bobby gives him a look from across the kitchen. One Eddie knows as I’m here to talk when you're ready.

Eddie ignores it. His hand finds its way back into his pocket before he's even made a conscious decision to put it there, fingers closing around the sticker and holding on. Corner, edge, shell. Breathe.

Eddie's getting very good at ignoring things.

Christopher, mercifully, does not interrogate him. Christopher does, however, haunt him.

Not on purpose. Chris doesn't ask about the aquarium or mention Buck by name or beg to go back. He's nine; he processes the world by absorbing it and redistributing it at random intervals, which means Eddie gets blindsided at dinner on a Thursday when Chris looks up from his mac and cheese and says, completely unprompted, "Did you know parrotfish make sand? They eat coral and poop it out."

Eddie, sipping his water, chokes slightly. "Where'd you learn that?"

"The aquarium," Christopher says, already back to his mac and cheese. Eddie's heart does an extensive acrobatics routine in his chest. He pretends it’s heartburn.

It keeps happening. Chris chooses to watch a nature documentary about sea turtles during their movie night and narrates over it with information he clearly got from a very specific source, saying things with confidence and authority and hand gestures that are eerily reminiscent of someone Eddie is trying very hard not to think about. He brings his notebook to school for show and tell. He asks Eddie to quiz him on ray species while they're driving to his abuela's house. He still sleeps with the stuffed turtle, the one with Keep exploring. —Buck written on the tag. Eddie, torturously, sees it every night when he tucks Chris in and every night his throat goes a little tight.

Chris has no idea, that’s the worst part. His son isn't keeping Buck alive in their house on purpose; Buck's just there, woven into the things Chris learned and loved that day, absorbed into the fabric of their life without anyone deciding it should happen. The parrotfish facts and the notebook and the turtle on the pillow are all just… remnants. Residue. Evidence of an afternoon that mattered more than Eddie's willing to say out loud.

And every time it surfaces, Eddie's left standing in the kitchen or sitting in the car or leaning against Chris's doorframe, holding very still. The way you would if a predator was actively hunting you and your survival depended on not being seen. Because if he moves, the feeling might notice him. It might catch up to where he's been crouching behind weeks of denial and drag him out by the ankle. And he really, truly, deeply cannot have that.

Firefighter schedules are not designed with emotional crises in mind. Eddie works twenty-four on, forty-eight off, weekends rotate, Saturdays are a commodity. He watches them slide by on the calendar: his off days falling on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and the occasional Thursday, Saturdays consistently and conspicuously belonging to someone else.

He could trade a shift. Henderson owes him one from last month, and Martinez has mentioned wanting a Tuesday off for his daughter's recital. It would be easy. A text, maybe two.

He doesn't do it. Shocker.

Because here's the thing he keeps circling back to when the wanting gets too loud: he spent one afternoon with this man. One. Between the ticket counter and the gift shop, they probably exchanged a total of forty sentences, half of which were about sea turtles. That's not a foundation for anything. It’s not a connection. That's a pleasant interaction with a customer service employee who was good at his job and happened to have nice arms, and a nice face, and a nice voice, and a nice— whatever. Eddie is a grown adult who understands the difference between genuine chemistry and the dopamine spike of someone being kind to him when he was having a bad day.

He tells himself this firmly, repeatedly, with conviction. And to be absolutely clear, his argument is not convincing, in the slightest.

He tells himself it's because the team needs consistency, because trading shifts is a hassle, because he shouldn't rearrange his life around a building full of fish. All perfectly reasonable, logical, airtight explanations that don't hold up to even thirty seconds of honest scrutiny, which is why Eddie doesn't give them thirty seconds. He gives them about four and moves on.

He doesn't buy the membership, either. He'd looked it up the first week, late at night, thumb hovering over the "purchase" button while the sticker sat on the nightstand beside him, mocking him. Annual pass. Unlimited visits. Discounted gift shop purchases. It would pay for itself in three trips and Christopher would be thrilled and Eddie would have a standing excuse to be there every Saturday that Buck also happened to be there, and—

He closed the browser. 

Buying a membership would mean admitting this wasn't a one-time thing. It would mean making a plan, building a pattern, turning a single strange afternoon into a recurring event, and Eddie cannot do that without also admitting why he wants to. The why, thanks for asking, is a door he's been standing in front of for weeks with his hand on the knob and his feet nailed to the floor.

So the Saturdays pass. One, then two, then five. Eddie goes to work, comes home, tucks Chris in, reaches for the sticker in his pocket, and breathes.

He tells himself he's fine. He tells himself the dreams will stop. He tells himself the daydreams are just boredom, the sticker is just a habit, and the strange burning in his chest every time Christopher recites a marine biology fact is just… indigestion. Emotional indigestion. From feelings he ate too fast and didn't chew properly.

He's fine.

He's an absolute disaster, but he's fine.

It happens on a Saturday, of all days.

Eddie's having a bad day. It isn’t catastrophic, or a day that'll make the news or require a debrief, just one of those grinding, terrible days where everything is slightly harder than it needs to be and the world is committed to making sure he doesn’t enjoy a single minute of it. He dropped his mug this morning while trying to get coffee, shattering it. He got four hours of sleep. A call came in that wasn't dangerous but was sad, sticking to his ribs all day, poking at his heart. An elderly woman who fell in her kitchen and couldn't reach her phone, lying there for hours before a neighbor noticed. She was fine, technically. Eddie carried her to the gurney and she held his hand the whole time and called him "mijo" and he had to go sit in the truck for a minute afterward, doing nothing but staring at the dashboard.

So, a Saturday. One that he could’ve avoided had he been at the aquarium.

He reaches into his pocket during a lull, automatic, muscle memory, thumb already anticipating the familiar circuit — corner, edge, shell — and finds nothing.

He checks again. Left pocket, right pocket, back pockets. Pats himself down he’s looking for his keys, except this is worse than keys, keys he can replace, keys don't have emotional significance, keys never told him to breathe easy. He can get new keys at a hardware store for four dollars whereas he cannot, in fact, get a new Buck at any store, for any price.

Fuck.

It's not there.

He retraces his steps. Locker, truck, bathroom, the bumper where he sat during shift change. At home that night he checks the washing machine, pulling out damp clothes and shaking each one far more aggressively than the situation warrants. The dryer lint trap. The couch cushions. Christopher's backpack, in case it hitchhiked. His nightstand, where it used to live, where there's still a faint ghost on the wood from weeks of it sitting in the same spot.

Gone. Genuinely, completely, irreversibly gone.

Eddie stands in his bedroom holding a sock he pulled from behind the dresser and stares at the empty nightstand, feeling the floor drop out from under him. It's a dramatic reaction to a missing sticker. He is fully, painfully aware of that. He can hear how it would sound if he described it to another person: yeah, so I lost this sticker a guy gave me at the aquarium and now I feel like I might throw up. Unhinged behavior. Genuinely concerning. 

If someone told him that story, Eddie would suggest talking to someone. A licensed someone. Or possibly medication. At the very least, a long walk and some fresh air.

But the sticker was the last physical evidence that any of it happened. Without it, Buck shrinks from a real person Eddie spent an actual afternoon with to a collection of memories he can't prove. Did Buck actually wink at him after the otter show, or did Eddie invent that because he wanted it to be true? Did Buck actually say you'd look good soaked or has Eddie's brain been editing the script for months, punching up the dialogue, adding flirtation where there was only friendliness? Turning a friendly aquarium employee into a leading man because Eddie apparently needed a leading man and his subconscious decided to cast one without his permission?

But look, Eddie’s never been into men. That’s just not a thing he does. He was married to a woman, he has a kid, he’s had thirty-plus years of being attracted to women and exactly zero years of being attracted to anyone else, so whatever is happening with Buck is clearly not that. It's just that Buck was kind to him on a bad day. Buck was patient and thoughtful and good with Christopher, and Eddie's been running on fumes for so long that basic human decency probably tricked his brain into thinking it was something more. That's all. That's the whole explanation. He was lonely and tired and someone was nice to him and his wires got crossed.

Sure, Buck is attractive. Eddie's not blind. But that's an observation, not a confession. Attractive people exist. Eddie can acknowledge that a person is good-looking without it meaning anything, the same way he can acknowledge that a sunset is nice without wanting to date the sunset. Buck has a symmetrical face and good arms and a smile that makes Eddie want to giggle and twirl his hair, but none of that is relevant because anyone would notice that. Any person, regardless of gender or orientation, would look at Buck and think, yeah, okay, that's a handsome guy. Eddie's just being objective. Observational. Scientific, practically.

This is a totally normal and convincing line of reasoning and Eddie is going to stick with it until he dies.

Without the sticker, though, Eddie can't prove anything. Not to himself, not to the version of him that wakes up every morning and says this is ridiculous, you met him once, get over it.

The sticker was his rebuttal to that voice. No, look. It happened. I have proof. A man I barely know saw that I was tired and gave me a cartoon turtle and told me to breathe, and it was real.

Now he's got nothing but a sock and an empty nightstand.

He adjusts. Eddie's good at adjusting. It's basically his whole skill set: encounter a problem, absorb the impact, keep moving, don't look down. So the sticker's gone. Fine. He's still a functional human being. He still shows up to shifts on time, runs calls, makes Christopher's lunches with the crusts cut off even though Chris insists he doesn't need that anymore (he does, Eddie's seen the evidence in the trash can). He's fine. Cool. Everything is nifty.

He's just… thinking about Buck more. Which shouldn't be possible, given that he was already thinking about Buck a frankly unreasonable amount, but losing the sticker seems to have removed whatever flimsy dam was keeping it at a manageable level. Now it's just constant. Background noise that accompanies everything he does, like a radio station he can't turn off.

He'll be restocking the truck and his brain will helpfully offer him an image of Buck at dinner across from him, stealing fries off his plate, telling some long-winded story about an octopus that Eddie pretends to find annoying but is actually hanging on every word of. He'll be doing dishes and suddenly he's in a grocery store with Buck, arguing about pasta shapes, and Buck is holding up rigatoni passionately, making Eddie laugh so hard his stomach hurts. He'll be falling asleep and there's Buck on the other side of the couch, feet tangled with his, watching TV, drawing absent circles on Eddie's wrist with his thumb.

The wrist thing is a new one. Eddie doesn't know where his brain sourced that detail, but he'd very much like to return it.

The point is, the sticker was a container. It gave Eddie a place to put everything he was feeling. He could hold it, touch it, run his thumb over the turtle, and the feelings stayed neatly inside that two-inch radius. Without it, they've just… spread out. Gotten comfortable. Kicked their feet up on the coffee table of his mind and made themselves at home.

He catches himself smiling during a call debrief because imaginary-Buck said something funny in the background of his thoughts, and has to cough to cover it. He zones out at a red light for long enough that the car behind him honks twice, because he was busy constructing an elaborate scenario where Buck meets his Abuela and she immediately loves him, which of course she would, because Buck is the type of person people love on sight. He spaces out while spotting Chimney at the bench press, which Chimney is not happy about.

"Eddie. Eddie. Eddie."

"What?"

"You were somewhere else for a solid ten seconds and my arms were shaking."

"Sorry. I was—"

"Thinking about her again?"

Eddie racks the bar for him. "There's no her."

"Uh-huh. You almost let me die just now."

"You were fine. That was barely two-twenty-five."

"My life flashed before my eyes, Eddie."

Eddie's not spiraling. He wants to be clear about that. He's functioning. He goes to work, he parents, he eats, he sleeps (mostly). He's handling his responsibilities. It's just that approximately forty percent of his active brain power is now permanently allocated to a man he met once at a fish museum, and the remaining sixty percent is doing its best to cover for the deficit. So far nobody's died, so really, what's the problem?

The dreams have changed, though. Without the sticker on his nightstand, they come less frequently, and when they do come they're fuzzier, harder to hold onto in the morning. Less full scenes, more impressions. Buck's laugh. The weight of a hand in his. A kitchen that smells like coffee and sounds like someone humming a lazy tune. Eddie wakes up and reaches for the details as they dissolve, spending the first five minutes of his day chasing a ghost.

He misses the vivid ones. He knows how absurd that is — missing dreams about a man he barely knows, mourning fictional scenarios his own brain invented — but he misses them all the same. They were the one place he let himself have it. Whatever it is. The thing he won't say. The door he won't open. At least in his sleep, he didn't have to pretend.

One night, after a shift that ran long and a dinner he barely tasted, Eddie's standing at the kitchen sink and Christopher wanders in with his notebook. 

The aquarium notebook. 

He's flipping through it, looking for a blank page, and Eddie catches a glimpse of the handwriting inside. Some of it Chris's careful print, but other parts a bigger, messier, more enthusiastic scrawl that Eddie recognizes instantly, embarrassingly, from a single afternoon four months ago. Annotations in the margins, exclamation points everywhere, little drawings of fish with smiley faces. 

Buck had crouched next to his son at a touch pool and annotated his field notes, drawing a grinning cartoon stingray. Eddie is gripping the edge of the counter now because there he is. Proof. Still here, scattered through his kid's handwriting, never gone.

Eddie breathes, loosening his grip on the counter. He watches Christopher flip past a page that has a lopsided sea turtle doodle on it with an arrow pointing to it labeled, "this is Shelby, she's 50 but looks 40," and thinks, okay.

Okay.

He's going back to the aquarium.

Not for Buck. Obviously, categorically, definitively not for Buck. 

For Christopher, who loved it. 

For a new sticker, because the old one is gone and he needs a replacement the way you'd replace a toothbrush or a phone charger, because it's a functional object that serves a functional purpose in his life.

If Buck happens to be there, then fine, great. Eddie can say hi, because there's nothing weird about wanting to see someone again. People revisit people. That's a normal thing to do. It doesn't have to mean anything. Besides, Chris loved Buck, so really, he only hopes Buck is there so Chris can see him again.

Eddie has nothing against gay people, has never had anything against gay people, thinks people should love whoever they want to love and live however they want to live. He just doesn't think that's him. That's all. Not a protest, or a crisis, just a fact about himself that he's had for thirty-odd years and sees no reason to revisit just because his subconscious has developed a fixation on one specific tall blonde person who happens to be a man.

He's already pulling up the schedule on his phone. There's a Saturday open in two weeks, and he needs to grab it before someone else does.

He texts Henderson that night. Trades the shift.

Four minutes. The whole exchange, from Eddie opening the text thread to Henderson confirming. Four fucking minutes. Two texts sent, two texts received. 

He stares at his phone. 

He'd spent months telling himself that rearranging his schedule was too complicated, too impractical, not worth the hassle. Months of checking the calendar and sighing, telling himself next time he’ll do it. When the actual, real-world, logistical barrier to getting a Saturday off was a hundred and twenty seconds of typing and waiting. A hundred and twenty seconds. He's spent longer deciding what to order at drive-throughs. He's spent longer tying his shoes. He once spent nine minutes choosing between two identical black t-shirts at Target and somehow that was a more acceptable use of his decision-making energy than this.

He wants to go back in time and shake himself. He wants to sit past-Eddie down and say what were you so afraid of? Except he knows exactly what past-Eddie was afraid of and present-Eddie is afraid of the same thing, so maybe he'll leave past-Eddie alone and let them both be cowards in peace.

Eddie puts his phone on the nightstand, right where the sticker used to be, and exhales. His hands are trembling, but he doesn't think about it. Not right now. He'll think about it later, when his heart isn't hammering and his brain isn't already fast-forwarding two weeks to a Saturday morning, to a blue polo, to a voice that sounds different when it says his name.

Later. He'll figure it out later.

He's getting really, really good at later.

Eddie wakes up at six o’clock on a Saturday for the first time in months and does not acknowledge why he's awake at six o’clock on a Saturday. He showers. He shaves. He puts on a shirt he hasn't worn in a while, a dark green henley that fits a little bit tighter than normal, that he selected for absolutely no reason other than it was clean and available and happened to be the first thing he grabbed, despite the fact that it was folded at the bottom of the stack and he had to move four other shirts to get to it.

He looks at himself in the bathroom mirror for about ten seconds longer than a person who isn't going anywhere important would need to. Fixes his hair. Fixes it again. Decides it looked better the first time and puts it back. This is normal morning behavior and means nothing.

Christopher's already up when Eddie gets to the kitchen, which is unusual for a Saturday and which Eddie attributes to some kind of internal kid-radar for fun. He's sitting at the table with a bowl of cereal and the aquarium notebook open beside him, reviewing his notes seriously.

"Ready to go?" Eddie asks, pouring coffee.

Chris looks up, beaming. "I've been ready since Monday."

Sounds about right.

The drive takes forty-five minutes and Eddie spends most of it pretending to listen to Christopher's running commentary about what exhibits they should prioritize while his brain runs a parallel track that goes roughly: what if he's there? What if he's not there? What if he's there and doesn't remember you? What if he's there and does remember you? What would you even say? Hi Buck it's me, the guy who's been carrying your sticker around for four months and dreaming about holding your hand. Yeah that'll go great, real smooth Eddie, maybe open with that.

He turns the radio up.

The parking lot is packed, because it's a Saturday and this is Los Angeles and apparently every family within a sixty-mile radius had the same idea. Eddie finds a spot on the far end of the lot, sitting there for a second after turning off the engine, hands on the wheel, his heart — not pounding. His heart isn’t pounding because pounding implies excitement and excitement implies he cares about this more than he should and he absolutely does not care about this more than he should.

"Dad," Christopher says from the backseat. "Are we going in or are you just going to sit here?"

"I'm coming. I was just... checking the mirrors."

"We're parked."

"Safety doesn't take a day off, Christopher."

Chris gives him a look, not buying it, but is willing to let it slide in exchange for sea turtles. It's an easy trade Eddie will take every time.

They walk toward the entrance and Eddie scans the front without meaning to. His eyes do it automatically, sweeping the ticket area, the crowd, the staff in their blue polos, looking for tall and blonde and annoyingly cheerful and finding instead: a teenager with a sunburn, two older women in matching visors, and a guy who's the right height but the wrong everything else.

No Buck.

Eddie's stomach dips in disappointment, small and stupid, and he ignores it completely.

He's probably inside. Doing a tour, or feeding turtles, or explaining sand production to a group of children with so much enthusiasm Eddie wonders if he’s ever once experienced a boring day. He's somewhere in this building. He has to be.

They buy the obscenely over-priced tickets, Eddie thinking passively that he really shouldn’t be doing this for a man he might see. He had considered buying the membership this time, had pulled up the page on his phone three separate times during the past two weeks, but ultimately couldn't bring himself to commit to what felt like a very loud, very permanent announcement of his intent. Tickets felt safer. Tickets said we're just visiting. A membership said we're coming back, repeatedly, on a schedule, for reasons I don’t really want to put on a form.

So. Tickets.

The blast of cold air hits as they walk in. Eddie takes a breath and tries to settle into it, trying to let the aquarium do its thing. And it does, mostly. The tanks are still beautiful, the lighting still makes everything feel like it’s in slow motion, and Christopher's still the best company Eddie could ask for, rattling off facts and scribbling in his notebook, pressing his face to every piece of glass he can reach.

Eddie follows him through the coral tunnel, past the reef tanks, through the invertebrate section, and he's present, he's here, he's enjoying it. He is. It's just that his eyes keep drifting to every staff member they pass. Every blue polo gets a second look. Every voice around a corner makes his pulse blip before his brain can confirm it's not the right one. He's doing a full surveillance sweep of a public aquarium and he knows how insane that is and he cannot stop.

Christopher doesn't notice, or if he does, he's got better things to focus on. He's currently engaged in what appears to be a staring contest with a moon jellyfish.

They hit the touch pool. Different staff member running it today, a nice woman named Maria who's great with the kids and knows her stuff and is absolutely, completely, unforgivably not Buck. Eddie watches Christopher dip his fingers in and wonders if he's imagining the slight disappointment on his son's face, or if Chris was also hoping for a specific set of hands guiding his through the water. Two fingers, gentle strokes. Almost like petting a really wet cat.

Eddie clears his throat and looks at the ceiling.

They make it to the otters. Different trainer on the platform. Eddie doesn't know what he expected. He'd built this whole scenario in his head over two weeks, a version where they walk in and Buck's right there, mid-tour, headset on, and he spots them and his face beams, like the sun when it first rises in the morning, encapsulating a dark sky and turning it into something beautiful. Not— not beautiful, like that. Just… whatever. 

Nevertheless, Eddie needs to feel the impact of being on the receiving end of that again. He'd rehearsed it. Unconsciously, sure, but he'd rehearsed it. The reality of a Buck-less aquarium is settling over him now, and it feels a lot less like a fun day out with his kid and a lot more like showing up to a party where the one person you wanted to see never came.

Not that Buck is the one person he wanted to see. He's here for Chris. And the sticker. The replacement sticker.

Shut up.

He finally asks. He's been holding off, telling himself it's weird to ask about a specific employee at a place he's visited exactly once, but curiosity wins. Or desperation. Or whatever word exists for the feeling of needing to know where someone is while also being terrified of the answer.

They're near the turtle tanks and there's a staff member adjusting a display, a younger guy with a name tag that says "Devon.” Eddie walks up and tries to sound casual, which is hard because Eddie's version of casual is essentially "stiff but quieter."

"Hey, uh. Is Buck working today?"

Devon looks up. "Buck? Oh man, no. Buck doesn't work here anymore."

The floor does not actually move. Eddie wants to be very clear about that. The floor is stationary. It's tile. It's bolted to the foundation of a building. It does not move. But.

"He left maybe… two, three months ago?" Devon says, friendly, oblivious to the fact that he's delivering what Eddie's body has decided to treat as catastrophic news. "Yeah, we miss him though. Dude was awesome. Great with the kids."

"Right," Eddie says. "Yeah, no, I was just— my son liked him. Last time we were here. He was, uh. Good."

"Totally," Devon says, smiling. Eddie wants to tell Devon this is not a smiling matter. "Everyone loved Buck."

Everyone loved Buck. Great. Wonderful. That's very helpful, Devon, thank you.

Eddie nods and walks away, not looking at anything or anyone for about thirty seconds while he tries to will the scowl off his face before Chris sees. Which doesn't take long because this isn't a tragedy, it's a mild inconvenience, it's a completely predictable outcome that he'd already considered and prepared for and is handling with total grace and composure.

He's also clenching his teeth hard enough to crack a walnut, but that's unrelated.

Of course Buck's not here. It's been four months. People move on. People get new jobs, leave old ones, rearrange their lives in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with whether some random dad they flirted with at a touch pool ever showed back up. Eddie constructed this entire trip around the assumption that the world would be exactly where he left it, and the world, characteristically, did not cooperate.

He knew this was possible. He told himself this was possible. But knowing a thing intellectually and feeling it in his chest are different experiences, and right now the feeling is there, and it's heavier than he'd like.

Christopher takes the news better than Eddie does, because Christopher doesn't receive the news, because Eddie doesn't tell him. He'll mention it if Chris asks, but Chris doesn't ask. Chris is currently having the time of his life with the sea turtles and has no idea that his father is standing eight feet behind him having a very contained, very quiet crisis about an aquarium employee who clocked out permanently sometime around February. Knowing that if he would’ve just taken his head out of his ass and came back to the aquarium then, they wouldn’t be in this situation. 

C’est La Vie, or whatever the French say. 

They make it to the gift shop and Eddie gravitates toward the sticker rack while Christopher orbits the plush section. He meanders for a second, flicking a keychain in rebellion. It doesn’t make him feel better. 

He’s circling the shop to try and keep an eye on Christopher when… there it is: Breathe Easy. Same cartoon turtle, same blue water. He picks it up and holds it, waiting for the feeling he’s missed so much to arrive.

It doesn't.

It's the right image, the right size, the right weight in his hand. It's the exact same sticker. But it's too clean, smooth, new. The edges are sharp and the colors are bright and nobody has ever touched it except the machine that printed it and whatever stock person put it on the rack. It hasn't been held during bad shifts or tucked into a pocket for weeks or sat on a nightstand next to a glass of water. It hasn't been warmed by anyone's hands.

Eddie buys it anyway. Puts it in his pocket. Feels the wrongness of it against his thigh and tries not to compare it to what used to be there, which is an impossible task he fails immediately.

Christopher gets another stuffed animal. A sea otter this time. Eddie pays for both without looking at the total because money is fake and his son is happy and at least one of them should walk out of here with what they came for.

In the car, Christopher chatters the whole way home, energized, flipping through his notebook, adding new observations. Eddie drives and nods and says, "that's awesome, buddy," at the right intervals and means it, genuinely, while also feeling the new sticker in his pocket and the old absence next to it. Thinking about a guy named Devon saying everyone loved Buck and having no idea how much damage the singular sentence did.

At home, after dinner and homework, after Christopher falls asleep with his new otter tucked under one arm and the original Buck-signed turtle tucked under the other, Eddie sits on the edge of his bed and takes the new sticker out of his pocket.

He puts it on the nightstand.

It looks wrong there. Same spot, same turtle, same words, utterly wrong. It's a copy of a feeling and not the feeling itself and Eddie didn't know it was possible to be nostalgic for a sticker but here he is, sitting in the dark, missing a two-inch piece of adhesive paper.

He leaves it there anyway, because it's what he's got.

He lies down and stares at the ceiling, thinking about Buck, somewhere in the city, doing God knows what, having moved on from the aquarium to whatever comes next, Probably charming an entirely new set of strangers with his encyclopedic fish knowledge and his stupid hair and his smile that could power a small municipality.

Eddie closes his eyes.

He doesn't dream about anything.

A few days pass and Eddie settles back into the rhythm of his life. Or tries to, doing a convincing enough job of it that no one asks questions. He goes to work. He makes dinners. He helps with homework. He reaches into his pocket and touches the new sticker and feels nothing, but keeps reaching for it anyway because muscle memory doesn't care that the magic's gone, it just knows this is what they do now. 

Corner, edge, shell. Corner, edge, shell.

Except the corners are too sharp and the edges are too clean and the shell doesn't feel right under his thumb because no one else has ever held this one and it turns out that mattered more than Eddie understood.

He's fine with it. He's adjusted. This is the extremely fine, super adjusted version of Eddie. The one who went back to the aquarium and got his answer and is now moving on with his life in a healthy and mature fashion. 

Buck doesn't work there anymore. So what? That chapter is closed. Eddie's going to stop thinking about him any day now, any day, he can feel it coming. Like a sneeze building except this sneeze has been building for four months and shows no signs of actually arriving.

Any day now. He’s sure of it.

It's a Wednesday night, nothing special about it. Christopher did his homework at the kitchen table, migrated to the couch for TV, and eventually took himself to bed with minimal negotiation. 

Eddie's wiping down counters as the house settles around him, listening to a podcast he stopped paying attention to twenty minutes ago, operating on autopilot.

The notebook is on the kitchen table where Chris left it after homework, open to a page of math problems, his pencil still sitting in the crease of the spine. It's the aquarium notebook, because Chris uses it for everything now, marine biology field notes sharing real estate with long division and vocabulary words. Eddie's seen it a hundred times sitting in that exact spot, as permanent a fixture on the kitchen table as the salt shaker.

His hand picks it up before his brain signs off on the decision. Same autopilot that finds the sticker in his pocket, or notices every tall blonde head in any crowd. The part of Eddie that wants things his conscious mind won't let him have just reaches over and grabs it, flipping the pages. By the time the rest of him catches up, he's already past the math and the spelling list and the page where Chris attempted to draw a map of their neighborhood for a social studies assignment.

The aquarium pages start about a third of the way through, and Eddie recognizes the difference immediately: Chris's handwriting gets bigger, more excited, letters leaning forward with enthusiasm. Woven between them, the other handwriting. Bigger, messier, full of exclamation points and arrows and little annotations that crowd the margins.

Eddie's seen glimpses of this before, caught flashes of Buck's scrawl from across the kitchen or over Chris's shoulder, but he's never sat down and actually looked. Never let himself. Looking would mean lingering, and lingering would mean feeling, and feeling would mean acknowledging that a stranger's handwriting in his son's notebook makes the tiny version of Buck that lives in his chest do gymnastics, and Eddie has been very committed to not acknowledging that.

But the house is quiet, Chris is asleep, and nobody's watching, so.

An entire comic strip takes up one page. Three panels: a stick-figure sea turtle wearing sunglasses, then the same turtle surfing a wave, then the turtle giving a thumbs up with a speech bubble that says "Stay cool, Chris!" It's terrible. The proportions are wrong, the sunglasses are lopsided, the thumbs-up looks more like a mitten. Eddie stares at it for a full minute, wearing the dopey smile often associated with when he’s thinking of Buck, and he's glad no one is here to witness.

The next page has a ranking system. Buck apparently helped Chris determine his top five favorite fish, complete with a scoring rubric that includes categories for "coolness," "weirdness," and "would it beat me in a fight." The cownose ray scored a 9 out of 10 on weirdness. Buck wrote underneath it: "disagree, I think they're distinguished. Like tiny underwater grandpas."

Eddie exhales sharply, the sound morphing into a fond chuckle as he keeps turning pages.

Doodles are scattered everywhere. A cartoon octopus flexing all eight arms. A shark wearing a top hat and monocle that Chris clearly requested because there's an arrow pointing to it in Chris's handwriting that says "fancy shark!!!" Buck's notes fill the margins too, little additions to Chris's observations: fun facts, corrections delivered gently ("close! it's actually 3 hearts, not 4, but you were SO close"), encouragements ("great observation, you're gonna be an amazing marine biologist").

Eddie's throat is tight, so full of joy it’s basically overflowing. There's too much warmth crammed into this notebook and it's all from someone who met his kid for an afternoon and treated him with more care and attention than some people manage in years. Eddie is sitting alone in his kitchen at ten p.m. looking at stick-figure turtles and feeling so many things at once he feels like he might explode with it.

The next page turns and his hand stops.

Bottom right corner. Tucked under a drawing of a smiling starfish, almost hidden, easy to miss if you weren't combing every inch of every page the way Eddie apparently is tonight. Buck's handwriting, smaller than the rest, written so carefully it’s nearly perfect.

A phone number. A tiny doodle of the Breathe Easy turtle next to it. And underneath, in cramped, considered print:

For your dad. In case he ever wants to talk about fish. Or whatever. —B

Eddie is completely still as he reads it again. And again. And one more time because his subconscious, the one running a 24/7 Buck Broadcast, needs triple confirmation before it'll accept that this is real and not another dream he's going to wake up from with his hand curled intimately around a pillow.

Buck wrote his number in Christopher's notebook. Months ago. On a Saturday afternoon while Eddie was standing right there. Buck crouched down next to his nine-year-old, tucked his phone number between a starfish doodle and a cartoon turtle, addressed it to Eddie, and left it there. Patient. Unhurried. Willing to wait.

In case he ever wants to talk about fish. Or whatever.

Or whatever. Buck wrote or whatever and expected Eddie to know what that meant and the thing is Eddie does know what that means. He's known for months. He's known since the touch pool and the flirting, since Buck said his name for the first time and Eddie's never wanted to hear anyone else say it ever again if they weren’t Buck. He's known and he's been pretending not to know because knowing means deciding and deciding means doing and doing means becoming someone who calls a man he met at an aquarium because he can't stop thinking about him, and that person, whoever that person is, is someone Eddie hasn't figured out how to be yet.

But Buck figured it out. Buck looked at him for one afternoon and saw it all and instead of pushing, cornering him, putting him on the spot, he wrote his number in a kid's notebook next to a starfish and said whenever you're ready.

Eddie sits at the kitchen table for a long time. The podcast has moved on to a new episode he'll never go back and listen to. The counters are dry. All the small sounds of the home settle around him for the night.

His phone is already on the table, a few inches from the notebook. He looks at one, then the other. Back and forth, a tennis match of indecision. The number in Buck's handwriting, the turtle doodle grinning up at him, and the glowing screen of his phone, waiting.

His hands are steady this time. That’s what surprises him, in this moment. After all the weeks of reaching for stickers and losing sleep, having his brain hijacked by elaborate domestic fantasies, the actual moment feels quieter than he expected. There's no panic. No but he’s a guy and I’m a guy and I don’t date guys except maybe I do. Just the number, and the turtle, the or whatever, and Eddie, alone in his kitchen, deciding.

Decisions never have come easy to Eddie, ever the overthinker. But this one—this one feels a little bit like riding a bike. When you finally shed what was slowing you down and just let go, finding out balancing on your own is easier than you expected. That there was no reason to be scared. 

His hand hovers there, but not with indecision or nerves. With anticipation. Excitement. The concept of fucking, finally.

Grabbing his phone, he starts typing. 

Eddie types and deletes the entire message two times. On the third try he types, stares at it, deletes half of it, rewrites the half he deleted, deletes the whole thing, puts the phone face-down on the table, picks it back up, and starts the whole thing over again. 

The first attempt was: Hey Buck, it's Eddie. From the aquarium. I found your number in my son's notebook. It sounded a little too stiff, like he’s about to ask Buck to confirm an appointment. 

The second attempt was: Hey, it's Eddie. Chris's dad. You gave us a tour a few months ago and I just found your number and wanted to say hi. Wanted to say hi. Really, Eddie? Four months of sticker-clutching, dream-having, locker-room-spiraling emotional upheaval and the best he can come up with is hi? Hi is what you say to your neighbor when you're both getting the mail. Hi is not the word for what he really wants to say.

The third attempt was: Buck, hey. This is Eddie. I don't know if you remember me but — and that's where he stopped because of course Buck remembers him, Buck wrote his number in a notebook, Buck drew a cute little turtle next to it, Buck wrote or whatever which is essentially open-ended shorthand for I'm interested in you and I'm giving you space to figure out if you're interested in me. Pretending there's a chance Buck forgot is insulting to both of them.

The fourth attempt was just: Hey — which Eddie rejected on the grounds that a single "hey" after four months of silence is actually really douchey, and he refuses to be perceived as douchey. Even if he has been deeply unhinged about this entire situation, he will not resort to being a dick.

He puts the phone down, only to pick it up two seconds later, repeating that about three times, doing the equivalent of what looks like playing hot potato with his phone. He grips it, refusing to set it down again, and his thumbs hover over the keyboard, his brain offering him absolutely nothing useful, just white noise and the faint sound of his own pulse in his ears.

He thinks about what Buck would text. Buck would probably just say what he meant. Buck would probably type with the same energy he talks with, big and warm and unafraid of taking up space, because Buck doesn't seem to have the part of his brain that Eddie has, the part that edits everything down to the safest, smallest, least vulnerable version before it leaves his mouth.

Eddie exhales, trying one last time.

Hey Buck. It's Eddie. From the aquarium. I just found your number in Chris's notebook. Took me a while, I know. I hope this is still your number. Chris says hi. So do I.

He reads it four times. It's not perfect, nor is it smooth. Chris is asleep and has no idea his name is being invoked as emotional cover, doesn’t even know Eddie is texting Buck, but it's honest and it's real and it sounds like Eddie and that's going to have to be enough.

He hits send before he can talk himself out of it.

The message goes through and Eddie watches the screen eagerly as the delivered receipt appears underneath. His heart rate could probably be detected by seismographic equipment at this point. He waits. Thirty seconds. A minute. Two minutes. The screen stays the sale, no typing bubble, or overly-happy response. Just Eddie's message, sitting there, small and blue and terrifyingly permanent.

He gives it five more minutes. Then ten. Then he puts the phone face-down on the table and tells himself that Buck could be asleep, or busy, or in the shower, or literally anywhere doing anything because it's ten-thirty on a Wednesday night and not everyone is sitting in their kitchen staring at their phone waiting for a text from someone they met at a fish museum months ago. Some people have normal lives. Some people go to bed at reasonable hours.

Eddie does not go to bed at a reasonable hour. 

Eddie goes to bed at midnight after checking his phone eleven more times and finding nothing new each time, lying there in the dark, staring at the ceiling with the notebook closed on the nightstand next to the stupid, magicless new sticker and his phone face-up beside both of them, screen dark, no notifications, no Buck, nothing.

He tells himself it's fine. His fail safe when he feels like crawling out of his own skin. Telling himself that everything is fan-fucking-tastic.

The number could be old. Buck could've changed phones. Buck could've seen the text and decided he didn't want to respond because four months is a long time, long enough to meet someone else, or lose interest, or for the offer to expire. Eddie can't blame him. He had his chance and he sat on it for a third of a year and this is what happens when you let fear make your decisions for you: you end up lying in the dark, alone, holding a phone that isn't ringing.

Sleep comes eventually, thin and fitful, and Eddie doesn't dream about anything at all.

Eddie shows up to his shift on Thursday morning ten minutes early with coffee he doesn't taste and a face that's apparently expressing his contempt more than he intends, because Hen takes one look at him and says, "Uh oh."

"Don't," Eddie says.

"What happened?"

"Nothing happened."

Hen tilts her head, obviously not believing him, but still doesn’t push. Very unlike her, but Eddie loves her for it.

He gets through the morning, running calls, doing his job, keeping his head down. He checks his phone between every single one, bathroom breaks included, turning the screen on just long enough to confirm what he already knows: no new messages. The disappointment doesn't get smaller with repetition. It stays the same size every time, a neat little gut-punch on a fifteen-minute cycle.

Chimney finds him at lunch. Eddie's not eating, which isn't unusual, but he's avoiding everyone, which is.

"So," Chimney says, sitting down across from him uninvited. "Trouble in paradise?"

Eddie looks at him. "What?"

"You've got a vibe today. A sad vibe. A specifically romantic sad vibe."

"Don’t start, Chim."

"Now, Eddie. You know those are the perfect words to get me to start. Did you and your lady friend break up?"

Eddie glares at him. "There's no lady friend."

"Did you two have a fight?"

"I literally just said—"

"Because you can talk to us, man. We're here for you. Hen's got great advice. Bobby's got wisdom. I've got emotional range."

"Chimney."

"I'm a good listener, Eddie."

"Chimney."

Chimney raises both hands. "Fine. But the offer stands. Whenever you're ready to tell us about her."

Eddie doesn't correct him. He thinks about it, for a second, the word forming and dissolving in his mouth before it gets anywhere near his teeth. But the station kitchen during lunch isn't the place and today isn't the day and Eddie's too tired and too raw and too busy refreshing a text thread that refuses to change.

The afternoon drags on, every call feeling longer than it actually is. The lull between calls is worse, though, because that's when Eddie's brain fills the silence with helpful reminders that he put himself out there for the first time in his adult life and got nothing back. His adult, ‘possibly not straight now’ life, too. Which makes it worse, somehow. 

He's in the locker room at the end of shift, changing out of his uniform, bag packed, ready to go home and probably not sleep again, when his phone buzzes.

Not a text notification, a call.

Eddie looks at the screen to see an unsaved number. Except he knows it, because he spent forty-five minutes last night staring at this exact sequence of digits in a nine-year-old's notebook next to a cartoon starfish. His hand is already reaching to answer, his heart recklessly jack-rabbiting over itself, a consistent jump, skip, trip, fall, and die. He’s so fucking nervous. Why is he so nervous?

He picks it up, not saying anything. Which he realizes is odd, considering his breathing is definitely audible through the speakers. 

"...Eddie?"

That voice. Months of dreams and daydreams and imagined conversations and none of them got it right, because the real version is warmer. A little rougher, like maybe he just woke up. And has just a tiny crack of disbelief to it.

"Eddie? Is–Is this actually Eddie?"

Eddie leans his forehead against the locker and closes his eyes. "Yeah," he breathes. "It's actually Eddie."

"Oh my God." Buck laughs, sending a pleased jolt through Eddie's entire body. "Oh my God, I can't— okay, first of all, hi. Hi. Sorry. I'm sorry I didn't text you back. I had the longest day at work yesterday and I got home and just completely crashed. I didn't even plug my phone in. I woke up this morning and it was dead and when I finally charged it and saw your text I just— I couldn't text you back. I had to call. I had to hear your voice. Is that weird? That's probably weird. I don't care. Hi."

Eddie’s still leaning against the lockers, soaking Buck in. "Hi."

"You found the notebook."

"I found the notebook."

"It took you four months."

"It took me four months."

"Eddie." Mildly exasperated, fully delighted. "I wrote it right next to a starfish. I drew you a turtle."

"I know."

"It was supposed to be smooth."

"It was very smooth."

"You're lying, but I'll take it." Another laugh, breathless and bright, and Eddie's filled with so much warmth it’s pouring out of him. He's amazed the locker doesn't melt. "I can't believe you actually— I thought you'd find it the next day. I thought you'd flip through the notebook that night and call me and I'd play it cool and pretend I wasn't sitting by my phone. And then a week went by. And then a month. And I figured you saw it and just… weren't interested. Or maybe Chris never showed you and I accidentally gave my number to a nine-year-old, which is kind of creepy when I think about it."

"No, I— Chris uses that notebook for everything. I just never looked through it."

"Until now."

"Until now."

A beat. Buck's breathing on the other end, and Eddie can hear him smiling. He doesn't know how he knows that, how you can hear a smile through a phone, but he can.

"I went back," Eddie says. "To the aquarium. A few days ago."

Buck exhales shakily. "You did?"

"Yeah. They said you don't work there anymore."

"No, I— yeah. I left a couple months ago. I'm, uh." A pause, and Eddie hears him moving around. "I'm actually training to be a firefighter. I'm in the academy right now."

Eddie pulls his forehead off the locker, opening his eyes to stare at the wall.

"You're becoming a firefighter."

"Yeah," Buck says, there's still a grin in his voice, but now it sounds confused. Eddie can imagine it, lopsided and dopey, Buck’s brows furrowed in the middle. "Why, is that weird?”

"I'm a firefighter, Buck."

"What?"

"Yeah."

"You're a— you're a firefighter? You didn't— you never said that! I thought you were, I don't know, a contractor or—"

"A contractor?"

"You have contractor energy! The arms! The general— I don't know, the vibe!"

Eddie's laughing now, leaning against the lockers, phone pressed to his ear, and it feels so good it almost scares him. "Contractor energy."

"Shut up. This is— okay, this is insane. This is actually insane. I'm going to be a firefighter and you're already a firefighter and you went to the aquarium to find me—"

"Yeah."

"Eddie."

"Yeah."

"I need to see you. When can I see you? Can I see you?"

Eddie's heart does the big, stupid, terrifying, wonderful thing. He lets it this time.

"Yeah," he says. "Yeah, you can see me."

They make a plan. This weekend. Saturday, because of course, due to tradition and all that. 

Buck suggests dinner and Eddie gives him his address before he can overthink it, says, "pick me up," and then immediately wants to throw his phone into the sun because pick me up sounds like a date. 

Buck goes quiet for half a second before saying, "yeah, okay, yeah. Of course I'll pick you up," His voice has gone soft and warm, kind of awed, and Eddie has to sit down on the bench because his legs stop working.

They talk for another twenty minutes. Maybe longer, Eddie loses track. Buck asks about his station, his crew, his schedule. Asks about Christopher and whether he still has the notebook and whether Shelby the turtle would remember him. Eddie says yes to everything, yes she would, yes he does, yes yes yes, a word he's been afraid to say for months tumbling out of him now without effort, without the usual twenty-step review process his brain puts everything through before it's allowed to leave his mouth.

When they finally hang up, it's because Eddie has to go. Not because he wants to. He says he'll call tomorrow and Buck says he'll pick up on the first ring and Eddie believes him completely. It’s a new sensation for him and one he's deciding, right now, to get used to.

He pockets his phone, pulls his bag over his shoulder, and takes a breath.

After a few breathing exercises to not seem like a schoolgirl with a crush, he walks out into the kitchen, where the entire team is very obviously pretending they weren't listening.

Hen's leaning against the counter, Chimney's at the table, Bobby's by the stove. They're all doing extremely unconvincing impressions of people who are busy with other things. Chimney's holding a magazine upside down. Hen isn't even pretending. She's just looking at him, arms crossed, smiling.

"So," Chimney says, setting the magazine down. "That sounded like it went well. She called?"

Eddie looks at him, then at Hen, then at Bobby. The three of them, his people, watching him with varying degrees of curiosity and care, waiting.

He thinks about deflecting, brushing it off, changing the subject, doing what he always does: minimize, redirect, escape. He's had a lot of practice.

But his heart is full and his face won't stop smiling and Buck's voice is still humming in his ear and for the first time in as long as he can remember, Eddie doesn't want to make himself smaller.

"He," Eddie says. "He called. And yeah, we worked it out."

He doesn't wait for a reaction. Doesn't scan their faces for surprise or confusion or whatever else might be there. He just picks up his keys, shoulders his bag, and heads for the door.

"Have a good night, guys.”

He's through the door and into the parking lot before anyone says a word, and he's smiling. The air is warm and the sky is that specific shade of dark blue Los Angeles gets right after sunset. Eddie walks to his truck feeling lighter than he's felt in months. Years, maybe. He just said the truest thing he's ever said and the world didn't end and he didn't combust and nobody threw anything and he's still here, still walking, still Eddie, just a slightly more honest version.

He gets in the truck and starts the engine, sitting there for a second with his hands on the wheel, not because he's checking the mirrors and not because he's stalling, but because he wants to hold onto this feeling for just a second before the drive home and the routine fold back in around him.

Christopher's in bed by nine. Eddie checks on him twice, one more time than usual because tonight he needs the grounding of his son's breathing, the reminder that his life is real and full and good and about to get bigger.

He showers, puts on sweats, stands in the kitchen and thinks about calling Buck again, just to hear his voice, but decides that's excessive even by his current standards. Decides to settle on the couch with a show he doesn't watch and his phone face-up on the cushion next to him, Buck's contact now saved with a full name and everything, no longer a sequence of digits memorized from a nine-year-old's notebook.

He should sleep. He has things to do tomorrow, a life that still requires his participation. Saturday is three days away and he's going to need to be a functional, responsible human being between now and then.

He’s halfway to convincing himself to go to bed when someone knocks on the door. 

The knock is a bit jarring, not tentative or polite. It sounds the way a racing heart feels — urgent, arrhythmic, slightly panicked. Three sharp raps followed by a pause, followed by two more. As if the person on the other side started confident, then immediately second-guessed themselves. 

Eddie frowns. It’s after ten, nobody comes to his door this late. He opens the peephole, just to be cautious, and his stomach promptly drops through the floor. 

Buck.

Buck is standing on his porch. In person. In real life. Not in a dream, or a fantasy, not in Eddie’s head but on his actual physical front porch. Buck is wearing a jacket Eddie’s never seen, which makes sense considering he’s been conversing with dream-Buck this whole time and has no idea what Buck’s actual clothes look like. His jeans are—wow. They’re tighter than Eddie’d expected, but hey, he’s not complaining. He has more pressing matters at hand. 

Such as the fact that Buck is here, and he looks wrecked.

Wide-eyed, slightly flushed, curls poofy and unkempt on his head, breathing like he may have ran here, even though there’s a Jeep parked crookedly at the curb that suggests he drove. 

Eddie opens the door. 

“Buck?”

“Hey.” Buck rasps breathlessly. "Hi. Hey. I know this is— I know it's late and I know we said Saturday and I know this is probably insane, it's definitely insane, I'm aware of how insane this is. And probably creepy, really actually, really creepy—"

"What are you doing here?"

The words come out in a rush, tripping over each other, hands waving theatrically as he tries to explain. Possibly worried that Eddie is going to slam the door in his face for showing up unannounced. 

"I was sitting at home. On my couch. Staring at your address. And I was thinking, you know, Saturday. Saturday's great. Saturday's three days away. I can wait three days. I've waited four months, what's three more days, right? Except then I kept sitting there and the address kept being right there on my phone and I just— I couldn't— Eddie, I have been losing my mind."

Eddie stares at him, wide-eyed. 

"I didn't stop thinking about you. Not once. Not for a single day since that afternoon. I dreamed about you. I dreamed about you, Eddie, full scenarios, you and me and Chris at dinner and you laughing at my jokes and— I left my number in that notebook and then I waited and nothing came and I thought, okay, he's not interested, or he didn't find it, or he found it and threw it away, and every single option made me feel insane because I met you once. For a few hours. And I couldn't get you out of my head. Do you know how that feels? To meet someone for an afternoon and then just be completely, totally, unreasonably ruined by them?"

Eddie swallows against the emotion in his throat. “Yeah,” he says quietly. “I think I have some idea.”

Buck searches his face, slightly panicked. Whatever he finds there makes his shoulders drop an inch. 

“So yeah, I was sitting at home and I thought, why should I wait?  I've waited for four fucking months, Eddie. Excruciating months that only made me want you more and I know it sounds crazy because I don't even know you, not really, but I knew I wouldn't get any sleep tonight if I didn't—"

He doesn't finish the sentence.

His hands come up and find Eddie's face, both of them, palms warm and slightly shaking against Eddie's cheeks, and then Buck's kissing him.

It’s not smooth. It’s not practiced or polished or cinematic. It’s desperate and a little clumsy. Buck’s nose bumps his and both of them are gasping into each other, breathless and wanting more. Eddie’s hands are sewn to his sides for about two full seconds before every single wall he’s spent months building just… goes. Crumbles. Folds up and blows away, gone as his hands come up to grip the front of Buck’s jacket and pull him closer. 

Oh, Eddie thinks. There it is. 

This. This is what he wanted. What the dreams were trying to tell him and the sticker was trying to remind him and his stupid, brave, reckless subconscious has been screaming at him since the coral tunnel. Not a friendship or an observation about a symmetrical face. This. Buck's hands on his face and Buck's mouth on his and the specific, unmistakable, undeniable feeling of yes, here, finally, you, this is exactly right.

He’s not confused. For the first time in maybe his entire life, he’s not confused at all. 

Buck pulls back first, just far enough to look at him, forehead resting against Eddie's, breathing hard. His eyes are huge and a little scared and very, very blue. An entire ocean’s worth of blue, enough for Eddie to drown in. 

He plans to. 

“Was that okay?” Buck whispers. 

Eddie laughs. It's a broken, stunned, wonderful sound. "Yeah, Buck. That was okay."

"Because I rehearsed this whole speech in the car and I was supposed to be way more eloquent and I think I blacked out somewhere in the middle because you’re just so—wow. You’re wow. I couldn’t help myself.”

Eddie kisses him again. Partly because he wants to and partly because it's the most efficient way to get Buck to stop talking and partly because he can. Because Buck is here, on his porch, and Eddie can reach out and hold his face the way Buck held his, he can kiss him and it's real, it's happening and it's not a dream he's going to wake up from at five am feeling warm and furious.

When they separate they’re both smiling, the porch light is buzzing overhead and the street is quiet and somewhere inside the house Christopher is sleeping peacefully, unaware that his father just had every remaining question about himself answered on the front porch.

They stand there for a minute, maybe longer, Buck's hands having migrated from Eddie's face to his shoulders while Eddie's are still gripping Buck's jacket. Neither of them seem particularly interested in letting go.

"Saturday," Eddie says eventually.

"Saturday," Buck repeats, grinning.

"You still have to pick me up. This doesn't count as a first date, y’know."

"This absolutely counts."

"This is an ambush. Ambushes don't count as dates."

"I'm going to remember you said that."

"Go home, Buck."

"Okay."

Buck doesn't move.

"You have to actually leave for that to work."

"I know. I'm going. I just—" Buck looks at him, his smile going even wider, if that’s possible. "Wanted to look at you longer, really get my fill if I’m expected to wait until Saturday before I can see you again.” Buck brings a hand to his chest like he’s been wounded, and Eddie blushes, making Buck chuckle before his expression grows more serious.

“Hey, Eddie?”

“Yeah?”

“I'm really, really glad you flipped through that notebook."

Eddie's chest aches, overflowing once again, a regular occurrence around Buck, it seems. "Me too."

Buck squeezes his shoulders once, walking backwards. He brings his fingers up into the shape of a square, squinting one eye to look at Eddie through the makeshift frame. 

“Beautiful. Just—god. Incredible. A masterpiece, really.”

“Buck,” Eddie laughs. He’s a little embarrassed at the attention and a lot worried that if Buck doesn’t leave right now he’ll pull him into the house and never let him leave. 

“I’m goin’, I’m goin’,” Buck says, holding his hands up. 

He walks to his Jeep, looking back twice — Eddie counts — before getting in and starting the engine, pulling away from the curb. Eddie stands on the porch watching until the taillights disappear around the corner because he's earned this, he's allowed to watch, allowed to want someone to stay and feel the ache of them going and know with certainty that they're coming back.

When the taillights vanish, and the ache in his chest loosens slightly, he goes inside, locks the door and leans against it, breathing easy.

Later, after the breathing and the standing and the staring at his own ceiling with a hand over his mouth because he can still feel it, all of it — Buck's palms and Buck's lips and the sheer unbelievable reality of what just happened on his porch — Eddie empties his pockets onto the dresser. Keys, wallet, the new sticker.

He looks at the sticker for a second, picking it up and turning it over in his fingers before he sets it back down. It's a nice sticker and it served its purpose, but he doesn't need a cartoon turtle to remind him to breathe anymore.

He sets his phone on the nightstand, same spot where the original sticker lived for weeks, where a cartoon turtle used to make his days a little easier. He plugs it in and the screen lights up with one new message.

Can't wait to see you Saturday, Eddie. 🐢

Eddie reads it more than once, setting the phone down gently with the screen still glowing, before lying back against the pillow.

The room is dark, save for the same blue glow of the streetlight peeking through the blinds, as usual. The same noises of the house around him, the house he’s been in for years, and will be in for years to come. Christopher, sleeping peacefully down the hall. Everything, exactly the same as it always has been.

Except Eddie.

When he finally closes his eyes, for the first time in months, he doesn't think about water, or aquariums, or cartoon turtles, or the sound of someone's voice echoing through a tunnel. He thinks about Saturday, a Jeep pulling up to his curb. About a knock on his door that he'll actually be expecting this time, from a man who waited four months and then couldn't wait three more days.

Sleep comes easy, and when the dreams come, they're not fantasies anymore. They're not elaborate scenarios or secret lives of parallel universes his subconscious built without permission.

They're just plans.