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“We should go dancing,” Eddie says, and Buck blinks.
“Now?” he asks, squinting at his watch. “It’s—Eddie, it’s nine in the morning. I don’t think anywhere is open.” He’s stretched out on Eddie’s couch, his long legs tucked in with his knees hanging off the edge. He cranes his head back to look just in time to see Eddie rolling his eyes.
“No, not right now,” he says. “Tonight. Later. At—” he reaches up to rub the back of his neck. “You know, normal dancing time.”
Buck snorts. “Normal dancing time,” he repeats. “Mm-hm. Just out of curiosity, when do you think that is?”
Eddie frowns. “I don’t know,” he says. “I’ve never really been out dancing.”
Buck scrambles to sit up, almost falling off the sofa in the process. “Never?” he asks. “Really?”
“When was I gonna go out dancing, Buck?” Eddie asks. “In Afghanistan? With a toddler at home?”
“I mean, yeah, okay,” Buck says. “But you’ve been out here for years.”
“Yeah,” Eddie says, a wistful edge creeping into his voice. “I guess I just—never got around to it.”
“Okay,” Buck says. “So. Dancing. Is this still about, you know, the power of Christ compels you?”
“The what?” Eddie asks, his eyebrows climbing in question.
“You know,” Buck says. “Whatever you were saying last night. About the priest telling you to dance in your underwear. Did he also say to go out dancing?”
“He didn’t tell me to dance in my underwear, exactly,” Eddie says. “He just said to do something—I don’t know. Frivolous.” His face does something complicated, then, like he’s trying to decide whether or not to be embarrassed about it. He seems to land somewhere in the middle, a blush spreading across the tips of his cheekbones even as a smile slips out.
“Frivolous,” Buck repeats. “You know, that sounds good. Let’s go dancing tonight.” Eddie frowns, starts to open his mouth, and Buck holds up his hands. “I’ll figure out the details if you make breakfast.”
“Deal,” Eddie says, laughing, and Buck wonders if Eddie’s smile has always lit his face up quite like this.
They while away the day on Eddie’s sofa, one action movie blending into another. Eddie makes the occasional attempt to ask Buck about Tommy, but he waves him off. He’s fine. He doesn’t need to talk about it. This is just how things go.
People leave him. He’s used to it by now.
But the thought of going out is starting to grow on him. He’d been ready to go, of course, as soon as Eddie suggested it—clearly unwilling to go by himself—but he’s starting to like the idea. He hadn’t realised until Eddie brought it up that he hasn’t really been out in years, either.
It’ll be good, he thinks. Good for Eddie, and good for him too. It’ll help him get his mind off things.
He heads home in the early evening. Eddie protests, at first, tries to question it, and Buck gestures at his day-old clothes. “Can’t go out like this,” he says. “I’m gonna go home and shower, get some dinner, I’ll come back and pick you up in a couple of hours.” He looks Eddie up and down. “You should change, too. Wear something sexy.”
He regrets it as soon as the words come out, wishes he could reel them in and shove them back into his mouth, but it’s too late now. Surprise flashes across Eddie’s face, chased by something Buck has never seen before.
“I, uh—” Eddie says, and swallows. “I'll try.”
And god, he succeeds. Buck pulls back up to Eddie’s house a couple of hours later, dressed in his tightest jeans and a black t-shirt, and finds Eddie leaning against the front door. He’s wearing jeans Buck has seen dozens of times, but something about the porch light makes them look different.
Or maybe it’s the way Eddie is draped against the door, his posture looser than Buck can ever remember seeing it. Like he’s unlocked a new level of comfort in his skin.
Or maybe it’s the shirt he’s wearing, a short-sleeved button up made of some kind of sheer black mesh. Buck swallows, mouth dry, and tries to remind himself it’s Eddie. It’s just Eddie. He can be normal about Eddie.
He has no reason not to be normal about Eddie.
He must not do a very good job, because Eddie climbs into the passenger seat and frowns.
“Too much?” he asks.
“No!” Buck says—blurts—and swallows one more time. “No, it’s good. I just—I guess I didn’t expect you to be, you know. A mesh shirt kind of guy.”
“I don’t know if I am,” Eddie says, holding the shirt away from his body and examining it. “Hen and Karen gave it to me a couple of birthdays ago. As a joke, I think. I figure if I’m ever going to wear it…” he glances over at Buck. “What do you think, sexy enough?”
There’s just enough of an edge to his voice for it to not quite land as the joke he’d probably aimed for.
Buck groans. “That was weird, I know, it just—I don’t know, slipped out—”
Eddie laughs, and there’s something brittle to it but it breaks the tension that had started to build between them just fine. “Let’s just go.”
“Copy that,” Buck says, more than a little relieved. He drives in silence, grips the wheel tight like he can wrestle back control of this night. Like he isn’t a little tongue-tied at the sight of his best friend in a see-through shirt, because that would be—
He flexes his hands on the wheel. He’s not.
He takes them to a club he vaguely remembers from when he was new to LA and looking for connection anywhere he could find it. It’s large enough not to feel claustrophobic, welcoming enough to attract all kinds of people. It feels like the right kind of place to pop Eddie’s—
For Eddie’s first nightclub experience.
Eddie climbs out of the car wide-eyed, a smile stretching slowly across his face.
“You’re gonna get carded if you keep looking at it like a kid in a candy store,” Buck says, bumping his elbow against Eddie’s as they wait in the short line. Eddie just grins.
“I’m doing something new,” he says. “I’m allowed to be excited.”
“Yeah,” Buck says, softer, and tries not to think about the way Eddie’s smile tugs at something buried deep down in his gut. He’s just—glad Eddie is happy, that’s all. He’s glad Eddie is choosing happiness for himself, that’s he’s reaching out and taking it like it’s something he deserves. “You are.”
Eddie ends up not getting carded, though his kid-in-a-candy-store look barely dims as the doorman gives them a disinterested nod and waves them through. People are milling about, but most of them seem to be clustered around the bar and the booths that line two sides of the room. Nobody is dancing.
For the first time all night, Buck sees Eddie falter.
“Want to get a drink?” he suggests, nodding at the bar. “Wait for some more people to show up?”
Eddie grabs the idea like he would a halligan handed to him mid-call, like by the time Buck finishes having the thought it’s materialised in his brain too. Buck doesn’t need to say anything further for them to split, Eddie heading to the one free table tucked away in the corner while Buck weaves through the people gathered in front of the bar.
Eddie raises an eyebrow when Buck sets a flight of vodka shots on the table in front of them, and Buck shrugs. “Beer is a lot of liquid.”
Eddie snorts. “You’re not wrong.”
“You wouldn’t want to slosh while dancing, would you?”
“I guess not,” Eddie concedes, and lifts a shot glass. Buck clinks one against his and throws it back.
The club is slowly filling up with people, and by the time they’ve downed their second shots, the dance floor is starting to look alive. Buck sees Eddie glance at it, then back at him, and he grins.
“Go on,” he says. “Have at it. That’s why we’re here, right?”
“You’re not coming?” Eddie asks, then looks to the dancing crowd again like part of him is already out there, slotting in amid the writhing bodies.
“I do not have nearly enough vodka in me for that,” Buck says, and half a laugh bursts out of Eddie before he catches it. “But you should go. Have fun. I’m good here.”
“You sure?” Eddie asks, and Buck can’t quite tell if his hint of reluctance is at the thought of going out there alone, or leaving Buck by himself.
“I’m sure,” Buck says, and Eddie grins, settles, adjusts his mesh shirt. “Godspeed,” Buck says, and Eddie laughs, bright and delighted, before turning on his heel.
Buck watches him go. He’s tentative at first, circling the dancers like a baby deer taking its first steps, but then the song changes and even from across the room Buck sees his face light up. He starts to move, and Buck knows it’s driven by pure instinct. That Eddie has stopped thinking, that he’s letting the music flow through his body and move him to the beat.
Buck hasn’t seen Eddie this happy in—
He doesn’t even know how long.
“Your boyfriend’s good.” Startled, Buck turns to see a man around his age leaning against the table next to him, eyes on Eddie. “People are gonna be all over him. You should go up there, you know—” the man nudges him with his elbow. “Mark your territory.”
“He’s not—” Buck splutters, chokes on his own tongue. “He’s not my territory. We’re—friends.”
“Oh,” the man says, then raises his eyebrows as if they’re sharing some kind of private joke. “Oh, I’m sure.”
“We—” Buck starts, then swallows, at the full weight of the man’s words sinks in. Boyfriend.
Your boyfriend.
“I’m just saying,” the man says. “I bet there’s any number of people out there who would love to snap him up.”
“He’s—” Buck starts, his voice weak even to his own ears. “He’s a grownup,” he manages. “That’s his business.”
“Sure it is,” the man says. “But who’s to say it couldn’t be a joint venture?”
He walks away before Buck can reply. Which is just as well, because if he’d wanted a response he’d have been waiting for a while. Buck opens his mouth, then closes it, opens it again even though the man is gone and he doesn’t know where the hell to start, anyway.
Your boyfriend.
That’s not—
Eddie’s not—
Buck’s not—
He’s not. He can’t be. He would know, wouldn’t he? It seems like the kind of thing he should know.
Granted, he’s been single while aware that boyfriends could be an option for him for all of twenty-four hours, but—
He would know. Something like this is too big to hide away behind the things he does not think about. He doesn’t know how he could fit it into the spaces between his ribs, the places he keeps feelings like these, and still have room for his lungs to expand when he draws breath.
So he can’t be. He would know.
Only—
On the dance floor, a man approaches Eddie. He smiles, and automatically, Buck catalogues the ways in which the man is different to him: taller, but leaner, lithe like someone who has spent his whole life dancing. Hair like his, but longer, the curl more defined and falling in his face. Bolder, in the way he moves across the floor and the way he grins at Eddie, holds his hand out as if asking for this dance.
And Eddie—
Flushes. Colour blooms across his cheekbones as he smiles back, and he takes the man’s hand, and lets the man twirl him under his arm before he settles against the man, his other hand finding his waist. They move together like they were made for it, like two pieces that were made to fit together, and Buck has the sudden, white-hot urge to march over, to grab the other man’s hand and yank him away—
Oh.