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1.
The first time it happens, the setting is so familiar that Buck doesn’t question it. The 118 firehouse, where he’s probably spent a not-insignificant fraction of his life by now. What fraction? Buck wonders idly, as he strides through the equipment bay. Too bad he doesn’t have his lightning math skills anymore. It’s the beginning of his shift, most likely. There’s Chimney buttoning up his uniform shirt in the locker room, and Ortiz from B Shift rummaging through one of the compartments on the side of the engine. They must have just got back from a call.
Kind of boring as dreams go. But it’s nice, because this is home and it’s safe (aside from one earthquake and a random buzzsaw blade… and maybe Chimney’s early attempts at cooking). Buck usually feels a steady undercurrent of satisfaction in his firehouse dreams, either because he’s taking pleasure in doing a task efficiently or because his favorite people are there with him. But a sense of creeping unease sets in this time. Buck realizes that he’s been standing at the bottom of the stairs for too long. He’s supposed to be somewhere, or doing something, but he’s not sure what it is.
Then he hears Tommy’s familiar laugh ring out from the loft.
What is he doing here? Of all the ballsy things to do, coming back after dumping Buck as abruptly as he kissed him that first time. Does Tommy think he can still pal around with everyone else here, like nothing happened? Buck jogs up the stairs—or he thinks he must have done that, because he’s now at the top, ready to tell Tommy to get the hell out of here. Or maybe drag him off to talk. Buck isn’t sure what he wants to do, exactly.
Tommy’s at the table accepting a plate of scrambled eggs from Bobby. He’s in uniform (not his flight suit, just the standard-issue blues, which Buck has only seen him wear in pictures). God, he looks good. For a horrifying moment, Buck thinks Bobby betrayed him by letting Tommy transfer back to the 118. Would he do that? What will the rest of the team have to say about it?
Buck eyes the others sitting around the table and finds that almost all of them are unfamiliar faces. And none of them take notice of Buck approaching.
Tommy does, though. He looks up from his breakfast, and his easy expression contorts into shock and then something more pained.
“Oh… hey.” Tommy says faintly.
“Why are you here?” Buck demands.
Tommy seems taken aback by the hostility. “I work here, Evan.”
“No, I work here. You work at Harbor, remember?”
“Yeah, I guess I do.” Tommy glances around wistfully. “I still dream about this place though. I was here for a long time. Longer than you.”
“So? You chose to leave. They would have been your family all along if you’d stuck around. But you ditched them, like you ditched me as soon as things were getting too real for you.”
It feels good to say it, like sinking an ax into a soft piece of wood. Buck’s been beating himself up for weeks, blaming himself for impulsively asking Tommy to move in with him, for not seeing the signs that Tommy wasn’t in it for the long haul. But now, confronting an increasingly defensive-looking Tommy, Buck lets the anger that was simmering beneath his self-recrimination find its way to the surface.
Tommy’s suddenly standing in front of Buck, arms crossed over his chest, though Buck doesn’t remember him getting up from the table. “It wasn’t going to work in the long run.”
“It was working just fine until I let you see how serious I was about us! And then you couldn’t get out fast enough. I hope you had your fun while it lasted, anyway.”
“You make it sound like I was toying with you,” Tommy says. “I wasn’t, Evan.”
“Then what were you doing with me, if you believed from the beginning that our relationship was doomed?”
Tommy raises his eyebrows in the way that means he’s either incredulous or unimpressed. “Doomed is a little dramatic. I wasn’t expecting some cataclysmic breakup. I also wasn’t expecting to be asked to move in with you after only six months.”
“You could have said no!” Buck cries. “But talking about it wasn’t an option, apparently. You shithead.”
“Hey!”
“Coward!”
Now Tommy’s angry—a cold, hard kind of angry that makes his jaw go rigid—but Buck’s on a roll and taking a sick kind of pleasure in it. “I can’t believe I almost called you like fifty times to apologize. It wouldn’t have done any good, would it?”
Tommy regards Buck evenly for a moment. “Would it have made me get back together with you? Probably not.”
That falls like a punch in Buck’s gut, despite being the answer he kind of expected. Tommy doesn’t want him back. He’s done, really done. The room around them seems like it’s getting dark around the edges, until all Buck can see is Tommy’s handsome, livid face in the center.
And then Buck wakes up in his own bed, gripped by a grief that feels like it’s choking him.
2.
The second dream of Tommy takes place in the grocery store, of all places. Buck’s pushing his cart through the aisles, increasingly frustrated as he searches and searches for something. There’s no one to ask, not an employee in sight. Are they all on break? Did the store close, leaving Buck locked inside for the night? But no, there are other customers around, so he’s okay. What was he looking for again? Powdered milk? Corn syrup? Dammit, he can’t remember now.
Buck takes a sharp turn into the baking aisle, and there he is, staring at the box cake mixes intently like he’s making a life or death choice between devil’s food cake and funfetti. He’s wearing the green flannel shirt that Buck remembers being especially soft under his palms.
“Tommy.”
Tommy’s head jerks around. “Oh. It’s you.”
He looks into Buck’s shopping cart, which is suddenly filled with the stupidest things Buck can imagine. Double Stuff Oreos. One of those big plastic jars of cheese balls. A box of white wine. The cheap frozen pizzas that Buck is pretty sure Tommy once mocked Eddie for eating. A half a dozen bottles of Pepto Bismol and some hemorrhoid cream. Jesus.
“So,” Buck says, desperate to divert Tommy’s attention away from the cart, “you’re gonna make a cake? Homemade is better, you know.”
“Don’t judge me, Evan. I only made it through one season of Bake Off.” Tommy says it just the way he used to, with a wry edge that usually earned him a pout which he would then happily kiss off Buck’s face.
Fuck, Buck misses that so much.
“I made Baked Alaska the other week,” Buck finds himself bragging. “And a few different kinds of bread. And cookies with Jee.”
Tommy tilts his head and lets his mouth curl upward. “I didn’t know you had such a passion for baking.”
“It’s my healthy or unhealthy coping mechanism, depending on who you ask,” Buck says easily. “To keep me from doing something stupid. Bet you can guess what that is. I didn’t think I’d run into you here. Or anywhere.”
“I don’t even know what I’m doing here, actually,” Tommy murmurs, looking around the aisle. He picks up a box of lemon chiffon and then puts it right back on the shelf.
“You love cake,” Buck reminds him. “All kinds of cake, but I’ve noticed that chocolate is your favorite. I was going to bake you one for your birthday. Four layers, buttercream filling, ganache—the works. Asshole.”
“You’re a lot meaner in dreams than in real life,” Tommy observes. “Are you still mad at me?”
“Shouldn’t I be?”
Tommy nods sadly. “Yeah, I could have done it better. Let you down more gently. I know it must have been a shock. We had some good times, though, didn’t we?”
Buck’s shopping cart has disappeared, leaving the space between them empty. He feels unprotected all of a sudden. Vulnerable. It’s going to be really humiliating if he starts crying in the fucking grocery store. How many people are already overhearing this conversation while they peruse the chip selection or heave a case of bottled water into their carts?
“It’s not just that you broke up with me after a five-minute conversation, Tommy. Every happy memory of our time together, all those wonderful moments we shared, they’re all tainted now. Because now I know that while I believed we were building something amazing, you were thinking it was bound to fail. So, no. I can’t just remember the good times.”
“I’m so, so sorry, Evan,” Tommy says, and Buck really wants to believe him. He does look remorseful. And incredibly beaten down.
“Is that what you were going to text me to say?”
“What?”
“I saw the bubbles. A couple weeks ago.”
“Oh.” Tommy rubs the back of his neck. “I was just going to—”
But the tones go off, and Buck awakes with a jerk in his bunk. For the rest of the shift, he’s weighed down by a vague feeling of disappointment that he can’t account for.
3.
He’s in Tommy’s garage next time. Buck only came in here a couple of times while they were together, but he recognizes it through the dream-blur of workbenches and tool chests because of the model helicopters hanging from the rafters. Chinook, Blackhawk, Huey. Buck’s proud of himself for remembering some of the names. There’s music playing softly from somewhere, a sweeping love ballad that’s likely older than Buck. Tommy’s such a sap when it comes to music.
A metallic clang draws Buck’s attention away from the helicopters. Tommy, sitting on a stool at a workbench, is leaning down to pick a tool up from off the floor. His fingers are smeared with grease, and he hardly has the small socket in his grasp before it clatters onto the concrete again.
“God fucking dammit.”
“Maybe wipe off your hands,” Buck says helpfully.
Tommy pivots sharply on the stool. He’s obviously not expecting Buck, who can now make out a small, half-rebuilt engine on the workbench. A lawnmower, or maybe an ATV. Tommy should really get better lighting in here, Buck thinks, squinting to see better.
“Wow, thanks, Evan. That’s a useful tip.” Tommy hangs his head and sighs. “It’s always like this. My hands are slippery. My tool drawers are all mixed up and I can’t find anything. I strip the head of every screw I try to turn. I hate it.”
“I thought you loved messing around with this stuff,” Buck says, gesturing broadly with his arm. “You told me this was your happy place.”
Tommy huffs. “Nope, this is where I get to relive all my childhood failures. I learned a lot from my dad about cars but, man, was he a bastard when I screwed up. I thought you were him, lurking back there.”
“I— I didn’t know that,” Buck stammers. “You never talked about your parents much.”
“There isn’t really anything nice to say.” Tommy picks up a wrench and flings it across the garage. Inexplicably, it knocks down a pyramid of canned tomatoes with bright yellow labels. Then he lowers himself down onto the floor to sit with his back against a tool chest. “And anyway, I didn’t want to bore you with my childhood sob stories.”
“I would have wanted to hear them, Tommy.”
“And I should have wanted to tell you. It doesn’t matter now, does it? God, I wish I could tell you how lucky you are to have gotten rid of me when you did. I always disappoint people I get close to. It’s pretty much inevitable. And you, Evan, are far too good a person for me to disappoint.”
Buck is about to refute this, but Tommy has suddenly gone out of sight. Buck finds himself on his hands and knees, lost among piles of junk—twisted scrap metal, tires, broken refrigerators—that fill the garage to the ceiling. If he can find his way through this labyrinth, he’ll tell Tommy that he never wanted to be rid of him.
The same music that was playing before fills Buck’s ears again, louder now. In a soaring chorus, the woman sings about never loving this way again, about holding on to the good while it lasts.
“What’s this song?” Buck calls out as he crawls.
“Dionne Warwick,” Tommy answers from somewhere nearby. “I’ve had it on repeat for the past three weeks.”
“It’s really sad.”
“I’m really sad. But I’m always a little miserable, so it’s not your fault, Evan. It’s just in my nature.”
“You never seemed miserable to me.”
Tommy makes a bitter sound. “Let’s just say I was putting my best foot forward for you. The way you looked at me, all admiring and fucking… adoring. I didn’t want to do anything to lose that.”
Hearing that, Buck’s about ready to jump up and start throwing shit out of the way to get to Tommy, to comfort him. But then he’s right in front of Tommy, who’s sitting with his knees pulled up against his chest, completely and utterly—
“Naked,” Buck says. “Why are you naked in your garage?”
“Huh. I don’t know.” Tommy looks down at himself, amused. He straightens his legs so that Buck gets an unobstructed view.
“Uh, is this turning into a sex dream?” Buck asks.
Tommy smirks and spreads his legs apart slightly. He runs his palm slowly down his chest, over his stomach, takes himself in hand. Arousal flares through Buck as he watches, waiting breathlessly for what’s next. Tommy closes his eyes and lets out a soft moan.
The dream ends abruptly, broken by the sound of Buck’s waking gasp. His blankets feel too warm, and he’s painfully, painfully hard. He rolls over to bury his face in his pillow for a moment before pushing a hand into his shorts.
Fuck.
4.
They’re yelling again.
Buck sits at the top of the stairs with his hands over his ears, waiting for it to stop, or for Maddie to come and make it stop. Where is she? With friends probably, or worse, that fucker Doug. How could she leave Buck alone with them?
I can’t! I can’t do it anymore! His mother’s voice is shrill and too loud, like she’s standing over him instead of halfway across the house. I can’t look at him!
“Hey. Evan. It’s okay.”
Buck vaguely feels a hand on his arm, pulling it away from his face. Tommy’s sitting beside him. He looks so sympathetic, so solid and safe, that Buck wants to throw himself into Tommy’s arms.
“You’re here,” is all he can say at first. He doesn’t understand why or how, but he’s so grateful that Tommy has come for him, maybe to take Buck away from this hell he’s trapped in. Like a superhero, or a knight.
“Are those—” Tommy glances down the stairs, frowning. “Are those your parents fighting? And this is your house?”
Buck nods. “I don’t know how to make them stop,” he whispers. “Don’t they know I can hear them?”
“What are they fighting about?”
“Me. It’s always about me. They wish they’d never had me.” The sound of his mom sobbing drifts up the stairs. Buck looks up at Tommy’s anguished face. “Let’s just leave. Go wherever.”
And then, only a heartbeat later, they are out. Pedaling bikes side-by-side down a dim cul-de-sac with the cool air rushing past. Free!
The lawns and houses on either side are smears of color, indistinct, but Buck knows he’s not lost. Everything’s quiet and peaceful now in the dead of night, and Tommy’s with him. Tommy’s with him!
“Don’t stop,” Buck calls over to Tommy, just in case he’s thinking of doing it. “We have to get as far away as we can.”
“Uh, sure, if you want to,” Tommy answers. Buck can’t see him anymore. The streetlights have all gone out, though the street itself still looks lit up, an endless gray ribbon ahead of them. “Where are we going?”
“To the ocean!” Buck lets out a piercing whoop. “And you have to stay with me, okay? I don’t want to be alone again. I’m sick of people leaving me.”
“Who left you?”
“Them,” Buck says, jerking his head back toward home. Then he rattles off the list that’s been ricocheting around his brain lately, for maximum damage. “Maddie. Abby. Ali. You.”
He punctuates each name by jerking on the handlebars and then slamming the front wheel down onto the road.
“Hey, it’s okay, it’s okay! ”Tommy soothes.
“No it isn’t! I’m fucking angry! And this is my dream, so I can do whatever I want. I can ride into a tree if I want to.”
A tree appears ahead of them as Buck says it, its silvery trunk as wide and smooth as a car hood and its branches arching across the entire sky. He pedals harder. His legs aren’t tired at all. He’s unstoppable.
“Evan, stop, please!”
The tree is getting closer, and Buck keeps his eyes locked on it. All the agony he’s ever felt has broken free in him in an unstoppable torrent. He’s almost there now…
“No, no, no, no—”
Buck’s on the floor then, heart pounding, stunned by the fall off his bed. He sprawls out on his back and pants in the dull morning light coming through his window shades, feeling shattered beyond repair.
5.
“Oh, god. Not again.”
They’re in Tommy’s helicopter this time, flying smoothly and—eerily—without the usual roar of the engine and rotors. Buck tries to squint through the windshield, but everything outside is lost in a wash of pale yellow light. And Tommy’s just staring into it, not even glancing at his instruments, like he should be if he’s flying blind.
“What do you mean, not again?” Buck demands.
Tommy rolls his head sideways so that he’s looking at Buck. He pulls off the sunglasses that Buck hadn’t noticed a moment ago and reveals his red-rimmed eyes. The rest of his expression reads unmistakably as done with this bullshit.
“Evan, the last time we did this, you deliberately crashed your bike into a tree. That’s not something I’m going to forget anytime soon. So maybe I should land and you should get the hell out.”
Buck doesn’t want to get out. He wants to be here with Tommy, cocooned in the cockpit of a helicopter floating in a hazy cloud of nothing. He wants to drink in Tommy’s profile, the sharp nose, the jutting chin whose cleft Buck loved to press his thumb into on his way to a kiss.
“How about we only talk about nice things this time?” Buck offers desperately, as if he can wrest control of this dream through sheer willpower. “I want this to be a good one.”
“Fine. Tell me something nice, then.”
“I went to the Lakers game. With Eddie. And,” —Buck pauses for dramatic effect— “I didn’t hate it.”
Tommy laughs. “I wouldn’t have got you the tickets if I thought you’d hate it. I had a feeling you’d like watching basketball more than playing it.”
“I did, yeah. Okay, your turn.”
“I went out to dinner last week. With people from work, for a birthday,” Tommy clarifies, in case Buck was worried that he meant a date. “I got Baked Alaska for dessert. I’d never had it before.”
“Verdict?” Buck asks.
“It was amazing.” He seems to take a moment to savor the memory, smiling softly, then prompts Buck.
“Maddie and Chim are having another kid. I’m so happy for them.”
Tommy’s face creases into a wide grin. “That’s wonderful. An uncle again, huh?”
“Yup. I kind of hope it’s a boy. But, you know, as long as the baby is healthy…”
“Of course. I wish I had siblings so I could be an uncle. I think I’d be a pretty cool one.”
“You totally would,” Buck assures him. “And hey, you might be an uncle some day. Through, uh, a partner. A— a husband.”
“Not holding my breath for that,” Tommy mutters.
“This is supposed to be a good dream. Be optimistic.”
Tommy shakes his head slightly. “I’m not very good at optimism. Obviously.”
“Well,” Buck says tentatively, just as the helicopter shudders, like it senses the conversation inside the cockpit taking a more dangerous turn, “being optimistic is something you can practice. And get better at. Just like… I can learn to be less impulsive.”
“Evan.” An alarm goes off, and Tommy flicks impatiently at a toggle switch to silence it. “This isn’t real.”
“I know it isn’t!”
“So you can’t haggle or therapy talk me into getting back together with you. In my own goddamn dream.”
“I’m not haggling. And this is my dream, you jerk.”
“Oh, yeah? Then show me which of these is the altimeter and tell me how much fuel we have left,” Tommy almost shouts, jabbing at the instrument panel. “You can’t. But I can. And I know what’s about to happen. Because I’ve had this same fucking dream for twenty fucking years, Evan!”
The chopper banks hard to the right.
“What’s happening?” Buck cries, but Tommy doesn’t answer. “Tommy! Tommy!”
“Mayday, mayday, mayday…”
And that’s the last thing Buck hears before he’s mercifully flung back into consciousness.
Awake
Chimney’s giving Buck the stink eye. All through breakfast, all through morning briefing. Buck gets a short reprieve when they rush out to a MVA that turns out to be a parking lot fender bender, but Chim’s right back at it once they return to the station.
“What? What did I do?” Buck whispers. He’s cornered Chimney in the back of the ambulance as he’s running through his inventory checklist.
Chim gives him a flat look before getting up to pull the ambulance doors closed. “You blabbed. And now I have to kill you.”
“Blabbed about what?”
“The baby.”
“No, I didn’t!” Buck says. “I swear. Not even a hint to anyone!”
“Oh, yeah? I ran into Tommy yesterday when I was picking up takeout, and he offered me and Maddie his congratulations. And I don’t think he meant the buy-one-get-one on ice cream at Ralphs last week.”
“What!” Buck sits back on the bench, gripping his knees. “I haven’t talked to him since we broke up. Not once!”
“No texts?”
“No!”
“No messages passed through a complicit third party, i.e., Eddie?”
“Definitely not.”
Chimney gives him a penetrating look. “To be fair, Tommy didn’t implicate you. In fact, he said he couldn’t remember where he’d heard the news. I assumed he was covering for you.”
“Chim, I promise it wasn’t me.”
“Well, it’s a mystery then,” Chimney says with a resigned sigh. “I guess I can let you off the hook. I didn’t tell Maddie, by the way. No need to upset her when she’s already on the brink of puking for about fifteen hours per day.”
“First trimester’s almost done though, isn’t it?”
“Yup, so you’ll only have to keep Baby Han Two, Electric Boogaloo under wraps for a little while longer.”
“I can do that,” Buck says, grinning with relief. On his way back out the doors, he can’t resist adding, “Since Tommy finding out was totally not my fault, you’re still going to name this one after me, right?”
Chimney laughs. “In your dreams, Buckley.”
Buck jumps down from the ambulance laughing with him. Then he stops in his tracks, a cold wash of shock hitting him.
In your dreams.
Oh, shit. Maybe he did tell Tommy.
*
Buck’s been sitting in his Jeep in front of Tommy’s house for twenty minutes, telling himself that he’s just waiting out this downpour… collecting his thoughts… checking himself to make sure he’s not doing something impulsive (again). He’s totally stalling, and he knows it. The thought of seeing Tommy in person for the first time in six weeks is making his heart do stupid things, both literally and figuratively.
Through the rainy windshield, Buck sees Tommy’s Christmas lights flick on. Nothing extravagant, just strings of multicolor bulbs across the eaves and around the windows and front door. He told Buck that he’d never been big on the holiday, and Buck was looking forward to bringing him to Maddie and Chimney’s in the hope that a family gathering with all the trimmings would make Tommy change his tune. That dream sure went up in smoke, didn’t it?
Now or never, Buck tells himself. He pushes open the door and steps out into the rain.
When he answers the doorbell, Tommy’s face is the dictionary definition of conflicted. His eyes go wide, and then he almost smiles before he catches himself and tilts his chin down in a reproachful way instead.
“Look, so something really weird is happening,” Buck says quickly with his hands held up in a placating gesture.
“Weird,” Tommy repeats flatly.
“Uh, can I come in? It’s pretty wet out here.”
Tommy steps back to let Buck in, then follows him to the living room with obvious reluctance. Buck decides to get right to the point.
“Okay, I know this is going to sound strange, but hear me out,” he begins.
Tommy’s eyebrows shoot up. “Like strange how? Like another curse strange, or like Tom Cruise playing a sexy, blond vampire strange?”
“Like, how you somehow knew that Maddie was pregnant strange.” Buck waits for it to sink in, but Tommy just shakes his head, confused. “Chimney told me that you couldn’t remember how you found out. But I think I know.”
“I— I just had a hunch, I guess.” Tommy says it just a hair too quickly for it to be believable.
Buck takes a breath. “No, I told you.”
“What?” Tommy laughs. “Have you been hitting the eggnog early, Evan?”
Evan. Hearing Tommy call him that cuts through Buck like a lance, but he plows on, determined to prove it, to grab onto whatever line the universe has used to link him and Tommy together and pull.
“Dionne Warwick,” Buck blurts out. “You’ve been listening to her song on repeat. You— You told me that in your garage.”
Tommy’s skeptical expression falls like a brick façade shearing off a building. “How did you…”
“Like I said, you told me. I didn’t know the song, but I found it on Spotify when I woke up.” Buck takes one long stride, so that he’s only a little more than an arm’s length from Tommy. “I think we’ve been getting into each other’s dreams.”
After staring across the room blankly for a moment, Tommy eases himself down into his recliner. It’s the ugliest thing, lumpy and brown. Buck had once teased him about his dad-core furniture until Tommy pushed him down into it and gave him a truly unforgettable blow job.
Now isn’t the time to think about that, probably, while Tommy is deciding whether or not Buck’s gone crazy.
But Tommy doesn’t look like he’s worried about Buck’s sanity (or sobriety) anymore. He scrubs a hand over his face, looks up at Buck, and says helplessly, “Baked Alaska.”
“Yes,” Buck exhales, smiling. “Yes. You tried it at that birthday dinner because—”
“Because you told me you made it.” Tommy makes a choking kind of laugh. “Did you really?”
“Yeah, I really did!” Buck says defensively. “I made it for Maddie and Chim when they came over for dinner. Along with about six different kinds of quick breads.”
“Your coping mechanism,” Tommy murmurs with quiet astonishment. “So… you’re saying that we’ve been dreaming each other’s dreams?”
“More like sharing them, I think. Or maybe more like getting pulled into each other’s dreams. You were right. The helicopter one was definitely yours.”
Tommy stands up, paces across the living room, then turns back to Buck with a heartbroken expression.
“You rode your bike into a tree.”
Buck nods. “Yeah. I never actually did it in real life, though, I promise.”
“But you… thought about it?”
Buck takes a seat on the couch and considers his answer. And the implications of answering honestly. He’s never talked about this to anyone but Dr. Copeland, and she threw around a lot of scary phrases like suicidal ideation when he did. But he quickly decides that if there was ever a time to bet all his chips, it’s now.
“Yes. I did, I think. When I was about twenty, I felt really trapped and hopeless.” Tommy comes over and joins Buck on the couch. He has tears in his eyes, Buck notices. “But Maddie saw it. She saw that I was self-destructing, and she helped me get out of there, with her old car and some money.”
“Where did you go?” Tommy asks softly.
Buck smiles. “To see the ocean.”
Tommy closes his eyes and then fumbles blindly until he finds Buck’s hand. He squeezes it for a moment, warm and gentle, before letting go. Buck wants to reach back—just for Tommy’s hand, or possibly for all of him—but there’s so much to say first.
“So you see, Tommy, I have been in dark places, too. And I’ve hurt people I cared about because of it. So you never have to hide your whole self from me, okay? Maybe I did see you through rose-tinted glasses a little, and I’m really sorry for that if it made you feel like you had to be some… paragon of queer self-actualization and positivity for me.”
Tommy chuckles. “Well there’s a title I certainly don’t deserve. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about Abby sooner. Stringing her along for years and proposing is only one of the many, many things that I’m ashamed of doing. And probably not even close to the worst one.”
“It was a pre-Glee world,” Buck says sagely. “I get it. Well, I don’t, but I want to learn about it. And I want to learn all about you, and I want you to learn all about me. Warts and mistakes and abandonment issues and shitty parents and all.”
“Warts? Don’t you mean boils?” Tommy quips. He slides a little further away on the couch, like he knows it’s time to be serious and he doesn’t quite trust himself to be within reach of Buck while he does it. “Are you asking to try again, Evan?”
“Yes,” Buck says emphatically. “I’m asking to try again. Look, I think we’ve both figured out what our mistakes were here. And they’re things we can absolutely work on and do better with. We just have to be willing to take the gamble and—”
“Be optimistic?” Tommy asks with a hint of a smile.
“Yeah, be optimistic. Even if only—I don’t know—five in a thousand relationships like ours work out in the long run, I want to try the hardest I fucking can to be one of those five. And it doesn’t have to be perfect. We don’t have to be perfect. We just have to keep trying.”
Tommy inhales deeply, then exhales, all while looking at Buck like he’s the most wondrous and dangerous temptation in the world. Finally, he sets a big hand on Buck’s knee.
“If I say yes, you have to promise me one thing.” He waits for Buck to nod. “Don’t try to rush this. Please don’t ask me to move in with you out of the blue or, I don’t know, do one of those god-awful, public marriage proposals. Being impulsive is fun for some things, but we need to talk about the big decisions, not spring them on each other. Okay?”
“Okay,” Buck says, barely managing to find enough breath in his lungs, because all through Tommy’s speech he’s been flying through the thin air of stratospheric hope. “We don’t have to be in a rush for anything. Anyway, that’s the second time I’ve impulsively asked a partner to move in with me only to have it backfire, so I think I’ve learned my lesson.”
“Good.”
Tommy starts to slide closer again, but Buck holds up a hand.
“You have to promise me something, too.”
“Alright. What is it?”
“Two things, actually,” Buck corrects himself. “First, you have to trust me to know how I feel and what I want. This isn’t my first serious relationship, even if it is the first one with another man. I really do kind of know what I’m doing—premature cohabitation requests aside, obviously.”
“Understood,” Tommy says solemnly. “And the second promise?”
“That you will never, ever call me ‘Buck’ again.”
With a joyful laugh, Tommy swoops in and takes Buck’s face in his hands. “I promise, Evan.”
*
Much later, when Tommy’s asleep with his arm heavy across Buck’s waist and the house is a nest of warmth and darkness around them, Buck lies awake for a long time.
Mostly, he’s too happy to sleep just yet. The six-week ache in his chest is gone and his body’s humming from his and Tommy’s very thorough reconciliation (on the couch, in the bed, in the shower). Then there are the things that Tommy told him afterwards, when they lay side-by-side, worn out and sated and both a little teary with relief. About the loneliness he’s never been able to shake, and the way Buck filled up his life so much that life without him felt as flat and empty as a desert highway.
As he waits for sleep, Buck dreams about the things to come. Not in the distant future—he won’t get ahead of himself again. He imagines the meals they’ll cook for each other, the stories they’ll share (especially the ones that will be hard to tell), the adventures and misadventures they’ll laugh about. In other words, all the building blocks they’ll need to make something lasting and strong, piece by piece.
Buck rolls over, ducks his head under Tommy’s chin, and closes his eyes. He and Tommy still have a lot to dream about together.