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“Run that by me one more time.” Bobby was staring up at the ceiling of his office. He’d heaved a strangled groan around Minute Two of Buck and Eddie’s explanation and hadn’t been able to make eye contact with either of them since.
“Buck and I got married yesterday,” Eddie repeated, as calm as he’d been the first three times he’d said it. “So we’re officially disclosing our relationship to the LAFD.”
Bobby ran an exhausted hand across his eyes. “Yeah, that’s what I thought you said,” he mumbled before raising his voice. “Hen! Chim! Can you come in here please? We need a medical check!”
“Bobby, c’mon, I promise we’re fine, and it’ll all make sense if you just—” Buck interjected, speaking for the first time. Until now, he’d been content to sit back and let Eddie explain it all. But Eddie had then proceeded to explain absolutely nothing. Instead, he’d princess-waved his ring-clad hand like he was Miss Congeniality, gave Bobby a grin filled with such unholy glee that Buck briefly worried about demonic possession, and informed Bobby that they needed to update their health insurance.
So maybe Buck should take it from here.
“It’s not for you,” Bobby sighed, just as Hen and Chim (as well as Ravi, looking frantic) came stumbling into his office, first aid bags in hand. He directed his next words to them: “Yes, hi, I’d like to report a stroke.”
Buck glared at him. “That’s not funny.”
“Tell them what you just told me, and we’ll see who’s laughing.”
“So is Bobby dying, or…” Chimney trailed off, noticing the rings on their fingers. “You’re engaged?”
“Married,” Bobby corrected him. “For the bit, apparently.”
“What does that mean?” Hen asked.
Buck, seeing his chance to regain control of this situation, rushed to explain. “Okay, so what happened was…”
***
72 hours earlier…
“Tommy said what?”
Buck and Eddie were halfway through their weekly shopping trip when Buck had made the mistake of saying, “We already have Prosecco at home. Although, fair warning: that bottle might be cursed.”
Which, as Buck learned approximately ten seconds later, was not the kind of statement you could make without offering an explanation. He just wished he didn’t have to be standing in the middle of the wine and fancy cheese aisle of their local grocery store while he told Eddie the story of his ill-advised hookup with his ex. But Eddie had volunteered to bring a charcuterie board to Maddie and Chim’s next wine night, which was a duty that Eddie took very seriously since it combined two of his favorite things: not having to cook plus obsessively rearranging tiny aesthetic objects. In other words, Buck knew neither of them were escaping this aisle for at least the next ten minutes, so he sighed and settled in to tell the story.
“So the whole time you were dating—” Eddie brandished a wedge of Gouda at him judgmentally. “He was what — threatened by our friendship?”
“I know! It’s ridiculous!” Buck agreed. He knew Eddie would think it was an insane accusation, take that, Maddie. “And don’t buy that goat cheddar. When we got it last time, you said it had too much of a nutty aftertaste, remember? You like that one with the red label better.”
“Oh right, thanks. Anyway, it would serve Tommy right if we did get together. Maybe he’d realize what acting like a jealous, insecure dick gets you. And what it doesn’t get you,” Eddie added direly as he tossed some Camembert into the cart.
“I mean, I wouldn’t call him a ‘dick,’” Buck said. “He wasn’t actually that bad of a boyfriend — before he dumped me, at least.”
“Mm.” Eddie replied vaguely, suddenly very interested in the expensive spelt crackers on the shelf across from them.
With that, the conversation naturally shifted away from Tommy and toward an argument about what a “cornichon” was and whether they absolutely needed three jars of them “for the vibe.”
It was only when they were in the produce aisle fifteen minutes later that Eddie suddenly said, “Okay but seriously: imagine how satisfying it would be to show up with matching rings to a scene that the 118 was working with Harbor, and just…flaunt our loving and healthy relationship in Tommy’s face.”
“I…guess…” Buck allowed. If he was gonna invent a revenge fantasy, he’d personally rather pick one that didn’t implicitly confirm all of the worst aspersions Tommy had thrown at his and Eddie’s friendship, but Eddie seemed to be on a roll with this one, so Buck let him have it.
“…plus, it would get my sisters off my back…” Eddie was musing when Buck checked back in on him a few minutes later, bell peppers for a weeknight pasta recipe in hand.
“What’s that about your sisters?”
“They’ve been texting me,” Eddie explained, sounding haunted by that fact. “And they’re obsessed with you. Won’t stop asking me questions.” He shivered.
Buck blinked, caught off-guard by the notion that Eddie’s sisters spent any time thinking about him at all.
“Oh,” he finally said. “Cool. They seem nice, from their Instagrams. Can you grab some cherry tomatoes?”
Eddie muttered something disparaging in Spanish but did pick up a carton of tomatoes, so Buck didn’t press the issue.
Eddie continued to mumble to himself as they moved toward the fruit area of the produce section. Buck hummed at him every once in a while, half-listening to Eddie complain about his “nosy family” while he checked peaches for ripeness, because Buck was an expert multitasker.
“…So that’s why we should get married,” Eddie said.
Buck dropped the peach he’d been holding, the plastic bag filled with the three other peaches he’d already selected, and also half a peach pyramid after he’d tried to catch the original peach and only managed to elbow the peach display instead.
“What?” Buck yelped, his multitasking now expanded to include tasks like ‘halt a peach jailbreak’ and ‘check his best friend for fever.’
“Married,” Eddie repeated, leaning calmly against the handle of their half-full cart as he watched Buck rush around the aisle corralling fruit.
“Aww!” said a nearby shopper who’d been rifling through the nectarines and clearly believed she was about to witness a deeply intimate moment that would suggest something meaningful about the romanticism of the mundane. Unfortunately for her, at the moment, Buck was more consumed by the romanticism of suddenly becoming the proud owner of 20 more peaches than he’d needed for his cobbler recipe.
“D’you think Chris would eat peach compote if I put it on pancakes?” he asked Eddie as he struggled to fit all the peaches into produce bags. Eddie, that dick, grinned at him while doing absolutely nothing to help.
“Buck?” he asked, ignoring both Buck and the nectarine woman, who was holding up a single nectarine like a magic orb and wasn’t even pretending not to eavesdrop. “Marriage? Yes?”
“I mean, sure, if you want,” Buck replied. “But don’t you think maybe that’s an overreaction?”
The nectarine woman stared at them both, open-mouthed. Eddie narrowed his eyes at her until she scurried away.
“No, listen, this is a great plan,” Eddie said confidently, once they’d been afforded all the privacy they were likely to find in the middle of a Ralphs on a Sunday afternoon. “It would be like a same-sex lavender marriage. Like how gay men and lesbians used to get friend-married so society wouldn’t judge them. The only difference is that, in this case, the ‘society’ in question is your ex-boyfriend. And my entire family. And all our friends.”
“Uh yeah, I know what a lavender marriage is, Eddie. Wait. How do you know what it is?” Buck’s jaw dropped, betrayed. “Have you been going on Wikipedia spirals? Without me?”
For the first time in this insane conversation, Eddie looked uncomfortable. His face flushed pink as he avoided Buck’s eyes and said: “What, like you have the market cornered on poor impulse control at 2am?”
“Okay, but we’re both men, you’re straight, and I’m bi, so this kind of feels like the opposite of a lavender marriage situation, if I’m being honest.”
Eddie rolled his eyes impatiently like Buck was the one being obtuse here. Which, Buck could grant him, was usually true. However, in this one particular instance, Buck thought he was being pretty fucking rational, actually.
“Whatever,” Eddie said. “Call it a chartreuse marriage if you want. The color isn’t the important part of the plan.”
“You’re so right about that,” Buck agreed faintly.
“The important part is that we both get to marry our best friend and then everyone else has to leave us alone forever. And we also get to stick it to your ex-boyfriend. Three upsides and no downsides, is what I’m saying.”
“What about the downside of everyone assuming we’re together, so it’s harder for us to date anyone else?”
Eddie paused, considering it. “Okay, four upsides,” he allowed. Buck groaned.
“Come on,” Eddie added, pouting out his lower lip and widening his stupidly big brown eyes pleadingly, like he didn’t know what a fatal hit that expression dealt to Buck’s self-control. “Just think of everyone’s faces when we walk into the 118 next shift and tell them we’re married now. Five bucks says Ravi quits on the spot.”
“Nah, he’s scrappy, he won’t be scared away that easily,” Buck replied absently as he thought it over. “Oh fine. But only because it’ll be really, really funny.”
***
“…And that’s the story of how we got married,” Buck concluded with a jazzy little ‘ta da!’ flourish that — incidentally — showed off his new ring to best effect. He’d practiced it in the mirror a couple times the night before, so he already knew it looked cool.
“Eddie was right. I quit,” Ravi said.
“Sit back down,” Bobby ordered. “If I can’t escape this, neither can any of you.”
“What does Christopher think?” Hen asked gently, like she was calming a spooked horse. Buck felt vaguely offended that she thought they’d do anything without Christopher’s approval.
“He laughed for ten minutes straight and then said, ‘do it for the plot,’ which he explained is a TikTok expression that means ‘great idea, Dad!’”
“Uh—” Ravi started to interject and then shrugged. “Something like that, yeah.”
“Well I for one, think this is wonderful news, and I cannot wait to tell your sister all about it,” Chimney said cheerfully.
“Thanks, Chim.” Buck beamed at him. “I think Maddie’s gonna be really happy for us.”
“Incidentally, Eddie, if you’re planning to go to any pick-up basketball games this week, please, please, please can I come too?”
“Uh. Sure? You know you’re always welcome. You don’t have to ask.”
“Yesss,” Chimney whispered to himself.
***
Several days later, Eddie returned home from basketball looking sweaty and windswept and deeply pleased with himself. Buck got a few seconds to admire his chartreuse husband’s flushed-pink cheeks (not to mention his arms in what was indisputably his sluttiest tank top — and Buck had studied that question empirically), before Eddie interrupted his quiet contemplation by flopping down on top of him on the sofa.
Ever since Buck had moved into Eddie’s house and then Eddie had moved into Eddie’s house, the two of them had lost any personal boundaries they may have once had. So Buck reacted to Eddie climbing all over him with nothing but a mild, “Gross, you’re getting basketball all over me,” and moved his arm out of the way so Eddie could squirm up against his side.
“Fun game?” Buck asked after a minute.
“Mhm.” Eddie rested his cheek against Buck’s shoulder. He glowed with a transcendental inner peace, like he was at one with the universe and all its creatures.
“What did you say to Tommy?” Buck asked.
“Just thanked him for being the catalyst that pushed us together,” Eddie replied innocently. “You can ask Chim if you don’t believe me. I think he filmed the whole thing.”
“Just that, huh? In those exact words?”
“Alright fine. I may also have lightly touched on how crazy it was that, if not for Tommy, I may never have found the love of my life. And that if Tommy hadn’t made such an ass of himself, he could’ve been the one standing on that basketball court feeling like the luckiest person on the planet instead of me. Because, as he no doubt recalled, being loved by Evan Buckley is a daily gift that some of us would never take for granted. Oh, and then I reminded him how great you are in bed before stealing the ball from him. For the symbolism.”
“How do you know how good I am in bed?”
“Oh please,” Eddie scoffed. “You are.”
Buck laughed and squeezed Eddie tighter against his side. “Thank you for chartreuse-marrying me in a misguided effort to defend my honor. You’re a good friend.”
“I know,” Eddie said smugly.
“And a good husband.”
“Mm.” It was another of Eddie’s non-answer noises. Buck pulled back so he could see Eddie’s face better. Eddie, noticing Buck’s sudden worry, groaned and tried to burrow into his shoulder. Buck gently detached him and sat back on the couch so Eddie couldn’t keep avoiding his eyes.
“Eddie,” was all Buck said. But it was enough to get Eddie’s carefully neutral expression to crack.
“Am I?” was all Eddie said, looking as unhappy as if Buck had forcibly dragged those two syllables out of him.
“Of course you are,” Buck replied, shocked.
“Come on, Buck. I proposed to you in a grocery store, because I was so jealous of your awful ex-boyfriend, and so worried that you’d think he was right about us and start pulling away from me, that I was willing to enter into a legally binding lifelong contract just to make sure we would stay best friends forever. And then I told you it would be funny to marry you, when the truth is…” Eddie choked a little bit on his next words and didn’t continue.
“Okay, I feel like I need to reiterate that Tommy wasn’t that bad—wait.”
Buck ran through Eddie’s words again, trying to focus through the buzzing that had suddenly overtaken every one of his senses.
“Eddie,” was all he could think to say. Eddie toppled against Buck like a particularly woebegone felled tree and then stuck his face in Buck’s stomach.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said, his words partially muffled by Buck’s shirt. “It’s humiliating.”
“Aww, but Eddie, being loved by you is a daily gift,” Buck reminded him cheerfully. His whole body felt as light and fizzy as that bottle of Prosecco that Eddie had made him throw away.
“Don’t make fun of me! I had a full-on sexuality crisis next to a pile of avocadoes. Don’t you think I’ve suffered enough?”
“Hm, that depends,” Buck said, fighting a grin as he stroked his hand soothingly through Eddie’s hair. “How do you feel about getting chartreuse-divorced and getting normal-married instead? Ivory-married? Pink-married? I guess we can decide on the colors later. Just no peach, please.”
Eddie lifted his head from Buck’s stomach, eyes wide.
“You’re serious?”
“As an avocado,” Buck promised him. “Incidentally, that’s another wedding shade we should probably avoid.”
Eddie tackled him against the couch before Buck could start ruminating on the advantages and disadvantages of navy blue.
***
“…And that’s the story of how we had sex,” Buck concluded. His hand was intertwined with Eddie’s and both were resting comfortably on Eddie’s knee.
“Got together for real,” Eddie clarified, giving Buck’s hand a little squeeze.
“Fell in love,” Buck corrected with a soppy smile at Eddie.
“Get out of my office,” said Bobby.