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Buck wakes up from a dream about measuring the longest inchworm in the world—"Sixty-eight inches," he tells the judge, and the inchworm, rainbow and cartoonish, turns its head to look at him and smile gormlessly—and for a second he can't figure out where he is, or why. He blinks the sleep out of his eyes. Still dark. And then a light flashes somewhere and he remembers: Tommy's house, in Tommy's bedroom, with Tommy's blackout curtains pulled tight across the windows, and Tommy himself so soundly asleep on the other half of this king-sized bed that he may as well be dead.
In the end it hadn't taken much for them to get back together: a chance encounter on a sidewalk, apologies, refuting each others' apologies, a misunderstanding and a brief argument, a cliché kiss in the middle of a seasonally inappropriate rainstorm that had come out of nowhere. The deluge had felt scripted, like Hollywood taking a pen to their lives, and so had the honking car horns reminding them they were holding up an intersection. And life since then, all three weeks of it, has felt lighter than it has in months. They've been keeping it to themselves, haven't wanted to let anyone else in to their little cozy bubble of happiness, to tell Buck that he's making the wrong decision. He knows what decisions he wants to make, now. He's an adult.
The light flashes again and Buck realizes it's Tommy's phone, ringing silently. He pushes himself up so he can lean over Tommy's body and inspect the screen. The incoming call is from Aunt Donna, who Buck knows about but has never met. She's called twice already.
It goes to voicemail, and she must have hung up, because a text comes through a minute later.
Aunt Donna: Tommy sweetie call me ASAP. It's about your father.
Oh. It's one of those phone calls. Buck's never gotten one, always been on-scene when things happened to the people he cares about; but he's had to make them, had to pick up the phone and send the preemptive text, had to sit down next to someone and wrap a comforting arm around them, and his gut sinks as he looks down at Tommy, sleeping peacefully under his soft green sheets.
"Hey," he says, wrapping his hand around Tommy's shoulder and giving him a gentle shake. "Hey, Tommy, wake up."
Tommy mumbles in his sleep and presses his face deeper into the pillow and Buck wishes he didn't have to do this.
"Wake up, Tommy," he says.
"What's up," Tommy says as he comes to awareness. "Did I miss the alarm?"
"No," Buck says. He presses the phone into Tommy's hand. "Your aunt called. She sent a text. I think you need to call her back."
Tommy looks at the phone in his hand, then blinks, then really looks at it. A handful of emotions work their way across his face and Buck counts the ones he recognizes, the ones he's never seen before. Then Tommy takes a breath and slides that stoic mask on, swipes through his phone, and hits call.
"What's up, Buck?" Chimney asks on the other end of the line; Buck can hear his niece yelling in the background. Breakfast, maybe, on her way to a play group.
"I need to take some leave," Buck says. "Um. Bereavement, if possible."
"Be—shit, Buck, who died? Am I going to have to—"
"No," Buck says, heading off the panic attack. "Um. It's—Tommy's dad passed."
Chim doesn't respond for a hot second and Buck worries he's dropped the phone until he clears his throat. "I didn't know you two were—"
"Yeah. Um. It's new," Buck says.
"Okay. That's—good to know. Okay. Is he doing okay?"
Buck looks out the kitchen window. "I don't know," he says. Tommy's on the back patio, where he's been for the last twenty minutes after hanging up the phone, after getting out of the bed and walking through the house with purpose, Buck stumbling after him, after pulling open a drawer in the kitchen Buck hadn't ever looked in before and taking out a pack of Marlboros and a lighter, removing a single cigarette and removing himself from the kitchen. "I don't think so."
"Shit," Chimney says. "Were they close?"
The only time Tommy's ever mentioned his dad was after Bobby's heart attack, and the only thing he'd said was that the guy was an asshole. "I think it's complicated."
"Yeah, it always is. How much time do you need?"
"How much am I allowed to take?"
"Well, technically none, since it's not your dad," Chim says. "But you should take as much time as you need. As he needs. You have a lot of PTO."
"Thanks, Chim," Buck says. He hangs up and watches Tommy press himself shakily up to standing. He hasn't been able to call Chim Captain, yet, but it's fine.
Tommy appears in the doorway, nicotine and panic wafting off him. "Sorry," he croaks.
"What are you sorry for?"
"I don't know," Tommy says. "Smoking. Waking you up."
Buck doesn't point out that it was the other way around. "I told Chimney," he says. "I asked for some time off."
Tommy looks lost. "Why?"
"To take care of you," Buck says.
"Why?"
"Because you probably need it," Buck says. "I did."
"Fuck," Tommy says; his hands come to his face and he collapses backwards against the kitchen counter.
Buck takes a step forward, and then another. When Tommy doesn't bolt he leans into him, letting his weight staple them together. He can tell that Tommy's struggling to regulate his breathing and he doesn't say anything. He just waits.
"I'm going to need to go up there," Tommy eventually says.
"Okay," Buck says, pulling up a mental map of California in his head. He can't remember exactly where Tommy's from. Somewhere in the Central Valley, he thinks.
"I'll probably need to stay for a few days. Maybe longer."
Buck nods. His chin presses into Tommy's shoulder with every bob of his head.
"I don't," Tommy starts. "I don't know why this is so hard to ask."
"I'll say yes," Buck says. "If that helps."
Buck can feel Tommy's jaw working against his cheek, can hear the grinding of his teeth. "Will you come with me?"
"Yes," Buck says, just like he promised. "What should I pack?"
He helps Tommy pick out two somber outfits, just in case he decides he hates his usual one on the day of. He packs the rest of a bag for him, while Tommy makes a couple more phone calls—one to his captain, one to his cousin to coordinate where they're staying. Tommy's aunt has offered them a room, but the bed is small, Tommy warns. "That's fine," Buck says. He can sleep anywhere, as long as Tommy's there.
"My car or yours?" he asks, once Tommy looks like he's ready. It's hard to tell, given the fact that he started pacing half an hour ago and hasn't stopped, but there was a slight change in the way he's holding his shoulders, and Buck is taking that as a sign.
"Either," Tommy says. "As long as I can drive."
Tommy's a nervous passenger. It was one of the first things Buck noticed about him, a year ago when everything was new and noticeable. He'll take an Uber, but he doesn't like it, judging by the way he grits his teeth and keeps his eyes on anything but the driver. The few times Buck has driven them places he can just tell when Tommy's stomping on an imaginary brake in the footwell. It's probably his most irritating quality. "Of course," Buck says. "Whatever you want."
He holds out his keys and Tommy's, too, and waits for him to choose. "The truck," Tommy finally says. "So we don't get stranded when your starter dies again."
"That happened one time," Buck says. "And you fixed it."
Tommy gives him a smile. It's strained and it's quick, but it's there, and that's all Buck can really ask for.
They stop at Buck's new place before they head out of town. He's had years to practice being an efficient packer and now he puts those skills to use: bag unzipped on the bed, drawers opened one by one, four of everything, mostly neutrals. He grabs his pink sweater in case the heat breaks at night and he grabs his regular suit, and he turns around in time to catch Tommy staring out the big bay window.
"That's the reason I got this apartment in the first place," Buck says. "The window, you know."
"I like the natural light." Tommy taps a knuckle against the glass. "It suits you," he says, before he turns back around.
Buck has all his things, and he lifts his bag up and shakes it as proof. "Ready when you are."
"Oh," Tommy says. "Are you sure? You don't need anything else?"
"Nope," Buck says. There's a weird look on Tommy's face. "Are you not ready?"
Tommy shrugs.
"Do you not want to go?" Buck asks carefully.
"I have to go, Evan," Tommy says, voice flat.
"That's not what I asked," Buck says.
Tommy sighs. "No, I don't want to go."
"Come sit," Buck says, patting the bed next to him; Tommy comes and sits. "You wanna talk to me?"
In the last three weeks they've only broken apart from each other to go to work or to pick up more food. Otherwise it's been day after day making up for lost time: sex, of course, but also conversations they should've had before. They've talked about the future, about their wants and needs, and about Bobby, and about the grief that was reverberating through both of their lives. Whatever this conversation is, though—this hasn't been one they've had yet.
"You don't have to tell me everything," Buck says. "Just, you know, give me the spark notes."
Tommy looks at his hands, really studies his cuticles, does a multi-point inspection of his nail beds. "The last time I saw him we both got arrested," he eventually says.
That is… not what Buck was expecting. "For what?"
"Assault. I guess he wasn't expecting me to hit back that time. Nobody filed charges. I was drunk underage, though, so they kept me overnight."
"Oh," Buck says. "So this was a while ago."
"I was eighteen, yeah."
"So that time you told me you and your dad didn't really talk—"
Tommy laughs, big and bright. "I was underselling it a little."
"Shit," Buck says. "And your mom?"
Tommy's laugh turns dark, humorless. "I've tried. I reach out every few months, I call her, I send cards, she just… she never replies, never answers. But you never know. Maybe—it's been so long, but—maybe."
Buck thinks of Maddie, of the postcards long collected, never returned. "Maybe after this," he says, hesitant in his suggestion, and Tommy nods.
And then Tommy leans over and kisses him, a quick peck on the lips and a tiny little smile.
"What was that for?" Buck asks.
"Sorry," Tommy says. He gets to his feet. "I just don't want to be too late this time."
"What do you mean?"
Tommy reaches for Buck's hands, pulls him up, grabs the bag off the bed as well. "In your last kitchen. The morning after we hooked up. I kept thinking about kissing you, and I never did, and then—"
"And then," Buck sighs.
"So I promised myself afterwards that if I ever got the opportunity to kiss you again, I should just fucking take it, and not hesitate."
"Wow," Buck says, starstruck. "Okay. I love you too, you know."
Tommy smiles at him, half guarded, half indulgent. "Let's go."
"Wait," Buck says, as they hit another slowdown on the 5 in Santa Clarita. They've spent the last forty minutes working through a random playlist that came up on Buck's Spotify, and he's getting tired of hitting next every three songs, so he's trying to find a podcast that'll last long enough to get them over the rest of the mountains but not be so involved that he'll get lost in it. "Why did I think you grew up on, like, the moon or something? Bakersfield's only two hours away."
"Probably because I never visit," Tommy says. He taps his fingers on the steering wheel, drumming out a pattern: tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap. "I don't come out here very often."
Buck turns to look at him, instead of at the traffic. "Just because?"
"My aunt was in a play a couple years ago, so I drove up to see that."
"That sounds fun."
Tommy nods. "She got back into the community theater thing after my uncle passed. She's good at it, and it keeps her busy."
They pass the aftermath of a fender-bender, and the traffic starts to dissipate. Tommy's rhythmic tapping keeps time as they pick up speed once more. "I couldn't tell you when I last went to Pennsylvania," he says. "It's been years. Since Maddie and I are both in LA now my parents just come to us. For a solid decade, though, they never came to see either of us."
"They didn't really reach out, either, did they?"
"No," Buck says, catching Tommy's sidelong glance. "And I thought you and I had communication problems."
Tommy bursts out laughing.
They make it to Donna's house before rush hour really starts to ramp up. It's a low-slung rambler style on a street lined with more of the same, and the front flower garden is bursting with color and pollinators. Buck stops to take a look at a few, on his way up to the front door, and when he finally stands up again Tommy is staring at him with a soft look on his face. That might be what Buck missed the most, in their months apart: the looks Tommy would give him when he thought Buck wasn't looking back. It feels so good to have them again.
The front door opens before they can even knock. Donna's a tall woman with a mess of dark hair, wearing a bright green sundress; she pulls Tommy in for a crushing hug and he goes willingly, and then she releases him and turns her gaze on Buck. "Hi, boys," she says. "You must be Evan. Sorry—Tommy said—you go by Buck?"
"Either works," Buck tells her. A few years ago it would have bothered him but he finds he doesn't mind as much anymore. "It's nice to finally meet you."
She hugs him, too. "Oh, you're sweet. And handsome! Good catch with this one, Tommy. I made up the bed in the little room for you, I hope that's okay. Jackie and Fish are driving up in the morning with the baby and I don't think all their baby crap will fit in there."
"Beth?" Tommy asks as he grabs both the duffel bags off the front step and follows Donna inside. Buck looks around as he closes the front door behind him. There are pictures everywhere, crowding each other out on the walls. He recognizes Tommy, finds a few of him looking baby-faced at the 118, and one of him in army fatigues, and one of him standing in front of a Blackhawk. There's his high school graduation, too, next to portraits that must be Tommy's cousins.
"She's not flying down. Of course not. She said to do a little dance on the grave in her honor and I told her to fly down and do it herself. And I told her you get dibs, anyway."
The house smells like nag champa, like it's been baked into the paint on the walls and the carpet in the hallway. Buck thinks about the cigarette from earlier. He thinks about how Tommy's unscented laundry detergent lays a blank canvas for the cologne he sometimes indulges in, on date nights. Buck's own apartment still sort of smells like the industrial pine sol they must have swabbed over every last inch of it between tenants.
The little room is the first bedroom they come to. It is little: the full-sized bed takes up most of the real estate. "Oh, I'm sorry," Donna says when the reality of two men over six feet sharing the thing sinks in, but Buck is quick to reassure her that it's fine.
"I can sleep anywhere. We've both slept on smaller couches, Donna, it's fine," he says, and the fact that that gets Tommy smiling is enough to tide him over through showering off the drive.
Tommy's sitting on the bed when Buck gets out of the bathroom. He's got the suits hanging up on the back of the door; one foot up on the bed, tucked under his knee, and he's refolding his socks that Buck had packed. Tommy likes them rolled a certain way. Buck just tucks one inside the other.
"We'll have to spoon tonight," Buck says.
"Not the worst thing in the world," Tommy replies. "Sorry it's so cramped."
"Don't apologize, Tommy," Buck says. "I meant it, I can sleep anywhere. Are you doing okay?"
Tommy puts the socks in his hands down and frowns. "I don't know," he eventually says. "Still feels kind of unreal? I thought that asshole would be haunting me for the rest of my life. I guess he still will be."
"Just, you know, like a ghost, and not—"
"And not like I'm afraid he'll pop out from behind every corner, yeah," Tommy says, meeting Buck's eye.
When Buck had first met Tommy it had seemed like the guy wasn't afraid of anything. He flew into a fucking hurricane with just a few sarcastic quips and an otherwise placid demeanor. Then Buck had asked him to move in.
"Boys," Donna says, poking her head around the doorframe. "I'm making late lunch. Early dinner. Lunner?"
"Thanks, Donna," Tommy says, without looking away from Buck's face.
"Tommy, do you still hate sesame?"
Buck had noticed pretty early that Tommy is a picky eater. Sesame's a new one, though.
"Sesame's fine, Donna," Tommy says, swallowing down a look.
"Okay. Well, there's tahini in the salad dressing if you change your mind," she says, and she pulls the door shut behind her.
"You've always been picky," Buck says, like he's writing it down in Tommy's iNaturalist profile.
"Yeah," Tommy says. He flops down backwards onto the bed. "My dad fucking hated it."
Buck maneuvers around so he can face him. "What was he like?"
"An asshole," Tommy says. "I don't know. He yelled a lot. He worked in warehouses and he was always pissed off about something. But he loved church, and he was always home for dinner."
Buck's parents were always home for dinner, too: stilted, quiet affairs with a tense cloud hanging over them that he only understood when he was thirty, when it was too late to rewrite any memories. "Will you tell me what happened when you got arrested?"
Tommy raises an eyebrow. "Hey, Donna?" he calls, loud enough to make it through the door, and she pokes her head back in. "Do you still have my mug shot?"
She heaves a sigh. "Of course I still have it," she says. Her voice gets quiet as she moves back down the hallway. "I printed out the news article about you getting that medal, by the way. Why does nobody ever ask about that? Nobody cares when you're being a hero. Oh, here it is. Ugh. Do you want the clip from the police blotter, too?"
"Evan's curious," Tommy says as she shuffles back out the door and pulls it tight once again. He sits up and passes the newspaper clipping and the photo over to Buck. He looks at the photo, first: young Tommy's hair was cropped close, and he has a black eye and a cut across his cheek. He's staring into the camera defiantly, righteously, like he knows he's going to walk away and not look back. The newspaper is faded, yellow, that soft consistency paper gets when it's twenty-five years old.
Police responded to a domestic disturbance, the article reads. Thomas Kinard Sr. and Thomas Kinard Jr. were both taken into custody. Mr. Kinard Sr. was transported to a local hospital for treatment of his injuries. Mr. Kinard Jr. was cautioned for underage drinking. After a conversation with both parties, no charges were filed.
"You put your dad in the hospital?" Buck asks, and then cringes. He hadn't meant to sound so accusatory. None of this tracks with the Tommy he knows, and it's hard to square the two in his mind.
But Tommy just laughs. "He was there for all of thirty minutes. A busted lip and a dislocated finger. Literally nothing worse than anything he ever did to me but no one ever called the cops for that. I went to school with bruises and no one ever gave a shit."
Daniel's leukemia had been discovered when a teacher caught a glimpse of a bruise on the back of his arm. Maddie told Buck this one night over sangria on her patio, the two of them out there nursing their drinks while they listened to Chimney sing a Disney song for Jee-Yun while tossing her up in the air and catching her every time she came back down to earth. He looks at Tommy's mug shot again, runs a finger along the line of Tommy's brow. He looks so young. Eighteen years old. About to go off and join the army, without a clue that his government would ship him off to a foreign country to destabilize it a year or so later.
"My mom was the one who called the cops." Buck looks up; Tommy's eyes are trained on the photo, on Buck's hand. "She never did when it was just him hitting me. But I think I scared her."
Buck doesn't know what to say.
"I need a shower," Tommy says abruptly, and he stands up and walks out of the room.
Buck's phone is halfway out of his pocket to text Bobby but—but Bobby is gone. Bobby is gone, and he can't help Buck now, and Buck's eyes well up and he bites his lip and he breathes hard, harder, even harder.
And then when he opens his eyes, Bobby's in the corner of the room.
Not really, of course. Buck made him up. He knows he did because Bobby's fuzzy and translucent and he's got a kind smile on his face, and his nose isn't bleeding, and he's probably seven or eight years younger, the way he was when Buck met him, when he was still walking around with the weight of a hundred and fifty people on his shoulders, when he still hadn't asked for help himself.
"Am I dreaming?" Buck asks. "Or did I finally snap?"
Ghost-Bobby shrugs. "Maybe your subconscious wanted an avatar for the advice you're trying to get."
"Oh," Buck says. He can accept this as fact. The shower kicks on in the next room, finally, and he hears the slide of the shower curtain across the bar. "I don't know how to help, here."
"You're doing it already," Ghost-Bobby says. "Listen, communicate, be a hand to hold."
Sometimes when his grief for Bobby is at its worst, when he's alone and it's dark and he can't stop thinking about his hand on the glass and the ventilator hood and the water dripping from the sprinklers and the horrible empty echo in that hallway, he starts to wish that the outcome had been different. He stops himself every time before he actually says what he wishes out loud, because he doesn’t want to put that energy out into the universe, but the cloud is so thick and Bobby was so bright.
“You don’t really want to go down that road,” Ghost-Bobby says, and Buck sighs.
He’s been thinking about Daniel a lot lately. Whenever anyone dies he thinks of Daniel. The first dead person Buck ever knew, and he didn’t even realize it until he was thirty. Not for the first time Buck wonders what Daniel would have been like. Would he have been a good person? Probably. Would he have protected Maddie from Doug? Maybe, maybe not—Buck couldn’t. Would he have been patient and kind and all the other things love is supposed to be in that one Bible verse Bobby liked so much? Would he have known what Buck should say to Tommy right now?
“Don’t go down that road, either, kid,” Ghost-Bobby says, and Buck sighs again.
"I feel stuck," Buck says. "Useless. In the way."
"You're not any of those things," Ghost-Bobby says. "You never have been, even when you hadn't found your way, yet."
Buck purses his lips.
"I'm serious. Tommy appreciates you. He knows you're trying. He just has to let himself take that hand, okay, kid?"
"I love you," Buck says, but the room is empty.
Tommy quietly slides back into the room, towel around his waist and another over his shoulders, and catches Buck's eye. "Sorry," he says. "I just needed to get out of my head for a second."
"It's okay," Buck tells him. "Really."
Tommy sits down next to him, tangles his fingers in Buck's. "Want to go eat whatever weird salad my aunt made?"
"Yeah," Buck says. He'd like nothing more.
The weird salad isn't actually that weird, but Buck watches Tommy pick at it and push it around with his fork and feels another block in the jenga tower he'd created in his mind of this cool, confident pilot come tumbling out. He eats his own portion, and then when Donna gets up to grab something in the living room he snatches Tommy's plate and swaps it with his own.
"Thanks, Donna," he says, really cheesing it up. "This is great."
"Aw, you're welcome, sweetie," she says, distracted by the photo album she's flipping through. Tommy shoots him a grateful look, and that's all Buck needs.
When they slither into bed, the air conditioner chugging unhappily along, it still feels like a hundred degrees out. The bed really is too small for both of them. Buck starts tucked into Tommy's arms, like usual; and then Tommy pulls away, just slightly, and Buck turns to face him and Tommy looks at him a little pathetically and Buck takes him by the shoulder and rolls him over so that he can be the little spoon for once; and that's all well and good until a thin slick sheen of sweat is all that separates Tommy's back from Buck's chest, and also Buck is rock hard and Tommy's rocking his ass backwards into him; and then there's not really enough room to actually do anything about it so Buck peels himself away from Tommy's back and pushes down on Tommy's shoulder so Tommy is looking up at him, and he's hard and leaking, too; and then Buck spreads his legs and straddles Tommy and lowers himself down onto him, pressing their cocks together between them, so much pressure they both might burst; and Tommy tilts his head back on the pillow and opens his mouth wide and lets out a silent breath of want, and Buck knows that look from nights at the loft when Tommy refused to let himself get loud because he didn't want Buck's neighbors to be upset with him; and Buck presses down again and then starts to move, back and forth, building a rhythm as the bed squeaks underneath them, and the pressure builds, and the air conditioner sputters, and finally they come so close together that Buck isn't sure who came first, where one of their messes ends and the other begins.
He drops his forehead onto Tommy's, sweat mixing with sweat, and then he rolls off, curling himself up into Tommy's side.
"God, Evan," Tommy says.
"Yeah?" Buck asks. "Good?"
Tommy smiles at him, then ducks his head.
"Kind of a rite of passage to, uh, to silently fuck someone in your family's house, right?"
Tommy shakes his head. "I never did that. Here or at my parents'."
"Wait, really?" Buck asks. He was trying not to shout while nutting while his parents watched the PBS News Hour in the other room starting in junior year.
"You're the only one," Tommy says, running a finger over the mountains and valleys of Buck's chest.
Buck frowns. "Wha—what?"
"I've never brought anyone else back here," Tommy says, still not looking up. "You're the only one."
"The only—nobody?"
"Who would I have brought?" Tommy asks. "This can't be a surprise, come on."
And it shouldn't be a surprise. They've had this conversation. They had it two weeks ago, as a matter of fact. They'd sat down on the rattan couch on Tommy's back patio and stretched their legs out onto the disintegrating ottoman and finally had the conversation that was probably a year overdue. The in-betweens, they decided to call them: all the people they'd dated in between Abby and each other.
Buck had told him all about Ali, and Taylor, and Lucy—which Tommy had known about already, it turned out, had known about since an hour after he left Chimney's bachelor party—and Natalia. And Tommy had in turn told Buck about Rob the bald lawyer who'd been a great first boyfriend but who hated Tommy's job, and about Sean D'Rhymes the drag queen who cracked open so many walls for Tommy but ultimately wasn't interested in commitment, and about Charles the bartender who had a mean streak that went from cute to sour a few months in. None of them lasted. None of them cohabitated. To hear Tommy talk about them, none of those relationships really even got off the ground.
"So you're telling me," Buck says, pushing up on one elbow so Tommy's hand gets dislodged, and poking at Tommy's chin until he does finally look up and meet Buck's eyes, "that I'm special?"
The look on Tommy's face is vulnerable, and open, and kind of sad. "Yeah, Evan," he says.
"Oh," Buck says.
Tommy pulls him back down, rests Buck's head on his own chest, and then ruins the sweet moment when he rears back in disgust. "Fuck," he says. "We're covered in cum."
He stumbles out of the bed and makes some aborted attempts at cleaning up and Buck sighs a little petulantly. If he had his way they'd stay covered in it forever, marking each other up and claiming their bodies; but Tommy hates the way it feels when it dries, so Buck won't force it. He simply waits for Tommy to be done using almost a whole box of tissues, and holds the sheet open for him, wraps him up in his arms.
Tommy's cousin Jackie swans in first thing the next morning, her partner and their baby close on her heels.
"Literally nothing on this bitch of an earth tastes better than a Tommy-cooked breakfast," Jackie says, giving Tommy a kiss on the cheek as he stirs eggs in the pan.
"Oh, trust me, I know," Buck says. "Hi. Evan Buckley."
"I know, I follow you on Instagram," she says. "My approval is conditional but the fact that you're here won you a thousand points."
"Fuck off, Jackie," Tommy says, but Buck shrugs. He thinks Maddie would say the same, if the situation was reversed. She'd texted him earlier, saying Chimney had told her what was up, wanting to know if he needed anything. Buck hadn't responded.
Jackie's partner—not husband, she takes pains to clarify—is a genial guy who goes by his last name, Fish. This is the accountant Tommy had mentioned, during the whole Halloween debacle, Buck quickly figures out.
"She thinks marriage is a farce," Fish explains to Buck when he asks. "And she likes being a contrarian."
This becomes obvious when Jackie hands the baby, still so new he can really only coo and blink, over; Buck holds him securely in his arms and lets the sense of calm he feels every time he holds a baby wash over him. "His name is Arthur," Jackie says. "Mom told me she'd disown me if I named him Albert like I wanted."
"Our friend's brother is named Albert," Buck says absently. "Wait, why is Albert bad?"
"Because the baby's last name is Fish," Donna howls.
Buck looks up. Tommy's rolling his eyes at the stove. "I don't get it?"
"Famous serial killer," Tommy says.
"Baby cannibal," Jackie adds placidly. "And I didn't do it, so you can stop rolling your eyes at me, Thomas."
"Straight people," Tommy mutters, just loud enough for Buck to hear.
Buck glances around the kitchen. "Arthur's cute, though, right? There's no—there's no cannibal murderer named Arthur Fish?"
"No, don't worry," Jackie says. "He's named after the aardvark."
"Evan never watched TV," Tommy says.
"Well, not cable, at least. But we had PBS on every day in my house. I know Arthur," Buck says. In his arms Arthur starts to fuss a little. "I always related a little to D.W."
Jackie takes the baby back. "Oh, you're a younger brother?"
"Sure am," he says. He doesn't add, My sister got attacked by a serial killer, or anything else like that. He plays it cool, and watches Tommy plate the eggs.
The wake is this afternoon, and then the funeral on Saturday morning, and then they'll bury him on Sunday after church, according to Donna. She's not involved with most of it. She wasn't in the will, she says, with as much emotion as if she was reading off the back of a cereal box. Neither was Tommy, for that matter. Everything went to his mother, like no one else on earth had ever crossed Thomas Senior's mind.
"And the wake'll probably mostly be her family," she says, loading the last of the breakfast dishes into the dishwasher. "I won't be going. Sandie and Pat are taking me out after vinyasa. You all are welcome to come to that, by the way, our new teacher's a hunk and a half. His name's Brandon. Sandie got so flustered flirting with him last week she called him Sandon."
"I feel like we should probably put in an appearance," Tommy says. "But I really would much rather take a vinyasa class from Sandon."
Donna wraps an arm around Tommy's middle and pulls him in for a hug and he goes like he weighs nothing. "I know you hate coming up here, sweetie, but I so appreciate it when you do," she says.
"I'll do anything if you ask me, Donna," Tommy says, with the same cadence he had when he said I'm doing this for Chimney. Buck wants to follow that thread back to the beginning, wants to know everything, all the gory details. He wants to see every inch of Tommy that his eyes had glossed over before.
Tommy must see the look in Buck's eyes, must know what he's thinking, because he gives Donna a squeeze. "Tell Evan what I was like as a kid," he says. "I'm going to go put real pants on."
"You always loved being outside," she says as Tommy walks off. She looks at Buck. "He was always in his own little world, you know? Daydreaming. I bet he was already thinking about learning to fly."
"I was," Tommy calls from the bedroom.
"I used to worry his father would stomp all those dreams out of him," she says. "Turn him into a carbon copy of himself. I'm glad he didn't."
"I am, too," Buck says. "I like the Tommy we have now."
"Alright," Tommy says, appearing in the kitchen once more, sweatpants replaced by a pair of dark jeans. "What do we think? Wake-casual?"
"You look fine, I think," Buck says.
"My handsome boy," Donna says.
"Ugh, you look like someone died," Jackie says as she passes through on her way to change the baby.
Tommy shrugs.
Tommy takes him the long way through the east side of Bakersfield, pointing out houses that his friends lived in and spots that used to be other spots and parks that held important memories. They pass a gun shop that used to be a CD and record store where Tommy's friend Owen worked, next to a diner where the hostess would always give him a free stale donut when she saw him. They pass Tommy's high school, fully remodeled and kitted out to the point Tommy no longer recognizes it. And all along the way Tommy tells him stories about being a kid here, the daily minutiae and monotony.
Through those long awful months that they were broken up, this is one of the things Buck missed most: the way he and Tommy would just talk to each other, about whatever. Nobody else listens to him the way Tommy does. He wonders if anyone else listens to Tommy like this. Sure, maybe there were some important conversations they forgot to have, that much is obvious; but the chatting, the little stuff? They had that one down.
"And this is where I grew up," Tommy says, slowing to a stop outside one of a bunch of beige little ranch houses on this block. This one has a grass lawn, although the grass is mostly dead. The shutters are a slightly darker beige, and the front door is, too, and there's an American flag hanging off the porch.
There are already half a dozen cars parked haphazardly in the driveway and along the sidewalk. There's a guy standing outside one of them, and as soon as he sees Tommy he lights right up.
"Tommy! Hey!" the guy calls, waving them over. He's younger, maybe Buck's age, and he has his other hand wrapped around a pretty woman with a wide smile. "Carina, this is my cousin Tommy I'm always talking about. Tommy, this is my wife, Carina! We missed you at the wedding, man! Who's your friend?"
He's looking at Buck expectantly. Tommy's jaw twitches. "This is Buck," he says. "My boyfriend."
Buck waves.
"Oh," the guy says.
"Buck, meet my cousin Seth. He lives in Reno," Tommy says. It's so bizarre to hear that name coming out of Tommy's mouth that it takes a couple seconds for Buck's brain to catch up. Don't call me that, he wants to say, until he catches the split-second look that crosses Tommy's face.
"Good to meet you," Buck says, leaning forward to shake both of their hands. He slips his own hand into Tommy's as soon as he's done. It feels a little clammy.
Seth is still floundering, but his wife gallantly rises. "I'm so sorry for your loss," she says. She reaches a hand out to touch Tommy's shoulder and Buck watches Tommy fight the urge to shrink backwards. "I only got to meet him a few times, but he was a great guy. So funny! And so kind to Seth and I when we were just starting out."
"That's—wonderful," Tommy says. "We have to go see my mom. Talk to you inside, I guess."
"Yeah, later," Seth calls after them as they make their way up to the front door.
"Alright," Tommy says. "Fair warning, I haven't seen or even talked to my mom in long enough that I have no idea how this is going to go."
Buck holds up two crossed fingers, and follows Tommy inside.
"Tommy!" someone says, an elderly man, and he claps Tommy on the shoulder like they're old friends. "Wondered if you'd show up. Marianne's in the kitchen, you should see her first."
"Thanks, Great-Uncle Pete," Tommy says. He hangs a right and Buck matches his pace.
The kitchen's small, and painted a vivid yellow, and a rail-thin woman is standing over the table. She stares at Tommy like she's seen a ghost.
"Hey, Mom," Tommy says, stepping into the room.
Her mouth puckers. Buck wonders how much she's missed him, how long these years have been.
"Who's this," Marianne says, not even sparing Buck or his hand a glance.
"This is my boyfriend," Tommy says. His voice is steady; Buck isn't sure how. "His name is Buck. He's a firefighter, too."
Marianne shakes her head. "What happened to that nice girl you were with?"
"You never met her, Mom," Tommy says. "And we broke up nine years ago."
"Couldn't you just—"
She cuts herself off.
"No, Mom, I couldn't," Tommy says, gentler than he needs to be, gentler than Buck thinks he could ever be. "And I'm not going to apologize for that."
He slips his hand into Buck's and steers him toward the kitchen door.
"We're going to go say hi to everyone. It's good to see you, Mom."
She doesn't say anything as they leave.
"Alright," Tommy mutters once they're out of the room. "Could've gone worse."
Buck chokes on his laugh.
Compared to Bobby's wake this is a downright party. The atmosphere at the 118 before the funeral had been nauseatingly cloudy. Buck looks around at all the people squeezing into the Kinards' living room; a bunch of them are offloading their aluminum trays and Pyrex dishes onto a card table set up in front of the TV. The demographics are surprising. Tom Senior had two sisters, and both of them hated his guts. Donna isn't here, and neither is Jackie. But Marianne is the middle of eleven siblings, and most of them and all their descendants are piled up in this room, and they all sort of look the same, and before Buck realizes what's happening he's being pulled into the middle of a group of relatives and they're all asking him questions.
"I'm, uh, Evan Buckley," he says. "Most people call me Buck."
"And you're friends with Tommy?"
"We're—we're partners, yeah," he says. He's not sure how clear he's supposed to be on that front. Tommy did tell Seth, yeah, and his mother, but—you never know.
"At work? You're a fireman, too?"
Buck nods. "Well, we're at different—"
"Tommy's a fireman? I thought he was in the army."
"He got out of the army a while ago, Sue. He's a fireman now."
"Wait, didn't someone say he was a pilot? Ronnie, did you say Tommy was a pilot?"
"He's a firefighter pilot," Buck says, enunciating so all these old ladies can hear him. "He works for the station with the helicopters and planes. He does air support."
"Oh," an aunt—Sue, probably—says. "So you're partners at the air support?"
"Uh, no," Buck says. "I'm at a different station."
"I thought you said you were partners."
Now or never, Buckley. "We're—we're romantic partners," he says.
Sue frowns. So does one of the uncles. "You're, um…?"
"We're—you know, we're together. In a—in a biblical sense. I'm his partner," Buck says.
"Oh," the other aunt says.
"Tommy's a—"
"Is that allowed?" Ronnie says. "I didn't know."
"It's 2025, Ronnie, everything's allowed these days. They probably have cats at the stations, too."
"Um, no, no cats," Buck says. "We're—you know, it's a municipal building—"
"I just didn't realize Marianne's son was a—"
"That's what that Proposition 65 is about. You have to have a gay person in all the fire stations now. And different races."
"No, that's about chemicals in the water," Buck says, but he doesn't think anyone's listening.
"And they've got sixteen genders, I guess," Ronnie's saying to Sue. "And you're not allowed to call anyone a girl anymore."
"I didn't think Tom would allow his son to be a—"
"Alright, I'm gonna—I'm gonna go somewhere else," Buck says, and he makes an expeditious retreat.
He meets up with Tommy at the card table, and watches as Tommy slops a spoonful of relish onto a hot dog bun. "Did you know relish is the fourth most popular hot dog condiment?" he asks. "According to some survey Heinz did."
Tommy raises an eyebrow. "What's first through third?"
Buck loves that Tommy never ignores him, never sighs in annoyance, never tells him to cut it out. Instead Tommy listens, even if he doesn't give a shit, and he asks clarifying questions, and he follows whatever train of thought Buck is rumbling along. "Ketchup and mustard, of course. Then diced onions."
"Was this Buzzfeed or TikTok?"
"A Slate article, actually," Buck says. "Pointlessly fascinating. The author put relish in her tuna salad."
"I'd try that," Tommy says, even though they both know it's a lie. What will end up happening is that Buck will make it, and Tommy will bravely take a taste, and Buck will happily clean the bowl with a box of crackers.
"I told some of your family that we're together," Buck says. Tommy nestles his chosen hot dog into his bun and nods. "I hope that's okay."
Tommy gives him an incredulous look. "I walked in here holding your hand. Of course it's okay."
"I just wanted to give you a heads up. They were kind of homophobic," Buck says.
"Evan, they're homophobes," Tommy says. "I would expect nothing less."
Buck frowns.
"Were they shitty to you?" Tommy asks, concern lancing through his voice.
"No," Buck says; Tommy looks at him disbelievingly. "No, Tommy. But they were shitty about you."
"Oh. Well. That's fine, then."
Someone clears their throat behind them, and they turn in unison. It's Seth, holding a bottle of water and looking chagrined.
"I wanted to say sorry," he says. "I guess—I didn't know you were—"
"It's fine," Tommy says, trying to head this off at the pass.
"Man, it's not fine. You know, Carina and I, we're liberal, right? Vote blue no matter who. We're—we're for the LGBT, okay?"
"Thanks?" Buck says.
"I just didn't want you to think that we, you know, wouldn't have your back. Because we do, okay, cousin?" Seth takes a deep breath. "You know when that whole thing went down with your dad we, me and Jeremy and Matt—our other cousins," he says, presumably for Buck's benefit, although Buck could have gathered that from context clues. "We wondered, like, what must have happened for Tommy to do that, you know? Like did you knock a girl up or fail out of high school or get really into drugs?"
Tommy's lip curls, and Buck wishes a medieval piper were here to herald the triumphant return of Bitchy Tommy. "Nope," he says. "Just a good old fashioned heartwarming little coming-out story."
Seth's mouth snaps shut.
"Alright, good talk," Tommy says. "Babe, you want to go see my childhood bedroom?"
"Absolutely," Buck says, following him away from the card table and the crowd.
It doesn't escape his notice that there aren't any family pictures on the walls of this hallway, but the meaning of that doesn't become apparent until Tommy pushes open a bedroom door and stops short.
"Oh," he says.
The room is—empty, for one. It's been 25 years, no one could expect them to keep a bedroom set aside for that long, but even so it's devoid of any traces of personality. The only furniture in there is a twin-sized bed with a blue comforter lain over it and a particularly ugly lamp. There are no photos on the wall, no old school books, no remnants of Tommy anywhere within its borders. It's like they scrubbed him out of existence.
Like Daniel, Buck can't help but think.
"Well," Tommy says. "So much for that plan."
"They erased you," Buck says. He tries to surreptitiously wipe his eyes.
"I kind of figured they would. They hate me," Tommy says. He looks over at Buck and his face changes immediately. "Evan, it's not that big a deal," he says, but Buck shakes his head.
"Sorry, it's just—I was thinking about Daniel." Honesty is their new policy and he's not going to break it here, now, even if it's not important.
"Oh, sweetheart," Tommy says, and Buck is wrapped into his arms.
"Sorry," Buck whispers. "Don't want to make it about me."
"I don't mind," Tommy whispers back.
They don't fuck in Tommy's childhood bedroom at his father's wake; instead they do something almost worse: Tommy holds Buck close while he gets his feelings under control, and they kiss each other so deeply Buck can feel the love coming up from Tommy's diaphragm, and then they compose themselves and head back to the living room.
The Buckleys loved their son so much that it destroyed them. The Kinards, Buck thinks as he follows Tommy back through the maze of relatives—not so much. They stop by the cooler and grab a couple cans of soda and then get stuck in a bottleneck in the crowd.
Seth's wife Carina finds them again as they're waiting in a doorway for some uncle or another to clear out of the way. "I wanted to apologize," she says quietly, looking around like someone's going to call her out. "I don't think he ever realized that the way he saw your dad might not have been the same way you saw him."
"You don't have to apologize for him," Tommy says, in that endearing baffled tone that Buck loves so much. The one he breaks out when he's saying things like, "you're inviting me to your sister's wedding?" or "you really believe in ghost curses?"
"Well, maybe someone should," she says. "Your dad was really nice to us, but—I get that things can be complicated. I'm from Ohio."
Seth calls her name and waves her over, and she smiles sadly as she leaves.
"She's… from Ohio? Is that supposed to mean something?" Buck asks. "Is that, like, a pop culture reference that went over my head?"
Tommy looks equally confused. "Is she trying to say she's, like… with it?"
"Being from Ohio is the new enlightenment?"
"Ohio. Where family relationships go to die?"
"Welcome to Ohio," Buck says. "The understanding state."
"God, she and Seth are perfect for each other," Tommy says. "I don't fucking get a single thing either of them say."
"It's interesting," Buck says, sucking in his stomach so that one of the aunts can make it through the doorway, and lowering his voice a little so that this doesn't become a conversation the whole room is privy to, "that—that Jackie and Beth feel the way they do about him, and that Seth and your other cousins feel the opposite, you know?"
"Well, before he was my father, he was Donna's older brother," Tommy says. He's not lowering his voice. He's just carrying on nonchalantly, waving his can of Barq's around like normal. "I think he bullied her a lot growing up. I don't know how violent he got with her, I never asked, but she always believed me when I told her what was going on."
"Oh," Buck says.
"And Seth and the others lived out of town growing up. They'd come down and visit for a couple weeks every summer and Dad would be awesome with them, he'd take us all fishing, get into trouble up in the mountains, we'd have cookouts and water balloon fights and everything." Tommy smiles, a twisted uncomfortable thing, more of a pained grimace than anything else. "He was such a great dad for those weeks, every time. And then as soon as their parents came and got them he'd turn around and smack me again."
It's loud enough that one of the aunts has paused her conversation and turned her head to look. "Jesus, Tommy," Buck says.
"It's not that big of a deal," Tommy snaps, and Buck sees the exact second he catches himself and reels it in. He pulls back against his side of the door frame and pinches the bridge of his nose. "Sorry. I'm—sorry."
The thing about Tommy is he doesn't snap. He doesn't lose his temper, or treat Buck like an idiot, or tell him to get over things. He shirks; he flees; he turns tail and run, but he doesn't snap. He's got the most remarkably even keel that Buck has ever encountered in a person before. But there's something insidious inside this house, maybe inside this city, and it has its hooks in Tommy, and at some point Buck can't help but think the fuse is going to have to blow.
"I'm sorry," Tommy says again, looking miserable, and Buck hooks his thumb into Tommy's sleeve and pulls him back down the hall toward the thankfully-empty kitchen.
"Okay," Buck says, once they're alone. "I know this is really weird."
"It's worse than weird." Tommy tears himself away from Buck, gets his hands into his hair, starts pacing back and forth along the narrow kitchen, brushing against the peeling formica. The almost uncomfortably cheerful yellow cabinets are giving the whole room an ominous vibe. There's a wall clock hanging above the sink and all of the numbers have been replaced with songbirds.
"It kind of feels like you're going crazy," Buck says. He doesn't mean it as a bad thing, or a knock against Tommy. He hopes Tommy understands.
Tommy's pacing picks up speed. "Of course I'm going fucking crazy! I'm at my dad's fucking wake, and I haven't seen him since fucking Bill Clinton was president, and it's a hundred and two fucking degrees outside, and I brought my fucking boyfriend with me, and nothing's fucking changed, and everything's fucking changed, and everybody keeps fucking apologizing to me, and—and—"
The hour hand on the clock hits the mourning dove and it sings out, hoo-oo-hoo, and Tommy claps his mouth shut. Hoo-oo-hoo, it sings again.
"Every fucking night," Tommy mutters. "That stupid fucking clock."
Buck makes a mental note not to try and find any charmingly kitschy bird clocks on eBay. Like everything else in this kitchen its sunny disposition is tainted. Tommy leans over the kitchen island, fingertips pressed so hard into the surface that his knuckles are white. His eyes are closed, and his breathing is labored, and Buck takes one step as loudly as he can; when Tommy doesn't flinch or move away, he takes another, and then he closes the gap. He leans over Tommy, letting his broad weight push down into him, and he breathes first in tandem and then slows his inhales down, draws out his exhales, until finally Tommy's breathing relaxes.
"Oh," a voice says from the doorway, and Buck feels Tommy's blood pressure spike right back up. "Not in my kitchen—"
"We're not even doing anything, Mom," Tommy says to the counter.
Buck takes half a step backward, if only to show her that his hands are empty. Marianne's a slim woman, not much substance to her physically, but she still manages to loom in the doorway.
"This is my home," she says. Buck's never heard that word pronounced with such disgust. "I thought—today of all days—you would try to be respectful—"
"I was just, you know, comforting him," Buck tells her. She doesn't even spare him a glance.
"I'm trying to keep myself together so I can make it through the worst days of my life and you're out there in the living room telling people the most horrible lies about him," she says.
"They're not lies and you know it," Tommy says. He finally looks up. "You watched it, Mom."
She shakes her head. Tears are welling in her eyes, Buck can see that from here. Tommy takes a step toward her and she darts away from the door, keeping as much distance between them as she can. "I don't want you in here," she says.
"Okay," Tommy says. "We were just leaving, anyway."
Early on in this new version of their relationship Buck had come to the conclusion that Tommy spent each and every day of those first six months on his best behavior. Locked up, cinched tight, never asking for anything. That had been a whole conversation, once he'd figured it out, and even though it's only been two and a half weeks since then it still startles Buck to watch Tommy retreat back into that side of himself. Hard-shell Tommy, Buck calls it, in the privacy of his mind. He remembers the crabs that would scuttle around on the beaches on the east coast, ricocheting off each other as they moved this way and that, trying to get back to the comfort of the ocean. He wants to reach in with his crab fork and tug Tommy back out of the shell, release him from the chitinous cage he's built around his soul. But, he thinks, as he watches Tommy curl deeper inside of himself in real time, maybe not here.
"He forgave you, you know," Marianne says, and Tommy turns away from the door.
"For what?"
"For all those awful things you said. For getting him arrested. He knew you were troubled, and he talked it over with Pastor Charles, and he prayed on it, and he forgave you."
"He forgave me," Tommy says, his voice biting.
"He was a good man," she says firmly.
"Sure," Tommy says. "I'm glad you can think that. I'll see you tomorrow, Mom."
It takes the whole drive home for the chill Buck feels to let go of him.
He wakes with a start. He's cold, for some reason, even though it hasn't dropped below 80 outside yet, but the thin blanket's been thrown aside and Buck's back is at the mercy of Donna's air conditioning. Tommy's not in the bed next to him. He's not anywhere in the room, as far as Buck can tell, as his eyes adjust to the weird shadows that the streetlight casts.
In the bathroom, the next room over, he hears water running. The sink faucet, if he had to guess. He slides out of the bed. He doesn't want to feel around in the half-light for a hoodie, so he makes his way into the hallway in just his boxers and his t-shirt.
The bathroom light is on, pooling out underneath the door. Jackie and Fish and the baby are down in the basement, and there's no sound coming from Donna's bedroom. The kitchen's dark and empty as well. Only one sign of life in this hallway and it's right here in front of Buck's hand. He turns the knob and pushes the bathroom door open.
Tommy's there: hunched over the sink, clad in his own t-shirt and pajama pants, head pressed against the mirror. The water runs over his hands. The bar of soap he's holding is a sliver between his fingers. Wisps of steam rise from the sink basin and Tommy's hands are red, irritated, like any more water and they'll crack open from the heat and the soap and the insistent rubbing.
"Tommy," Buck whispers.
Tommy doesn't respond.
Buck's not sure how long he's been in here. He must have been out of bed for at least a few minutes, long enough for Buck to get cold, to miss him, to wake up. Was Tommy feeling sick? "Tommy," he whispers again, but it doesn't seem like Tommy hears him.
Tommy's hands are moving rhythmically: soap, suds, between the fingers, over the backs, under the water. Soap, suds, between the fingers, over the backs, under the water. Three more times Buck watches him do this before he shakes his head and realizes this is less cleaning off after going to the bathroom and more some sort of fucked-up ritual.
"Tommy, stop," Buck begs. "You're going to hurt yourself." But even as he gets the words out he realizes: that might be the point.
There's nothing else to do but reach across Tommy's hunched-over body and turn the tap off himself. That's enough to shock Tommy into looking up at him, eyes wide and full of a fear Buck hasn't seen since November. A thought works its way into Buck's brain like an intrusive worm. What did Tommy do that night, after leaving the loft? Was it something like this?
"Tommy," Buck says, and even though he's still whispering his voice is as loud as a shout in the now-silent bathroom.
"Fuck," Tommy says, sinking to his knees right there on the bath mat.
Buck grabs a seashell-printed towel off the rack and presses it into the palms of Tommy's hands. "Where'd you go?" he asks.
There are dark circles smeared under Tommy's eyes like twin bruises. "I'm right here, Evan," he says, gaze focused on the towel in his hands. He crumples it up and then smooths it back out.
"No, when you—when you were at the sink you were somewhere else," Buck says.
Tommy crumples up the towel again, smooths it back out. Again. Again. Patterns, Buck realizes. He counts in his head: multiples of three, maybe. Tommy doesn't seem to notice what he's doing, just crumples and smooths over and over.
"She said he forgave me," Tommy says, more of a mumble than anything.
Buck remembers Tommy's mother in the kitchen. "Yeah," he says cautiously. "Was that—did that suck?"
"I never forgave him," Tommy says. "I can't forgive him. I thought I was going to have more time, he was only seventy. He—he—"
Buck lurches forward, wrenches the towel that Tommy's a second away from tearing in half out of his hands. He slips his fingers in between Tommy's and gives them a squeeze.
"He hit me so many times I lost count," Tommy says. His voice sounds wrecked, as quiet as he is in the hush of the night. "And then I got home that night and I was just drunk enough that I didn't give a shit anymore and when he went to hit me I was ready for it."
"Okay," Buck breathes. Tommy's hands are shaking in between his own.
"I just fucking snapped. I wanted to give him one for every time he did it to me, but—I couldn't stop hitting him. Over and over. I get why she was afraid of me," Tommy says. Buck presses a finger into his pulse point; it's erratic, just on the wrong side of normal. "I was afraid of me, too."
There's nothing to be afraid of inside the Tommy Buck knows. He's steady, dependable, always going the extra mile. Willing to put his job and his life on the line for the people he cares about. He's never not answered the phone when Buck has called him, no matter the time, no matter what Buck had said to him the last time they spoke. He's a little mean, sometimes, sure, but that's a different thing. At some point in the last twenty-five years, his skin hardened into a carapace, and everything just rolls off him now. Until it doesn't, of course: until something gets lodged in him like a splinter and Tommy has to excise the wound the only way he knows. Deep in his chest Buck's heart breaks for the person Tommy used to be.
Buck stands up. "Let's go back to bed," he says.
Tommy looks up at him, grief etched plainly on his face. Buck wonders what his own face looked like, when Bobby died.
"Please," Buck says, reaching out his hand, and Tommy takes it and hauls himself up to his feet. First they just stand there, Tommy's face tucked into the tender spot where Buck's neck meets his shoulder; then, with a hand at Tommy's lower back, Buck is able to usher him out of the bathroom and back into the little bedroom. They fall into bed as one, and Buck pulls the blanket back up over his shoulders, just to take the edge off the air conditioning.
"I've never seen you like that before," Buck says.
Tommy exhales, long and slow through his teeth, like it hurts him. "I've never let you see that before," he corrects.
"Is that something you do a lot?"
"No," he says. "It's—if I say it's under control would you believe me?"
Buck shrugs. "Is that the truth?"
"It's being in this place," Tommy says.
"Okay," Buck says.
Tommy's quiet for a while and Buck focuses on the way his chest rises and falls with each breath, the dark grey t-shirt he's wearing catching just a tiny bit of light from the streetlamp outside. "I have some issues," he finally says, so softly Buck almost thinks he's dreamed it at first.
"I hadn't noticed," Buck tells him. He cranes his eyes up and watches Tommy smile.
"Flatterer," Tommy says. For another long moment he doesn't say anything, and then: "It's hard to talk about things."
"I get it," Buck says.
Tommy turns his head, finally looks Buck in the eye. "If I talk about things then I'll have to think about them, and if I think about things I get—I can get—stuck."
This, Buck deeply understands. "Like a feedback loop."
"Yeah," Tommy says. "Like a feedback loop."
A moth or something bonks against the window glass before it takes off again for the streetlight. Buck and Tommy breathe in tandem, a little out, a little in. Slowly, slowly, Tommy loosens beside him.
"When I was younger, it felt like most of the people who knew me used what they knew to hurt me," Tommy says. "You've talked about the same thing."
Buck can't remember saying any of that. "I have?"
"People get stuck thinking about the you that they first met." Tommy walks his fingers up Buck's arm, catches the hem of the sleeve of Buck's shirt, and tugs at it while he talks. "They don't let you grow and change in their vision of you. And then when they want to lash out they hit you right in those vulnerable spots."
One of the first conversations they'd had when they got back together—after they flung themselves into Tommy's bed and rutted against each other like it was going out of style and then, after rehydrating, drinking down glass after glass of water and Gatorade in Tommy's kitchen, eating midnight scrambled eggs and crawling back into the bed to fit themselves back together, talking until the sun came up—was the way Buck was feeling about the 118 after Bobby. He'd told Tommy about how Hen and Chim were withdrawing from everyone, about Gerrard lurking around every corner, about Eddie's volatile weeks in the house that didn't feel like Buck's anymore, about the building collapse and the way everyone congratulated Eddie for coming up with something that was literally in their training, for using a tool for its intended purpose, and then Eddie turned around and threw it right back in Buck's face. Buck apologized to Tommy's armpit when he finished rambling, feeling like he was picking open a festering wound all over again, but Tommy had cupped his jaw and kissed his forehead and said that the 118 was wrong, that Buck was indeed clever, that he did know what he was doing. At the time Buck thought Tommy was just trying to gas him up. Now Buck wonders about all the things Tommy trained himself not to say.
"I hid for a long time," Tommy says now, every word being pulled out like a tooth at the dentist. "I had friends in high school but I never let myself get too close to them. I didn't want them to know what was going on at home, and I…I already knew I was gay at that point but coming out to anyone would've been the end, you know? My parents weren't going to pay for college. Donna would've offered but I knew money was tight for her. I wasn't good enough at baseball or school for a scholarship. The army was the only way out."
Buck nods.
"So I got used to hiding, and then I guess I started believing the lies I was telling about myself. Took another fifteen years before I could even say it out loud to another person. But I kept thinking, you know, I escaped one situation. I can escape this, too. And I knew it would be hard but I swear it was so much harder to come out and really live than it was to leave home and join the fucking army at eighteen."
Tommy pauses and licks his lips and Buck thinks about all of the versions of Tommy that came before this one, all of the previous Bucks and Evans. Even the Tommy and Buck of last year wouldn't be having this conversation, Buck knows, because they didn't. Maybe it was fear. Maybe it was something else. Maybe it was this thing Tommy's talking about.
"Anyway. I promised myself I never had to come back here if I didn't want to, but here I am. And now I'm afraid it's all going to crack open and all the shit I've been tying up inside me for decades is going to come pouring out."
"I'll hold you together, Tommy," Buck says.
"Evan."
"I will. I mean it," Buck says, tangling his hand up with Tommy's, which still feels raw from the sink. "And if it all comes out I'll help you put yourself back together. And I won't be scared off, no matter what."
"You say that now," Tommy says, bitterness creeping in.
Buck sits up, to hammer the point home. "I say that and I mean it. I'm not running away from you. Nothing you say or do is going to make me run away from you, okay?" He shakes the hand that's holding Tommy's. "That's the price you pay for getting back together with me. I'm stuck on you like superglue."
Tommy stares at him, and then he snorts, and he smiles bashfully and nods. "Fine," he says. "I trust you."
"Do you?"
In a small voice, uncharacteristically earnest, Tommy says, "I do."
Buck pulls Tommy tight against his chest. It takes some maneuvering, in this undersized bed, but they make it work.
"Can you do me a favor," Tommy says after a while.
"What do you need?" Buck asks.
"Do you think you can just… tell me something? Talk for a while? I don't want to hear what's going on in my head right now."
"Anything?" Buck asks.
"Please," Tommy says, so soft into the stale air of the room.
Buck casts around for a subject. "Okay," he says. "Did you know aspens are mostly clones? Like those big groups you see up in the mountains? They're not separate trees, they're all one big root system. There's one in Utah that's, like, a hundred acres. Tens of thousands of trees but they're all connected, they're all one tree."
"I don't think I knew that," Tommy says.
"It's like fifteen thousand years old, too. Just keeps regenerating. Sends up new shoots every year. Always growing and changing and it's never the same tree two years in a row because one of the clones is always dying or falling over and new clones are growing. But it's all one root system. One big family. And they're genetically identical, all of them."
"That's really beautiful," Tommy mumbles.
Buck yawns. "The first trees reproduced through spores," he says. "Like ferns, and mosses, those kind of things. I guess cloning themselves came later. And seeds. Can you imagine? Living before seeds, and before anyone else?"
Tommy's breath is warm and even against Buck's skin.
"I used to be so lonely," Buck says to the ceiling. "I think you were, too."
Sleep doesn't take long to pull him under.
In the morning they move together slowly. Buck finds some expensive-looking unscented hand cream in a drawer and rubs it into Tommy's hands, into the red lines that spiderweb across his knuckles, the torn-up cuticles. He can feel Tommy watching him but he doesn't falter. Then they lay out each others' outfits, work themselves into their suit pants and their dress socks and their crisp ironed shirts. Buck is going tie-free today, but he stands behind Tommy and wraps his arms around Tommy's shoulders and works a half Windsor into the narrow black silk that Tommy brought with him.
"Thanks," Tommy says, catching Buck's eye in the mirror, and Buck ducks his head down onto Tommy's shoulder and places a kiss on the fabric there.
They follow Fish's car down to the funeral home. This is the same place that Donna's late husband was celebrated, Tommy tells him as he rolls through the lot looking for a parking spot. "Now that was a good funeral," he says, putting the truck in reverse as they pass one wide enough. "Partly because one of his friends owns a bakery in town and they catered the thing with cream puffs. I was eating eclairs for days."
"Sounds like all of my friends after you dumped me," Buck says.
Tommy's reaching around him to back into the spot he found, and he stops and stares at Buck with an eyebrow raised. "What?"
"Oh," Buck says, "I'm sure I told you about the baking."
"Yeah, but I think I would remember if you mentioned eclairs," Tommy says.
Buck sighs. "And a baked alaska. I think at one point there were fourteen loaves in my freezer."
Tommy stares, and stares, and then he dips his head in and kisses Buck long and deep, full tongue and everything, and he only stops when the car behind them gives a little tap on the horn. "Sorry," Tommy calls through the closed window, and he eases off the brake.
The funeral home is nice: soft light-colored wood paneling lines the lobby, and the air conditioner is set to a glacial temperature, and Buck looks up at the portraits on the walls. He notices the fire exits. He glances into the big room. People approach Tommy, one after another, give him a handshake before moving on in search of his mother. There are too many people here. There were too many people at Bobby's funeral, too, but Buck spent that whole day feeling like he was riding a wave between feeling everything and nothing. He squeezes Tommy's arm and then ducks away, following the signs for the men's room. He doesn't usually get social anxiety but he needs a minute to himself.
"Nice place," Ghost-Bobby says, popping into existence to lean against the paper towel dispenser. "Seems like Tommy's dad was a popular guy."
Buck startles. He squats down, checking under the stall doors to make sure they're alone. "Guess so," he says. "Tommy looks a lot like him."
"Funny how that happens." Ghost-Bobby stands, hands in his ghostly pockets, and meanders toward the mirrors. He's not reflected there, but maybe he can see himself in the astral plane; he adjusts his own collar, flattens down his button-band. "You're not wearing a tie."
Buck shrugs. "Still no good at tying one on myself. Bet everyone's going to have a bad impression of me, huh?"
"Those who matter won't mind, and those who mind don't matter," Ghost-Bobby says sanguinely.
"I guess you're right," Buck says. "Hey, have—have you been haunting anyone else?"
Ghost-Bobby levels him with a look. "I'm a figment of your imagination, Buck," he says.
"Oh," Buck says. "So everything you tell me is something I already knew?"
"Maybe on a subconscious level. But let's not get metaphysical here."
"Yeah, the real Bobby's too Catholic for that kind of talk," Buck says, and Bobby grins.
"The day will pass," he says. "I always thought the funerals were the hardest part. You have to sit in the grief. You can't escape it. But then the day ends, and you wake up, and you keep going, and it starts getting easier."
Buck drags a hand across his eyes. "Yeah," he says. Three months. Eleven weeks, if he's counting. Muscle memory only guides him to Bobby's contact in his phone four or five days a week, now, instead of all of them. He only cries when the memories get to be too much.
The door creaks open, and Tommy sticks his head in. "Oh, there you are," he says. His shoulders are up by his ears but he looks relatively unscathed. "Lost you for a minute there."
"Hey, Tommy," Buck says. "Sorry, I just needed a minute."
Tommy steps into the bathroom and shuts the door. "You okay?"
Buck looks at the mirror. There he is: a man, a partner, a friend, a son, a brother, a firefighter. A shell wrapping itself around so much grief. A balloon filled with impossible joy. There Tommy is, too, and now Buck has seen him in this new context, filling in the gaps that seemed so deep before. And there Bobby isn't. All that's left is a hole.
A hole, and the marks he left on everyone he knew.
"Yeah," Buck says, catching Tommy's eye in the mirror. "Yeah. I was thinking about Bobby, but—I'll be okay."
Tommy nods. Tommy knows. He holds out his hand and Buck takes it. "Let's go listen to this bullshit," he says. "I shouldn't say that out loud."
"It's okay. No one else is in here," Buck tells him as they leave.
The funeral is fine. Someone from Tommy's parents' church sings Amazing Grace, and the pastor sings his praises, and he goes on and on about how good of a person Tom was, how much he loved his family, how hard he worked, how kind and generous he was. Tommy isn't mentioned once, except obliquely: something about how much grace Tom had in his heart, how open he was to forgiveness.
Buck sticks a finger in Tommy's pocket, gives his side a gentle poke, and Tommy sways toward him just slightly.
Everybody is heading back to the the house, afterwards, an afterparty of sorts. The two of them make their way through the crowd; Jackie and Fish and Donna and the baby are hanging out near the snack table, nodding at the donut holes and talking under their breath. Someone stops Tommy again, gives his hand a shake, and someone else asks the funeral home director who's standing next to them why the burial is a separate day. "Mrs. Kinard wants it to be a private affair," the director says solemnly. "Just those closest to her and the deceased."
Tommy whispers into Buck's ear: "So, we're probably not invited."
Good, Buck thinks. He's had almost enough of this family.
It takes them forever to get out of the parking lot but Tommy takes a shortcut through the neighborhoods and they're back at the house before most of the crowd.
"I feel like we're going to need a vacation when we get home," Buck says as Tommy puts the truck in park. "Do you ever feel like that?"
"I'm pretty bad at taking time off in general," Tommy says.
"Me, too. Before I met you, well—everyone I spent time with was already at work."
Tommy nods decisively. "When we get back we should look at our schedules and then book a getaway. Just you and me." He bumps his knuckle against Buck's sternum. "Should we go brave the masses?"
"Kiss me, first," Buck says, and Tommy does, once, twice, three times for good luck, his hand coming around to cup Buck's jaw, their foreheads knocking together. And then they go in.
The house is filling up quickly. All sorts of people in here, today; Buck gets cornered by some random old man as he steps aside to let someone with a walker through the narrow space between some furniture and then the man is telling him all about the instability in the market for thresher parts and rust removal, and all Buck can do is nod politely.
"And who are you?" the man finally asks.
"Oh, I'm—I'm here with Tommy," Buck says.
"Little Tommy," the man says. "What an idiot that kid was. I remember one Easter lunch that kid was refusing to eat anything until his dad whooped him upside the head and then he ate a pig in a blanket so fast he ended up puking it all back up five minutes later. Sesame seeds everywhere! Ruined the whole table. But we all had a good laugh about it. I always wondered what happened to him, after all the hullaballoo with the fighting and hurting his dad and all that. He joined the army, right?"
The man laughs now, too, and Buck sees red. "For your information, Tommy's a hero," he says, struggling to keep his voice even. "He's a firefighter pilot, and he's saved a bunch of lives. He saved my captain's life, and my—and my brother-in-law, and—and he's a good person."
He can't help the way his voice breaks. He can't help the way his face heats up. He doesn't care about whatever the man is saying or not saying. He just pushes away from him and stalks across the room until he finds Jackie and Tommy over by the doorway.
"Who was that?" Jackie asks.
"I don't know," Buck says. "Some asshole."
"This whole crowd is assholes," Tommy says. He cranes his head. "Oh, that's Jim. He lives next door."
"Well, he sucks," Buck declares.
"Alright, I need to piss. Can you hold this?" Jackie asks, depositing baby Arthur into Tommy's arms before she hurries down the hall to the bathroom.
"Yeah, sure, no problem," Tommy calls to her retreating form. He looks down at the baby in his arms and makes a silly face. Arthur's a couple months old, not really a newborn anymore but still so tiny, and Buck has to press a knuckle into his lip so he doesn't moan or say anything weird at the sight of it.
"Aw, Tommy with a baby," one of the random aunts says. "You look just like your father did when you were born, you know."
Tommy's smile contorts into a grimace.
There's movement from across the room, out of the corner of Buck's eye, and then Marianne is there wringing her hands, shaking her head. "No, no, no," she's saying, as she reaches toward the baby. This is the closest they've stood to each other this whole weekend. "He can't—someone—"
"I've got him, Mom," Tommy says.
"No, he can't—can someone take the baby, he can't—"
"Jackie handed him to me. I can hold onto him until she gets back, it's fine."
"It's not fine, you're going to—to—"
Tommy pulls himself backward, stepping until he hits the wall. Little Arthur has noticed the commotion and his face crumples a bit as he lets out a soft cry. "I'm going to what, Mom?"
Everybody in the room is looking, now, and everybody in the room hears when Marianne says "I don't want you to infect him."
Time dilates, like it did when he realized Tommy was breaking up with him, like it did in the lab, like it did when he looked up and saw that strange light emanating from the cloud overhead. And then a whole bunch of people start talking at once.
"Infect—"
"Oh, are you sick—"
"He's not sick," Buck says, cutting through everyone else.
Tommy's shrinking up against the wall, the baby's face turning red as he cries. Marianne reaches again but it's Carina who comes to the rescue, stepping in front of her and gently hefting the baby out of Tommy's arms. "I'll take him," she says, mostly to Tommy. "Just until he stops crying."
"It's bad enough that you came here with—with—and you're in my house," Marianne says, "and I won't let you—"
"I don't understand what's wrong with him," one of the aunts says. "Is it contagious?"
This is so, so much worse than Buck had thought it would be. He was prepared for—for homophobia, yeah, for a house full of painful memories, sure. But from Tommy's cautious hope when he'd told Buck about his mom a few days ago, there was no way for Buck to pick out the truth, that it would be this bad.
"He's not sick," Buck says again. It's no use.
The commentary is coming from every direction and Buck loses track of it all. "Did you know Tom's son is gay?" a man asks. "She's just trying to protect the baby," someone says. "I didn't think he did anything wrong," someone else says.
Jackie pushes all the arms in her way aside and grabs the baby back from Carina. "What the fuck," she says, glaring at her aunt. "I gave him to Tommy for a reason."
"You can't," Marianne says. "I don't want it to get on an innocent baby—"
"Whatever the fuck it is, it's already all over him," Jackie snarls. "Tommy was the third person to hold Arthur after he was born. And I don't appreciate you just—just stealing my baby and giving him to some random bitch from Ohio I'd never met before this weekend—no offense—"
"None taken," Carina says, putting her hands up in surrender and backing out of the situation.
"Don't talk to your aunt like that, she's grieving—"
"I'll talk to her however I fucking want, thanks—"
"Oh, you are just like your mother, you awful girl—"
At some point in the chaos, Tommy must have slipped out. Buck casts around, but doesn't find him, even though it's strange to lose someone that big in a crowd this size. He pushes through the aunts and the uncles and the rubberneckers trying to follow the drama and heads for the door.
He makes it outside and the air immediately thins. There's no one yelling, out here, no baby crying, just the sound of someone running an electric leaf-blower a block or two away.
Tommy's nowhere to be found.
The truck is still parked on the curb, sandwiched between Fish's Hyundai and one of the great-uncles' Buicks. Buck calls him and it goes straight to voicemail. Phone must be off. He doesn't have anyone's number inside, and he doesn't want to risk the fight spilling out here anyway. He's half a second from calling Maddie and asking if she can reverse-911 a phone that's off before he comes to his senses and lets himself relax.
Half the houses on this street have been torn down, new lot-fillers replacing them, extending their boundaries from one retaining wall to the next. New families must have moved in over the past couple of decades. In front of the house across the street an elementary schooler sits on her front porch, scrolling on an iPad. Buck imagines Tommy at that age. He conjures up an image of him, collected together from the pictures in Donna's house. Nine year old Tommy holding a toddler-aged Jackie in his arms, staring down at her with a sweet gentle look of awe. Twelve year old Tommy and third-grader Beth sitting back to back on the couch reading their books: Goosebumps for him, Saddle Club for her. There aren't any pictures of Tommy on any of the walls of this house, on this street. That Tommy's been wiped from physical memory.
Tommy liked being outside, Donna had said. Always in his own little world. Dreaming of something bigger, she'd theorized, but maybe he was just trying to survive the only way he could.
Bobby, I need a sign, Buck thinks. The tiniest of breezes picks up, and Buck turns his head.
To his right Buck can see the mountains barely peeking up over a new construction, and so he heads up the sidewalk toward them, trying to channel the Tommy that lived here as he walks.
Three blocks later he's starting to doubt himself when he sees it: a little neighborhood park, a baseball field and a chain-link fence, palms and oaks and a tall hedge made up of something scrubby, a swing set and monkey bars and a spinny wheel and a few sets of picnic tables and there off to the side in the dirt behind a park bench a figure in a dark suit is huddled in the dirt.
Buck approaches slowly, like Tommy's one of the dogs at the shelter on fire, but even as he snaps a twig under his foot Tommy doesn't look up. He moves around so the sun is at his back, and he waits, and finally Tommy lifts his head and blinks up at him, red-eyed exhaustion written all over his face.
"Hey," Buck says.
"Hey," Tommy says. "Found me."
"I figured you couldn't have made it that far if you weren't flying," Buck says, and Tommy just nods.
"They still yelling?"
"Yeah, Jackie was threatening to kneecap your great-uncle Pete when I left," Buck says.
Tommy snorts. "That's good. Glad everyone's enduring memory of me is going to be the fact that I ruined Dad's funeral by holding a baby."
"If that's what it takes to ruin it, it wasn't much of a funeral to begin with." Buck squats down so he can rest his hand on Tommy's shoulder. There's a bunch of dirt stuck to his suit pants and Buck starts to pick the pieces off one by one. "I'm sorry. That was a fucked up thing for your mom to say."
"Yeah," Tommy says. He bites his lip and sniffs and brings his sleeve to his face. "Fuck."
Buck doesn't say anything. There's nothing to say. There's no one else here to feel the July sun beating down on them, to witness Buck curling around Tommy like a guard dog.
"I came out here a lot," Tommy starts. "When things got bad at home. Snuck out when no one was looking. He'd get drunk and angry and I'd be in his way and he'd…"
Buck squeezes Tommy's shoulder.
"I always thought it was just him. I thought I was such a coward every time I left because I thought for sure he was doing it to her, too. I wrote her letters from Basic and from Afghanistan telling her I was putting money away and I was going to get her out, right, and she never wrote back."
Somewhere off in the distance a car honks. A dog barks, and another one joins it in chorus. A bead of sweat trickles down Buck's spine, taking with it the rest of the anxiety he'd felt when he'd realized Tommy was missing. A bird calls, and if he had his phone out, if this moment weren't so charged, he'd pull up his birding app and find out who it is so that every time they hear it in the future they would know. Instead he keeps his gaze fixed on Tommy as Tommy pulls and pulls at the button on his left cuff.
"I thought… For decades. This whole fucking time I thought it was him and I thought, there must be some reason why she couldn't save me from him, and in the end it turns out she just didn't want to." Tommy wipes uselessly at his face and Buck aches, bone-deep and endless. "I was just a kid."
"I know," Buck says, pulling one of Tommy's hands to his chest. "I know, Tommy."
"How could you do that to a kid?"
"I don't know," Buck says. He's asked himself that question a million times before. A kid, or a partner, or anyone you were supposed to love: how could you? How could you? "But you got out."
Tommy looks around. "I did get out," he says slowly. "Fucking Bakersfield."
"We don't have to stay," Buck says. "We're two hours away from home. Your home. Our home. Tommy, let me take you home."
"Our home," Tommy says. He pushes himself up, out of the dirt, and he nods. "Fuck it. Yeah. Let's go."
It's a long, sweaty walk back to where the truck is parked. They take it slow, one step at a time; Buck pulls off his suit jacket first, slings it over his shoulder, rolls his sleeves up one by one, and Tommy does the same half a block later. He looks radiant in the dark green and Buck has a wild thought that maybe eventually they'll dress back up in these same suits and shirts for some version of forever. Someday. He smiles and swallows that thought back down, but he can't help beaming when Tommy reaches out and tangles their fingers together, here on the sidewalk where he grew up.
They make it back to the truck eventually. The Hyundai is gone; Fish and Jackie must have finished reading everyone the riot act.
From behind him Tommy taps Buck's wrist, and when Buck turns Tommy's got his hand outstretched, the keys dangling from his finger. "If you're going to take me home," he says; in the sunlight his hair sparkles, the handful of greys around his temple setting off a light show.
"Yeah, I can drive," Buck says. He takes the keys and accepts the weight that comes with them.
"Thanks," Tommy eventually says from the passenger seat. "For coming with me."
"Of course, Tommy," Buck says. "It was never even a question."
Tommy taps his knuckle against Buck's thigh. "It's appreciated all the same."
Buck changes lanes so he doesn't accidentally end up on the wrong ramp and drops his visor against the sun. It's been sitting on the tip of his tongue for half the day, at least, and now that Bakersfield's in the rear view mirror he finally feels like he can crack open a can of levity. "Permission to make a joke?"
"Evan," Tommy says, a little scandalized. "Granted. Of course."
He could open with something about cloth and wires, about how sea turtles drop their eggs and get the fuck out before anyone can challenge them for custody, but in the end he goes for something simple, something tried and true. "Maybe we both have mommy issues."
He's expecting a chuckle or a wry comeback. He doesn't expect Tommy to reach over and take his right hand off the steering wheel and slot it into his own, to squeeze tightly so their fingers rub together, to take a deep and steady breath. "I love you," Tommy says.
Buck smiles at the road ahead.
There's a lot to be said for seeing someone, for being seen. Buck remembers Tommy telling him that, late that night they got back together, after everything else they did: "I was so scared to let you see me," he said, the two of them hiding under the covers in each others' arms. "But I'm glad I finally did."
Now he watches Tommy as Tommy recounts a story of some shit he and his cousins got up to in the mountains one summer, without any adult supervision, shooting cans with a BB gun and chasing each other through the woods, Matthew busting his knee open and Tommy having to drive the rusted old truck down to town so he could get a tetanus shot. He stares at Tommy's crows' feet, the way his whole face lights up as he laughs. He sees him, all of him, the parts Tommy was afraid to show him lying bare on his skin as he waves his hands animatedly and smiles wide for the first time in days; and from the way Tommy's face crinkles as he catches Buck's eye, he knows Tommy sees him too.
Buck turns back to the pot on the stove. It's time for the tomato paste, and he holds his hand out for Tommy to finish opening the can.
"Thanks," he says, as Tommy deposits it in his hand. When he looks up after scooping the paste out Tommy's got the drawer still open, and he's pawing through it with a determined look on his face. "What's going on?"
"Ah-ha," Tommy says, pulling the pack of Marlboros out from where they were wedged under a pair of takeout chopsticks. He crumples the pack in his hand. "I'm going to throw these out."
"Oh!" Buck says. "Are you sure?"
"Positive," Tommy says, and he slips past Buck towards the garage.
Buck gives the sauce a stir. There's something not quite right about it, but he's not sure what.
"I would've put the tomato paste in before the garlic," Ghost-Bobby says, and Buck doesn't jump, he doesn't.
"Oh? Why—why's that?"
Ghost-Bobby leans over Buck's shoulder and inspects the contents of the pot. "If you wait too long you can overcook the garlic. Then you get that sulfuric aftertaste, remember? And putting the tomato paste in earlier lets it caramelize."
"Tommy does have a sweet tooth," Buck says with a nod.
"How'd the rest of the funeral go?"
Buck shrugs. "Tommy's parents suck. But I'm also realizing everyone's parents suck."
"Truer words never spoken," Ghost-Bobby says.
"And, and I don't know if we would ever—I don't know if he wants, or even if I want—but I'm kinda worried about being a parent who sucks."
"Not much you can do about that but try your hardest."
"See, this is why I need you here, Bobby, to help me do it right."
Ghost-Bobby levels a stare at him. "Kid, think about who you're asking for advice."
"Oh, right," Buck says.
"Everybody does it wrong. Some people do it wrong more tragically than others. But nobody comes out of childhood without any scars. You just have to try to be better than your parents were."
"So maybe love is the answer?"
"Maybe," Ghost-Bobby says. "I mean, I've only been dead for a couple months, right? Not sure when I'll figure that one out. Want me to let you know when I do?"
Buck chews his lip. The sauce smells good. Not perfect, but Tommy will probably like it anyway. "I still need you here," he says to the pot.
"No," Ghost-Bobby says. "You want me here. There's a difference."
When Buck looks up he's gone. But Tommy is coming back through the garage door, and he seems a little lighter somehow.
"Alright," Tommy says. "Cigs are gone. Quitting for real this time."
"You know, I'd never even seen you smoke before the one the other day," Buck says.
"I've only needed three in the last year." He doesn't need to elaborate on when.
Buck gives Tommy's shirt a little tug. "So, are you gonna post it on all your socials, make it official? Hashtag my quit date?"
Tommy steps closer into Buck's orbit. "Why would I need to do that? You're the only person whose opinion matters to me."
"God, you're romantic," Buck says. "You wanna taste this sauce, or what?"
He holds out the wooden spoon, and Tommy leans in. "Really good," he says. "Is this a Bobby recipe?"
"No," Buck says. He drops the spoon back in the pot and reels Tommy in for a kiss. "It's mine."