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Eddie’s not sure at what point “a couple of beers” becomes “a dangerous amount of honesty,” but he’s always suspected the line runs right through his living room. Somewhere between the coffee table with the scratch from Chris’s Lego spaceship crash-landing and the couch cushion Buck sank into like a human golden retriever, there’s a soft spot in the night where he can feel himself getting… talky. Not sloppy. Not even loose. Just—unfastened at the corners. Like the world is a shirt he hasn’t buttoned all the way, and a breeze is getting in.
It’s a good breeze. It smells like pizza grease and laundry detergent and the lemony stuff Buck uses on his hands when he thinks no one’s looking. (Eddie notices. Eddie always notices. He is excellent at noticing, unless the noticing is about his own feelings, in which case he is legally blind.)
They’ve got the TV on low—whitewater kayaking highlights, for some reason; Buck claims it’s soothing—and their phones out, thumbs scrolling. Buck’s socked feet are on Eddie’s coffee table, which is against house rules and also something Eddie never enforces, because he’s busy pretending his heart isn’t weird about the way Buck wiggles his toes when he’s content. It’s after a shift, the 118 blessedly quiet for once, no burning buildings, no freeway pileups, no spiraling calls that yank old scars into the present like fishhooks. Just them. Home. The kind of night that makes Eddie’s shoulders stop living around his ears.
“Okay,” Buck says, sudden and delighted, which is how Buck says almost everything. He lifts his phone, grinning at the glow. “Tell me you’ve seen these.”
Eddie squints at the screen. The font is pastel and a little aggressive. “What am I looking at?”
“Couples quizzes,” Buck says, like it’s a normal thing for two grown men to say out loud in their living room at 10 PM on a Thursday. “They popped up on my explore page. The comments are wild. People are like, ‘This ended my marriage,’ and ‘This made me realize my boyfriend is emotionally unavailable.’ I—” He laughs, bright and easy. “I wanna know if we pass.”
“We?” Eddie repeats, because it is the only safe word he has.
“Yeah.” Buck nudges him with a knee. He has absurdly persuasive knees. Eddie feels the nudge like a nudge to his soul. “C’mon. It’s for science.”
Science. Eddie knows science. He knows triage protocols and airway management and how to calculate pediatric dosing under pressure. He can definitely handle a light internet quiz designed for people who argue about throw pillows.
He can. He absolutely can. (He can’t. He can, though. Mostly.)
“What’s the worst that could happen?” Buck adds, which, statistically, is the most dangerous sentence a firefighter can say.
Buck just flips his phone around again, biting his lip like he’s trying not to smile too hard. “First one’s called ‘How Compatible Are You, Really?’ There’s a cartoon of two peas in a pod. We’re peas.”
“We’re people,” Eddie says, but it’s too late. Buck has already tapped Start.
The first question appears, all friendly teal bubble letters like it isn’t about to ruin Eddie’s night.
When something bad happens, who do you turn to first?
“Easy,” Buck says, thumbs poised. “We’re answering for ourselves, right? Like, truthfully?”
“Obviously.” Eddie hears himself sounding wry. He hears himself sounding fine. He is fine. He is a pristine example of fine. “What kind of people lie on quizzes?”
“The same kind of people who think pineapple belongs on pizza,” Buck says gravely. “Monsters.”
“Wow. Strong stance.”
“I’m a man of principle.”
Eddie hums. When something bad happens— He scrolls through the options. Partner, family member, friend, therapist, no one. There’s not a circle for “the idiot who keeps showing up no matter how far gone you feel,” which feels like an oversight. He selects Friend. His thumb hesitates. The screen asks him to be more specific.
Who is the friend?
Buck, he thinks, faster than he breathes. Buck, every time. The earthquake when he put walls around his fear and Buck walked right in. The worst night on the floor of a hospital hallway when he was sure the world had shrunk to a single beeping machine and Buck’s voice saying, Hey, look at me. The well, the dirt, the rope, the handshake they never quite admitted out loud. Hey. I’m not going anywhere.
It’s not— It’s normal. It’s normal to have a person. Firefighters have partners. Partners have each other’s backs. Eddie has Christopher and a mortgage and a sock drawer that’s eighty percent Buck’s socks at this point, because Buck never remembers which ones he left, and Eddie never remembers to give them back. That’s a village. That’s healthy.
He types: My best friend.
He does not type: Buck. He does not have to. It’s implied. It’s something the house knows.
“Who’d you pick?” Buck asks.
“Friend,” Eddie says, which is accurate and not a lie, and therefore his favorite kind of defense.
Buck’s smile tilts. “Same.”
The next question: How easily do you share your feelings with this person?
Eddie’s thumb twitches. He does not, as a rule, share his feelings easily. He shares them the way a dragon shares treasure: reluctantly, with smoke. But there are exceptions to rules. Sometimes there are addendums. He remembers Buck on his couch last month, late and restless, shoulders tight with something unnamed, and how Eddie had split himself open like a piñata by accident, told him about Texas and the weight of adolescence and the way responsibility carved a groove in a life that’s hard to climb out of. He remembers Buck listening like he always listens, with his whole face.
“Uh,” Eddie says eloquently, and then he actually reads the choices. Very easily. Somewhat easily. With effort. Not at all. “With effort,” he decides, and then hears how cowardly that sounds and slides to Somewhat easily. “Depends on the day.”
Buck snorts. “I went ‘very easily.’ You do this thing where you pretend you’re not saying anything, but then you say the most honest sentence I’ve ever heard anyone say, and then you get mad at me for having heard it.”
“I do not—” He does. God, he does. He can feel the old heat rise in his neck. He drinks beer to put the heat somewhere else. “You make it sound like I’m… like I’m—”
“Human?” Buck suggests lightly. “It’s cute.”
“Stop calling me cute,” Eddie says automatically, which is a new rule. Not codified yet. They might need a whiteboard. No “cute.” No “buddy.” No “hey, I saved your life again, pal,” because the cadence of that one can shred Eddie from sternum to spine if he’s not careful.
He taps Somewhat easily like it’s a seatbelt.
Next: Do you feel safe being vulnerable?
The word vulnerable is a landmine. Eddie steps around it most days by being useful. He cooks breakfast and packs school lunches and fixes leaky faucets and volunteers for the calls no one wants. He knows what he’s for. He can carry. He can do. He is sturdy enough to hold other people’s fear without dropping it. Vulnerability is for other weather.
But— They are playing a game. They are men, but they are playing a game, and he is drinking a beer with his socks on in his own living room, and Buck is leaning into his cushion-curved space like gravity, like he’s always leaned. Vulnerability is a part of that, whether Eddie has decided it is or not. He selects Yes.
He stares at the pixel that turns blue. Huh.
“So, like, you’re thinking?” Buck says after a minute. “The wheels are turning. I can hear them. They sound like a train.”
Eddie wonders if his face is obvious. His face is always obvious. He is not inscrutable; he’s a billboard. He’s jealous of people who can be an empty lot. “I’m thinking you should get more coasters,” he says, because he is a coward, and then, because he is not: “This quiz is dumb.”
“It’s incredibly dumb,” Buck agrees solemnly, and taps Next with a flourish.
The quiz sprints into a lightning round. Who knows your biggest fears? Who do you tell your dreams to? Who has seen you cry? (Eddie glares at the phone.) He presses Buck in his head every time, and Friend on the screen, and when the little spinning circle spits out a percentage, it says 89% and a confetti animation bursts like a celebration.
“Whoa,” Buck says. “Look at us.”
Eddie takes a sip of beer to keep his hands busy. “Look at what?”
“High-compatibility best friends,” Buck says proudly, like they earned a merit badge. “We should print a certificate.”
“There’s a certificate?”
“There should be.” Buck taps to share the result and then thinks better of it. “Probably not to the firehouse group chat.”
“Please God no,” Eddie says, and somehow the words come out as a laugh. He’s not alarmed. This is not alarming. This is adorable internet trash and not a computerized mirror he didn’t ask for.
He adjusts the pillow behind him. He feels aware of his shoulders again, the quiet around them loosening, the way he’s sitting angled toward Buck like a plant window-leaning for sun. He tells himself it’s because Buck hogs space. He tells himself a lot of things.
“Round two,” Buck says, relentless and gleeful. “’How Well Do You Really Know Each Other?’”
Eddie considers faking a yawn and bed. He considers saying, I have to call Chris, even though he FaceTimed Chris two hours ago and watched his son explain at length which ninja turtle is best at algebra. (It’s Donatello. Obviously, says Chris. Obviously, says Eddie’s heart.) He considers declaring sudden devotion to the kayaking documentary.
Instead, he says, “All right, but I’m gonna crush you.”
Buck’s eyes spark. “Oh, it’s like that?”
“It’s like that.”
The quiz gives them the option to play split-screen: one column for what Eddie thinks about Buck, one for what Buck thinks about Eddie. It’s like handing them both a stack of flashcards and a stopwatch.
What’s their coffee order?
Eddie writes: Iced vanilla latte, half sweet, extra ice, with an espresso shot if it’s early or a second if it’s after a call that went sideways. He adds, Only uses compostable straws now because he watched one video about turtles.
Buck glances at his column and huffs a laugh. “You know about the turtles?”
“I was there when you gave an impassioned speech to a barista and then tipped twenty bucks to compensate for the speech,” Eddie says. “Also you sent me three turtle videos in a row..”
“You cried at one,” Buck says, not looking at him. “A little.”
Eddie pretends he doesn’t hear. He is now concentrating on being the best at a quiz that doesn’t matter. (It matters more than anything has mattered in weeks. That’s ridiculous, but it is happening, right here under his skin.)
What’s their favorite movie they’d never admit to liking?
Eddie pictures Buck pretending to hate The Notebook and then looking personally betrayed by the rain scene. He writes: The Notebook. Then he crosses it out, remembers the way Buck knows all the words to Mamma Mia! as if he lived on the island in a past life. He writes: Mamma Mia! final answer.
“What’d you put?” Buck asks. Eddie covers the screen with his palm like he’s hiding state secrets.
“What’s my comfort food after a bad call?” Buck reads his. He sounds curious and fond at once, like the answer is a gift he wants to unwrap.
Eddie doesn’t have to think. “Plain buttered noodles. You claim it’s easier on your stomach. It’s actually because Maddie made them when you were sick.”
Buck goes quiet for half a second. The kayaking guy on the TV paddles through white foam. “Yeah,” he says softly. “Okay, Eddie. Your turn. What do you eat when you’re sad?”
“I’m never sad,” Eddie says. Buck’s face does that thing where one eyebrow lifts, unimpressed. “Fine. Uh. Rice and fried eggs with salsa.”
“Wrong,” Buck says, triumphant. “That’s your everyday happy food. Sad Eddie is a cereal guy.”
Eddie blinks. “A what?”
“Cereal. Not even fancy cereal. Like—cornflakes.”
“I do not—” He pictures himself, last month, standing in his kitchen at midnight, crunching through not one bowl, but two. Buck had taken the spoon from his hand and swapped the bowl out for toast because toast, he’d said, is less existential. “Whatever,” Eddie mutters. “You guessed.”
Buck beams. “I know you.”
It lands in Eddie’s chest like an elevator dropping a floor, a swoop he’s not ready for. He clears his throat and stabs the next prompt.
What’s their go-to stress relief?
Eddie types for Buck: a run, long enough to find the edge of something and breathe. Or fixing something in his apartment he already fixed last week. Or baking at midnight, flour on his cheek, humming without realizing, leaving texts that say “if I left muffins on your porch don’t ask questions.”
He hesitates. He types, He likes when I sit on his counter and keep him company. He deletes that. He is not prepared to see it in print.
“What do you do?” Buck asks, writing something swiftly. He doesn’t look up. He says it casually, but the question is not casual. It has weight.
“Me?” Eddie scratches his jaw. “I…clean. I fix things that aren’t broken. I—” He wants to be joking about this. He wants to shrug and say, I alphabetize my spice rack and call it mindfulness. He finds himself saying, “I take care of the house. I take care of Chris. I take care of everybody.”
“Who takes care of you?” Buck says, so gently Eddie could hate him for it.
Eddie looks at his phone. The letters blur for a second. He swallows. “We’re playing a game, Buck.”
“I know.” Buck’s voice is a touch rough now. “I put ‘he calls me.’ Just—just so you know.”
Eddie’s ears are warm. The room feels like it tilted a degree. He can hear his pulse, a small hammer somewhere in his throat. He jabs at the next question like he’s mad at it for existing.
What’s their biggest fear?
He’s not writing that down. He’s not letting the algorithm ingest his nightmares and spit them out as content. He writes heights (a lie) and large snakes (not entirely untrue) and then, against his own will, the words being left stick to the surface of his brain like gum on pavement, and he looks away fast, finds Buck watching him.
“I put ‘failing the people he loves,’” Buck says, and then adds, like a quick cover, “Also clowns.”
“I don’t fear clowns,” Eddie says, indignant.
“You fear what they represent,” Buck says gravely.
“Okay, professor.”
“Okay, denial.”
Eddie barks a laugh, because what else can he do. He doesn’t ask what Buck put for himself. He already knows. The well, the dirt, the rope—no. He thinks of Buck’s quiet insecurities like small, delicate glass things Buck hides in drawers, how he takes them out and polishes them when he thinks no one will comment. He knows enough. He knows too much.
They keep going. Buck knows Eddie’s order at that hole-in-the-wall taco place—al pastor, salsa verde, no onions because he’s kissing Chris goodnight after and onions are rude—and Eddie knows Buck’s tell when he’s overwhelmed—a soft jaw, a faraway look, a silent five minutes that ends with him saying something odd and true. Buck knows Eddie’s Spanish swears by tone alone. Eddie knows Buck’s left knee sings when the weather changes. Buck knows Eddie sleeps on the right side of the bed on purpose (tactically advantageous; he can get to the door first), and Eddie knows that Buck takes about six minutes longer to leave the house than he claims, because he gets distracted making sure his plants are “emotionally supported.”
“I’m starting to think,” Buck says at one point, eyes skimming his screen, “that I know you better than—like, anyone I’ve ever dated.”
“Same,” Eddie says before he can stop himself, and then it’s out there, hovering between them like breath in winter. He wants to pull it back. He wants to hold it up to the light, too. “I mean—Shannon—” He clears his throat, because this feels like a kind of betrayal, unfaithful to the story of a life he’s told himself he lived properly. “We were kids. We did our best. And with Ana—”
“With Ana, you were trying very hard to be a guy who dates Ana,” Buck finishes softly, not unkind. “You were good to her.”
“I wanted to be,” Eddie says, staring at a kayaking sine wave. He thinks of how he remembered important dates like he was studying for an exam. He thinks of how he’d learned her preferred wine and the way she liked her salad and still felt, weirdly, like a guest in his own life. “I didn’t—I didn’t pay attention like this.” He hears the confession as he says it. He hears the click of something sliding into place. “To…someone’s everything.”
He’s talking too much. He shuts his mouth. He drinks his beer. He tastes lemon soap in the air and pretends he doesn’t.
The quiz, a merciless little thing, recognizes blood in the water. It gives them questions that feel almost cruel in their accuracy.
Whose hoodie do you steal?
“These quizzes are gendered,” Eddie grumbles, desperate for an angle. “Hoodies are neutral ground.”
“You steal mine,” Buck says, cheerful. “The gray one, because it’s soft.”
“Chris steals that one.”
“Chris steals with permission.” Buck tilts his head. “You steal and pretend you didn’t.”
“I do not steal—” He absolutely steals. That hoodie has been on his body at least twice a week for months. He’s never asked. It’s Buck; asking feels like introducing bureaucracy into a system that’s working fine.
They hit Submit. The score dings up on screen: 94%. Eddie feels his heart skid.
“That’s…high,” Buck says, awed.
“Clearly there’s a curve,” Eddie says, very calm, like he’s explaining to Christopher that different grading scales exist and some kids get badges without doing extra credit. “We’re above average at being friends. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Okay,” Buck says easily, and Eddie hates him a little for being so okay with Eddie being so not okay. “One more?”
“Don’t we have to, like—hydrate?” Eddie says feebly. “Or sleep? Or go on a run around the block until we forget what the internet is?”
Buck laughs and scrolls. “This one’s called ‘Romantic Potential: Hard Numbers.’”
“That sounds like a math test I failed in tenth grade,” Eddie says. He can feel the rumble of panic now, low and steady like distant thunder. “I’m not good at math.”
“You were literally doing math on the rig today,” Buck says. “You calculated the drip rate while we were bumping over potholes.”
“That’s medical math,” Eddie says. “Different.”
Buck shoots him finger guns and taps Start.
The questions are unhinged. They are also uncomfortably sane.
If you were trapped in an elevator together for two hours, what would happen?
“I would dismantle the ceiling panel, you would yell at me to stop, I would stop, we would play Heads Up on your phone, and then we would talk about the worst thing that ever happened to us and pretend we didn’t,” Eddie mutters, typing: play games, share snacks, talk, don’t panic. He scrolls. There’s an option that says “make out to pass the time,” and he skips it so hard he almost throws his phone.
Buck cackles. “Eddie.”
“I didn’t click anything,” Eddie lies.
How do you feel when the other person texts “made it home”?
This one nearly does him in. He feels the relief in his bones. He feels the way his body does an inventory—okay, okay, he’s fine—like that text is the roll call after a disaster. It shouldn’t be that big a deal. It is. He clicks: Deep relief.
What’s your love language?
Eddie stares at the options like they’re incriminating. Words of affirmation, acts of service, quality time, physical touch, gifts. He knows himself like he knows the layout of his own kitchen; he reaches for acts of service like a reflex. He takes care of things. He makes coffee before Buck wakes up after a double. He replaces Buck’s smoke detector battery before it chirps because he knows exactly when it’ll go. He edges toward physical touch and stops, stomach swooping, because he has rules. He has very clear rules. Touch is for family and life-threatening situations and the couch late at night when Buck falls asleep on his shoulder and Eddie tells himself it’s the weight of a good day.
He taps acts of service. He taps quality time. He hovers over physical touch and does not tap it. (He taps it. He doesn’t even realize until the blue circle fills and his thumb is there, a traitor.)
“Same,” Buck says, easy. “I put the same.”
“What, all three?” Eddie says, because this is not a test. You cannot choose all of the above. That’s not fair.
“Yeah.” Buck shrugs. “Feels true.”
Feels true. Eddie stares at the word like it’s a rock with a spark inside, something people used to call fire before they had a word for it.
Do you see a future with this person in it?
The quiz doesn’t specify what kind of future. It doesn’t narrow itself to platonic or romantic or family or work. It just lays the question out like a fork in a road and lets them step where they will.
Eddie sees a future like a long California street lined with jacarandas and Buck complaining about the purple blossoms getting stuck in his bike chain. He sees school recitals and Buck laughing too loud next to him in the audience. He sees holidays, the kind where you need an extra folding table and three more pies than you planned. He sees Buck at his dining table assembling a toy with too many screws while Chris supervises, the kind of supervision that includes eating the cookies meant for after. He sees arguments about paint swatches and a world where mundane fights matter because you’re safe enough to have them.
He clicks: Yes, absolutely.
He closes his eyes for a second. Something in his chest is tender and warm and terrifying.
The quiz whirs. He can feel Buck’s thigh warm along the couch, touching always touching. He can feel the room take a breath with them. He can hear a car four houses down, someone coming home late and loved.
The result appears in a spray of pixel confetti. 97%.
Buck whistles low. “That’s…high.”
“Sure,” Eddie says, voice faint. His heart is trying to walk out of his body. “But, like, these quizzes. They’re designed to—” He gestures helplessly. “To trick you into confirmation bias. And we’re— We’re best friends. Of course the numbers look…like they look. We spend a lot of time together. We share responsibilities. We communicate under stress effectively. That’s basically… marriage in the workplace.”
“Marriage in the workplace,” Buck repeats, deadpan. “Is that like when HR sends an email because two of the office plants got too close?”
“It’s a phenomenon,” Eddie says, and now he’s talking fast, which is his least favorite tell, and he knows it, and he cannot stop. “It’s like— You know how astronauts living in confined spaces for extended periods develop—you know, camaraderie? It’s proximity. It’s repetition. Our routines are synchronized. There’s a—like, a survivorship bond. If you plot it on a graph—”
“We’re plotting it on a graph,” Buck says, eyes bright, because he loves when Eddie does this, loves when Eddie pretends he’s not having a feeling by doing algebra at it. “What’s on the x-axis?”
“Time,” Eddie says promptly. “Years. And the y-axis is—uh—compatibility coefficients. Which are skewed by—by co-caregiving. Which is a real thing.”
“Co-caregiving,” Buck says, nodding like he’s taking notes. “Because of Christopher.”
“Yes,” Eddie says, grateful for the solid ground of his son’s name, something real, someone he can talk about without falling apart. “Because—because you’re his…you’re his Buck. And you’ve essentially functioned as a third adult in this household for—what, going on years? So, of course, we’ve integrated patterns. Which artificially inflates—”
Buck leans against his arm, the barest brush, as if he’s steadying an avalanche with his shoulder. “Artificially inflates what?”
“Perceived—” Eddie’s hand is making weird shapes in the air, drawing curves only he can see. “Romantic… potential.”
“That’s what the quiz called it,” Buck says lightly. “Hard numbers.”
“Numbers lie,” Eddie says, too quick. “Numbers are a lie invented by Big Calculator.”
Buck chokes on a laugh. Eddie soldiers on, because stopping would mean acknowledging the 97% blinking up at him like Christmas lights.
“Also, the sample size is two. That’s not significant. And the questions are—are culture-specific. We’re— We have a communication style that reads as—” He flaps a hand. “Emotionally literate. Because we’ve been to therapy. Separately. And also together sometimes. Not together together. Like, we took turns being in the same office. For different reasons. My point is—”
“Your point is,” Buck says, eyes soft, smile hovering like a hand close to Eddie’s back, “we’re good at this because we’ve practiced being good at this.”
“Exactly.” Eddie’s relief is a stupid shape, lopsided, like a balloon he’s overinflated and tied badly. “We’ve done reps. We’ve built muscle. Friendship muscle.”
Buck looks at their phones. He looks at Eddie. “I feel like maybe,” he says carefully, “that’s also how relationships work.”
Eddie’s brain immediately throws up a bureaucratic partition. “Not necessarily,” he says, and hears himself scrambling, and hates that he’s scrambling, and cannot stop scrambling because it feels like if he stops he’ll slide down something steep and never find his feet again. “Relationships are—romantic relationships are— They have different…deliverables.”
“Deliverables,” Buck says, with delight. “Are we circling back for the Q3 review?”
Eddie covers his face with his hand. His palm smells like lemon and heat. He tries not to think of Buck’s shampoo. “Shut up.”
Buck nudges his knee again. The kayaking show has ended; the TV asks them if they want to keep watching. The house lights are low. The city hum is quiet outside. Eddie feels something inside him—panic, affection, the dizzy terror of recognition—trying to be heard.
“It’s funny,” Buck says, and he sounds genuinely amused, not the laugh he uses to skate over thin ice. “We’re both just…not seeing it.”
“Seeing what?” Eddie says, immediate, reflexive, a cat batting a hand.
“Nothing,” Buck says, and it’s so easy that Eddie almost believes him. “I mean, we’re obviously insanely compatible as best friends. Which—like—yay us. Top score. We’re good at being each other’s person. That’s a nice thing to know.”
It’s a nice thing. It’s the nicest thing Eddie has ever known, in fact. He stares at the 97% and thinks of all the times he’s counted to ten on a scene, talking to Buck in his head so he could get through the next minute. He thinks of Christopher’s laugh when Buck does the thing with the pancake flip and the pan. He thinks of the day after the shooting when he could breathe again for the first time and he did it on Buck’s couch like it was a medical device. He thinks of the hoodie, gray and soft, and how sometimes he sleeps in it when Buck’s in it, which is called a t-shirt, Eddie, say it right, or else your brain is telling on you.
“Yeah,” he says. “Nice.”
“Want to take another?” Buck asks, as if they haven’t been filleted by pastel prompts. “’What Kind of Couple Are You?’ This one has pictures. Like, aesthetic pictures. We could be the one in the cabin with the dog.”
“We are not a couple,” Eddie says mildly, and clicks the cabin anyway, because he does want to be in that cabin with that dog. He wants to be anywhere ordinary with Buck, places where nobody dies and everybody argues about whether to put the mug in the dishwasher right away or let it live on the counter for an hour. (Dishwasher. He is not a monster.)
They click through photos—city skyline or quiet backyard (backyard), sunrise run or late-night drive (both, which is cheating, but Buck lets him), homemade dinner or takeout (homemade with takeout fries, don’t judge), dog or cat (dog, obviously, though Eddie thinks of cats sometimes, the way they claim you and pretend they didn’t)—and the result says Cozy Homebodies and Eddie says “gross” and tucks the blanket closer around both their legs at the same time.
“Okay,” Buck says, laughing, pulling his beer a little closer and then forgetting to drink it. “Hear me out. ‘The Tough Questions: Do You Trust Each Other?’”
“We already did trust.”
“This one’s spicier,” Buck promises. He wiggles his eyebrows in a way that should be illegal. “It asks if we share passwords.”
“Absolutely not,” Eddie says on instinct.
“You know the code to my phone,” Buck points out, maddening.
“That’s different.”
“How?”
“Emergencies,” Eddie says. “Also Candy Crush.”
“Also Candy Crush,” Buck agrees solemnly. “And my apartment code, and my storage unit, and my—”
“I’m not a hacker, Buck.”
“I’m saying—” Buck tips his head on the cushion toward Eddie, softening around the edges like he’s a man-shaped pillow with opinions. “We trust each other. With dumb stuff. With big stuff. With—everything.”
Eddie feels the weight of that in his sternum like a hand pressing gently, checking for a heartbeat. He hears himself say, low, “Yeah.”
The spicy trust quiz, shockingly, agrees with them. It gives them green check marks like gold stars. It asks, Have you ever lied to this person? Eddie says, Technically, no, if you count omission as an administrative decision. It asks, Would you move for them? Eddie’s heart, traitorous and efficient, says, I have.
He wants to get mad at himself for that. He wants to be the practical person he builds in the mirror every morning, the man with the well-packed go bag and the clear-eyed emergency plan. Instead, he is sitting here under a blanket with Buck and thinking about the way Buck’s voice goes soft when he says Christopher’s name, and it’s a kind of vulnerability he didn’t consent to, and he can’t bring himself to protest.
By the time they hit the end, the night feels like it’s leaned toward them a little, like the house is listening. The final question pops up with a ta-da: On a scale of 1 to 100, your romantic compatibility is—
Eddie watches the numbers flicker like a slot machine. 81. 92. 95. 97. It stops at 98% like it’s been waiting there for hours, bored, wondering when they’d show up.
“Oh,” Buck says softly, and Eddie would like to file a noise complaint on himself for the sound he makes. It’s not human. It’s a piano hitting the wrong key. It’s a breath he wasn’t expecting to take.
He can feel everything inside him scramble into defensive formation. Logic puts on body armor. Rationalizations line up like toy soldiers. He pulls on the first thought he can find and wears it like a hat so no one can see his head is on fire.
“These websites are predatory,” he says briskly. “They prey on the human desire for certainty. They make very bold claims based on very little data. Did we even see their methodology? No. And the questions were leading. The order was weighted. There’s a priming effect. And we’re—like I said—we’re statistical outliers. Our bond is off the charts. As best friends. So the algorithm thinks—” He waves a hand. “Thinks things.”
“What things?” Buck asks, eyebrows up, amused in a way that makes Eddie want to move to a different couch. Or a different planet.
“That we’re a couple,” Eddie says, grim, out of the side of his mouth like it’s contraband. “Which is obviously—it’s not— We’re not.”
“No,” Buck agrees easily. It should help. It doesn’t. It makes Eddie feel like someone took the brakes out of his car and told him it would be fun. “We’re not.”
“Right,” Eddie says. He stares at the 98% like it owes him money. “So it’s wrong.”
“Definitely,” Buck says, utterly unbothered. He bumps Eddie’s shoulder with his own, casual and intimate, as if to say, Look how not-weird this is. “Also, if we were a couple, we’d crush it.”
Eddie’s brain short-circuits. He has no defenses for that sentence. He flashes, ridiculous, on images that are not safe for this moment: Buck standing in his kitchen in the gray hoodie, Buck sorting mail, Buck kissing him good morning with toothpaste breath because they’re late and also not. He slams the door in his mind and leans against it like a cartoon.
He picks a hill. He plants a flag. “There’s also the dad-friend coefficient,” Eddie blurts. “It’s a known bias.”
Buck blinks. “A known—what?”
“Dads and their closest friends often exhibit higher measured compatibility due to shared routine management, child-centered scheduling, and co-regulation under stress,” Eddie says, inventing a scholarly tone that would flatter a TED Talk. “It’s—like—if you map task matrices and overlay them with affective baseline stabilization, you end up with a false positive.”
Buck stares at him and then bursts into laughter so loud the neighbors can definitely hear him. Eddie wants to be offended. He is, briefly. He is also embarrassingly warm.
“You are such a nerd,” Buck gasps, delighted, leaning forward like he might fold in half, hair falling into his eyes. “A terrifying, extremely hot nerd.”
“Don’t call me—” Eddie says, and stops, because the word hot is standing in his living room with a nametag on. He should ask it to leave. He does not. He swallows. He puts a frown on like armor. “I’m serious.”
“I know,” Buck says, but his eyes are kind. “I know you are.” He sobers a little, dipping his head toward Eddie’s space, close enough that Eddie can see the darker ring around his irises. “It’s okay, you know.”
“What is?”
“To just…like what you like,” Buck says, almost a whisper, like a secret he’s keeping for Eddie, not from him. “For things to be what they are.”
Eddie doesn’t have a slot to put that in. He is a machine that does not have that part installed. He looks down at his phone. 98% is still there, obnoxiously cheerful, like a waiter who refuses to take a hint.
He exhales. He decides he will be okay later. He decides he will be okay now. He decides that okay can mean a different thing every ten minutes and still count.
“Another quiz,” he says gruffly, clearing his throat. “’Can You Read Each Other’s Minds?’”
Buck beams like the sun came back on. “Absolutely.”
They do terribly at that one, on purpose. Eddie guesses Buck is thinking about penguins when he’s thinking about pizza. Buck guesses Eddie is thinking about traffic patterns on the 405 when he’s thinking about the best way to fix the squeak in their front door. Eddie calls foul on the word our in his own head and pretends he didn’t hear it.
Between questions, they drift. Buck leans more fully into him; Eddie adjusts like a man who has spent his whole life learning how to carry weight. Their shoulders slide together. Their calves brush under the blanket. It is an accident. It is not.
Sometime near midnight, Christopher texts a photo of his friends dog wearing a sweater and a caption of simply: look!!! buck would love this. Eddie sends back three heart-eye emojis and a threat to tell Buck that he is now legally responsible for dog sweaters.
Buck peeks over. “Chris says you’re legally responsible for dog sweaters,” Eddie lies.
“Tell him I accept my sentence,” Buck says easily, and Eddie’s entire skeleton tries to turn into a swoon. He holds firm. He is, after all, a man of principle.
They keep going. They take a “Do You Have the Same Interior Design Style?” (they do, infuriatingly; they both like clean lines and soft blankets and big windows and cozy lamps that look like they belong in a Nancy Meyers movie). They take “Who Apologizes First?” (Eddie does, privately and with a store bought pie; Buck does, loudly and with a home baked pie; both are right). They take “Are You the Couple Your Friends Root For?” and Eddie hovers long enough over the word couple that the quiz times out and asks if they’re still there.
“We’re here,” Buck says, not to the phone, and Eddie’s chest aches a little, a good ache, a stretch, the kind you feel after a run when you stop and the air finds you again.
By the time they peel themselves off the couch, the kayaking guy has been replaced by a screensaver of a trail through a forest. The beers are mostly empty. The house is soft.
Buck stands and stretches, t-shirt riding up an inch, a dangerous inch, and Eddie looks at the blank TV as if it holds moral guidance. “You staying?” he asks, casual as he can, because staying has become one of their sets of parentheses—after a late shift, after a bad call, after a quiz that eats their composure and asks for seconds. There’s a spare toothbrush in the bathroom and a half-read book by Buck’s side of the couch and a blanket that lives here more than anywhere else.
“If that’s cool,” Buck says, like it isn’t the most obvious yes in the world. “I’m comfy.”
“Yeah,” Eddie says, and his voice is a little low. “Me too.”
They move around each other in the kitchen, a practiced dance. Buck takes their bottles; Eddie wipes the ring off the coffee table and pretends that the 98% on his phone is just a weather report for some city he’s not sure he’ll ever visit. They brush teeth in the same five-foot space, knocking elbows. Buck hums something under his breath; Eddie recognizes the melody from the muffin mornings. He pretends he doesn’t.
When they settle back on the couch, the blanket finds them without discussion. Buck’s head lands against the bony part of Eddie’s shoulder. Eddie stares at the ceiling very hard and thinks about very practical things like checking the smoke detectors and whether the filter on the air conditioner needs changing and how many eggs they have left for the morning. Buck sighs, a small content sound that rearranges all the furniture in Eddie’s chest.
“Hey,” Buck says, already half-asleep.
“Yeah?”
“Next time,” Buck murmurs, “we do the ‘Which Taylor Swift Bridge Are We?’ one.”
Eddie smiles into the dark. He does not, under any circumstances, think about bridges. “Deal.”
“Bet we get the same one,” Buck says, words blurring. “We’re, like…98% the same.”
“Don’t say that,” Eddie says, because it sounds like a diagnosis and he is not ready, will never be ready, to live in a world where the treatment is simple. “We’re…us.”
“Yeah,” Buck says, and the smile is audible. “That’s what I meant.”
Eddie lies there and watches the screen saver pretend to be a forest and feels the night settle around them like a promise he doesn’t know the wording of yet. He thinks about their scores and about how numbers don’t lie but also don’t tell the whole truth. He thinks about the way Buck’s weight feels against him—easy, familiar, like a story he can tell in his sleep. He thinks about the word couple and shakes it a little, hears the rattle, decides he will not open that box tonight because there are some gifts you don’t unwrap until morning.
He closes his eyes. He dreams of jacaranda blossoms and a gray hoodie and a kitchen where two toothbrushes stand next to each other like it’s normal. In the morning, he’ll make coffee the way Buck likes it and claim it’s because he’s a good friend. In the afternoon, he’ll send Buck a link to a quiz about “Are You Secretly the Mom Friend?” and score a hundred percent. He will ignore the truth until it taps him on the shoulder and asks if he’s ready.
For now, he’s ninety-eight percent sure he can keep being exactly this brave.
He’s wrong about the math. He always has been. But he’ll get there. The thing about Eddie Diaz is—he does his reps. He gets strong. He learns how to carry what matters without dropping it.
On the coffee table, their phones light up and go dark again, the last quiz still open. 98% glows and fades, glows and fades, like something breathing. Eddie doesn’t look. He doesn’t have to.
Beside him, Buck shifts, closer without meaning to. Eddie doesn’t move away this time. He should, maybe—there’s a line somewhere between friendship and whatever this is—but the idea of distance feels colder than it should.
So he lets it happen. Lets Buck settle against him, warmth seeping through cotton and bone, steady and familiar. Then—without thinking, or maybe after thinking too much—Eddie shifts too, fitting his chest to Buck’s back. His arm slides over Buck’s waist like it belongs there, and his hand finds the soft dip beneath his ribs.
Buck exhales, long and easy, a sound that melts the last of Eddie’s hesitation. He smells like soap and the citrus hand cleaner from the station, like the day fading into something quieter.
Eddie lets himself breathe. Lets himself want this, just a little. The stillness isn’t tense; it’s whole. His thumb moves in a slow, unconscious arc against Buck’s shirt, tracing nothing in particular, just keeping count of the rise and fall of his breathing.
It feels good. It feels right. It feels like something that doesn’t need defending.
He doesn’t tell himself it’s for balance. Or warmth. Or physics. He knows exactly what it is: the comfort of being exactly where he wants to be.
Buck shifts again, only enough to settle deeper into his hold and Eddie lets his shoulders relax. Eddie tightens his arm, gentle but certain, a silent yeah, I’ve got you.