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“Did you meet my brother?”
Eddie sighs, and contemplates the benefits of drowning himself in his beer. He doesn't even need to turn around to know—
“That's your brother,” says a voice that definitely doesn't belong to some random woman Buck picked up for him.
“Yeah,” Buck replies, all bright because he's in a genuinely good mood and three drinks in and also so, so earnestly trying to make Eddie have a good time, like Eddie's idea of that isn't just getting to stare at Buck, flushed with alcohol, all night. “I mean, we don't exactly look alike, but—”
Eddie turns around.
Buck has a hip propped against the bar, and has just finished ramming his hands in his pockets with a drunk, wobbly little smile. He still looks like a fucking dream, still makes Eddie's mouth go just as dry as when he knocked on Eddie's door a couple of hours ago in blue jeans and a white t-shirt that gapes a little at the collar but hugs his arms almost indecently.
Buck's eyes spark when he realizes he has Eddie's attention. “Eddie, this is Chase. Chase, Eddie. I think you two'd have fun together, so I'm just gonna—bye.”
And he's gone before Eddie can even open his mouth, lost to the music and the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd they've somehow stumbled onto on a Wednesday night.
“Hey,“ someone says, and it takes Eddie a deep breath and a few blinks to remember that there's a person there. Slowly, he peels his eyes away from where Buck disappeared and lays them on this man Buck apparently picked for him.
Chase is—big. Only a little taller than Eddie, but much broader in the shoulders, and he's smiling under a full, dark beard. Eddie can't quite tell what color his eyes are for the muted, red-tinted light, but there's no mistaking the way they drag over him head to toe, slow, deliberate.
Entirely against his will, Eddie flushes. The back of his neck goes embarrassingly hot; he tries to quell the heat with a hand, still wet with condensation from his glass, but it doesn't help.
Eddie's so in love with Buck it feels like walking through the world with blinders on sometimes, not stopping to look at other people because there's no point - but he thinks that, if he could ever find it in himself, Chase might be his type. Big and broad and bearded.
He doesn't really know what to do with that; isn't used to it. Wanting men. Wanting at all.
“Hi,” he remembers to say, when Chase's eyebrows start climbing up his forehead. His face feels hot, now, and he really hopes it's dark enough in here to hide it. “Sorry about,” he waves a hand, “all that.”
Chase blinks, once, twice. Then his face splits into a grin so dazzling it almost looks familiar. “You're not his brother, are you?”
“No,” Eddie grins back, set at ease. He sits back on his stool. Chase takes it for the invitation it is and takes his own seat, flagging down the bartender for another of whatever Eddie's having. “No, I'm his best friend.”
“Ah,” Chase laughs. His entire body is turned toward Eddie; Eddie's eyes involuntarily fall to the way his thighs fill the chair, muscle straining at the seams of Chase's jeans, and he—doesn't have to make himself look away, actually. Not if he doesn't want to. “That's good to hear. I would have been a little concerned otherwise.”
Eddie blinks. “About what?”
“Whatever this is,” Chase says, still smiling, and takes a sip of his beer. “You guys have some kind of situation going on, right?”
Eddie opens and closes his mouth a few times, but all that comes out in the end is a laugh. “I'm that obvious, huh?”
Chase tilts his head. He looks Eddie up and down again, but it's not as heavy this time, just curious.
“Not you,” he says, slow, like he's figuring Eddie out. “Him.”
Eddie's mouth, somehow, goes dry mid-sip. “Him?”
“Sorry, man,” Chase grins, “I feel like I know everything about you except, like, your shoe size. He wouldn't shut up about you for a full five minutes. Had to remind him that he should actually introduce us if he was trying to be a wingman.”
Without thinking, Eddie sweeps his eyes over the crowd, the booths in the back, looking for a familiar pair of shoulders. To do what, he's not sure, but he needs to see Buck, just for a second.
“He's been on a kick,” he says, distracted, looking behind Chase at where the crowd on the tiny dance floor is shifting. “I don't get out much, apparently.”
Chase raises an eyebrow.
“But it's always been women so far,” Eddie says, the words like little shocks of electricity on his tongue. “You're a bit of a surprise.”
Chase slides forward on his stool, his knees a breath away from bumping into Eddie's. He puts an elbow on the bar, props his chin up on his fist and looks, like Eddie's the only thing in the room worth focusing on.
“You have a kid, right?” he asks. Eddie can't stop a startled laugh.
“Buck tell you that?”
“Obviously,” Chase replies. “He didn't tell me anything specific, I just meant—if you had a kid pretty young.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Eddie says, and finds that he has to look down at the bar top, tracing the dents in it with his fingertips, picking up peanut crumbs and remnants of sticky drink spills. The music gets fainter, or maybe just cedes to the thrumming of blood in his ears. “I'm, uh. Here and queer, I guess. Just took something like three decades to be able to say that out loud.”
Chase's knee does bump into his, then, a reassuring little touch, so much like Buck and not like him at all.
“Hey,” he says, and waits until Eddie looks up at him again. He's inexplicably terrified of what he might find on Chase's face, but it's nothing other than that steady light in his strangely-colored eyes. “I'm really happy for you.”
And Eddie's had people say that to him; has heard it from Buck and Hen and Chim and Bobby, from Pepa, even from his abuela, but there's something about a stranger saying it that makes him blink furiously, the rich yellow bulbs over the bar blurring in front of his eyes.
“Um,” he says, horrified to hear how rough his voice is, “thanks.”
And the way Chase smiles when he reaches forward and clinks their glasses together makes Eddie realize that he's not quite a stranger. That he can't be, when they share something like this.
“Don't mention it,” he says, taking a drink. Some of the foam stays behind on his mustache, and he wipes at it with the back of his hand. “Actually—oh, look at that, there's your boy.”
Eddie flushes down to his goddamned toes. Buck isn't his anything, isn't his, but the way it sounds—
“Tell you what,” Chase says, his eyes glinting. Green, Eddie thinks when the light changes. They're green. “I kind of feel like dancing. Care to join me?”
Eddie clears his throat. “I'm not much of a dancer.”
“Come on, Eddie,” Chase says, grinning, and Eddie's name sounds—kind of nice, actually, coming from his mouth. “I don't believe that for a second. I know you've got moves.”
Eddie scratches at where his cheek is still burning, and he has another no right on the tip of his tongue. But then Chase gets up, all six feet something of him, and extends a hand, and Eddie, Eddie—takes it.
It does something to his insides that he couldn't identify if he tried, to let Chase pull him toward the dance floor, weaving through the crowd, the path ahead obscured by the breadth of him. It's a hot, shivery kind of thing, pooling somewhere behind his navel, a gentle heat. Chase's hand is dry, big, callused where the base of his thumb presses into Eddie's skin.
The air gets hotter, heavier when Chase pulls him along the edge of the dance floor, clear across to the other side, already swaying in place when he lets Eddie go and turns around.
“Relax,” he shouts over the music, which is loud enough here to settle, buzzing, all the way in the core of Eddie's bones. He has danced before, has gone out a few times back when it was in the cards for him, has twirled Shannon around their narrow little kitchen to whatever song was on the radio, has forgotten himself while drying dishes to the music Buck's always putting on, but this is something else entirely.
He closes his eyes, just for a breath. Someone bumps into him from behind, gets him moving, and then it's easy, easy, to not stop. Opposite him, Chase might be laughing, or Eddie may well be imagining it, but it makes him grin as he allows his hips to loosen, as he becomes aware of the floor under his feet.
“Told you,” Chase says. Eddie opens his eyes. They've gravitated closer, close enough that Eddie can smell cologne wafting off the line of Chase's collarbone. He has to lift his chin a little to look him in the eye. “You have moves! Not so bad, is it?”
Eddie laughs, a little surprised at how easy it is to do. “Fine,” he shouts as the song changes, this one louder, heavier, “you were—”
But the rest of the sentence dies somewhere halfway up his throat, because Chase reaches out and touches him. It's easy, almost innocent, just a warm hand at Eddie's waist, but it's so much bigger, heavier than anything Eddie is used to, Chase's fingers burning through the back of his t-shirt, brushing his ribs.
He falters, and then falls right back into step when Chase pulls, brings them closer, almost chest to chest. There's an embarrassing, exposing kind of heat gathering under his collar, and he knows he'd be shaking even if the bass suddenly cut out, and he shouldn't, but—why shouldn't he?
Quickly, before he has a chance to get into his head about it, he reaches out. Threads a finger through Chase's belt loop and tugs, closing the last of the space between them, and when he lifts his head, his nose brushes over the side of Chase's neck.
The tension behind his navel snaps, sending heat racing right under his skin, spilling into every last corner. They're not even doing anything, just dancing close enough to feel each other move, and it's unlike anything Eddie's ever felt before, this buzzing warmth under his tongue, the weakness in his knees.
Chase laughs a little, right in his ear, sending goosebumps racing down the side of Eddie's neck.
“I have to show you something,” he says, and puts his other hand on Eddie's waist too, neatly turning them around between one beat and the next.
Eddie opens his mouth to ask what he's supposed to be looking at, but he has to put a little bit of space between them to do it, and then the question becomes obsolete.
Because Buck is right there, over Chase's shoulder, leaning against the wall by the bathrooms with his shoulders hunched, and he's looking. Eddie catches him, with his eyebrows drawn together and something in his eyes that he can't identify across all that distance, but the second their gazes meet, Buck looks away. Looks down at his shoes, rams his hands in his pockets, bends his head.
He's easy to read: upset, but not in a way Eddie's seen before.
He loses his rhythm.
“I should—” he starts, but Chase squeezes his hip, gentle.
“Hold on a minute,” he says, his breath brushing warm over Eddie's ear. “Let him see you.”
Eddie frowns, watching the miserable bow of Buck's back, but he sways when Chase does, his body nudged into motion.
“Something's wrong,” Eddie says.
Chase makes a noise, then pushes him away, just far enough that they can see each other, bending his head forward to be heard.
“Yeah,” he says with a grin, his teeth flashing white in the half-dark, “you're dancing with me.”
Eddie blinks, watches as Chase's face changes shape with the light. He looks back at Buck, who's still there, now tapping his foot, his entire body angled away from the dance floor.
He's not jealous. He can't be jealous when he's the one who excused himself to the bathroom in the middle of a guys' night out and came back with a man to introduce to Eddie. Can't be jealous when he's always asking about Eddie putting himself out there now that he has himself figured out. Eddie's the pathetic one between the two of them, the one who can barely put his feet straight with the way Buck's always pulling him into his orbit.
“He's not—” Eddie starts, but he has to lean in closer to do it, turn into Chase, feeling the warmth of Chase's skin so, so close to his lips - and then the rest of the sentence disappears right off his tongue, because across the distance, over the heads of people drinking and laughing and nudging each other in the booths, Buck looks at him.
Buck looks at him, clenches his jaw, and his eyes glisten in the dim light of the bulb above his head.
“No,” Chase says, firm, squeezing Eddie's hip again. “Eddie. He is.”
Eddie makes himself look away. His skin still feels alight with all this, the proximity and the heat and the dark, but something about it - about locking eyes with Buck over another man's shoulder - feels almost depraved.
“There's no way,” he says, just as they're left in a second of silence between songs. “He doesn't—”
“He told me your favorite brand of beer,” Chase interrupts. “And about your favorite food, the haircut you're considering, the weird route you take to work to avoid traffic, and he would not shut up about you being a great dad.”
Eddie—stops. Lands back on the ground with his feet planted, and not even a couple of stray elbows in his back get him to move this time.
Buck can't.
He can't, except Eddie tilts his head, and blinks through the darkness, and Buck is wiping the heel of his palm over the corner of his eye, tapping his foot so fast his entire body shakes with it.
He's doing all of that, and not leaving.
Chase sighs, a puff of air that brushes Eddie's neck. A new song starts, and he nudges Eddie's feet with one of his own, leaning in and in and in.
His beard brushes over the soft skin under Eddie's ear, and he shivers.
“Can I put my hand in your back pocket?” Chase asks, and Eddie almost laughs, but the sound turns into something rough, scraping the walls of his throat.
“Why?”
Chase shrugs. He turns them around again, firm hands on Eddie's waist, and then one of his hands moves lower, a wide palm splayed over Eddie's back, where his shirt has to be damp with sweat by now. Eddie's heart echoes in his ears, and the liquid heat in his veins makes it hard to concentrate, and he could almost, almost get lost in this; except every last cell of him is screaming to go to Buck, to fix this, to take the hurt away.
“Not going to kiss you when he's standing right there,” Chase says, with something endlessly amused in the tilt of his mouth. It's a bad idea, a terrible idea, because Buck set them up in the first place, but—there's something about Chase that makes Eddie trust him, and he's been trying to make up for the years he spent not trusting anyone.
“Okay,” he nods, and Chase grins, another flash of teeth before he—well. Puts his hand in Eddie's back pocket.
He's not slow about it, not really sensual the way he could be, the way Eddie remembers trying and not quite getting with his first girlfriend in high school. Even so, the touch has goosebumps racing up the center of Eddie's back, gathering at his nape, flashing over his scalp. He tightens the hand he has on Chase's hip, turns his head into Chase's shoulder, and—
“He's gone,” Chase says, and then there's space between them, possibly more space than at any point since they met each other. Chase is watching him with something that's not quite pity, but the softness of it makes Eddie squirm. “You should probably go get him.”
Eddie suddenly feels small, and alone, and cold. “You really think—”
“Oh my God, yes,” Chase says, rolling his eyes, yelling over the music. “Go before he runs out on you. You can do this. Just like you could figure out how to call yourself queer after thirty years.”
Eddie opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. Another person jostles him from the back, hard enough that he almost stumbles over his feet, but he just—stands and stares, his head pounding to the rhythm of the bass that's shaking the floor, smelling like a man who isn't Buck, because Buck is—
“Go, Eddie, Christ,” Chase says, reaching out to grab him by the wrists and drag him off the dance floor. “He went out that way.”
Eddie blinks. Looks Chase in the eyes - definitely green - and doesn't quite know what he's supposed to say.
“Thanks,” is what he settles on, not a little breathless, because he's—and Buck is—and Eddie—
“Don't mention it,” Chase says again, grinning under his beard. “You owe me a beer if we ever run into each other again.”
And Eddie's head finally, finally clears, between one blink and the next, the haze of heat retreating, his flush going down. He has to go.
“Fuck a beer,” he says, and grins back. “I'll invite you to the wedding.”
Then he turns and shoulders his way into the crowd that lines his way to the exit. Somehow, he manages to catch Chase's shout of “good luck”, and then he's stumbling out into the street, even the balmy spring air suddenly cool on his face. There are dozens of people leaning against the outside of the bar, talking, stealth smoking, waiting for Ubers, but Eddie hasn't spent the last four years hanging on Buck's every word to lose him in a crowd. He sweeps over people in one direction, then turns, and—there.
“Buck!” he calls, jogging to make up the distance between them, even as Buck's shoulders hunch further, as he takes another step down the sidewalk in the vague direction of where they'd come from earlier tonight. “Buck, wait.”
He does. Eddie shivers with it, the easy way he listens, but it only lasts until he's standing in front of Buck and watching as he ducks his head, trying to hide his face.
“Sorry,” he says, his voice rough. “Sorry, I wasn't feeling too well, so I just—”
“Look at me,” Eddie interrupts.
Buck takes a step away from him.
“You should go back inside,” he says, dodging the light of the streetlamp above him, scratching the back of his neck. Eddie knows this voice, knows what Buck sounds like when he's been crying, even if he's wiped the evidence away. “Chase seems great, you shouldn't—”
“Buck,” Eddie says, and makes up the step Buck put between them, coming to stand toe to toe with him. “You're upset.”
“I'm not,” Buck replies, then huffs at how unconvincing he sounds. “I'm fine. Sorry.”
He tries to retreat again, makes to step around Eddie and disappear into the night as if Eddie would ever let him, though for a second, he contemplates it. Buck is desperate to hide from him, and Eddie's to blame, so maybe he should.
But then Buck takes a step, and Eddie's reaching out to grab his wrist before the thought to do it so much as enters his head.
“Don't,” Buck says, quiet, so quiet he almost gets drowned out by a passing car. “Eddie, don't. I'm okay. Let me go.”
And finally, finally, he raises his head. His eyes have a sheen to them in the low light, the same kind of shine Eddie saw back inside, with Buck leaning against the wall trying so hard to see and to look away at the same time.
That's what he was doing, and Eddie only recognizes it in retrospect, the same thing he felt watching Buck with Taylor sometimes.
“Buck,” he says, only just loud enough to be heard. “Sweetheart.”
Buck's eyes snap to him, wide in the darkness, some of his eyelashes still stuck together. Eddie wants to take Buck's face in his hands, to kiss his bottom lip where he's worried it dark pink, to smooth out the crease between his eyebrows with his fingers and feel Buck's expression change. He wants.
“I'm sorry,” he says, feeling Buck's blood pulse underneath the thin skin of his wrist. “I shouldn't have done that in front of you.”
Buck shakes his head, a little frantic. “No, you—don't worry about me—”
“You're upset,” Eddie says again, and this time Buck doesn't say anything in response, doesn't move. “Even if you were the one who set me up.”
Which has happened a dozen times before, in nondescript bars like this one, Buck bringing a woman over with a wink and a mischievous smile. Eddie always ended up back with him in under twenty minutes, always ended the night on his own couch with Buck slumped into him, talking about nothing and staring at the ceiling. It always went the same way, until tonight.
“I know,” Buck says. A group of women leaves the bar behind him, walking in their direction, so Eddie pulls on his arm a little, moves them into the shadow of the neighboring building. “I just,” he scratches the back of his neck, “I've never seen you actually be into someone.”
Eddie almost, almost laughs. “I was only into him in the loosest possible sense of the word,” he says, and picks up Buck's other hand, moves down until all of their fingers are tangled. Buck accepts the touch easily, and presses his fingertips into the hollows between Eddie's bones.
“Right,” he says, quiet, head bent down toward their feet. He's holding himself straighter, though. Less upset, and more—if Eddie didn't know better, he might call it shy. “Didn't really look that way.”
Eddie steps in closer. Buck's back hits the wall behind him, and Eddie will feel bad about the white t-shirt later, maybe when he sees it on the floor.
“You want to know what I thought when you brought him over?” he asks, squeezing Buck's hand.
Buck looks up at him, still with that frown. “What?”
“I thought he might actually be my type,” Eddie says, and keeps holding on when Buck flinches, almost imperceptibly. “I don't really—know this Eddie yet. The one who dances with giant bearded strangers in bars. But I thought he might be the kind of guy I'd like, if…” and he trails off there, his confidence stuttering. He's almost sure. Almost, and he has to be the one to do it, has to take a breath and crack himself open the way he's been practicing, because this matters more than any of the things he's had to drag from his past into the light of the present. This - Buck a little nervous and a little messy-haired and so disarmingly beautiful even in the orange beam of a streetlight - is where he's meant to go next.
So he squeezes Buck's fingers. Breathes, and Buck's chest rises in perfect sync.
“He might be the kind of guy I'd like if I wasn't already completely gone for you.” It comes out soft, like he's delivering some kind of bad news, but it's there: in the air between them for a second, two, as another car passes by and Buck blinks like Eddie might disappear right where he's standing, and then—
“Eddie,” Buck says, broken right in the middle. “I don't—”
“I love you,” Eddie says, and this time it's sure, even. True. “You know I love you. You know, Buck.”
Buck reaches out with both of their hands. He runs the tips of his fingers over Eddie's face, Eddie's own knuckles brushing over the spot he touched.
“I don't know anything,” he says, his voice a little choked off, but Eddie's watching the realization dawn right there in his eyes. “I didn't know, and it felt so fucking presumptuous to hope—”
“You kept bringing me people to date,” Eddie smiles, and disentangles their fingers so he can pull Buck close, put a hand on the exact spot on Buck's waist he's always wanted to be allowed to touch, “and I kept coming back to you.”
“You kept coming back to me,” Buck repeats, and doesn't quite close his mouth after, an understated, quiet awe.
Eddie runs his fingers over the line of Buck's jaw, feeling the stubble there, and the heat sparks back to life in his fingertips, except—bigger. More.
“And I always will,” he says, smiling when Buck smiles, wobbly at the corners. “Unless you bring me another random guy to make you jealous—”
Buck cuts him off with a kiss.
Eddie is a weak man, and has imagined this more than once: the way Buck would kiss, completely giving himself over like he does with everything else. The way their first kiss would go, probably a little awkward, the two of them stumbling into each other with the gravity of what's happening.
Instead, Buck grabs him by the hips like he knows exactly where his hands are meant to go, and pulls him close with a naked, desperate hunger that sweeps Eddie's feet out from underneath him. He wraps his arms around Buck's neck, tangles his fingers in his hair, makes a fist, tugs, and Buck only kisses him harder for it, teeth scraping over Eddie's bottom lip.
He's thorough, insistent, and Eddie doesn't just get goosebumps; he starts shivering, from somewhere so deep he doesn't think he's ever touched it before, and it doesn't stop when Buck gentles, when he hides his tongue behind his teeth and comes back to kiss Eddie gentle, sweet, over and over and over.
Eddie doesn't have it in him to make a sound, to do anything other than breathe and try to stand on his feet. He can't even try to pick it all apart, everything he's feeling, the fire up his spine and this lazy, low, burning feeling that has him craving Buck even as he's holding him, that wants to sink into him, have him closer, closer still. It's all-consuming, head to toe, inside, out, probably seeping through Eddie's skin into the air, sinking into the ground underneath them; it's nothing like Chase, nothing like anyone who came before.
“Don't,” Buck whispers the first time they pull away, breathing hard, his lips moving right over Eddie's. “Please don't pick up a random guy ever again, I love you, I—”
Eddie leans forward, this time, and kisses Buck so carefully it makes something inside him ache. He puts his forehead against Buck's when he pulls away, his eyes closed.
“You're the one who's picking them up,” he says, smiling.
Buck runs a hand down his back, slow, deliberate, and sinks it into Eddie's back pocket. His thumb, pressed low, low into Eddie's back, burns like a brand, and Eddie—Eddie doesn't enjoy it, because he's not fifteen, except for the part where he pushes back into the touch before he even knows he's doing it.
“I think I'm done with that,” Buck says, with a smile in his voice, pressing them together chest and hip and thigh. “If—I mean. If we're on the same page about this.”
“Buck.”
Buck whines in response, wrapping tighter around Eddie, making them sway in place.
Eddie chuckles. “What?”
“I love the way you say my name,” Buck says into his neck.
Eddie presses a kiss into his hair, breathes him in and keeps breathing, timing the rise and fall of his chest to the way Buck's back expands under his hands.
“Then I'll keep saying it,” he murmurs, stepping from foot to foot as Buck sways with him, the barest suggestion of a dance to music nobody can hear. “Okay? I'll keep saying it until—oh.”
Buck raises his head, and pulls back to look at Eddie. “Oh?”
“I said I'd invite Chase to the wedding,” Eddie says, fighting a grin.
Buck's face goes through a dozen emotions at once. He opens his mouth and closes it two, three times, but he never lets go of Eddie, doesn't so much as loosen his hold when he says: “I'm not sure which part of that is more important to talk about.”
“Well,” Eddie says, framing Buck's face with his hands, “how about the part where there has to be a wedding for him to attend, so if you would—”
“Yes,” Buck interrupts. There's a breath of stillness, of perfect science, and then he's pressing the word into Eddie's lips with so much fervor they stumble backwards. There are tears in his eyes when he pulls away, but they don't fall, just shimmer along the line of his lashes, sparking there. “Only you could pull off the least romantic proposal I've ever heard of and still make me feel like this, I—Eds. Yes. Of course.”
“I'll propose to you for real,” Eddie says, and to seal the promise he raises Buck's left hand to his lips, kisses the empty space above his knuckle. His own eyes sting, blurring Buck's shape haloed by the streetlights, but Eddie would know him anywhere. Will know him anywhere, for the rest of their lives. “As soon as I get a ring, and maybe take you out on a date at least once, but I just—”
“Just?”
“Wanted to know so I can go invite him,” Eddie grins, and turns around to run.
Buck is still, silent, but only for a second. As soon as he realizes what's happening, he gives chase, laughing, surprisingly coordinated with the drinks already worn off. Eddie makes it halfway to the bar before Buck wraps his arms around his waist from behind and lifts him, spinning a little with the momentum and Eddie kicking his feet. He stumbles a couple of steps to the left, then to the right, both of them laughing so hard it makes Eddie feel hollow with the sheer amount of feeling spilling out of his mouth, but only until he looks over his shoulder at Buck and feels full to the brim again.
“No,” Buck says when he's set Eddie back on the ground, pressed to Eddie's back, his hands interlaced on Eddie's stomach. A huddle of smokers are staring at them, frozen mid-drag, and Eddie doesn't give a shit.
“No?” he grins.
Buck leans forward to kiss him. Eddie has to tilt his head most of the way back, teetering, but Buck steadies him, and smiles.
He grabs one of Eddie's hands and spins him out of his hold, sending both of them stumbling again, grinning at each other like nothing exists in the world other than the two of them making idiots of themselves.
“No,” he says, his eyes a familiar blue. “We're inviting him together.”