Archive of Our Own

“Theoretically,” says Buck, as soon as Eddie picks up the phone, “your ex writes a book about you.”

There is a pregnant pause. “…Right,” Eddie decides on, finally.

“In theory.”

“Okay,” Eddie says. Buck can imagine him at the other end of the line pressing his thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose, the way he always does when something is confusing him, like Christopher’s Math homework, or Chimney whenever he comes out with something out-of-pocket over the firehouse dining table, which helps, a little, because at least Buck isn’t the only one feeling a little like his stomach is falling out of his ass. “And in theory, where are you now?”

“The Barnes & Noble on Sunset.”

Buck chews on a thumbnail as Eddie clearly tries to find a way to respond. All the while Taylor Kelly’s printed blue eyes stare deeply into his soul. “Which is… unrelated to the matter at hand?”

“Eddie, Taylor’s written a book about me.”

Secrets of the LAFD: A Tell-All taunts him from the bookshelf. He only came here to track down a book on aeronautics, because Christopher has recently moved from dinosaurs to space and Eddie will only let him watch Star Wars if he reads enough non-fiction to know that none of what happens in it is real, which Buck took as a challenge—only apparently the children’s education section is right next to the celebrity memoir section, and apparently cutting your teeth for four years on Skywitness counts you as a celebrity, and either way Buck and Taylor broke up two years ago and the first time he’s seeing her again is on the front cover of a novel she’s written about him. Plus the rest of the Los Angeles Fire Department, sure, but undoubtedly him, too. He’d check for certain, only for some reason he feels afraid to even touch it, something like panic tunnelling in his stomach at the thought of reading about himself through her eyes.

“What?” Eddie says. “Whu…?” He can’t seem to decide which question to ask; eventually decides on, “When?” which of all them is the easiest to answer. At least has a concrete answer.

“I don’t know. Recently.” Unbidden, Buck flips open the front cover, bracing himself. Of course, it’s nothing but the title page, the inner flap of the dust-jacket, but on the side, amidst all the copyright disclaimers and credits, is Taylor Kelly, 2023. “This year.”

“This year! You broke up a century ago.”

That’s what Eddie would like to believe, because Eddie never liked Taylor. “Two years, but close.”

“What’s it called?”

Buck tells him, and Eddie goes very quiet.

“It’s… about the LAFD?”

“Apparently so.”

“You have to buy it.”

“What?” Buck had called for sage counsel and emotional support, of which that suggestion is pointedly neither. “You can’t be serious.”

“We need to know what she said. I mean—Buck, this is serious. It sounds like the beginning to an exposé. Do you think anyone in the department knows?”

“You would think so, right?” But Buck would also have hoped if that was the case, he would have at least been given a head’s up.

“Best case scenario, we can sue her for libel, but—shit, she was privy to a lot.”

“We never did anything wrong.”

“Except break her heart.”

Buck scoffs. “I didn’t—”

“You need to buy it. We have to show it to Bobby and decide what to do.”

Buck fidgets a little. Unfortunately, this was the reason he had called Eddie, which is because Eddie always knew the sensible thing to do—and this, admittedly, is it. Taylor’s proximity to Buck for years meant she had seen a lot, got a better look behind the curtain than most people ever did. And while Buck is beyond dedicated to his job, would lay his life down for his team and trusts them implicitly, he’d also trusted her with the times when he wasn’t. He’d told her about his probationary year, when he used to spend his time stealing firetrucks to have sex in, being a reactionary hothead and defying direct orders… fuck, he even told her about the time a barista mistook his uniform for being in the Navy and gave him a discount on his coffee and he hadn’t corrected them.

He doesn’t want to think what this book contains. He doesn’t want to find out.

But for the sake of the department, he has to.

“Okay,” he says, finally.

“Okay?”

“I’ll buy it.” Gingerly Buck picks it up by the corner as though it is poisonous. Her face watches him, unimpressed, from the cover. It’s a newer headshot, one he doesn’t recognise, in a little circle by her name as though only in conjunction with picture will she be recognised as Taylor Kelly, Skywitness News Eight Reporter, as opposed to just obscure author Taylor Kelly, which begs the question how she even got a book deal or landed herself in the celebrity memoirs section at all. He carries front-side down in the crook of his arm so he doesn’t have to look at her.

There’s a crackle of static over the line as Eddie just breathes, and then he says, after a long moment, “I’m sorry, Buck.”

“Thanks,” Buck says quietly, instead of it’s okay, because—well, he’s about to find out. “Catch you at home.”

He winces as soon as he says it, because he said home like it was a shared home, one they had together, as opposed to just Eddie’s place, but thankfully Eddie just says, “See you at home. Don’t forget to buy spring onions.”

It was the first thing Buck had bought. “I won’t.”

Eddie hangs up, then, which is normal, because the conversation had ended, even if what Buck had wanted was for him to stay on the phone, warm and alive and amused down the line and nestled in between Buck’s ear and his shoulder as he shopped. But he doesn’t, so Buck puts his phone back in his pocket, grabs the first space book he sees, and then heads off for the till.

*

Bobby’s eyebrows have gone sky-high, which is moderately comforting. “Well,” he says, which Buck thinks is apt. His hands hover around the edges of the book, planted firmly in the middle of his desk, like he’s trying to figure out which way to approach it as though it’s a puzzle box rigged to explode.

“Where does she get off?” says Hen. “The body’s cold. Why is she still holding onto all of this?”

Everyone looks at Buck at this, like he’s expected to have an answer as to why his ex-girlfriend wrote a book about him instead of doing the normal thing after a break-up like keeping a diary or axe-throwing. Chimney says, generously, “Maybe she’s not over him.”

Buck holds his elbows in his hands and thinks, for a moment, whether or not they could shatter in his hands. “I doubt that.”

“I suppose it does take time to get a book published,” Hen says dubiously. “Maybe she wrote the bulk of it the year you guys broke up?”

“But why get it published?” Eddie says. “Why does she think she’s important enough that the whole world wants to read about it? It’s normal to keep a diary to process your feelings, but to take it to a publisher instead of keeping it in a locked drawer like the rest of us is ridiculous.”

Buck distantly latches onto the rest of us? and Chimney’s lips twitch up as he presumably follows a similar thought process, mouth open to say something, but then Bobby interrupts with, “Team, while I understand our concern for Buck, we can’t overlook the fact that this is, first and foremost, about the LAFD.”

“Does the commissioner know about this?” Hen says. “The chief? Anyone?”

Bobby touches his temple like there’s a migraine building, where his eyebrows are still lodged high. Buck reckons it’s a shock response: his own face has looked grey and drawn all morning, like he’s already prematurely grieving. Grieving what, he’s still not sure, but probably all his dignity and privacy comes closely to mind. “I need to make some calls,” he says tiredly, and they all leave him to it.

Hen immediately puts on the kettle when they get to the kitchen, and Chimney slides Buck his half-finished Reuben without comment, and Buck loves them both so immensely that it fills the sinkhole that’s opened in his chest, just a little, just enough to keep walking comfortably. Eddie squeezes his shoulder as he sits next to him, and Buck loves him too, in a different way, and he eats his sandwich and sips the mug of tea that Hen slides his way and tries not to dissolve.

“Have you read it yet?” says Chimney.

Buck shakes his head.

“You might not be in it,” Hen says, gently.

But Buck knows better. He’s the one who dated her, after all. “She knows what makes a good story.”

She’d been a good storyteller. Always wrote her own news anchor script, was the clever quick-witted bombshell you wanted at your side at dinner parties with the most interesting stories and the most engaging way of telling them. The inverted pyramid, or something: start with the hook. Lead with the gory detail first. People like guts, she always said. Why do you think murder podcasts are so interesting?

Maybe that’s why they liked each other. They had good hooks: both single and attractive in Los Angeles with a casual bone to pick. Good chemistry and not much else. Then the pyramid widened and they realised they didn’t fit so well when it got down to the details. Buck was affable, a firefighter and blue-eyed; below it he was traumatised, angry and reckless. Taylor was sparky, clever and looked incredible in red; she was also patronising, cruel and selfish. Sometimes she couldn’t tell when too much gore made people uncomfortable; she was so certain of her ability to tell a good story she wouldn’t always be aware that it wasn’t the right time; she’d had the air of knowing she was the smartest at the table and making everyone feel just that bit shit because of it. And Buck… where to start, with Buck? Where did the pyramid end with him? He has an image of roots down to the centre of the earth, growing uglier with every foot downward. Easy when you look like him to get away with a poisoned core.

Point is, Taylor had liked hooks, and Buck was a good one.

Eddie squeezes his shoulder again, and his hand drops. Buck misses it something bad as soon as it disappears, like his voice in the phone. He wants it to stay curled up like an animal on his shoulder. It’s always so fleeting.

“Are you going to read it?” Chimney says.

“I need to, right?” Buck says, even though there’s nothing he wants to do less. Predictably, Hen says, “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, Buck,” and he smiles at her gratefully.

“Thanks, Hen,” he says. “But I probably should do this.”

“I can read it for you,” says Eddie, and Buck looks at him. “If the higher-ups weren’t previously informed of this, they’re gonna have to read it anyway. I can tell you if there are any parts about you and what they are.”

Buck is so grateful for him he thinks he could choke on it, like something physical and winged in his throat. “You’d do that?”

Eddie shrugs. “Of course,” he says. “You bought me spring onions.”

He says it like it’s a fair trade off, like he’s picking up painkillers for Buck on a grocery run he’d already planned to go on, but it’s not, because Eddie actively disliked Taylor, probably more than Buck remembers Eddie disliking anyone, had disliked her as a person and as Buck’s girlfriend, and he’s volunteering to spend multiple hours reading words she’s thought and printed onto pages so Buck doesn’t have to.

It would be easy for Buck to. He reckons Taylor on a page is Taylor at her most concentrated: meaner, cleverer, more shrewd. He’d probably enjoy it, to be honest, or at least parts, because there was once a time he enjoyed her, when mean was honest and clever wasn’t unkind. Of course, there’d also be parts too sore to even look at—love makes the good parts better and the bad parts so much worse—that he’d have to read through slitted his fingers, that he couldn’t read at all—but he’d lived with it, once. He could do it again for three hundred pages, able to be put down throughout and then burned afterwards. But Eddie: Eddie just hated her. He’d find no such enjoyment. This would be like individually plucking his eyelashes, one by one.

And he’ll do it for Buck. Of course he’ll doing it for Buck—like it’s expected. Like there’s no alternative. He’ll always do it for Buck.

So all Buck can say is, “Thank you.”

Eddie smiles at him, but then, Hen who’s been squinting at the cover for the last few minutes, says, “I think she got lip filler”, about the portrait of Taylor, and Chimney says, “Oh my God, Albert got chin fillers the other day” and Eddie laughs and says, “What?” and the conversation swiftly moves on to discuss Albert and his chin, and Buck is unsurprised because whenever Albert routed their runs he’d always take them past the clinic on Borrow and stare at it mournfully like encouraging Buck to tell him to do it, but mostly Buck just sits there and eats Chimney’s sandwich and tries not to think of the space on his shoulder where Eddie’s hand had sat.

*

The commissioner does not know about the book, nor does the chief, so a department-wide investigation is carried out as contact is made with Taylor Kelly and her publishers as well as most of the 118 who are apparently mentioned the most and whom Ms Kelly alleges were her main sources. That’s what the LAFD lawyer who has been assigned says to them when he first makes their acquaintance, just his name—Frederick Beagley, like a claymation character—and that Ms Kelly has alleged that they were her main sources. “Alleged,” Hen says, “so without evidence?” and Frederick Beagley just smiles his genially C-shaped clay smile and says that the case is intricate and being processed.

Hen had put her arm defensively around the back of the couch where Buck sits as she spoke, and yet he still can’t help but feel like this is all his fault.

For the most part, life moves on the same. Buck goes to work; does his job. Rappels down buildings and extricates people from burning cars and cats from trees. Sometimes he goes back to his own apartment. Most days he goes to Eddie’s, just to sit around a dinner table with people as Christopher talks importantly about Saturn’s rings and the cool mnemonic he learned to remember all the planets in order—My Very Epic Mother Just Served Us Nachos, but Christopher likes to make it Nine Pizzas instead because even though Pluto isn’t really a planet he doesn’t want it to be left out—and eat whatever recipe Eddie found on his Reels that week, and pointedly not look at the book on the arm of the couch and how every time he sees it the receipt Eddie uses as a bookmark, the one from the vegan café they go to sometimes on weekends, moves further and further down the side.

Every day he goes on a run. He goes four times around the block, until his blood is pounding in his ears and his calves are tight, and he wears headphones but doesn’t play music. Just him and the road and the stone in his shoe that he runs on until his sock is wet with blood and then limps home.

And yet Taylor Kelly and her big blue eyes stay hanging over him.

The lawsuit with the Los Angeles Fire Department has made it big news, bigger than it would have been just left alone. The Barbra Streisand effect, Buck hears Chimney say, so he goes home and Googles what it is, listens to Hello, Dolly! as he scrolls through pictures of Barbra Streisand’s beautiful white house lodged in a cliff face like a tooth. No one had heard of Secrets of the LAFD until it made national news, and now the irony of it all is the department’s attempt to pull it from shelves has made it hot commodity, put into the hands of more greedy consumers intrigued about what in it could be so bad. Buck does five laps; six. The stone sinks into his heel. He wonders how many more laps until he's ground it into his skin.

The thought occurs that she’s probably happy, wherever she is. Any press is good press, she’d been a believer in, and Buck had once said, how can you think that? And she’d looked down at him, because he’d been lying in bed reading while she’d been sat up on her laptop and said, not kindly, it doesn’t matter why someone’s tuning in so long as they’re tuning in. Every eye is a buck.

I’m Buck, he didn’t say in return, but he thinks of that now, as he runs, the stone in his shoe pressing harder and harder into the sole of his foot. Every eye certainly feels like it’s on Buck: he’s mostly sure he’s imagining it, but people seem to look at him as he jogs past, eyes catching not on his arms and shoulders like he’s used to but his face, his birthmark, just past his ear like his mother had always done. What has she written about him? What part of him has been packaged away in those pages and sold like a bar of soap?

Because he doesn’t have music playing, he doesn’t realise how loud the sound in his headphones has been turned until his phone rings.

“I finished it,” is how Eddie opens.

Buck keeps running. He had been, to some extent, expecting this. Last night the receipt had been only ten pages away from the back cover; it had just been a matter of what time. “And?”

“You should come over.”

“How bad is it?” Buck says, when he comes through the front door. Eddie appears, drying his hands on a dish rag, in a blue Henley and a worn pair of sweatpants, and he frowns at the sight of Buck, sweaty and panting at the doorstep.

“Did you… run here?”

“It sounded like it was urgent.”

Eddie rolls his eyes. “Not urgent enough that you had to drop everything and sprint.”

Buck doesn’t know how to say that for Eddie, it’s harder to not drop everything and sprint when he calls, like his internal compass is always tuned for true north. “You were the one who ominously called me.”

“Yes, next time I’ll have to clarify it’s okay to get into a car and drive.”

“Eddie,” Buck says, a little desperately, and Eddie’s gaze gentles, just a little.

“Sit. I’ll grab us a beer.”

That means it’s probably bad. Buck kicks off his shoes and heads for the living room. Christopher is out, at a friend’s birthday party, which Buck knows because it’s been pencilled in on the Diaz family calendar hanging in the kitchen for a month when Mikey Juarez first handed out the invitations, and Eddie had sat in the firehouse panicking for an hour and a half over an email about dietary requirements and whether or not he should buy Christopher new shoes for the occasion. “Christopher has enough shoes to last him a walking trip around the world,” Buck had said, and Eddie said plaintively, “But what if the other kids don’t think they’re cool?” and so Buck had sat beside him as he watched a hundred and one YouTube reviews about what sneakers were in for eleven-year-old boys and tried not to die at the emotion welling in his chest. It’s been there so long it’s made itself comfortable, slowly carved out space for itself amongst his heart and lungs and ribs and metastasized into an organ of its own, but there are times when it grows big again, crowds everything smaller and beats beats beats, like loving Eddie is a bodily process as vital as breathing or moving blood around the body.

It’s happening again, now, when Eddie comes back into the living room with two bottles of Coors Light and Taylor’s book under his arm. His socks are mismatched, just slightly, one black and one navy, and as he moves Buck can see the heel of the navy sock has been worn almost transparent with all the steps Eddie has walked in it, and he passes Buck a beer and sits next to him on the couch and Buck sees the book has been tabbed, little highlighter-orange and blue and green plastic slips sticking out between the pages.

Part of him warms impossibly, at the work and effort Eddie has gone, but another part of him thinks, oh no. There are a lot of tabs.

“So,” Eddie says, after Buck has prised off the cap of his beer and taken a long swig, “do you want the good or bad news first?”

“Good,” Buck says.

“You’re never mentioned by name.”

That’s something, he supposes. “Okay.”

“The LAFD are…” Eddie shakes his head. “She’s not written kindly about us. But there’s little evidence; all anecdotal and mostly conjecture, you know the sorts of sensationalised stuff extrapolated from nothing. I don’t think the lawyers are going to have a hard time building a case against her, and I don’t think they’re going to have a hard time winning it, either.”

Every sentence closes like it wants to end on a turn. Buck says, “And the bad news?”

Eddie’s jaw ticks. He has a long sip of his beer, pulls away with an exhale and scrubs a hand down his face. “She’s…” he says, and then nothing else, for a moment. “She’s an awful person.”

“She’s not that bad,” Buck says, a mostly scabbed-over instinct to defend her.

“Yes, she is.” The ardour arrests him; he thinks, dimly, with a sinking heart, what could possibly be in that book. “I can’t love you and like her, Buck. Not… not after this.” He touches the book. “Some of things she’s said about you make me want to just…”

He doesn’t finish his sentence. With a voice that feels disembodied, Buck says, “Can I read it?”

Eddie is quiet for a moment. “Honestly, I don’t want you to.”

Buck has to smile. “I’m sure she’s said worse to my face.”

“Not publicly.”

“There’s no name attached.”

“But I knew it was you. I—” Eddie manages a laugh. “Christ, Buck. I hate her.”

Buck holds out his hand. And eventually Eddie passes over the book.

“Everything tabbed in yellow is you,” he says. “I’m gonna get another beer.”

He stands up and leaves, and Buck holds the book in his lap for a moment, just looking at it. Taylor’s portrait stares impassively back at him; her eyes are like glass, a blue so light he’d always reckoned he could see right through them to the clockwork of her head. On his more spiteful days, the days they’d have a sniping passive-aggressive argument about something-or-other and then pretend it had been resolved when they went to bed together, Buck would lie with her on his chest and imagine if he listened hard enough he’d hear the tick-tick-tick of a complicated mechanical system moving inside of her instead of a heart. Of course, it wasn’t true, and there were some days when they’d curl up on the couch and watch a movie together and he’d catch her dabbing away tears, her sleeve coming away stained with spilled mascara, and he’d have a moment of thinking, look, she has empathy. But it had always been that way; like he was convincing an imaginary peanut gallery of assembled onlookers, pleading with them for proof of humanity.

He turns the book on its side. The yellow tabs are spread out, but they are most dense in the centre of the book, as though there’s a whole section about him. Sure enough, when he carefully pages it open, the chapter is entitled My Firefighter.

Blood fills his mouth. He swallows it down, and dully reads.

As well as running alongside the 118 on the ground, for three years I was in an on-and-off relationship with a member of the team. Relationships with public servants are nothing new; everyone knows someone who is the wife of Someone, a mayor or sheriff or vet. And these women are all the same. They are not doctors, or teachers, or lawyers: they are Wives, and Mothers. They fold the sheets at home, take the children to school, have a delicious hearty meal on the table every night for the man to return home to. The inherent nature of having a partner work such a job means regression. You cannot have a career yourself when you are attached to a firefighter. Their job is more important, after all, and they work such demanding schedules, so is it so hard for you to cater to their every whim, stay up until two or wake up at five to be there to rub their sore shoulders when they return home? But why is it that I must upend my life to provide and care for them? This is what being the partner to a firefighter was like.

Buck doesn’t realise Eddie’s returned until the couch shifts beside him, and when he looks up Eddie’s sitting down, nursing another beer, watching him with careful eyes.

“Well,” Buck says. “She’s a good writer.”

“She’s alright.”

Eddie’s eyes watch him intently, as though trying to see through his skull to find what he really feels. Buck just looks down at the book, smooths a hand over the page.

“I didn’t,” he says, and then stops. “I didn’t mean to make her feel like that.”

“Like a wife? A mother?” Eddie’s tone drips with derision, emphasising every invisible capital letter Taylor had bestowed the titles. “When did she ever prepare you dinner and rub your shoulders?”

“She has a point.”

“She’s describing it like you had four children and you were away at sea. She knew what she was getting into—and she’s speaking like she never had late nights or early mornings either. It makes you sound…”

“Unbelievably chauvinistic?” Buck says. “Yeah.”

There’s something that’s planted roots in him, though, at the thought that maybe he could have been, that he could have neglected her in such a fundamental way, but Eddie’s still shaking his head. “It’s not the 1950s anymore. She’s not giving enough credit to anyone here.”

Buck thinks of Karen, a mother and a rocket scientist who holds Hen’s hand at every 118 gathering. “I didn’t have a problem with her having a career.”

Just her career. Just exploiting people for views and eyes—every eye is a buck, after all—and invading privacy and disrespecting the one thing he’d ever asked of her. He still thinks of Jonah Greenway and shakes with anger. As one tends to do after a breakup, he’d gone through oscillations of wondering if he’d made a mistake, but he’d only have to look at the way Chimney’s hands sometimes shook as he opened his locker, the way Hen wouldn’t touch a defibrillator for months, and be more certain than ever that it had been the right thing.

“You don’t have to read the rest,” Eddie says.

But that had only been one tab of forty, and there’s still a lot of him left on the operating table to be packaged and sold off. “I need to.”

Eddie nods; touches his thumb to the rim of his beer bottle, collecting condensation. Buck’s own is lukewarm in his hand, the paper label coming off under his fingers. On pure impulse, he says, “Can you read it to me?”

Eddie’s eyes flicker. “I… don’t know.”

“Come on, you just said the word extrapolate.”

Buck’s trying to lighten the mood, but Eddie shakes his head. If there’s one thing therapy has done, it’s made him sincere, and Buck still reels with it, sometimes. “Not because of that. I don’t want to say any of the things she’s written about you aloud. Especially—Christ. Especially not to you.”

And Buck gets it, he does, because it had been one thing to sit beside a lawyer all these years ago listening to him clinically repeat out things Buck had told him in confidence to his team’s faces, but another entirely to have to say them himself. But while maybe not in the way he really aches for, a way that the extra organ in his ribs keens for every minute he’s awake, he’s certain that Eddie loves him. Certain that Eddie would lay his life down for him in the way Buck would for Eddie. Whatever Taylor’s written about him, at least in Eddie’s mouth it’ll be gentler. Packaged in a voice Buck knows for sure doesn’t believe it.

So all he says is, “Please?”

And Eddie relinquishes. “Okay,” he says, and takes the book from Buck’s hand. In its trail he’s left a sweating print around the dustjacket. Cracks it open to the chapter. “I’ll read.”

Buck leans back against the couch, looking at the ceiling, mechanically gathering sticky label residue beneath his thumbnail, and then closes his eyes.

*

It’s. Well.

Buck supposes it was too much to expect that she’d turn the reporter off in the bedroom.

*

Like he’d listen out for the sound of ticking cogs between her ribs, she’d lie in bed against his chest and think about how she’d make this into a headline. Man grows up with the mother of all daddy issues; deals with it by putting out fires like a man. No, too convoluted, but she liked ‘the mother of all daddy issues’. That could be a pithy byline. How about: What happens when a saviour baby fails? He goes into firefighting to save people in the way he couldn’t save his brother. Or: Not a Catholic, and yet man still tries to atone for every sin he’s ever committed before the age of three now at the age of thirty! Or: Diversity win! Local bisexual is not only a slut to fill the raging aching emptiness in his heart from the fear of being fundamentally unlovable, but he’s also depressed! Or: You can’t blame a guy for suicidal ideation when the only time he was ever looked at as a child was when he was injured. Does he even like firefighting or is it a form of self-harm?

Needs some workshopping. Lucky she’s got an editor and a book deal for 70,000 words.

*

Maddie calls the next evening.

Buck’s been fielding everyone’s calls all day, just doing lap upon lap upon lap of the block and every five minutes silencing his ever-ringing Apple watch, but Maddie’s ringtone has been What A Girl Wants by Christina Aguilera since he was nineteen and she first moved upstate with Doug, and the very sound of it, the same song he’d hear through the bathroom door as she straightened her hair for school and he’d moan about missing his bus, is enough to give him pause. For the first time all day he presses answer.

“Hi, Evan,” she says, when the line connects. She’s one of the few people who can still call him Evan. In Eddie’s mouth, Evan sounds like I see you; in Maddie’s, it sounds like I see you, and I’ve always seen you, and you were mine before you were anyone else’s. Maybe that’s why he’s already feeling a little tender around the edges as he lets himself back into his apartment and says, just as softly, “Hey, Mads.”

For a moment they just breathe on the phone together as Buck makes his way towards the couch. In the far distance of her end of the line he can hear what sounds like Chimney in the background, Jee-Yun’s delighted laughter, the clatter of pans. He imagines her sat on her own couch in their house together, warmed by her partner and daughter in the room over, and feels lonelier than he has in a while.

“I’m guessing you’ve seen,” he says.

“Maybe I just missed the sound of your voice.”

“Did you?”

“Always,” she says, and Buck’s heart, bruised black, constricts a little. “But I’ve also seen.”

They’re quiet for a moment, breathing together like they used to do whenever they’d sleep in the same room.

“How are you doing?” she says.

Buck leans back against the couch and stares up at the ceiling of his loft. After all that has happened in here, he thinks he’d be okay if it all burned down and he never saw it again. “I don’t know.”

“I can’t believe her.”

“Mm.”

“I’m so sorry this is happening to you.”

“And you.” Even Daniel hadn’t escaped Taylor’s pen. It appears everything she’d encountered was free real estate, dead or alive. “I didn’t… I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

“How could you have known?”

“I don’t know. She always liked a story.”

The closest Taylor had ever come to self-awareness was a Channel 8 function where Buck had come as a plus-one, in a suit jacket and white sneakers he’d scrubbed at with a toothbrush because he knew the effort would make her happy. The two of them had mingled, snacked on canapes and bitched about the more unbearable of her colleagues over glasses of prosecco in the corner. It had been a good evening for them. Her closer coworkers, though, the ones who introduced themselves with names Buck had heard from Taylor before, had been particularly interested in him, and on the drive back home, with a pilfered bottle of something and Taylor’s bare feet on the dash and her hair down around her shoulders, because her shoes had hurt and the pins of her elaborate updo had itched, she’d said, “They think I got lucky, with you.”

Buck had looked at her. “How so?”

She’d raised her eyebrow at him, in the way she’s done in her author picture, like she knows something you don’t. “Because. You’re good-looking and a public servant and tortured.” Her voice dramatically lowered on tortured. “People like you—men like you—are of interest to writers.”

“Why?”

“Because there’s meat. Gore. Things to get hooked on.” Her finger curled, like a literal hook, like she was casting a line and seeing what vulnerable flesh it would catch on. “You would have made some poet very happy, you know.”

“Good thing you’re not a poet,” he teased.

Taylor bared her teeth. “Oh, I’m worse.”

How right she was. A poet could make anything beautiful. Instead his ugliness was laid bare in print.

“You’re not a story, Evan,” Maddie says, now, and she sounds pressing in the way she does when she’s about to cry. Buck tips his head further back so he doesn’t do the same. “If she wanted to take up her issues with and slate the LAFD—go for it. That’s something else. It’s an institution, and sure, it has made its mistakes, but it has lawyers and departments. To bring you into it, when all you were was a fallible, human boyfriend… It’s so unbearably thoughtless of her to forget that there’s a person in this.”

“I mean…” Buck doesn’t know why, even now, he’s trying to defend her. “We ended so badly, I mean she’d given up her old place to move in with me—”

“So she publishes your childhood trauma in her… fucking muckraker? How is that fair?”

Maddie doesn’t swear often, and the curse word takes him by surprise. “I… I don’t know. I guess it’s not.”

The admission has his eyes burning. He closes them as if to stave off tears.

“It’s not,” Maddie says, fiercely. “It’s cruel.”

“I just…” It comes out in a whisper, because Buck is afraid if he speaks any louder his voice might crack, and he’s held in so much that he’s afraid what would come out if he let it. He almost feels like a little kid again when he admits, in a tiny voice, “I tried, Maddie. I really tried to be good for her.”

Maddie’s voice drops down just as gentle. “I know.”

“But she—she still saw all the broken parts anyway. She wasn’t meant to see those parts or think those things. Not when she—she was supposed to love me.”

He can forgive retrospective reflection, but some parts had been so meticulously written it was if she’d existed as an investigative journalist in those moments, documenting the end of a relationship that hadn’t ended yet. Like all along she was expecting to have to do this, and had been cataloguing the cracks for years.

And the hardest part about it all, he thinks, even harder than having it all out in the open at all, is the fact that he’d been trying. He was a therapy attendee, on a first name basis with Dr Copeland (Meredith) and was getting more encouraging head-nods than blank-faced note-jotting. (He’s learned the blank-faced note-jotting wasn’t because he’d made a good joke, but because he’d said something concerning that she was checking if she could get him medicated for.) Importantly, he was doing the work. Journalling and going to yoga classes and trying mindfulness and keeping a positivity diary and being sincere instead of deflecting with sex or his fists, writing out five things he liked about himself every morning to centre himself in a way that had nothing to do with his body but his capacity as a friend, a brother, a partner.

That should have—

He twists his mouth. That should have been enough. To know to be a little gentle with him. To see that he was trying. But she never saw it like that. She was happy for him, that he was sorting himself out, but she herself had never believed in therapy for herself because she didn’t like people telling her how to feel. She didn’t like being wrong, or being in the wrong.

(Something in Buck had also always darkly wondered if she was afraid therapy would make him less appealing to her. She liked him—how did she put it?—tortured. Tortured made him interesting to her writer friends. Tortured made him a fun fuck. Buck thinks their fundamental problem had been finding out too much about the other. It wasn’t a coincidence that they worked best as casual hookups, where they could fill in the blank spaces of the other with imagination. In reality, tortured wasn’t angry wall-sex, but scalding himself on the stove on purpose and peeling the burn open in the shower because he couldn’t save a child the day before.)

“I’m here for you, Buck,” Maddie says. “Whatever you need. And this changes nothing.”

Buck snorts. The tears do spill, then, and he roughly wipes them away with the back of his hand. “Of course you’re still here. You’re the only one who knew it all, already.”

“I think you need to give your team some more credit,” she says, and Buck sucks the inside of his mouth between his teeth, bites down until his mouth fills with blood. “And I saw you with the frosted tips, which was maybe worse.”

A laugh is startled out of him. “No worse than your eyebrows.”

“They’ve grown back!”

“Uh-huh.”

“I changed my mind,” Maddie says, “I hate you, and I’m emailing everyone you know that awful photo of you in the JNCOs.”

“Not the JNCOs, Maddie please—”

On her end of the line Maddie pulls out her laptop, and they get distracted going back over their old Facebooks and laughing at all the bad pictures, and Buck almost forgets Taylor—except for the fact where her book still sits, tabbed, on the kitchen counter, and when eventually, an hour later, when the call ends and he goes to the bathroom, he’s startled by the blood on his lips.

*

The station is wallpapered with the JNCO photo when he gets in the next morning, which is equal parts relieving and dismaying. He pulls down two on his way in, and then he opens his locker and is greeted with a printed cake.

“How did you even get it made this fast?” he says to Chimney, who emerges from between the lockers like he’d been lying in wait there all morning for this reaction. Distantly, he’s aware of Hen and Eddie also making their ways over, as though they’d been primed for this, but he avoids eye contact.

Chimney has a knowing bite of his banana. “I know a guy.”

Buck raises an eyebrow. “A cake guy?”

“With the amount that happens at this station, he’s been the most dialled of any of my other guys. Do you know how rare it is to have a veteran of a cake decorator tell you he’s never made a cake for a certain occasion before?”

“Was it the rebar?”

Chimney scowls, picking a banana string off the peel. “No. He’s made three of those. I’m talking about the multiple heart-stopping and resuscitation attempts.”

Buck remembers that cake. You make my HEART STOP! it had said, and everyone had been so dismayed it went uneaten by everyone except Chimney, which potentially had been his plan all along.

“Well,” Buck says. “Glad you’re keeping him in business.”

Hen squeezes his shoulder. “Good to see you, Buckley,” she says, and he hears the little hidden message in it, the I know what’s happened, and am glad you’re here message, and at once he’s so grateful for Maddie and Chimney he could die, probably. It was B-shift on the 24-hour yesterday, so he hasn’t seen any of them since that night at Eddie’s.

Speaking of:

“Even if it is looking like that,” Eddie says, and Buck feels more than sees his presence, standing closely at his shoulder, their shirtsleeves brushing but not skin. Buck feels the distance more keenly than he’s maybe ever felt anything, the absence ringing hollow like a grave, but he also can’t turn and meet Eddie’s dark gaze. Like he hasn’t seen any of them since the day of the night at Eddie’s, he also hasn’t seen Eddie since the night at Eddie’s; hasn’t even spoken to him, leaving all his calls to ring to voicemail yesterday. It’s unusual for Buck and Eddie, who rarely go a day without contact, even if the contact is just one of their goes at Words With Friends, or Eddie sending bitchy texts about the haircut of whichever Jeopardy! contestant is annoying him that night, but especially given the context. After Eddie had read Buck the chapter, Buck had sat there, feeling a hundred things but mostly just numb, and Eddie had said, what are you thinking? and Buck had said, that I don’t really want to talk about it, and Eddie said okay, and they’d put on the National Geographic and watched giraffes until Buck had rescued a little bit of his breathing, and then it was time to pick up Christopher, and Eddie had said, you coming? and Buck had feigned a headache, said he might actually head home.

Eddie had looked at him, obviously seen right through it, and he hasn’t had to play the Christopher will want to see you card since their friendship was in its infancy and they would still sometimes use him as an excuse to hang out, but had let him go. And then Buck went home, put on his gym shoes, and jogged round and round and round the block until the sun rose.

He can feel the wound on his foot now, hopes he isn’t walking with a noticeable limp. Says, about the JNCO photo, “Yeah, well, Maddie said they were cool.”

“Maddie was setting you up,” Hen says.

“Yes, I realise that now.”

She just snickers, squeezing his shoulder and says, “Well, I’d better be getting a slice,” and so Buck carries the cake up to the loft with the others trailing him like a procession, walks past approximately eight more JNCO posters and also a cardboard cut-out, and then doles out slices at the kitchen table. It’s where Bobby finds them a couple of minutes later, looking affably bemused.

“What’s all this about?” he says, and then, predictably, “Oh, is that red velvet?”

He’s given a slice, does the obligatory song-and-dance about how he hadn’t been angling for a piece and then tucks into it happily. Buck says, “No, just Tuesday.”

“Well, I don’t know why everyone’s laughing, I think you looked very handsome,” Bobby says. “It’s fashionable.”

“Yeah, but you’re a man of the seventies,” Chimney says. “Of course you’d think that.”

Eddie’s foot touches Buck’s below the table. Buck doesn’t look at him.

“I’m only a few years older than you, Chim,” Bobby says with a laugh, and Chimney says, “We’ve all seen that pompadour, Cap,” and he and Hen break into dramatic humming of the piece that had played over the video of Bobby figure skating when he was a kid. Bobby just rolls his eyes, finishes his cake, and then says, “Buck, a moment in my office?”

Buck knew this was coming from the moment he walked in. He moves his foot away from Eddie’s and stands. “Sure.”

Bobby’s office is one of the places in the firehouse he’s visited the least; there’s never usually a reason to visit, for one, and he also knows that during a long shift, a hard shift, Bobby uses it almost like a chapel. A place of prayer. He’d walked in, once, on Bobby sat behind his desk, eyes closed, thumbing the beads of the rosary he keeps on his desk, lips mouthing prayer. Buck was never a religious kid, not like Eddie, who keeps a Bible in every room even if he never touches them, but he’s built up a resentment against God anyway, who has made his life one cosmic joke, and as such doesn’t feel like he’s welcome in to a sacred place.

It’s not sacred now, anyway: just an office. Buck sits down in front of the desk as Bobby takes the chair behind it.

“Firstly,” Bobby says. “I wanted to let you know that the LAFD has won the case against Ms Kelly and her publishers on counts of defamation and invasion of privacy.”

It’s a hollow victory, but a victory nonetheless. Through a mouth that feels like cotton, he says, “I didn’t know invasion of privacy was an actual legal thing.”

“Apparently so.” Bobby smooths his fingers across the creases in his temple, growing deeper by the year. “But many of her claims about the LAFD were libelous and many of her methods of gathering information were seen as untoward. She has to pay a generous fine and as her result her book is being pulled from shelves.”

The relief is palpable, even in his body, the knots of his shoulders and calves he hadn’t realised he’d been holding all these weeks finally loosening, and yet the victory still feels… meaningless. He’s angry he’s not more glad of it. “That’s good.”

“It is. Granted, we didn’t escape totally unscathed. Some of her claims have resulted in a lot of internal investigations taking place, but I think this is a good thing. You need to give the department a shake every couple of years for the dead birds to fall out.” Buck nods, only half-understanding what this means. Like he can read the stunned processing on his face, Bobby adds, a little kindly, “This is good news, Buck. We’ve won.”

He should be glad. Why isn’t he glad? She can’t profit off tearing down the LAFD anymore; her book is off shelves; and importantly for him, his secrets can live and die in the paper shredder. Yet his chest still feels hollow and achey, his calves still tensed like he’s preparing to run. His wounded heel throbs. Maybe the rock was made of lead, and he ground it into his bloodstream, and this is what it is like to die in slow motion.

“On a more personal note,” Bobby says, “I’ve been made aware of… what else the book contained.”

Buck doesn’t respond.

“You have grounds,” Bobby says, and his voice is careful. “If you’d want to pursue your own legal action.”

“I think we’ve both had enough lawsuits for a lifetime, Cap.”

Bobby’s lips twitch upwards. “Well, Mr Beagley wanted me to let you know that the option is there. And to pass along his card, but I’m sure that was unrelated.”

Buck shakes his head. “I just want it to be over.”

He avoids meeting Bobby’s gaze, just picks at a plastic skintag underneath the chair and looks at his knee, which he hadn’t realised was jogging up and down as though in his head he’s still running around his block. In his periphery, he can see Bobby watching him, like he’s hoping Buck will make eye contact and they can have a loaded-gaze moment, probably the thing he took him in here to achieve, but the lawsuit has been won; Taylor’s book is no more. And so he doesn’t want to talk about it anymore.

Bobby must get this, because, finally, he says, “In that case, you’re free to go.”

Buck nods, and pushes himself to his feet. Just as he’s reached the door, Bobby says, “Buck.”

Buck turns.

“I was sorry to read about your brother,” he says, softly. “I didn’t know.”

Something seizes tight in Buck’s throat. It tastes like tears; like bile. “Thanks, Cap,” he says quietly, and then slips out.

*

“You’re avoiding me,” says Eddie.

One-two. One-two. Buck aims careful hits at the punching bag, absorbing the force of each one hard through his knuckles and wrists. “No I’m not.”

“Yes, you are.”

“We’re talking now, aren’t we?”

“Buck.” And then there’s a hand bracing the back of the back, and the next punch jars his arm all the way to his shoulder, making him gasp and his eyes sting. He hisses through his teeth as he nurses it close to his chest, shaking his hand and rolling his elbow. When he looks up, Eddie’s watching him with hard, worried eyes, in a workout singlet and shorts as though he’d been on his way to the station treadmill and took a detour when he saw Buck. It’s that, maybe, the sincerity in his eyes, the way he hadn’t approached with any ulterior motive except concern, that has Buck skittering a little in reticence.

“Sorry,” he mutters as he straightens, readjusting the Velcro of his knuckle strap.

Eddie makes a frustrated sound. “I’m not looking for an apology. Talk to me, man. What’s going on?”

The truth is, too much. What feels like a regurgitating of every trauma he’s experienced, the all-consuming feeling of a throat scraped raw from bile, over and over. He feels simultaneously aged by it all and also very, very young, like Taylor had shucked him like corn of all his callouses and left him vulnerable and small. And then Eddie, in the middle of it, reciting vindictive words about him in a voice that cared, and even though Buck had asked him to, hearing it aloud from his mouth, hearing his warm drawly voice shape every reason Buck was a bad person and every private thing he’d ever thought, that Taylor had ever thought about him, the times he thought she hadn’t seen him pressing on old burns or going on three-am runs or, on his worst days, finding videos of the shooting online and seeing the way he did nothing—

It was too much. Too much for even Eddie to see.

He’d known most of it, probably, but it’s one thing to know distantly and another to be told, directly. And he’s not alone in his baggage—least of all not with Eddie—but she’d told it meanly. Callously. There’s no empathy to be gleaned. It wasn’t a story told with grace asking for your compassion; it was one where Buck was, concretely, the bad guy. A life spent helping strangers opens doors, she’d written. So was it surprising when I discovered his infidelity? No. I’d known it like an inevitability, like the coming of a new season. But was it surprising when he dealt with it by asking me to move in, give up my apartment and my lease and my ten-minute commute, for him, and thinking it reasonable? Yes. Even I wouldn’t have thought him capable of such cruelty.

Buck doesn’t know how to say that, so he says, “I’ve just… been dealing with some stuff.”

But Eddie’s evidently not in the mood to be vagued with. “Some stuff? You mean the book your heinous ex-girlfriend came out with?” Buck sets his jaw. “I know, Buck. I was there. Don’t try and blow this off.”

Buck rolls his elbow, throws an experimental hit at the bag again. Does another, when his arm feels okay.

“Or just—say you don’t want to talk about it,” Eddie says, and he almost sounds insecure when he speaks. “But don’t shut me out. We’re meant to be partners.”

“Look, if you so desperately want to find out what’s wrong with me just reread the book,” Buck snaps. “It should tell you everything.”

Eddie’s face reels like it’s been slapped, but before he can say anything the bell goes. Buck’s heart is pounding, his mouth sour with regret and guilt, but he ducks his head and shoulders past Eddie for his turnouts. They have a job to do, after all. It’s not the time.

Except it appears the universe is prepared to make one last joke of him, wring him out one more time before it finally lets him dry, because when the trucks pull up to its destination—a jumper on a roof, pacing with a gun, evidently there long enough that the gathered cops have brought deckchairs and cards—the ever-familiar Channel 8 van is there too.

Lowly, Buck curses. Everyone in the truck looks at him, except Hen, whose eyes go wide behind her glasses as she peers through the window. “Oh, shit,” she says.

Maybe she’s not here, Buck desperately thinks as they all clamber out the truck. Channel 8 is a broad network—they have lots of different presenters. It would have to be astronomically poor luck that of the likely dozens of reporters they have, the one to be paged to this incident would be Taylor Kelly. By now the rest of the 118 have come to similar realisations, Chimney lifting his sunglasses as though the to check that emblem on the side of the van isn’t a trick of the light. Succinctly, he says, “Well, this is awkward.”

“Tell me about it,” Buck mutters.

Bobby has taken off to adjourn with the police captain on duty—Athena, Buck can see, who is sipping at a bottle of water looking deeply inconvenienced by the whole matter. Buck can feel Eddie somewhere near his back, but unlike previously he doesn’t approach him, just keeps his shoulder against the side of the truck with his arms folded, watching the scene ahead of them. Buck feels his absence something chronic, and he rings with guilt. His outburst was unreasonable and unkind, and he knows Eddie’s left the ball in court to make things right, but also he doesn’t know if he can do it yet, not when he still feels so itchy and wrong-footed. Maybe when they get back. Just the sight of the Channel 8 van has unseated him, armpits sweating and uniform feeling a size too small. Post break-up trauma, or something. He had to avoid Walgreens like the plague after a particularly bad situationship with a cashier a couple of years ago.

Then from around the side of the van he spots a flash of shiny red hair and his mouth goes dry.

“Well, looks like we might be here for a while,” Bobby says, when he returns. “They’ve apparently been trying to de-escalate the situation for close to three hours now. We were called to do an extraction but with that gun we don’t want to risk provoking him.”

“Is it even loaded?” Chimney says. “I mean, you’d think he would have shot it by now if it was.”

Bobby shrugs. “We don’t want to risk it. We’re just going to have to wait him out.” Everyone sighs about this, until he adds, “Hey, Athena said they’re putting in an order for pizza, anyone got any requests?”

“Do not say banana peppers,” Hen says immediately, and Chimney drops his mouth open in indignation, but all Buck can look at is Taylor Kelly, not a hundred feet away from him, speaking to someone. She’s turned away, so all Buck can see is the side of her, her patented candy-red lipstick, the flare of her orange hair. She’s wearing a long white coat and brown high heels, and Buck hasn’t seen her in over two years except for on the cover of a book, those blue see-through eyes watching even when he turned the book cover-down, and yet somehow she’s here, in the flesh. She’s so much smaller than he remembered. In his head—in the past few weeks—she’s become almost a giant in his memories. Now, a long red hair catches on her lipstick, and she absently brushes it away as she talks. She’d barely come up to his shoulder.

The movement has her eyes drifting across the lot, just briefly—and then they snag on Buck. They go a little wide.

Buck doesn’t think he can move. Behind him, Eddie exhales. “Is that…”

She starts coming over.

Hen and Chimney haven’t noticed yet, still squabbling over banana peppers. Taylor stops a stone’s throw from them, arms folded tightly across her chest. All Buck can think is that Hen was right, she did get filler. It’s an insane observation but it’s the only one that dates her to now, instead of back to two years ago when she’d last been in his life.

“Buck,” she says.

“Hey,” says Buck.

The sound of her voice finally has Hen and Chimney registering her presence for the first time. Buck’s aware of Chimney drawing himself up like a mating bird, but only Hen greets her, with a chilly, “Taylor.”

“Hi, Hen,” says Taylor.

“I just need to be sure,” says Hen. “Do we need to sign any NDAs before we start speaking to you? You know, before you write another book about us?”

Taylor’s lips purse, but it’s the only acknowledgment she gives. “Buck, a moment?”

“Buck,” Eddie murmurs, but Buck steps away from the hearth of his presence.

“Sure,” he says.

They find a spot in the shadow of the Channel 8 van, where men hefting over-the-shoulder cameras are sipping at lattes in paper cups and discussing last night’s Knicks game. Like this, Buck is closer to the jumper than he was at the truck, and he can hear him yelling out his own pizza orders to the cops below, waving the gun to emphasise. “If there aren’t any fucking black olives I’ll shoot myself, you understand?”

“Duly noted,” the officer calls back. “Do you want stuffed crust?”

“So,” Buck says. “The book.”

Taylor sniffs, adjusting the fat sausage curl of her hair on her shoulder. It’s the same way she’d always done it, with her biggest curling iron so it fell in one neat pigtail on each shoulder, and at the end of the night when she’d return home with them hanging down her back they’d fall like curtains over a stage, a gap down the middle of her hair where she’d parted it. “I’m sure you’re happy.”

“Happy?”

It’s the furthest thing from what he’s been feeling. “You won. You and your big government-backed department. You got the last year of my life pulled from shelves. Does it make you feel good, to know you scared a small publisher into submission?”

“Uh,” Buck says, “not really?” Taylor rolls her eyes, like that’s the issue. “You really think I’m happy about all of this?”

“I think the department didn’t find my book all by itself.”

“Okay, yeah, I was the one who found it, but—” She scoffs. “Taylor, some of the things you wrote about me were totally inappropriate. You get that, right?”

“I never named you.”

“Oh, yeah, I’m sure the big blond firefighter kept it real anonymous.” It’s hard to tell, but he thinks Taylor flinches at this—like maybe she hadn’t expected him to have read it. Distantly, it occurs to him that maybe she’d never anticipated it to personally fall into his hands, that she’d prepared herself for the fight with the LAFD over the things she’d said about them, but that her chapters about him would fall through the cracks. And yet this doesn’t make him feel any better; somehow, he’s even more mad. “I told you all of that in confidence.”

“I didn’t—” Taylor has the decency to look a little contrite. Vulnerability had always felt discordant on her in how rarely she’d ever show it; she was the kind to go down fighting as long as she could. “I didn’t expect you to read it.”

“So what, if you had it would have been different? You would’ve axed the chapter?”

Buck doesn’t mean for the edge in his voice, but it’s though weeks of grief have finally set like concrete around his heart, and face-to-face with the eyes that have been staring him down from the cover of this godawful fucking book it’s hard not to get angry. Taylor bristles with it, straightening. The vulnerability is gone. “I’m a writer, Buck. I’m perfectly entitled to write about my life as it happens. You were the one insistent on overstaying his welcome in it and treating me like shit when you very well could have up and left at any point.”

Oh, I make you unhappy? she’d all but laughed at him during their breakup. You asked me to move in the morning after you kissed another woman and I make you unhappy?

“Our lawyer told me I had grounds to sue, Taylor.”

She scoffs again, but for a moment her eyes are afraid. “Of course he’d say that. He’s a lawyer. He wants your money.”

“I didn’t,” Buck says, because he knows she’d never ask, but the fear in her eyes abates. “For the record.”

“Why not?” she says. “If you’re so hurt by it? I thought you were great at lawsuits.”

It’s such an unexpected undercut of a hit that for a moment Buck can’t quite speak, just staring at her. “Are you serious?”

She stands firm, but her expression wavers, a little. She knows she went too far.

“Maybe because I don’t actually want to raze your entire fucking life to the ground,” he says. “Maybe because I thought I’d give you the dignity of sparing you instead of raking my entire life across the coals.”

“I told you, you were never meant to—”

“So you still wrote it?”

“It’s basically a diary, Buck. Grow up.” She arches an eyebrow at him. “Besides, what part wasn’t true?”

And it’s then that Buck realises she’s still exactly the same person as the one who’d stood in his kitchen and pressed a key back into his hand. He’d thought that maybe in the years they’d been apart, something in her would have softened, realised the error of her ways, but she stands before him, entirely unchanged. Still making exactly the same mistakes that had made Buck break up with her in the first place.

“You don’t even get what the problem is, do you?” he says.

“What, that I dared criticise your big important fire department?”

“No. All along—the whole thing. It doesn’t matter if it’s all true—you don’t get to exploit people for your own gain. That’s not how life works.”

Taylor rolls her eyes. “Newsflash, Buck: that’s exactly how life works. I’m a reporter. I report on news. I know you want to act all high and mighty about our careers, but my job is to tell stories, even those people don’t want me to. It’s called freedom of speech and the public have a right to know.”

Buck’s mouth feels numb when he says, “The public have a right to know about my brother who died of leukaemia?”

“It was one line, Buck.”

“And it’s been my whole fucking life.” He’s shaking, he realises. “That’s what you don’t get. To you, it’s a story. To me, it’s my life. It’s this weight I’ve been carrying around since I was barely four years old. I don’t ever stop seeing him. He’s everywhere. And you think it’s just some story to put in your little tell-all?” She opens her mouth, but he can’t stop talking. “No, because you don’t think, Taylor. That’s the problem. You think my sister, who’s done nothing to you, is glad that half of Los Angeles knows about her dead brother and the fucking pantomime she had to put on for half our childhood to pretend he didn’t exist? You think my parents back in Pennsylvania are glad their dead son is making headlines? We’re not characters from a book. We’re real people. Your stories hurt people. How after all this time are you still not seeing that?”

He doesn’t realise he’s out of breath until he finishes speaking and feels winded, every word spat from his lips like sour candies. His ears are ringing.

And then behind him, footsteps crunch.

Taylor laughs, wet and angry. “Oh, and of fucking course he’s here too.”

“Good to see you too, Taylor,” Eddie says, measured, and he stands next to Buck. Touches his elbow, absorbing some of the shock. Buck doesn’t realise he’s still shaking until the trembling point of him is cupped by Eddie’s steady, worker’s hand, and the tension lets out, just a little. “Everything okay over here?”

“Everything’s fine,” Buck says. “Let’s go.”

“You should be so lucky that’s all I said,” Taylor says, at his retreating back, and Buck goes tense as a live wire. “I could have mentioned him, too.”

They turn. She’s white-faced, watching them with damp, livid blue eyes. Buck’s heart feels suspended in his chest. “What are you talking about?” Eddie says.

“That you were the third member of our relationship. I was basically eked out by you and your son.” She raises an eyebrow at him, at his disbelieving face. Buck thinks he’s disintegrating at the extremities; there’s no other reason why he can’t feel his fingers or lips. “Hasn’t he told you?”

“Told me what?” Eddie says, and he sounds very, very careful.

“Come on, Buck.” Taylor smiles without her eyes, still damp with fury. Bared teeth. “You didn’t think the infidelity I was talking about was the one with that Lucy girl, did you?”

“Buck and I were never together.”

“Tell him that.”

Buck feels Eddie glance at him, but he resolutely doesn’t look back. Every muscle has locked in his body, and he’s gone entirely cold. He can’t move.

And then, just as Buck feels like he’s going to drop tail and run, Eddie says, “You know what I think, Taylor?”

“Tell me,” Taylor says, her voice dripping in irony.

“I think,” Eddie says, and his voice is measured and calm in a way that cuts like a knife, so much so that any traces of humour disappear from Taylor’s eyes, “that you’re sad. I think that you’re lonely, and cruel, and that until you look in the mirror and wake up you’re going to be alone. I think that only narcissists believe their diaries are important enough to publish, and that you’ve smeared your own name, and I think that you’re also wrong. About a lot, but especially about Buck. You would be so lucky to get to know him again, to have gotten to know him at all. He’s the most selfless, kind person I know, who’d do anything for me or my son. I don’t care whatever you’re holding over his head, because frankly you being out of his life means he gets to be more in mine, and if that makes me a terrible, selfish person then so be it. You didn’t deserve to know him. So if anything, I don’t feel bad for you. I just pity you.”

Taylor has gone very quiet, just watching him wide-eyed.

“You were also wrong about your diary being interesting enough to publish,” Eddie says. “It’s not, and you’re a bad writer.”

A shocked kind of laugh escapes her, more an exhale than anything. For a long moment she doesn’t speak, just looks at them him shaking with rage, nostrils flared, but face very, very white, and Buck thinks, distantly, that he knows he’s won. She’ll never learn, but there’s nothing to defend here. “Well,” she says, finally, her voice quiet. “Thanks to your legal team my book’s been canned and I’ve been dropped from my publishing house. I barely kept this job. So I guess that’s not a problem for you anymore.”

“No,” Eddie says evenly. “I guess it’s not.” He looks at Buck. “Shall we?”

“Yeah,” Buck manages, somehow. “Yeah. Let’s go.”

He turns without waiting for an answer. At his back, he hears Eddie say, “Ordinarily I’d say it was nice to see you…”

“Oh, fuck off, Diaz,” Taylor snaps, and the gravel crunches as Eddie jogs after Buck.

Buck feels a hundred things. Sensation back in his fingers, for one, which at once just want to curl into the soft give of Eddie’s turnouts and stay there forever, and wrung-out like a rag, and something resigned and cold too, but also… relieved. Light, in a way he hasn’t felt in weeks, since he walked into the Barnes & Nobles for a book about space. Like the tumour he’s been carrying around with him since he first saw the book has finally been cut out and left behind.

“Hey,” Eddie says lowly, when they’re shoulder-to-shoulder, “you sure you’re good?”

All Buck can say is, “Why did you say all of that?”

“What?” It’s day and night, the way Eddie was with Taylor and how he’s smiling at Buck now. Not for the first time, Buck is so glad he is lucky enough to get this Eddie, to be liked enough by him to get the crinkly-eyed smiles that turn his dark eyes almost the colour of whiskey, like amber. “What do you mean?”

“All that stuff you said to Taylor. Why?”

Buck doesn’t know why he’s pushing the matter. Maybe pushing Eddie into admitting that he didn’t say you being out of his life means he gets to be more in mine, and that Buck had just imagined it; or, worse, that he did say, and hadn’t meant it. All he knows is that this can’t be happening, this can’t be real, not on the kerb of the worst few weeks of his life in recent history.

“Because,” Eddie says, “I’ve been winning arguments with Taylor in my shower for years and finally it felt good to do it in person.” Buck stares at him. “Because I meant it, Buck. Why are you being weird?”

He meant it, Buck thinks dizzily, and yet all that comes out is, “You imagined having arguments with Taylor in the shower?”

Eddie rolls his eyes, but the tips of his ears are pink. “Not often.”

“But you did.”

“Yeah. Sometimes.”

“About what?”

“Why are you being cagey about Taylor?”

“Because,” Buck says, and he can feel the flush on the back of his neck, this rising feeling of elation in his stomach, the strangest sensation of being suspended. “Because she also meant it. What she said.”

Eddie’s face does something complicated, but not in a bad way. Something almost like—like hope. Buck’s heart gallops into overdrive. “About telling me to fuck off?”

“Eddie.”

“Buck,” Eddie says, and he’s stopping, forcing Buck to stop with him so he can look at him in the eyes. It’s even worse like this, because Buck can’t duck away or deflect from his sincerity. Not that he’d want to: he thinks he could die in this moment, Eddie’s eyes staring into him, and be happy. Death by beautiful-eyed man. A way to go for sure. “Why were you avoiding me?”

…A little less happy. “Eddie—”

“No, I need to know. Before we say anything else. Before—before anything else happens.”

Anything else, Buck latches onto it.

“I need to know,” Eddie says. “We talk to each other. Partners, remember?”

“Because I didn’t want you to think about me the way she thought about me,” Buck blurts, and Eddie reels a little, like he hadn’t been expecting it. “Eddie, you’re—you’re one of the most important people to me. I couldn’t take the thought of reading all that shit about me changing how you viewed me. Even—even hearing it aloud in your voice was too much.”

Eddie looks—he looks devastated. “Do you really think I would think of you like that?”

“I don’t know,” Buck admits. “Or—no, I know you wouldn’t, but I was so terrified I wasn’t being rational.”

“I knew all of it already. You know that, right?”

“But Taylor saw it as a detriment, and I… I didn’t want you to realise that it was.”

“Buck,” Eddie says, and then his hands, his lovely, warm, steadfast hands are coming up and cupping Buck’s face, and Buck is so glad they’d ducked behind one of the police cars so the way his knees go kinda liquid at the movement isn’t seen by anyone. “It’s you. There’s not a part of you I could ever think as a detriment. Except maybe the JNCO jeans.”

“Oh, fuck you, man,” Buck complains, and Eddie laughs, vibrating through his hands. Buck rings with this second-hand laughter. “I’m forcing Maddie to delete her Facebook.”

“It was sweet. I’ve seen worse.”

“Yeah?”

“Of course. Like the frosted tips.”

“Oh my God,” Buck bemoans, and makes a move as if to pull away but Eddie doesn’t let him, keeping one hand on his cheek as the other smooths down his shoulder. “I hate you.”

“No you don’t.”

“No I don’t,” Buck says, and Eddie smiles, the kind of twinkly, whiskey-eyed smile that never fails to make Buck’s stomach backflip. Buck can’t believe this is happening. Feels almost shy when he says, “You meant it?”

“Every word,” Eddie says. “You’re mine.”

Like the way Evan had sounded in his mouth: like he was something else. Something good. It’s been a long time since Buck’s felt like something good. But maybe anything in Eddie’s voice feels like that. “I, like, love you. Like in the infidelity, eking-out way.”

“That’s the worst thing you’ve ever said to me,” Eddie says, but when he kisses him it’s like he means it. Like Buck is something treasured. “I love you too, by the way. Like in the having imaginary arguments with your ex-girlfriend in the shower where I imagined confronting her about how shit she was and how you deserved to be with me instead.”

Buck’s eyes go wide. “Oh my God.”

“JNCO jeans, Buck,” Eddie hurries to warn him, but Buck’s chest feels so bright and radiant all he can do is wrap his arms around Eddie’s shoulders and laugh, breathing in the scent of him, aftershave and soap and sweat and the laundry detergent of his uniform. “What?”

“Nothing,” Buck says. “Just… really happy.”

And Eddie’s smile could power Los Angeles. “Come on,” he says, taking Buck’s hand and squeezing. “We’ve got pizza.”