Archive of Our Own

here's that voice in your head
giving you shit again
but you know he loves you
and he doesn't mean to cause you pain
please listen to him
it's not too late
turn off the engine
get out of the car
and start to walk

it doesn't have to be like this
— DRUNK DRIVERS/KILLER WHALES, Car Seat Headrest

*

Texas is hot. L.A. was hot too, but Texas is a different beast and it’s one with molten breath. It licks its way up Eddie’s spine and leaves a sheen of sweat across the back of his neck.

Californian heat is more mystical in nature. It inspires the imagination, conjuring up images of beach fronts, following threads of sense-memory: sand gritty between wet-slick fingers, the taste of sea-salt and surf on the upper lip, the chemically-metallic smell of sunscreen with zinc. Texas heat is unforgiving with nothing to offer besides dark dreams of an endless and oppressive desert, cracked-dry earth with no water in sight, and the bleached-white bones of some long-gone animal lying forgotten beneath the beating sun. It’s the kind of hot you’d expect in Hell.

Eddie finds it to be an adjustment. His sweat-slick palms slip their grip over an Allen key that feels too small in his fist. He’s trying to build a TV stand. His new home is a mess of slipped-lid boxes, half-heartedly pillaged and cast aside like partially devoured corpses best left for scavengers. The acrid stench of cardboard fills the living room. Unpacking can only be accomplished in small doses. Each instance sees Eddie poured-over with the effort, all damp and smelly and parked in front of his pathetically sputtering A.C. unit where it clings to the pane of an east facing window, his cheeks flushed and his chest volcano hot as puffs of cool air weakly flutter the strands of hair plastered to his forehead.

It’s been too quiet lately. Eddie can’t find his Bluetooth speaker. Having the TV set-up would help, he thinks, with its offerings of hushed voices and blue-light glow.

It’s a simple piece of furniture. Eddie picked it out from a picture on a website and it arrived on his doorstep, a convenience of the modern age. The instructions are unnecessarily complicated, opting for the vagueness of pictograms over the straightforwardness of written directions. The task proves long and arduous. When Eddie’s finally finished with it, he wanders into the kitchen and shoves his face under the faucet with the tap nudged all the way cold. It sears frigid water against his overheated skin, slipping off the curve of his brow, soaking his hair line and his shirt collar. He pulls away from the stream with a heavy breath and leaves it running. There’s a used drinking glass sitting upright at the bottom of the sink. Eddie fills it to the brim and throws it back, drinking it down in four or five big gulps, fast and reckless enough that some of it spills out of the corners of his mouth, trembling a path down his chin and throat. Once it’s empty, Eddie refills it before he wanders back into the living room.

His new TV stand sits awkward and misplaced in the centre of the unseemly looking hardwood floor. That’ll need replacing. Eddie adds that to the ever-growing list of to-do’s that exists nowhere but inside his own head. He fishes his phone out from the pocket of his basketball shorts, snaps a picture and sends it to Buck. This took me four hours, he follows it up with. I put it together wrong and then had to take it apart again. Eddie’s apathetic thumbs-up is shoved into the corner of the photo, his palms dusty, his nail beds dirty and torn-up around the cuticles.

Buck tapbacks a heart in reaction to the image. It looks great!

Keeping in touch is a concerted effort. They text each other semi-regular updates. Two scrolls up from Eddie’s most recent message is a picture of an Italian sandwich Buck ate a few days ago, exploding with cured meat and marinated eggplant and a thick shmeer of garlic mayonnaise. Eddie could tell it was taken at the firehouse from what he could see of the background. He told Buck I hope you brought gum with you to work today. Further upwards, there is a photo of Eddie out on his front porch with his fingers curled under the jaw of a vaguely scraggly looking cat, who is nuzzling into his palm. I think she’s a stray, he had said to Buck, noting the lack of collar around her throat. I gave her some tuna. What should I call her? Buck had responded, simple and confident: Cheddar, after the orange hue of her fur.

The constant contact is good for Eddie. Open communication proves an effective shield against the looming shadow of loneliness and the text thread itself serves as a sort of informal inventory, a charting of Eddie’s accomplishments since he began this endeavour that still occasionally feels foolish despite his commitment to it, especially as the presence of boxes persist and the repairs pile up. Eddie can’t remember the last time he spent this much time alone. Probably when he was a kid, right after Sophia was born. It’s hard enough being back in Texas — where it’s hot, where things are so familiar and yet so wickedly unfamiliar, nostalgia turned rancid and rotting putrid in Eddie’s guts — and he can’t help but worry that his old life is slipping away, like shifting sands beneath his heels.

But then there’s Buck, an open line, an extended hand, and he holds tight to Eddie despite the distance, happy to indulge and incapable of disingenuousness. There is this disordered mountain of unspooled context-thread between them, all knotted up tight from the years of back-and-forth and pulled taut across the hundreds of miles, and it manages to hold despite it all, a phantom tugging against the first knob of Eddie's spine.

Maybe that’s why the heat gets to him so much. Some buried bodily instinct to tempt him to escape these harsher climates and return to something more mystical, more open, more free.

Eddie’s glass is empty again, its smooth surface turning lukewarm in his grip. He leaves it on the misplaced TV stand and moves listlessly into the bedroom. This space — much like the rest of Eddie’s newly acquired fixer-upper — remains largely bare; a bedframe and its accompanying mattress in the centre of the room, a dresser pressed up against the far wall, across from the backyard-facing window, and a full-length mirror propped up at the apex of two perpendicular walls, a wood frame around its unexceptional reflections. The rest of it is just more mess, more unpacked boxes and piles of unwashed laundry.

Eddie sighs. It’s hard to feel fulfilled when for each minuscule accomplishment there are at least a dozen other tasks waiting in another room. He had recently had the washer and dryer serviced and he was excited to finally be able to clean his own clothes under his own roof, rather than trekking back and forth to the coin laundromat ten minutes away, schlepping dirty clothes and hoarding pockets of small change. Unfortunately for Eddie, however, it turns out that convenience does not necessarily inspire promptness and he had neglected the chore for some time. There was always something more important worth doing, something more pressing that required his attention.

And now it was coming back to bite him. Eddie looks down at the piled-high laundry hamper resting at his feet and kicks it unceremoniously, frustration bubbling over in one quick flash-bulb moment. It dislodges the pieces of dirty clothing sitting atop of the pile and something catches his eye.

The fabric is slight when Eddie picks it up, thin and petite in the width of his palms. It’s a camisole, spaghetti-strapped and perceptibly textured with breaks in the fabric where the tiny image of something vaguely floral shaped has been cut to expose a sliver of skin. It’s simple, white in colour save for its pink lace trim, swooped across the collar and adorned daintily across the bottom hem, with a small bow tied permanently at its centre, poised to sit like sweet, feminine jewelry between both collarbones.

Eddie holds it out in front of him. Something stomps in his chest, a rhythmic giant’s foot-pounding of his heart beating deeply against his ribcage, sending his blood hurtling through him in surges that feel too thick to be contained, as if liable to burst at any moment. Where did this come from? Did Eddie manifest some torrid, personal thought into the physical plane, damming himself to confrontation in the process? Was someone playing a cruel, sick joke on him? Who could? He was alone. And Eddie had never, ever told anyone about… those particular thoughts. Those feelings that he understood, logically, were his own but that he found some difficulty in self-indentifying with.

It occurs to him like the first deep breath after breaking the waves. The cadence of his heart tempers, though the trilling buzz permeating within his veins remains.

There’s a slight tremor to his hands as Eddie drapes the shirt across the bedsheets. He pretends he doesn’t notice. Things can only hold the power that you give them. Eddie can be non-chalant about this. So non-chalant, in fact, that he can snap a photo of his newly acquired tiny little tanktop and send it to Buck, watching as the image pops up and immortalizes itself in their text thread.

The sun shines brightly through the bedroom window. It’s hot out today. It was hot out yesterday. Eddie feels the presence of sweat against his body like a second-skin.

Ghosts of girlfriends past, he types, mouth pursed and nose scrunched.

Buck’s reply only takes a few minutes. Looks a little small for you.

Eddie stares at Buck’s response. Each pixel that comes together to form the shape of the letters, each letter that serves its purpose to form the word, each word that follows into the next to build the sentence. His eyeline drifts purposefully upwards, back towards the photo he took. He notes the way the collar of the shirt scoops, delicate and feminine; notes the length of it, short and cropped to cut the waist; appraises its inherently playful nature, its overt innocence and sweetness, a slick veneer to hide deeper implications of enticement. He realizes — with some dreadfulness, gelatinous in the back of his throat like a hard-to-swallow pill — that the body he imagines wearing it is not some false figure of a conjured up woman. It’s not even Marisol, or Ana, or Shannon, the bodies of women he’s been acquainted with, that he’s mapped with his fingers and his mouth. The body he imagines possesses a different kind of familiarity. Something deeper, scraped down to the bone.

It’s his own. Eddie’s own figure. He looks at this petite scrap of fabric and imagines it without hesitancy, without shame, without repentance. What would it look like? If this was the thing cutting the lines and adorning the curves of Eddie’s own slim, trim form.

What would it look like if Eddie wore it?

He’d swallow heavily if only his throat could accommodate it. It’s too sticky. It’s traveled upwards into the cavern of Eddie’s mouth now, coated his tongue and his palate, everything gummy and halfway lactic.

Despite the obviousness of his train of thought, Eddie types back to Buck, it’s not mine. He fires off a few more rapid texts one after the other. Marisol’s, I think. Must have left it with me by accident when she moved out. Guess I brought it with me by mistake.

Surely Eddie would have remembered packing it. But he supposes it doesn’t much matter how he came to possess it in the end, only that he’s the one who retains it now. He holds his phone in both hands, cradled between his palms, eyes fixed on the screen until it dims.

Ding! It heralds Buck’s reply, illuminating the screen once more. Ahh, it says. Uninteresting. More typing. The bubbles that indicate it cycle their animation over and over. Eddie flexes his jaw until it pulses, a dent in the centre of his brow.

Kind of a shame, though, finally comes, unusually short for how much time Buck dedicated to composing it. Then: I think it’d probably look pretty good on you.

Adrenaline. Eddie feels it rush through him like an old friend, filling his ears with TV static. Buck has used Eddie’s heart to hit a home run, sending it soaring through the air and leaving Eddie with nothing but the dread of where it might end up. His fingers fumble for the lock button on his phone before he tosses the whole thing across the mattress without much further thought. It bounces back and forth across the pillows for a moment until it slips, sliding easily across their silk surface to disappear into the crevice between.

Alone with his thoughts, Eddie inhales audibly through his nose until his lungs clench, attempting to ground himself without really knowing where the footholds are. The camisole remains where he laid it: across the bedsheets in front of him, utterly unassuming. Eddie wonders, distantly, what it might smell like. Marisol’s favourite perfumes always smelled like milk and cinnamon, sugary enough to taste. Perhaps Eddie might find the same taste in those fibres, or perhaps it has been replaced by the dry Texas heat and the stale smell of unwashed laundry.

Eddie rounds the mattress to fish his phone out from between the pillows. Buck hasn’t sent any follow-up texts and Eddie doesn’t let himself reread the most recent one again. He long-holds the screen with his thumb, sliding the pad of it to kiss across the HAHA emote and simultaneously send it as an alert to Buck’s phone in response.

Eddie can be non-chalant about this. Of course he can.

***

He used to watch Shannon as she applied her lipstick in the rearview mirror of her parents hand-me-down Honda Civic. This was back when they were still dating. When she’d park on the curb outside of Eddie’s house and he’d meet her, sliding into the passenger seat coolly and pressing a short kiss to her cheek. This was in high school, before the weight of responsibility truly settled, and the two of them believed they were in love. That’s the single detail that Eddie can insist upon above all else and with regards to the entirety of their relationship: he thought he loved her and she thought she loved him.

They’d drive to the movies to make out in the back of the dark theater, unless the movie turned out to be good or they ended up really liking it. Eddie remembers seeing Drag Me To Hell and Inception that way. Other times they’d take the long way around to their favourite diner, the one they agreed was the best in the area but was unfortunately on the other side of town. They’d order milkshakes and split orders of french fries and laugh, carefree and young and unburdened, especially when it was just the two of them. When things were good they were really good. That’s part of what made their abrupt downward spiral so unfortunate.

Back then, Shannon wore lip gloss almost exclusively. Lipstick came later, as she got older, one of those unspoken milestones on the journey from girlhood to womanhood. But high school was still girlhood, and so Shannon painted herself with lip gloss in thick layers, shimmery and sticky, sweet-scented like candied fruit. She’d use two fingers to disperse the globs of it that would collect in the corners of her mouth and then seal the same two fingers between her pursed lips, swiping away any remnants that might get on her teeth from the cradle of her inner lip skin. It was almost mesmerizing, watching from the passenger seat as she’d repeat the ritual in the reflection of the rearview mirror with practiced ease. It always affected this change in Shannon. Not only in her demeanor but in the way Eddie would perceive her as well. He doubts she understood what she was doing — probably lacked the self-awareness to internalize the habit — and he could never put his finger on where exactly the lines of difference were drawn, either, but he knew they existed.

It wasn’t uncommon, either, for Shannon to lean over with her elbows perched on the console and her gloss freshly applied, pressing her lips to Eddie’s cheek or his mouth, leaving him with a vaguely possessive smear of pink glitter. She said she found it romantic that he never wiped it away. That at the close of their evenings together she could kiss him goodbye and leave the mark of it behind. Eddie would smile at her, tell her he’d miss her, that he’d see her later, and then he’d climb out of Shannon’s car and watch as she pulled away.

His parents surely noticed the marks but they rarely ever mentioned it. Maybe once or twice Helena had caught Eddie as he was coming back through the front door, tapping against her cheek with a delicately manicured fingernail, mirroring a spot Eddie couldn’t see but he could feel, tacky and cool against his own skin. She’d gesture with a knowing smile and an almost fond, light shake of her head. She liked Shannon more back then. Before Shannon got pregnant, before Shannon had Christopher and before Shannon left.

In the bathroom mirror, Eddie would find the splotch of sheer pink on his cheek, or smeared across his own mouth, pouty with warm breath, glistening and glittery and —

Pretty, Eddie would think, oddly detached from the form staring back at him in the mirror. As if they were each their own person, living their own lives, possessed by their own individual thoughts and feelings, bending or unbending to their own specific wants.

Eddie could stare at himself — at this other self, staring back at him through his own reflection — for only so long before it would inevitably turn his stomach. He’d scrub at his messy cheek or his dirty mouth with the back of his hand, nausea washing over him like rainwater as he willed the dark pit in his gut away, every unfounded theory Eddie had ever had about himself attempting to break down his locked bathroom door.

He’d run the water from the faucet freezing cold, the sound of it sharper against the sink basin than its more bearable counterpart. He’d wash his hands, brush his teeth. He wouldn’t think about it. He wouldn’t think about it. Not until the next time Shannon smeared that same pink-sticky-fruity stain against his skin, at least.

***

There’s a community pool about five minutes down the road from Eddie’s new place that’s open all summer, surrounded by bleached-white concrete and a wrought iron fence with paint peeling off the lifeguard towers. It’s quaint and busy in a way that tells you the neighborhood appreciates it. Eddie takes Christopher on a semi-regular basis, a sort of neutral territory for them, something more suitable for the drafting of peace treaties. Eddie’s son hasn’t exactly been the most receptive to his father’s reappearance into his life — this new life, it seems, that he’s built for himself here in Texas — but he has yet to shut Eddie out completely. Eddie counts it as a win, no matter how miniscule it seems.

The pool helps. It’s not the ocean but it’s the closest thing they’ve got. Close enough to soften things, to remind Christopher of countless days spent knuckle deep in beach sand, of Eddie smiling at him through the tint of his sunglasses. If Eddie closes his eyes and basks in the sun the right way, if he feels the kiss of wind as it’s bounced off the surface of the water, listens to the tittering of other families while he can simultaneously sense the presence of his own son amongst them, the strongest of beacons even in the darkest of places — he can almost pretend they’re back in California and this whole regression back to Texas has been some awful dream.

But it’s Texas, inescapably so, down to the twangy vibrato that colours the voices of the parents that linger around Eddie’s pool chair just to hit on him.

And Eddie gets hit on… well, like, a lot. Like they might as well be lining-up single-file and waiting their turn it gets so egregious sometimes. Step right up and see if you can entertain this seemingly oh so lonely man with insubstantial scraps of conversation! Ugh. Eddie should be nicer. They’re all very nice to him. Mothers and fathers and even the occasional nanny or two, each of them finding new and creative ways to subtly ask Eddie if he’s married or otherwise spoken for. Eddie pretends not to notice the obvious slant to their line questioning, operating under the fallacy that some things might just go away if you ignore them for long enough.

It’s exhausting despite the flattery. He tries not to whinge about.

“You’re so toned,” the mom at Eddie’s side coos appreciatively, perched on the lounge chair opposite his. She introduced herself to him as Lulu, a bottle blonde in a teal one-piece and a sun hat the size of a small umbrella, approachably pretty but not really Eddie’s type. He doesn’t turn her away, the same way he never turns any of his would-be suitors away. He engages in polite conversation, smiling as demurely as he can while his face flushes hot from being on the receiving end of such an overt compliment. “You must work out a lot, hmm?” Lulu folds one leg over the other, humming as she presses her lips into a line and rakes her gaze over Eddie from head-to-toe. Her eyes linger on the bare planes of Eddie’s fluttering abdomen before rerouting their return to his face, stopping briefly to admire the way the sun reflects the droplets of water clinging to slope of Eddie’s shoulders, glittering enticingly before the moisture wicks itself away, disappearing into the atmosphere.

Eddie knows he’s attractive, if the barefaced vanity of that statement can be forgiven. This fact is not illusive to him. He understands attention for what it is. Sometimes, he can even find the assurance to be proud of himself for it — for the body he possesses and hones through concentrated effort — but he wields it less like a weapon and more like a shield, a sturdiness most effectively used for protection rather than peacocking.

It’s not his favourite topic of conversation, but he can indulge in it, dosed with an appropriately sized spoonful of humility. He nods in response to Lulu’s assertion, smiling in a suitable fashion from his well of natural charisma. “I was a firefighter,” he tells her. “Back in L.A.”

“Ugh,” Lulu groans emphatically, her response sort of refreshingly unfiltered. “Wow. Pretty face and a big time hero,” she continues, tossing her hair over her shoulder and perching her chin on the back of her closed fist. “I’d keep that to myself if I were you. Looking like you, I mean. Everyone loves a hero, baby, and they’re already treating you like a piece of meat fresh from the slab. You’d be even more popular than you are right now, and something about you tells me you wouldn’t really be into that.”

Eddie ducks his head towards his chest, huffing out a sheepish laugh. “Am I that obvious?”

Mercifully, Lulu shakes her head. “Nah. I’m just good at reading people. My ex husband and I were partners at the same law firm. Never mix business and pleasure, by the way,” she winks at Eddie, tilting the brim of her enormous hat in his direction. The shadow it casts stretches across both of their pool chairs, reaching far enough to project the shape of a half moon over Eddie’s bent knee. Lulu is, to her credit, a very funny woman, innately charming and with a wealth of her own charisma that would probably work on… well, anyone else. “Don’t worry, I’ll keep your former profession a secret. I’ve been living in this area long enough to see the way the birds pick at unattended snacks — and I’d hate to see a particularly good catch get chased away.” Eddie scoffs, attempts to wave her off, but Lulu doubles down. “I’m serious. And you know it. And it’s not just me and the other moms who notice. You could show up next week in a tiny red bikini and confuse the hell out of some delicate dad sexualities, if you’re ever looking for a bit of fun.”

She says it so casually, a smile denting her cheeks, mouth split by a shark-like grin that shows off both rows of her pearly white teeth. All that blush and heat that once felt localized in the pit of Eddie’s sternum rises, spinning in the apples of his cheeks like a cyclone, forcing him to turn away from her. He laughs again, more forced this time, rubbing his palm across the back of his neck in a physical attempt to shuck off some of the awkwardness he’s feeling. He stares off across the horizon like he’s searching for something that isn’t there.

It wasn’t the compliment that threw him off. Compliments are easy and expected. Lulu clearly had no qualms about dispensing them in abundance with such a hot knife of honesty. So it wasn’t the compliment. It wasn’t the sentiment she was attempting to convey.

It was the words she used to say it.

A lot of moms wear bikinis to the pool. Some, like Lulu, wear one pieces. Some of them don’t wear bathing suits at all, content to sit beyond the grout lines in their cropped t-shirts and tiny denim shorts and avoid the water altogether. Every outfit is different, variety showcased through shapes and styles and all the colours of the rainbow. Little triangle tops that tie in delicate knots around the base of someone's throat and the circumference of their ribs. Tiny boy short bottoms that scoop the flesh and fat of those with more ample assets. Flowy beach covers, swathes of fabric tied haphazardly around the waist and complimented by muted-colour flip flops and cat-eye sunglasses and those wide-brim hats.

The single commonality is obvious: it is clothing meant to emphasize certain attributes. These things that may not look all that tantalizing on their own, as heaps of nylon and spandex or cotton and linen, but when ascribed to the right body? When they are following the lines of proper shapes and slopes?

The image appears to Eddie like a mirage, not an exact replication but something close to it, something that fits the suggestion of the shadows. A figure pruned and polished by the right lift, the right nip and the right tuck. It’s an approximation — a guess, a fantasy — but it is tempting and beautiful despite its distinct unreality. Eddie doesn’t know what he would like. Of course he doesn’t but…

His ass split from tight-fit fabric. Everything held in place just-so. The delicate balance of letting just enough slip, straddling the line between tasteful and obscene. Eddie doesn’t have the chest tissue to fill out a little triangle top but he knows the shape of his torso into the cut of his waist down into the cradle of his hips well. He knows it’s desirable. It could be effortlessly highlighted by the cinch of pulled taut strings. So much skin. Miles and miles of it, honey-hued and flushed pink with blood. His blood running rampant inside of him, chasing itself through his veins like an excited kitten. Rushing to his cock, which would no doubt be chubbing up in this scenario, barely concealed by a veritable scrap of fabric, tenting it obviously. Maybe the head would slip past the edges of privacy to ooze precome against Eddie’s own thigh, half-hidden and wrapped like a present, patiently waiting for someone to come along and tear it open.

An errant cascade of water pitter-patters over Eddie’s skin. Someone’s unruly kid is splashing. A mom rises from her chair and calls after him, shouting his name and telling him to cut it out. The cold flush breaks Eddie’s reverie.

“Sorry,” he sputters abruptly, realizing he’s been sitting in silence and staring unblinking into the sun for the last thirty seconds. Lulu remains at his side. Eddie’s not sure if she’s been watching him stare blankly into the distance all this time or if she’s been trying to engage him in conversation. Either way, he’s embarrassed, too nervous to look at her, afraid of what he might see reflected in her expression even with his vision blown out like this. “Sorry,” he repeats lamely, sun-stinging tears along his lash line. “I — should go,” Eddie stumbles through the words, stumbles up from his chair, stumbles for the bag of snacks and towels he brought with them today. He feels clumsy and foolish and without hope of recovery, throwing the bag over his shoulder and digging into the pocket of his swim shorts for his sunglasses. He plants them on the bridge of his nose to soothe his aching irises and scans the pool until his eyes find Christopher, whom he gestures towards in a silent bid of time to go. “Yeah. Sorry, uh, Lulu. Yeah. Lulu. It was nice meeting you. I gotta go. Sorry.”

The concrete is hot beneath Eddie’s shoes, the sun hot against the back of his neck. He rounds the edge of the pool to meet Christopher with a towel and his crutches as he emerges. There’s a respite of shade over here, closer to the brick-building of the restroom and a line up of currently unused vending machines. Eddie uses the moment to find purchase against the wall behind him, breathing slowly, feeling the gritty brick beneath his fingers. It grounds him. His chest burns but it’s not the thundering of his heart beneath his ribs that causes the soreness. It’s deeper than that, something more shadowed and difficult to parse, complicated to identify, like the potentially poisonous fungus that doesn’t match any single diagram you can find.

Whatever it is, it sows an ache in Eddie’s breastbone, something weighty and wide compressed into such a small space. Near-fit to bursting.

***

The ache doesn’t subside. If anything, it manifests further, growing and twisting its shape. It carves something into Eddie, or perhaps out of him, and sends him into a mild tailspin.

He knows men experimenting with things traditionally considered feminine is not a new concept. He’s seen it depicted elsewhere and on others. In movies like Some Like It Hot and Too Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar. The existence of such strains of desire are not foreign to him. Eddie isn’t stupid. He’s a grown man — and as a notion on its surface level, the concept, to him, is simple. And there was never any shred of appetite within him to excavate that further, or to hold those thoughts up to the light and examine them properly.

But something’s different. Suddenly, Eddie no longer lacks the capacity to self-identify with such practices. Suddenly, he’s looking back on things with a new perspective and reevaluating moments in his life with greater context. The realizations come in waves, bracketing like the tide and sending Eddie’s guts churning with a highly combustible mixture of both excitement and trepidation. That was what he liked so much about Shannon’s lip gloss, he thinks. His teenage face in the mirror, that boyish haircut that Eddie had once left unkept. He had more freckles when he was younger — a smattering across the bridge of his nose, sprinkled there in their own depictions of individual constellations. Slippery pink smeared across his lips, his cheeks red, his mouth parted open with his tongue sitting limp inside of it, tucked behind his bottom row of teeth. Bubblegum scented and so far removed from any shred of traditional masculinity. Freed from the pressure points of a skin that always fit sort of uncomfortably. Eddie tries to triangulate that feeling within himself now, tries to recapture the essence of what it was those errant waves of nausea always tore away from him, when he’d come home after dates with Shannon.

Eddie breaks his mould. Molts from the chrysalis and spreads the width of his imagination. He can see it if he adjusts the focus. Himself, the modern version of Eddie, wearing something sort of cute and sweet and sexy, something pretty and maybe baby pink. Playful, ruffled edges and delicate, ornate lace. It was once impossible for Eddie to swing so close to the sun. Now, suddenly, he finds himself craving the warmth. He wants to dig deep, commit to these thoughts and their natural conclusion beyond the single apple bite. It’s a softer reality now — not cruel, not scary, easier to swallow — and it’s happened almost overnight. When exactly did Eddie become capable of such a thing? He can’t be sure. Maybe it was just that he was getting older. Maybe he was becoming more comfortable living the life he had built for himself with love and care and people who dispensed those feelings back to him, people who never judged him too harshly. Maybe it was merely a case of checks and balances; the freedom of knowing that once everything is gone there will be nothing much left to lose.

Whatever the reason for this revelation, it hardly matters. The wingspan of Eddie’s longing broadens with his search. And before Icarus ever fell, at least he flew.

Under the cover of darkness with the brightness of his screen dimmed all the way, Eddie types lingerie into the Google search bar. A dirty little secret that’s all too tempting, impossible to restrain oneself from indulging in, like dark chocolate, or red wine, or an opportune wank in an inopportune place.

The results are mostly online retailers, but that’ll do for this particular thought experiment. They display their wares in flickering banners across their home pages, their websites bright and cute and feminine, declaring demure little brand names in thin cursive font, each of them a distinctly different pseudo-synonyms for the colour pink. Blushing. Rosy. Flushed. Eddie lingers on a thin-looking camisole, patterned with tiny red strawberries. The same pattern comes mirrored on a pair of underwear, its waist adorned with scalloped-cut lace.

Eddie clicks through more images. This particular set — audaciously ascribed with the somewhat suggestive title of Fresh Picked Berries — comes in a boy short too, which would theoretically offer more coverage, if only the fabric used in their construction wasn’t so sheer. They cling enticingly to the thighs and ass of the girl who models them, her skin smooth and soft where it shows. She’s smiling at the camera, pink blush placed high on her cheeks and her full lips scintillating beneath the studio lights. When they photograph her from behind, she lifts her long hair in two loose handfuls above her head. The ends of it cascade across her back and shoulders like a graceful, pillowy waterfall.

Emboldened with a careful eagerness inspired by his findings, Eddie digs further. What’s the use in mucking yourself up if you don’t commit to it fully? Dirty is dirty. Wrong is wrong. And sometimes those two things together can feel very, very good.

He finds a selection of bralettes that offer little to no modesty, constructed from criss-cross lace and carved across the chests of the wearers, so much flesh peeking through. He appraises one, specifically, that comes in a deep shade of eggplant purple. The model who displays it is of a similar skin tone to Eddie, a bronzy-looking tan that drips gold across her collarbones and the slopes of her shoulders, and the chosen hue for this particular garment is emphasized greatly in contrast, looking gorgeous, like the soft flesh of a ripe purple grape.

The website also boasts an impressive array of underwear in an impressive variety of styles. It describes them using words like cheeky and thong and sweetheart-cut and g-string. The girls who wear them are faceless, shot from the torso down with all of their body hair surely photoshopped out. They twist themselves into knots, emphasizing the hourglass tilt of their waists, cocking their hips and tilting their pelvises, the right direction based on the right angle.

It’s all peculiarly sexless; Eddie isn’t interested in the bodies so much as he is interested in how the bodies wear the clothing they’ve been given. He remembers being a kid and ducking his head any time he and his mother would walk past the Victoria’s Secret that was in the mall back then, like a sinner in the booth at confession. At that age, it’s hard to really understand why you feel like you shouldn’t look, but you never do, just like Eddie never did. A brush with shame too early to be recognized for what it is, too elusive for you to be able to perceive where exactly it’s taken root inside you. Even now, it remains an expectation, the way so many habits from childhood end up living forever. Eddie’s waiting for the feeling as he flips through more and more photos of more and more girls wearing more and more lingerie. But it never comes. And that’s a peculiar thing, in and of itself.

If he were braver, perhaps Eddie could look into the face of the underlying reason he embarked on this journey in the first place and not be afraid of what gets reflected back at him. Perhaps he could take it in and live in it without shame. He hasn’t really allowed those two currents in his mind to connect completely, hasn’t pulled on the threads of his thoughts to stitch them together, into something greater than the sum of their parts. They spark, though. Reach out to each other like squirming electrical eels, a north and south pole attraction, prodding Eddie’s brain stem and sending a sharp shiver down his spine, pooling like hot oil to rest between his thighs.

Eddie looks. And he looks and he looks and he looks and he keeps waiting. Waiting for the shame to come, for it to inspire that familiar wave of nausea, that betraying turn of his stomach, caustic and cancerous and irradiated. That too, never comes. The anticipation of it reaches its apex and dissipates, crumbling away faster than Eddie can catch it with his bare hands.

After that, all there is a quiet and detached acceptance. Hard to swallow, like a painkiller, but still promising relief on the side of the bottle.

***

Marisol’s abandoned camisole finds itself washed, eventually. Lost track of at the bottom of a dirty clothing hamper that went belly-up into the washing machine, a single mass of colours and fabric that lended itself perfectly to the concept of plausible deniability.

Metamorphosis blooms in Eddie’s heart and mind like a parasite. It’s not a delusion, and maybe it won’t be repression one day, but for now Eddie still relies on ignorance as a form of self-preservation. Baby steps.

It’s hot inside but it’s always hot inside, the same way it’s always hot outside. Eddie has managed to amass a small army of oscillating standing fans that he runs non-stop, hoping the relief to be gained from air in constant circulation will be worth the cost of the electricity. He would like to say he’s become more accustomed to living in a state of perpetual dampness, as the days in Texas have turned into weeks, but so far, on that front, very little progress has been made.

He and Buck hang out over FaceTime whenever they can find the opportunity. Tonight, Buck makes himself dinner in a familiar kitchen in L.A. while Eddie folds laundry, across the world and all alone in El Paso, Texas.

Buck’s eyes are trained on his own hands where they work to dice tri-coloured sweet peppers. Orange and yellow and red, lined up like little soldiers. He uses his left hand to press the flesh flat against the wood of his cutting board while his right hand holds the knife, slicing with practiced ease. “How have things been lately, by the way? With Christopher, I mean.”

Eddie hasn’t been spared Buck any of the gory details about what it’s been like out here in the desert. It seemed pointless to sanitize, even when Eddie’s own shortcomings afflicted him with a sharp sense of ugly feelings like guilt and anxiety. Buck always manages to soothe away those things anyway. He was there the day it happened. The day they both watched Christopher walk out that front door. Buck had shared in Eddie’s grief and his desperation, and then it was Buck who best understood why Eddie had to leave. Helped him do it, even. He was the one whose support for Eddie came unconditionally and without ulterior motive, despite Buck’s own feelings on the matter, his own wants and whims. Isn’t that all anyone could ask for? A friend who puts what you need above even themselves? It was Buck who told Eddie it was okay to go. So when he asks, Eddie can be confident in the fact that it’s because he really wants to know, and he can attempt to answer as honestly as he can. It’s the least he can do.

“Mhm. Work in progress,” Eddie admits. “But getting better.”

This past Sunday, Eddie had taken Christopher out for ice cream. It was the longest stretch of time they had spent talking, just the two of them, in what had to be months. Christopher had been quiet on the drive home afterwards.

Buck smiles at Eddie through his phone screen, muddled slightly but bright besides that. “Progress is progress,” he insists, comforting in his long-held belief that pure determination can solve any problem. In Buck’s case, it probably can. “You’re trying. That’s what matters. And I’m sure Christopher sees that. He’s a good kid.”

“Yeah. He is.” Eddie responds absently, trailing off a little into shades of hopelessness as he bundles up a pair of socks by turning them inside out. He works through the muscle memory of folding laundry, hardly paying any attention as he watches Buck use a salad spinner to dry his spinach. The muscles in his biceps bulge as he presses down emphatically, quick and consistent. The temporary noisiness allows Eddie some solitude with his own thoughts, his eyes glazed over. He’s locked somewhere secret, somewhere that only exists when Eddie’s spending time there, considering those thoughts. Like a plume of smoke, or a two-way mirror.

It’s at least a half a dozen breaths before either of them speaks up. Buck returns from sliding this week’s chosen protein on a sheet pan into the oven and cracks a smile, letting out a short, sharp laugh. “Still holdin’ onto that, bud?” He asks, tilting his head. Eddie follows the gesture, looking down at himself — and finds Marisol’s delicate camisole hanging pinched between his thumbs and forefingers, smelling like laundry detergent and hot Texas air. “Thought for sure you’d have gotten rid of that by now, man. ‘Cause of the bad vibes. What was it you said? Ghosts of girlfriends past?”

Caught off-guard, Eddie’s brain scrambles like an egg in a hot pan. He can hear it sizzling. His self-preservation instincts hook into the very first illusive catch of a thought that crosses his mind: a joke. It’s sitting right inside his mouth. All he has to do is open wide.

“I don’t know,” Eddie replies, shrugging non-chalantly. “Had half a mind to give it a shot,” he tells Buck, managing to keep his voice steady, his expression angled into something he thinks is meant to be…playfully alluring. “What was it that you said? That it might look good on me?”

There is an unfortunate unsteadiness tacked on to the very last few words. Buck might not even notice through the static hum of the phone speaker, through the miles and miles of distance between them. If he does, he doesn’t say anything. That’s an interesting hallmark of their relationship: all the things they say and all the things they don’t say. Buck’s knife rests lonely and forgotten on his cutting board, the tip of its blade poised in Eddie’s direction, glinting with the reflection of Buck’s kitchen. Eddie’s old kitchen. His kitchen in his new place isn’t as nice. There’s not enough space and it doesn’t let in enough light. The whole house feels darker, actually. More hostile and cavernous. On the other side of the screen, Buck’s home looks full of shimmering air and bright, warm sunshine.

Buck chuckles. His face is… relaxed, save for where his eyeline cascades firm and unflinching, exerting enough unseen pressure to tighten up in Eddie’s esophagus. His Adam’s apple bobs uselessly as he attempts and fails to swallow against it. His tongue takes up all the space in his mouth and he can’t even crack his jaw open to release it. That familiar pooling in his pelvis is back, too; just below the belly button, a mere few inches above where his cock might stir to life inside of his shorts. Eddie hasn’t jerked off in days. It’s too hot, even at night, and most of the time that Eddie is alone — in his bedroom, in the dark — his thoughts are too loud for that. It’d be pretty pathetic to even try.

The pink tip of Buck’s tongue swipes across his upper lip. “Might not even fit,” he says, meal prep forgotten in favour of staring at Eddie through the split reflection of his phone screen. Buck and Eddie melded together through half-formed shapes and shadows. “You’ll end up spilling out the top like you’re wearing a Victoria’s Secret push-up bra, man.” Buck laughs. His smile is familiar and friendly.

Eddie’s throat finally loosens up enough for him to swallow around the phantom obstruction, coughing awkwardly into the cradle of his elbow before finding the breath to speak. “Yeah, well,” he manages through the razor-raw sensation. “You’d pop the seams as soon as you got it over your shoulders, big guy.” Eddie puts a light-hearted emphasis on the nickname, sounding like he wants to be Tony Soprano.

Buck shakes his head in good-natured admonishment. He picks up his entire cutting board, knife included, and slides it none-too-gently into the sink, already steaming-full of hot and soapy water. Eddie is still holding Marisol’s accidental hand-me-down, as he has been the whole time. He lets it drop. The fabric crumples, pooling in his lap.

“I have been working out more,” Buck responds mischievously, the sharpness of his tone now worn down into something more recognizable and dull. Eddie pulls a pair of inside-out shorts from his pile of clean laundry and leaves the camisole where it rests, limp across the width of thighs. “Bi’s and tri’s, especially. Thanks for noticing, Eddie.”

***

Nighttime drags its heavy liquid silver ghost across Eddie’s empty room. He hardly notices. His head too muddled, his thoughts too obscured by dense fog. The hours tick towards dawn slowly regardless. Eddie remains vehemently conscious, doomed to wakefulness and a spiral of deciphering.

He didn’t put the camisole away with the rest of his laundry. To commit the garment to drawer space felt too permanent, like carving out a hole in his life was flying too close to admission. Realizations crest over Eddie near-dreadful, threatening a dark wave that will drag him he-doesn’t-even-know how deep.

There’s a looming, terrible thought within him that this particular admission is…inevitable. That it has crystalized and become impassable. That the only way out is through.

But, for now, Eddie braces himself against the tide and tries to keep his head above water. These things can change in an instant. The current flows both ways. His earlier conversation with Buck sent it spinning like a whirlpool, chasing itself in circles. Here in the aftermath, Eddie lingers in the safety afforded ashore. He avoids the chaos at the centre and, by consequence, forfeits any clarity that might be offered in the eye of the storm. Perhaps he might read the swirls like rings on a gnarled stump or like the permanent indents in the skin of his palm. Use it to understand the past and uncover the way forwards, towards relief and respite. Towards reward, if there is any to be reaped.

The truth is that Eddie’s hesitance doesn’t really matter. The curl and coil is hypnotizing. It beckons him further into its potential abyss. The only terror that exists is in what might be found on the other side. Salvation or damnation. That’s what keeps Eddie awake at night.

It’s hot. It’s Texas. It’s always hot. He loathes Texas, Eddie has come to realize. There is no improvement to be found in the life that he leads here. Everything is worse — even Eddie’s own relationship with his son, if we’re comparing consistency across timelines. Restless in bed, Eddie kicks away all his blankets, but the heat remains bone-scraping, like sandpaper through his bloodstream, widening the gaps in his veins and arteries. Eddie’s hair is slick against his temples and unkept across his forehead. Sweat pools in the small of his back and smears salt-stains across his fitted sheet. A tingle permeates deep in each of his calf muscles, unshakeable and unsettling him. He’s wearing boxer briefs, the least amount of fabric he could manage without feeling totally exposed, but even those are beginning to irritate him. The elastic is too tight around his waist, uncomfortably pinching the skin of his thighs. All together, it makes Eddie believe there’s a nest of snakes below each individual layer of his flesh, writhing and desperate to be freed, to shed what they’ve been carrying. Eddie scratches at the bend of his elbow with blunt nails until it starts to burn. It’s been too long.

The camisole sits unassuming at the bottom of his empty laundry hamper, spread out artfully so that it may be displayed in its full-picture. Full-shape, full bright colour and full tight fit. Bright white in a dark room, drinking in the metallic hues straight from the spout in the halo of the moon, reflecting back into the corner of Eddie’s peripheral vision, snagging him like a fishhook baited with —

With what?

When shaved down to their most earnest core, memories are little more than a cataloguing of moments. Snapshots of specificity amongst the ultimate contradictions that come together to build a human life. And afterwards, we are charged with their care; we categorize them, sort them into feelings, into thought experiments, into lilypads across a shimmering pond. Our actions inform the narrative but it’s hindsight that tells the story. And so, for Eddie’s intentions and purposes (and ours, as well): now is just a moment, just the scant stretch of time that might be considered present. Here. Now. It doesn’t mean anything, doesn’t become anything, until we move past it. Before that, it is nothing to no one, not even the body that holds it. Try hard enough and it may remain as such. Or maybe you don’t want that. Maybe you want something different. Either choice might feel good, just as easily as either choice might feel bad.

But none of us will know for sure until we’ve passed it.

Eddie rises from his mattress like a thread pulled from an anchor-point in his sternum, until it’s dropped unceremoniously with no further actions to coax from him. Eddie stops, almost abrupt, and lingers. He stares at the camisole where it lies like a corpse in a casket — difficult to acknowledge head-on but obvious to tell it’s what is sucking all the air out of the room. The plastic slats on the laundry basket look like prison bars. Eddie slides, wordlessly, to the far edge of his mattress, flowing unobstructed across its malleable surface until the bottoms of his feet touch the floor.

Logically, he knows the heat present in the room has not subsided. His skin bares the evidence, sticky-wet in every nook and cranny, his hair plastered to his scalp, eyelids heavy with the quality of the atmosphere — but there is a frigidity permeating outwards from within, radiating to all of his extremities and chilling Eddie from the inside out. He stands, in nothing but a pair of too-small underwear, and takes a step forward. Two steps forward. Three steps forward. One at a time. Closer and closer.

The funny thing about this camisole is that Eddie can’t even recall a single time Marisol wore it. He knows, logically, that it must have been misplaced in that chaotic time between her moving in and then moving back out again, but there’s something so impermanent and ethereal about it. Almost like it came from nowhere. Summoned from some mysterious ether, dropped by a hand beyond that of even a benevolent God’s.

Whatever the circumstances, it hardly matters. It's ended up here. In Eddie’s possession. Close enough for him to reach out and touch it. To grip it with both hands and lift it up towards his chest. Then further still, up and up, until Eddie can spread the neckline over his head and pull it down across both his shoulders, fitting each of his arms through their designated delicate strap. He shimmies at the hips, rocking side to side to facilitate the slide of fabric down his torso while he tugs at it. He runs out of it quickly, the bottom hem stopping quite high, a tiny shirt clearly made for someone with a different body type. But it emphasizes the shape of Eddie’s waist regardless, that very first slope before it droops inwards and flares out again into his hips and ass.

The fabric itself is uninteresting. Not soft but not uncomfortable. Clearly something that was produced on a mass scale for not a lot of money. There are potential aesthetic merits to its lightly textured constructions but those are lost on Eddie. His pectoral muscles are too defined, too wide, and they force the camisole to surrender in compromise, stretching out and warping its design. That doesn’t really bother Eddie. The lace at the top and bottom flutter like a whisper against his heated skin, the kiss of a cool breeze, and the sensation is enough to make him shiver and raise gooseflesh, spiking Eddie’s blood pressure. The shade of pink chosen for these adornments is cool-toned, loaded with blue, offering itself in a magnetic contrast to the warm-tones of Eddie’s slightly olive skin.

Each of Eddie’s laboured breaths strains the stitching. He can see himself in his full-length bedroom mirror but he’s trying not to think about it. He’s trying to separate himself from the physical and examine this from the point of view of what he’s feeling. A more elusive task, but perhaps one ultimately more rewarding.

Eddie twists on the balls of his feet to get a better vantage point in the reflection but he can’t stop staring at his face. The pit in his gut is too heavy and nervous, making it difficult for him to find the courage to lower his gaze. To really take it all in. He’s flushed, hot and red and damp with it. He chances a glance, chest bubbling up with a sickly potion of hesitant anticipation, slick like sweat across Eddie’s brow, until everything drops, slipping and sliding and falling, down and down and down. There’s a swoop in Eddie’s gut like he’s just jumped out of an airplane, and then —

And then there he is. There he is. Eddie’s throat catches, his chest half-full and aching in stasis. There’s a latent sour taste in the back of his throat but it lacks full potency, drowned out by something else. Something brighter and sweeter that is creeping upwards through the length of Eddie’s chest plate, calm and cool and comforting. Not an ominous, intimidating wave but rather the shimmering surface of something quiet and undisturbed, like a solitary lake.

The camisole is too small for him. That much is obvious. The straps cut into the slant of his shoulders and core deep indents into his flesh. The threads groan as they stretch to accommodate him, squeezing tightly and hindering movement. The construction of the garment is compromised — but that doesn’t mean it there aren’t seductive shapes to be cut, or slopes and edges to be admired. The way it dips, for example, exposing the near-totality of Eddie’s sternum, the collar pulled taut across his chest. He follows a bead of sweat with his eyes until it slips slowly into the shadows between his pectoral muscles, his mouth uncharacteristically dry. His entire stomach is exposed. It ripples through pinched breaths. Eddie’s waist is cut clean and obvious, the line along the top of his pelvis shredded. His too small underwear eats the meat of his thighs, turning him into some prime-cut straight from the local butcher, cleaned and clipped to perfection, presented raw and waiting, a blood-soaked hunk of red meat, ready to be devoured.

Eddie’s dick kicks against the confines of his underwear. He sees it with his own two eyes. It curls a knot in his guts, slithery and tight.

The moment isn’t over yet. It retains its plasticity. Stretching, extending, as of yet uncommitted. It has the chance to be whatever Eddie wants it to be; to be defined by what comes next, what decisions he makes in the split second after this eruption. The bodies in Pompeii were immortalized forever because they were blanketed in volcanic ash, cementing their last moments into history. Eddie knows that because he watched a documentary about it with Buck once.

Eddie moves like a puppet with no puppeteer for guidance. Something that possesses the capacity for action but lacks the willpower to force it. The thought of Buck occurs to him, oddly enough. Or perhaps not oddly at all. They had spoken earlier. And about this camisole — the one Eddie is wearing — specifically. It would stand to reason that Buck’s face may have due cause to invade Eddie’s thoughts at a time like this. Wouldn’t it? The motive was clear and the path was obvious. Eddie could testify to it in court, he thinks. He could swear it true with his hand pressed to the face of a Holy Bible.

It’d probably look pretty good on you, Buck had said. He had meant it as a joke. A lot of things could be jokes. Most things have that capacity, should they merely be presented the correct way. What matters is intentionality. What matters is how you said it. When you said. Who you said it to.

What it meant when you said it, without saying anything at all.

Eddie’s likeness in the mirror is virtually hypnotic, like
a Fraser spiral, or staring straight into the sun. It requires a concerted effort to break away from and Eddie manages it with some difficulty, fumbling for his phone where he left it charging under his pillow. Buck’s told him that’s bad for the battery but Eddie likes the assurance of being able to hear the vibrations of it, pressed practically right up to his ear even through all that fabric. Eddie turns it face-up and the screen declares the time but his eyes gloss right over the numbers where they are presented to him, zero-ing instead on the Camera icon tucked away in the lower left corner.

Mercifully (or perhaps, as it may reveal itself to be: irresponsibly), Eddie is spared the front-camera facing view. The image of his own dimpled, sweat-damp mattress appears instead, shrunk down to fit his phone screen. He circles the length of the mattress, steps as sure-footed as they can be, his brain empty and buzzing. Not even his anxious inner monologue penetrates the static. Everything is quiet and soft. Eddie moves through pure action, absent reaction, until he’s standing there, where he didn’t even know he wanted to be, his reflection facing back head-on.

He pauses. Regales himself once more, closer this time. He could reach out and touch the mirror like this, and if he did perhaps he would slip below the silver pool of its surface and into another dimension. Become the man in the mirror. His skin stretches long and bare in every direction past the edges of the camisole; his shoulders and collarbones, the length of his arms and his naked abdomen. Hips and thighs crammed into his ill-fitting underwear, brought new life through its unexpected complimenting of the camisole, the ways they boast similar qualities. Eddie finds this version of himself to be… flattering, despite its peculiarity. He’s never felt this way about his own body before. Their relationship has always been more divorced, the mind and the body and the soul all separate entities. Eddie could understand his desirability, could even acknowledge and accept it, but it always digested and settled in his stomach more like it was happening to someone else. Eddie would rather treat it as a tool, something to be broken and reshaped. The simple and straightforward mechanism built to carry him through life, rather than a source of sinful pride, or soulless vanity.

But it was easier to be beautiful in the world, wasn’t it? Beauty can effect tangible change, the same as strength or wits or force of will. Beauty is practical when it’s wielded properly, and Eddie can reckon with practicality.

This, however, feels like an indulgence. Like swiping frosting off the cake and eating it straight from the pad of your finger. Eddie is present, weighed down by the might of his own skeleton, but there’s this slippery quality to something like freedom, like surrender. Vulnerability and acceptance. Our very own understanding of destiny comes from the idea of following a prescribed set of actions not wholly your own.

Eddie’s still looking at himself. He stands straight-backed in the mirror, raising his arm to hold his phone, hovering near the line of his shoulders. His eyes flick to where he can see his phone screen illuminated in his peripheral. He finds the same image presented before him without buffer, but this time it’s like looking through the eyes of someone else, how they might see him. His eyes shift again, slow and steady, until Eddie can hold the sight-line of the camera’s lens where it’s looking right at him, sharp and pointed like the vertical slit pupils of a nocturnal predator. His thumb hovers over the shutter button.

He presses.

He’s not sure how many pictures he takes. Eddie doesn’t let himself keep track. The phone screen blinks repeatedly — maybe about two dozen times — and with each flash comes more and more exposure, like the bright white light coming through an x-ray print, Eddie sloughing off layer after layer as the lens digs deeper and deeper.

When it’s over, he doesn’t look at them. He won’t look at them. Not yet, anyway. Maybe later. Tomorrow morning, or the day after. It needs to be somewhere different. A different moment, a different feeling, something different from this. To be lived separately and classified its own way in hindsight. And while things may remain irrevocably tethered together, in the way that snapshot memories can sometimes form a bigger picture, it deserves its own chance to exist in solitary. To be done away with and forgotten, or to immortalize its commitment in stone. The road stretches far in either direction. Backwards, tracing its origins, or forwards, into a future for which there is no end.

Eddie climbs back into bed. The pressure of his knees against the mattress muss it up even further, enough for the fitted sheet to pop off in the far corner. Eddie leaves it. He collapses onto his front, shoving his whole arm, still clutching his phone, underneath where his head rests on the pillow. He breathes deeply on a constant loop, desperate for as many heavy gallons of air he can possibly shove into the too-tight space of his lungs. It stretches them wide, and they strain against his heart, pinching at something deep within.

He’s still wearing the camisole. Trapped by it, all stretched out fabric trying it’s best to hold him in. He should feel claustrophobic but he doesn’t. Just calm. Lying there still, with no real desire to move. It feels, fleetingly, like he might be waiting for something. But Eddie’s not sure what. He falls asleep that way and, upon waking, is greeted by the rays of a hot Texas morning sun; harsher than the soft tendrils of moonlight that rocked him to sleep the night before.

***

The hours between nine p.m. and two a.m. on a Saturday can prove particularly fruitful for the Uber drivers of El Paso. Eddie makes it two bites into his oil-dripping pizza slice under the harsh glow of the gas station parking lot before his phone chimes with a new ride request. He shoves the whole thing into his mouth unceremoniously and takes two quick sips of his Red Bull to wash it down before he accepts the ride, shifting his car into drive and peeling out onto the street while digging sleep crusties out of his eyes. Night descends like blue velvet. The lines of fluorescent lights break the pattern.

The pick-up destination is a bustling cowboy bar with a buzzing pink-and-blue sign above its entrance. Butch and Sundance, it declares, pulsing with neon like a descended-upon bug zapper. There’s a crowd of about a dozen people milling around outside, smoking cigarettes and exhaling plumes of fruit-scented vapour, laughing crumpled up and full-bodied in that jovial way that is typical of drunk people. When the bouncer holds the door open for a group of exiting patrons, what explodes out from the inside reflects across the sidewalk like a kaleidoscope, in all the colours of the rainbow.

The rear passenger-side door of Eddie’s car opens. It spills light and hot air and a thundercloud of sound into the small, tight space. “Hey,” someone calls over the noise, words fuzzy and slurred over a liquor-wet tongue. “Uber for Joanie?”

Eddie shifts in his seat well-enough to peer over his shoulder. “You bet,” he answers, smiling. The eyes staring back at him are wide, framed in twinkling sparkles with pupils blown open. Three adults in their mid-twenties slide into Eddie’s backseat, packaging themselves like sleeping sardines in a tin can, arms over arms and knees bumping knees. They’re damp with sweat and smell like it, the stench of alcohol bleeding from their pores along with something sharper, more chemical. Each of them has chosen a different bright colour to adorn themselves: a fuschia pink cowboy hat encrusted with rhinestones, a tight-fitting sleeveless shirt in radioactive green, a millions flecks of chunky glitter smeared across cheek and shoulder and chest in a highlighter purple and a bright, oceany blue.

They titter amongst themselves as they settle. Eddie dutifully counts the click of each seatbelt before he shifts into drive, pulling away from the curb outside the club and back out onto the open, empty street. The noise lingers behind them, a thumping rhythm that gets further and further away until it disappears completely.

Someone pops their gum. “It’s so lame that Dante bailed last minute,” they say, chewing through the words emphatically, their teeth clicking.

“Eh. It’s whatever,” comes the shrugging response from a different voice. Joanie, if Eddie had to guess, sitting in the spot directly behind him. “Dante stopped being fun when he stopped doing coke anyway.”

“You gotta be more supportive of his sober journey, NieNie. That shit wasn’t good for him.”

“Excuse me, I am very supportive of my friends on their sober journeys,” Joanie defends herself seriously. Her voice is sugary; high and with loads of vibrato packed into the end of her sentences. “What I’m not supportive of is when it makes them boringggg.”

Shame does not exist in the back of a late night Uber, as Eddie has come to understand. Especially not after drinks and dopamine hits and god knows what else. Loose-lipped and loose-limbed, these people behave as if Eddie isn’t sharing their breathing room, admitting to long-held secrets and speaking candidly on crude subjects. To them, he’s basically white noise. He fades into the background of their evening.

Tonight is not the first instance of this — a conversation that persists without modesty in his orbit. It won’t be the last. But Eddie doesn’t really care, even though he’s not always the most comfortable captive audience, because it’s all pretty harmless. People having fun. Enjoying themselves. The world does not want for misery. Better to accept bad behaviour and forgive it for the sake of some good old fashion fun.

“Cory said he knew the DJ. Did you guys know the DJ?”

“You made out with him for, like, twenty minutes straight tonight, Hyun-woo, and you didn’t even bother getting his Instagram?”

“Hmph,” Hyun-woo (at least, Eddie assumes it’s Hyun-woo) huffs. “I made out with plenty of people for twenty minutes tonight, Joanie, and I didn’t get any of their Instagrams either. Doesn’t it make more sense to do some sampling before you commit to one particular dish?”

Most of the time, Eddie would politely attempt to shut off the perceiving parts of his brain and focus on the road ahead of him. It’s the only sense of privacy he can possibly offer. Other times, however, something will catch his attention — and he can’t help himself but to follow the conversation thread, careful to keep his face impassive as he consciously eavesdrops, though he doubts anyone is ever really looking at him.

“Well, whatever. Since you guys were no help I found his Instagram myself — and look at who he’s following!”

A flurry of audible, clinking movement twinkles over the backseat as a phone seemingly exchanges hands. “Is that Molly’s deadbeat cousin? The one who cheated on his fiancee and gave her an incurable STD?”

“It is seriously unwoke of you to speculate on someone’s sexual health like that, Shade. And don’t say it like that, STIs are very common and unfairly stigmatized.”

“Whose stigmatizing!?” Shade retorts. “Molly told me herself!”

“Well, then, it’s fucked up of Molly to share that kind of personal information!”

They all speak in slurry, vowels soft as butter and consonants dragged out. Hyun-woo interrupts the building tension brewing between his friends. “Yeah, okay, anyway — what’s he doing following the DJ at a gay club? And I looked at his profile and tagged pictures. No fiancee that I can see. Wasn’t she blonde and super fucking WASP-y?”

“For sure. Her name was, like, Briar Rose or something. So hetero, and Molly told me she, like, never voted once in her life.”

“Ugh, I hate people like that.” Joanie echoes vehemently. “People like that deserve gay fiancees.”

“You think he’s gay?” There’s a hopeful tone.

“Duh, Hyun-woo. Put the pieces together. DJ at the gay bar. Cheated on his fiancee and got an STI. You know what demographic famously never uses protection?”

“That’s a stereotype. Now whose being unwoke?”

“A stereotype of my own community, Shade. Get a grip. Do you use condoms when you fuck guys?”

The question is answered. Instead, someone asks, “Do you seriously think he’s gay, though? I met him a couple times. He never came off that way. And they were engaged.”

“So what? You don’t realize you're gay until you realize you're gay. Simple as that. Some of us know who we are from a very young age,” Eddie guesses Joanie gestures to herself and her friends, who all offer quiet damp mouth noises as their expressions all must shift drastically in response. “And some of us take longer to figure it out. One of Candi’s gay dads was, like, married to, like, a woman. And then he had a kid with a man and they named her Candi. With an I.”

“That’s pretty gay.”

“Babe. Tell me about it. And we just left the gay bar.”

The friends erupt into a resounding chorus of near maniacal laughter. It’s a wall of sound. Eddie’s brain filters it out until it’s as tertiary as TV static, or the quiet drone of the radio. Take the time to get to know me, if you want me, why can't you just show me?. He sighs quietly. His eyes flick to the GPS display on his phone. They’re five minutes from their destination. Eddie relaxes further into his seat, his hands going loose around the steering wheel as he disappears below the surface of his consciousness.

They’re polite enough to thank him on their way out, at least.

***

Eddie's final ride of the night is a long and quiet one, across an uneventful stretch of road from the El Paso airport into one of the surrounding suburbs. His passenger wears headphones the whole time and nods off periodically against the car window. Eddie stares at the road ahead until all of his surroundings blur, smearing against his vision, until he might as well be driving through nowhere, on a journey to somewhere that has no name.

“Um, I think someone dropped this,” Eddie’s passenger breaks the haze, hand emerging from the abyss between the front seats, bright like a strike of lightning through the shadows. He’s holding something small and oblong.

Eddie opens his palm to it. His adrenaline spikes with the acceptance of an offering he doesn’t yet understand. It reminds him of Ash Wednesday, arms crossed over his chest and eyes tilted upwards, to the priest and God above him.

The item drops without much weight.

It’s a tube of lip gloss. Clear like glass. Thick and viscous beneath the pinch of Eddie’s thumb and forefinger as he lifts it to examine. There's an air bubble warping the shape of the logo. The trio from earlier, Eddie thinks. One of them must have dropped it. There’s a function in the Uber App where you can submit a report about a missing item. The driver can respond if they have and a paid drop-off can be arranged.

Eddie checks his phone for the notification. There’s nothing.

“Thanks,” he turns to mumble to his passenger, but the man is already gone, outside slamming the trunk shut with a resounding thud, suitcase clutched in his fist.

Eddie drives home with the lip gloss tube sitting in his cup holder. A sick nervousness ratchets up as the minutes pass, spiking Eddie’s adrenaline even though nothing is happening. He waits for the chime of a new notification. Nothing ever comes.

Once Eddie has pulled into his driveway and cut the ignition, he googles Butch and Sundance from the front seat of his car. The photos he flicks through depict mostly sweaty bodies smiling at the camera while bathed in bright colours. He lingers on the address.

Eddie takes the tube of lip gloss out of his cup holder and shoves it into his glovebox, slamming it closed. It hits his ears like a gunshot.

He’ll hold onto it for now, he rationalizes. He’ll make sure to give it back if they ask for it.

***

Eddie and Shannon went to their junior Homecoming together, but not before two other girls asked Eddie if he’d go with them instead. He had to let them both down gently, one after the other. Helena tells Christopher the story over dinner one evening.

“That’s where you get it from,” she says, smiling wide and prideful, threatening with two fingers that she’s going to pinch Christopher’s cheek. Chris ducks away from her with an exasperated look on his face. Tonight, Helena and Eddie sit across from each other while Ramon occupies the seat at the head, Christopher placed strategically between each of his grandparents. As far away from Eddie as he can be. “Both of you, so popular with girls. Our Edmundo was such a charmer back in the day. Always coming home after dark wearing makeup that wasn’t his.”

Eddie remembers Homecoming that year. Shannon had worn pastel purple, a sleek column dress that hung to her ankles. Her shoes were a pair of strappy heels whose silk laces were threaded with small, decorative white flowers. Eddie had dressed in compliment; simple, all-black, with a purple pocket square and a boutonniere to match the corsage he had purchased. They had left the dance earlier than most, abandoning their friends to swing through the fast food drive-thru for some sodas and a couple of apple pies. Shannon found them a secluded corner of the parking lot, and they ate and they talked and they laughed, and Eddie remembers thinking about how thankful he was that Shannon was his best friend.

She had climbed into Eddie’s lap after they were finished with their one-dollar pastries, tossing the bag of garbage into the backseat and clambering over the centre console. They made out for a long time, like all the other kids their age did. The whole car smelt like apples and cinnamon. Shannon was wearing lipstick. It smeared waxy across Eddie’s mouth and tasted waxy on his tongue. Different from the usual sticky-sweet sensation of Shannon’s lip gloss. The lipstick was airier, cloud-soft, like if you wore it for long enough you might forget it was there. It wasn’t better than the lip gloss. It wasn’t worse either. Just different.

At some point, Shannon pulled away from Eddie’s mouth, the curtain of her dark falling over shoulders and into Eddie’s space, smelling faintly like pear and honeydew. Obscuring the landscapes around them, their own private shadowed cave. Shannon’s face was so close to his. She was looking down at Eddie, a mischievous glint in her iris. And then she lifted her thumb and pressed it across Eddie’s bottom lip, past the corner of his folded together mouth, down to the slope of his still soft-skinned chin. She kissed him once more without removing the obstruction, the blunt edge of her nail scraping across the seam where their lips met. Eddie had sighed against her before she moved away again, and he saw that there was red smeared across the impression of her thumbprint, the same shade of it that was now escaping the contours of her messy mouth.

“You look good like this,” Shannon had told him. At the time, Eddie could only imagine what she meant. He imagines it more clearly now, no longer afraid of the image. His mouth, filthy and red, smashed wax and slipped pigment. Climbing up the slopes of Eddie’s cheeks from the base of his parted lips, slipping down his chin and skittering across his jaw. He could see himself wearing the half-ruined impressions of a near dozen kiss marks, imprecise but not indiscernible against his skin, his deep-red blush blurring all their edges. His hair had probably been wild at the time, thoroughly tousled from where Shannon had run her fingers through the strands, pulling from the root near the tip-top of Eddie’s skull to coax him through a sharp gasp.

Eddie had kissed her again, craning his neck and pressing forward to catch her when she ran from it, her laugh sweet and her smile bright even in the dark. She melted against him, pressing their open mouths together, her hands anchoring themselves against Eddie’s shoulders, her breath hot where it mixed with this. She still tasted like apples and so did he.

“I’m serious,” she repeated, murmuring it into Eddie’s throat with gentle whispering. She was looking at Eddie again, somehow even closer this time, her eyes flickering all over his face, lingering on his mouth, on the red that was still smeared around it. She filled up his entire field of his vision. Her eyes looked huge. “Pretty. It suits you. I like it.”

***

Back in L.A., they told each other everything.

For Eddie, the urge never wanes. He finds himself just as subjugated to it in Texas as he was in California. It pours out of him like an undammed flood, filling every crevice in his mouth and space between his teeth. What wouldn’t you tell him? The universe asks and Eddie comes up short.

“I haven’t jerked off in two weeks.”

Perhaps not quite the response Buck had been expecting when he had offered Eddie a cheery smile and a polite hey, how’s it going over FaceTime. He makes a noise like he’s swallowed a croaking frog. Eddie watches Buck’s brain turn off, reset, and boot itself back up again, all from the look on his face. “Sorry,” Buck says through the click of his throat. “You, uh, caught me off-guard there, bud. Come again?”

Eddie scoffs, knowing that he’s being teased. Except — Buck’s face turns quizzical. Eddie raises an expectant eyebrow and waits.

“Oh, uh, I mean…” Buck’s eyes widen as the double-entendre occurs to him, tossing his head left and right as his tongue scrambles. “No, that’s not — shit, uhhh. What I wanted to say was…” and then, after some consideration and a hail-mary shrug, Buck asks, careful and cautious, like the thought is occurring to him as he speaks it into existence. “Did you, uh, did you call me just to tell me that?”

Heat floods Eddie’s face even worse, spreading the flush from his cheeks down the column of his throat and to the cradle of his chest. He stares at Buck, Buck’s whole upper body filling up the width of the screen. “Um.”

It hadn’t even occurred to Eddie to consider it. Hadn’t even occurred to him that he might have needed some other reason to call Buck, to summon his presence and tell him exactly what’s been going on in Eddie’s mind. They always told each other everything. That’s how this worked. Eddie had finally worked up the courage to look at the photos he had taken the other night and they had looked — yeah. They were something, alright. Low-lit, cinnamon coloured and spiced in a similar way. Eddie was looking at the camera half-lidded, a slight cock of one hip and an upwards tilt to his chin. He hadn’t even realized he was posing like that. It had come over him instinctively, looking at himself through eyes he was pretending belonged to someone else. And when he was beholding those images, beginning to understand the way they made him feel — well, was one of the most significant shifts Eddie had felt in his life in so long. It felt like progress and at a time in Eddie’s life where everything else seemed so futile.

He always told Buck about the significant things in his life. Buck wanted to know and Buck never judged him. That’s how this worked. It was that simple, as Eddie understood it, and while he couldn’t drum up the courage to admit to Buck about the photos he’d taken of himself wearing women’s clothing, at least he could offer a softer admission. Something to bridge the gap in the meantime, while the situation continued to develop.

“I…um…” Eddie forms useless sounds with no deeper meaning. He presses his teeth together, tonguing the roof of his mouth, wetting it from the inside. As if to facilitate the slide of something truthful and real. “I must’ve — I guess I had something else to talk to you about,” Eddie lies instead. “But I, uh, forgot. I must’ve forgot. Sorry, Buck, my head’s been such a mess.”

“Don’t say sorry!” Buck refutes in an instant, his probing tone gone pillowy, a creature comfort. Eddie braces himself for some sort of good-natured jape to break the tension, a little prod between the ribs with a metaphorical elbow, I know fourteen days without an orgasm would distract me too but, to his surprise, Buck doesn’t tease. Or maybe he does, just much more subtly, asking Eddie, “when, uh, how did you notice that you had…” Buck trails off, his tongue darting out to flick pink and wet across his top lip. “That it had… been that long?”

“By accident,” Eddie answers, curt with a small shrug. It was an accurate enough summary of the circumstances. He started by accident and he continues on purpose, or perhaps he continues because habits are easiest when you don’t even notice yourself developing them. It was always too hot, Eddie was too busy, it was too much effort. Days passed, in the beginning, without much notice. A vague sense of it, like a tingling at the base of the skull. Until it slipped to the front of Eddie’s psyche and he could suddenly perfectly recall the last time it happened and exactly how long ago.

(Quick and harried and rough and not even that good, nothing but spit for the slip, the night after he had taken the photos. He hadn’t even looked at them yet and wouldn’t for another few days. The thought of them buzzed like an anticipatory sugar-ache in Eddie’s teeth. He was face down against the mattress, palming the ridge of his half-hard cock through the fabric of his underwear lazily, thrusting half-hearted into the heat of his own palm. He spit into the cup of his own hand and shoved it past the elastic of his boxers, folding his hip upwards to make room, shoving his ass into the air and his forehead deep into the pillow below. The angle wasn’t all that good but it didn’t matter. Eddie came with his mouth wide open, heaving through breaths that stuttered, groaning wretchedly into wet fabric and an empty room as he spilled release into his own hand.

He had put the camisole away earlier that evening, into the very back of his top drawer. He couldn’t imagine himself ever reaching for it again but he couldn’t imagine himself getting rid of it either.)

Despite the honesty that Eddie offers, Buck’s expression remains vaguely uncertain. “Are you gonna… keep going?” He traverses the sentiment delicately, with careful trepidation.

Eddie’s breath gets stuck in his throat. There is a hot, piercing sensation puncturing the soft walls of his stomach. “I don’t know,” he answers, truthfully. “Maybe,” he answers, searching.

“Yeah,” Buck nods, a pin in an unreadable map. He licks his lips again. “Yeah, like, y’know. Why would you stop now anyway?”

Eddie doesn’t respond. To this, he has no answer. Suddenly, he feels light as air.

***

Butch & Sundance.

Like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, obviously. Eddie reads the neon sign as it flickers above the entrance. Across the parking lot, his engine is silent and still. The pedal beneath his foot has long turned cold. They had a copy of that movie on VHS when he was growing up, Eddie remembers. It was worn at its edges and faded across the front from sun damage but he can still recall the way Paul Newman looked on the cover, and he remembers Robert Redford’s mustache, and he remembers the line: kid, there's something I ought to tell you. I never shot anybody before.

This morning, when Eddie woke sometime nearing 7AM, he did so achingly hard. Heat was pooling between his thighs and wetness had soiled the inside of his boxer briefs. He could tell the anticipation had long been thrumming below his skin, building to its crescendo even as he slept, and it had slammed into Eddie with the full breadth of its force from the moment he opened his eyes, dragging a ragged gasp from his throat as his hips pressed involuntarily into the mattress.

Eddie had willed himself to sit still. Grit his teeth against the pulsing of his cock and clenched his fists into the malleable plush of the pillows. He had mewled, sad and foolish, his voice peaking an octave like the sound of a wounded animal.

But Eddie had managed to keep his composure. He managed to cling-steady until the heat of his cock blistered and burned itself out. Until he went soft again. It brought with it a half-baked sense of relief; numbness in the face of what could have been, what should have been, the exact opposite type of this feeling. It took almost forty-five minutes before it was finally over. It left Eddie breathing heavily and damp with a fine sheen of sweat.

He was cold after that — probably the coldest he had felt since moving back to Texas — but it didn’t take very long for the heat to come rushing back in. It stayed with him all day after that. A nagging sensation in his subconscious, an itch he would scratch if only he could find it. It was the type of urge that required immediate addressing. It would not be shirked off otherwise. Like a thorn in your palm, or the hair-thin presence of a sliver below your skin. Something that could be inconsequential if only you could manage to ignore it.

Eddie cannot ignore it. He’s being called to something. His temperament will not allow him to do anything but answer it.

It’s how he found himself in this parking lot. It’s why he’s still sitting here, working up the courage.

He could go inside. It’s still early, and the real hard partiers probably won’t start showing up until after ten o’clock. It would just be drinks at a bar. Eddie has had drinks at a bar before. Maybe he could meet someone and talk to them, let them buy him a round. He’s done less of that variety, to be honest, but it’s not exactly unprecedented.

The car door shuts heavily behind him. The tickle in Eddie’s throat begs to be wetted. His feet scuff the pavement as he strolls forward, his pace leisurely, his palms blooming with sweat. There’s no bouncer waiting at the front door and nobody checks his I.D. before they let him in. He was right; the place is mostly empty, except for a few couples sharing booths, a handful of random single patrons meandering at the bar, and two decent-sized groups playing at the pool tables. They’re blasting the droning chorus of Call On Me by Eric Prydz. The conservative number of spread-out TV screens behind the bar seem to all be playing the same thing: a western, Eddie observes. His eyes follow the distinct form of Anthony Perkins, depicted in pixels and floating above the rest of their heads.

He finds himself naturally gravitating to the empty seat at the far end of the bartop, tucked away and not quite as obvious to the rest of the world. As if Eddie might be afraid to run into someone that he knows. That was unlikely. Eddie hasn’t lived here for years. It would have to be someone from high school and most of those people probably don’t even remember him now.

Probably.

“What are we having?” The bartender — a slender man, with a severe brow and spindly but well-defined arms, decorated by sporadic tattoos in varying levels of quality — asks Eddie.

But now Eddie’s stuck in this spiral of a thought pattern, jagged against the soft matter of his brain as it spins. What would he do if someone he knew saw him? If someone who knew him from high school — someone who knew him from Shannon and from having a baby and from joining the army and running away — spotted him with that look of recognition in their eyes.

Would Eddie have to admit to himself that this was a secret after all? And how could it not be? He hadn’t told Buck. A secret from Buck was so often a secret from everyone else too. Eddie could count the instances of the opposite on a single hand, and even then, they’d all mostly been for Buck’s benefit.

But Buck doesn’t benefit here. In this case, Eddie is the truth's sole beneficiary.

“Rum and coke,” he finally manages, his throat croaking embarrassingly. The bartender smiles, but all Eddie feels is foolish.

He’s gone before the drink is ever served to him. He leaves a twenty-dollar bill on the counter in his wake, the last shred of evidence that Eddie was ever there in the first place.

***

The package arrives, discreet and orderly, on Eddie’s front doorstep one late afternoon, just as the brand’s website had promised.

It weighs almost nothing. Unsuspecting and simple, a rectangle-shaped box made of non-descript brown cardboard and sealed down the middle with several layers of thick-stripped, transparent packing tape. It’s stamped with Eddie’s name and his new address.

Edmundo Diaz. El Paso, TX.

It was basically serendipitous. The universe had anticipated Eddie’s need and answered it. In the wake of his abandoned attempt at a night out, he thought it best to regroup. He had only decided a day and a half ago to take a much-earned weekend off, and that was after thinking about it for a long time. Things have been good lately. Good enough to have Eddie feeling optimistic. He still wakes some mornings expecting a different ceiling above him, or a warmer presence in his kitchen, or a different set of windows that let in a different cascade of light — but maybe that’s just one of those feelings that’s never meant to go away, sticky like a bad cold, like remembering you’ve forgotten something after it’s already too late to turn back and retrieve it.

Eddie uses the pocket knife in his kitchen junk drawer to slice through the layers of tape, breaking it apart and blooming it open like a transparent flower. Inside is a matryoshka doll of other boxes; one after another after another after another, the final of which arrives in a demure shade of dusky pink, tied with a bow made from cream-coloured silk. This box is slim, its depth shallow. The lid slides off like butter.

It’s a lot of fanfare for what essentially amounts to a pair of lace panties posed on a bed of brand-custom tissue paper but, well — that makes it sort of special, doesn’t it? For Eddie’s first time.

He stares at the scrap of fabric. There’s a layer of sweat across the base of his neck, soaking his hairline, and the muscles in his jaw won’t stop buzzing like a beehive. Eddie clenches his back teeth, grinds them together, and by consequence activates his salivary glands. They fill his mouth with hot, heavy saliva.

The panties are a much more formidable force in person than they ever seemed when Eddie was clicking through the pictures on the website's listing. He took great care in his choosing. Something approachable, he thought, but not boring. What was the point of all this if it wasn’t exciting? He ghosts his touch over the lace. The sensation lingers, tingly against the pads of his fingers like hot, grainy sand. Like this, he can feel the threads of delicate webbing that hold everything together.

Part of Eddie is still hardwired to welcome the shame, he realizes. The muscles in his abdomen are tense in defence of an assumed oncoming wave of nausea and he shivers with molten chill. This is full fight-or-flight mode, Eddie thinks — and while the dread of it is somehow absent, the anticipation is at an all time high. His body is poised at the starting line, leaning into the wind and waiting for the go-sound.

Waiting, and waiting forever, because the shame never comes.

Eddie replaces the lid on the box, shrouding the allure of the panties like a dirty secret, something for behind closed curtains. He leaves the box on the dining room table. He distracts himself by browsing the food delivery apps for dinner tonight, flopping onto the couch, his subconscious tugged at incessantly all the way.

He waits until the sun goes down, though. At least to challenge himself any further.

***

It’s a fairly straightforward process: one leg first and then the other. The elastic waist snaps into place along the cradle of Eddie’s hips.

In the dark, things feel less permanent, like the edges have been sanded away. Illuminated by the single lit lamp on his bedside table (otherwise decorated with miscellaneous markers of a life and its habits, such as: a book on parenting, a pair of reading glasses, a barely-sipped glass of still water and a rapidly dwindling bottle of ibuprofen), Eddie stands before his full-length mirror, feet a shoulder width apart and his back ram-rod straight. Heat boils in his chest cavity, spreading liquid-iron blood in his veins. Malignant and gentle, sweet and searing, cauterizing some deep-seeded ache within him, like the awful fever that kills the awful sickness.

The temperature of the room increases as Eddie takes himself in.

This fabric offers very little in terms of extra coverage. Eddie’s thigh meat bunches it upwards and the unapologetic roundness of his ass does the rest. But it doesn’t matter; he ruined the haphazardly sewn lines of that camisole too and that didn’t matter either.

The lace cuts shapes and patterns through peaks at Eddie’s bare skin, drawing the eye to his anterior thigh muscles, the inciting curl of his waist. Guided along that path by the dainty, elegant texture from one hip bone to the other. It makes Eddie feel… covetable. Like a diamond, or a shiny pink-and-blue hued pearl. He can sense the tension in his glutes from the way the underwear separates his asscheeks, emphasizing their plumpness and letting some of that enticing muscle-fat hang out just below the hem line. Polite but not too polite. It’s warm flesh and coarse hair below that, framing the softness of Eddie’s tummy and the shape of his cock. His cock... trapped, pathetic. Shadowed and obscured and yet still so damningly obvious. Half-hard and getting harder, firming up, blood flowing hot through the entire length of Eddie’s body, down and down and down until —

He presses his palm to his cock over the lace and hisses through his teeth.

It’s been over three weeks since Eddie last jerked off. He gave Buck the update in the late afternoon on the twenty-first day of his repentance through abstinence.

Eddie rubs at his cock listlessly, in big fat palmfulls, lace sandwiched between skin on skin. It turns abrasive quickly, but Eddie doesn’t stop, dragging a chorus of multiple hisses between his teeth. He keeps working himself over, dragging his other hand across his chest, smearing sweat and grasping at his pectoral muscles in unforgiving handfuls, rubbing over the tight peaks of his nipples.

“Ohhh,” Eddie breathes, dragging out the syllable. It rakes through him, pinging and metallic and near painful, but all Eddie senses is the hot satisfaction of palming himself, of palming his chest and cock in equal measure. His hips shift involuntarily on a swivel, offering better angle after better angle to the reflection of the mirror. From this particular viewpoint, Eddie can see the heavy weight of his cock as it strains through the panties and where the lace cuts across his asscheek tight enough to dimple the flesh. He sighs, pain and pleasure and shame and pride, scathing and sparking and never letting up.

It’s easy to get lost in it. That’s Eddie’s body — but he can detach himself from reality and watch his own hands work, manhandling him like they belong to someone else. Like he belongs to someone. He’s not gentle with himself. What would be the point of that? Eddie knows exactly how much pressure to exert. He knows when to go in with the blunt edge of a fingernail or when to pinch the tan bud of his puffy nipple between his thumb and forefinger. He knows exactly what he can take. He makes himself take it. His hips fuck lazily into the palm of his hand, pooling precome at the head of his dick through the delicate lace, sticky where it leaks between his fingers.

Eddie could get himself off. He could follow that searing path of pleasure to its most natural conclusion. Soak the front of these brand new panties, leave it dripping all over his hands. But that’s not the goal he’s chasing — Eddie’s looking for something more long-term, more committed. Eddie wants something that requires patience, composure and endurance.

So he doesn’t chase his orgasm. He keeps his touches light and purposeful, squeezing his cock to lure more wetness from the tip, fondling his own chest hard enough to leave angry red handprints. His mind wanders, dipping into that shallow pool of euphoric anticipation, feeling it all around him, corporeal and cerebral alike.

Buck’s voice comes to Eddie like a spirit from the ether, like the voice that whispers in your ear while you’re balanced on the precipice between asleep and awake. Eddie. It’s his own name breathed into the flushed-red shell of his own ear, something he’s heard from this voice before but never dealt with this sort of intentionality.

Eddie groans, perhaps too wearily, shivering full-bodied as his eyes slip close and his head tilts back, and he drops his both hands.

***

Despite the lack of orgasm, the underwear are still a mess. Eddie slides them off carefully — they are sullied, wet and viscid with all the precome he had managed to milk slowly from his half-hard cock while pinned beneath the weight of his hand and the scratchy texture of the lace. He should throw them straight into the washing machine, he thinks, or straight into the garbage, but something stops him. Something makes Eddie drag his thumb across the sodden fabric, to feel his own release (if it can be called that, considering the circumstances) tacky against it, to force it into the very stitching of the garment.

He wants more. Something not so simple or so unintimidating. He wants something that will scare him. Something that will send his pulse hammering, something that he’ll be nearly too afraid to even step into. He’ll manage it in the end, he thinks. Or: he believes he can. But before that he’ll be shaking, holding back the anticipation like a gag reflex, like a reactive dog on a short leash. Waiting for that same potent mix of pain and pleasure and shame and pride that churned up his guts earlier.

Perhaps the shame might return under those circumstances. Not as deterrence but as enhancement. A kiss of it, warm against Eddie’s temple, setting his body on a low simmer, everything boiling up together.

Frightening, and sort of familiar.

***

Late night scrolling proves a difficult habit to break. Two weeks after his purchase, Eddie makes another.

There’s a lump in his throat as he flicks through the photos of the model advertising the garments. It’s a set this time; a more traditional shape and cut of underwear in a deep reddish-violet, with knee high stockings and a garterbelt to match. The model is dark-skinned, her hair braided and tumbling across the smooth flesh of her glistening shoulders. She’s not wearing anything on top. Her arms are folded across her chest, pressing her breasts together as she keeps them covered. She’s smiling at the camera with her head tilted slightly back. As if someone has just told her a joke, the remnants of her laugh still stuck in her teeth. She’s beautiful.

In a blur of half-formed thoughts and partly-considered ideas, Eddie guesses at his measurements and trusts the sizing chart, checking out with all three items in his cart and a 10% repeat customer discount applied. In the immediate aftermath, his nervous system running on high and demanding to know exactly what he’s done, Eddie considers cancelling the order before the shipping confirmation hits his inbox. But he steals himself, brushing the jitters aside and resolving not to think about any of it, not until the items arrive on his doorstep.

Stepping into a pair of underwear is fairly straightforward; the process of adorning oneself with all these additional embellishments is a bit more involved. It forces Eddie to pay attention, to perceive each action as it is executed with an acute awareness, cementing his place firmly in the heat of the moment. He works against the resistance of elastic, feeling every change in the texture of the fabric as he slides the underwear into place around his waist. These ones are softer than their predecessor — constructed from a sheer, silken material, with a quality akin to thin netting rather than lace — and Eddie’s ass swallows up more in the back than it did the others, leaving him more or less completely exposed.

Then come the stockings. Eddie tests them by rubbing the material between his thumb and forefinger. Their texture reminds him of the underwear. Except the stockings are clearly made from something thicker, better at holding itself together under a wider breadth of movement. They slip, whispery and ticklish, up the length of Eddie’s calf, displacing the hair that grows there into a messy swirl of unsymmetrical patterns. Eddie wonders if he should shave next time.

Finally: the garterbelt. Eddie sits on the edge of his mattress — naked, safe for his barely-there underwear and his high-rise socks, settled firmly into place above the twist of his kneecap, kissing lace across the width of his thigh — and attempts to make sense of what exactly he’s looking at. The belt itself, he thinks, meant to circle the perimeter of his waist and crafted from something like satin-spandex. Able to stretch and snap back, held together by a dainty line of tiny silver clasps, like a row of pointed metal teeth. The shape reminds Eddie of twin crescent moons; half-full and pointed at either end, with four identical straps that hang loose from each of their waning peaks and holding four identical clips.

The actions themselves are deceptively simple, it turns out. Everything comes with instructions and challenges very little besides one's dexterity. He fastens clasps, slides straps over skin, adjusts the cut of fabric. It’s the shortest journey to some sense of freedom: one specific task at a time. There’s no tremor in Eddie’s fingers as he works. Even as he moves on, anchoring clips and settling himself into the space he’s created for the body that he wears.

He looks down at himself before he dares a first glance at the mirror. His stomach quivers. Lower, there is satin and nylon. Lower still, his cock bends to the confines of the underwear. Excitement comes over Eddie like a flash-fire, the unending nervousness that has been quietly present this entire process rushing in to fan the flames.

For a second, Eddie thinks he might be sick. But then, strangely, he finds himself sort of waiting for it. Hoping for it. He’ll spit out the broken tooth, drain the infection straight from the source. He might lose something malicious and sour in the taste of bile; out with the old and in with new.

When Eddie and Shannon got married, they followed the old tradition. Something old, something new, something burrowed, something blue.

Eddie lifts his eyes, bracing himself for the humiliation, and like the first glimpse of the skyline after a long and stormy night, he finds himself in the mirror.

It’s the reflection of a braver self.

His throat clicks, like someone’s shoved their fist down his throat, slipping past his Adam’s apple and obstructing all the space Eddie might use to swallow or create breath.

It’s everything in stunning, startling clarity.

His skin glows. Eddie, reflected in warmth and decadence, like caramel and honey. The room is half-dark because Eddie likes it that way. Softer edges. More space to grow and no sun to shrink from. And it makes the colours — a crimson violet everywhere — look richer, contrasting in compliment. The stockings make his legs look long, longer than they already are, and Eddie decides the next time he tries this he’ll definitely shave beforehand, yearning for the kiss of such fabric against totally bare skin.

The garters follow trend, subtly lengthening the appearance of Eddie’s form. They chart the bulge of his well-muscled thighs from start to finish, halving them into sections like trussing a roast with butcher’s twine. You could gnaw on those heaps of flesh, should you desire it, and the resistance against the cut of your teeth would be tender and chewy.

Shapes and slopes continue; hips, the width of Eddie’s panties slung low across the cradle of his waist, the soft spill of his stomach. His dick sags the fabric, enough that tufts of Eddie’s dark pubic hair spill out over top, delicious and naughty in such a delicate fabric. A wet patch forms at the slit of Eddie’s dick, pearling through the grates of its sweet, sheer cage. Eddie thinks about pressing his thumb against — smearing, anointing precome across the front of his new underwear and making such a mess about it — until he reconsiders. It might be more fun to live the most fantastical version of this for as long as he can possibly manage. The mess can always come later.

The fabric belt hugging Eddie’s waist completes the image, pulling the eyes away from the specifics and bringing the whole picture into focus. This way, it becomes an outfit of sorts; meant to be perceived as one cohesive piece. One perfect and terrible thing that Eddie has done to himself. One terrible, perfect thing that he has allowed himself to have.

Part of Eddie is compelled to reach up and fold his arms over his chest in a pointless attempt to salvage modesty, or dignity, from something that’s not all that salacious at all, nor particularly vulgar. He has a flat chest, plumped slightly with muscle, but it’s what the model was doing on the website. Her braids falling around her face, her smile wide and bright. It’s difficult for Eddie to slip into her shoes, or to conjure up an image of himself that looks like that. She seemed so carefree, so open and uncaring. Eddie’s never wielded his body that way, offensive over defensive.

But then… why shouldn’t he? He looks good, even if that’s only by his own estimation. He likes the way he looks, as much as that scares him to admit. It’s all scary. It all scares him. Fear is weakness, though that’s rhetoric Eddie never seems to apply to anyone but himself.

The clothes look like they were made for him, even in all the ways they so clearly weren’t, everything coming together with luck and coincidence to showcase Eddie’s best assets. Like they were built to fit him, or he was built to fit them. Emphasizing the parts meant to be emphasized, drawing the eye across the body in a sensual unmoving dance.

Eddie’s ass in a pair of barely-there underwear is as tempting as anyone else’s can be, isn’t it?

He turns around to check for himself, twisting at the waist to see better. The movement snips its shape even further, snatching Eddie clean and slim and cut. Below that, his round and perky ass is split down the middle by his underwear. Eddie is hot and pink from cheeks to chest. God, he can’t believe he’s doing this. He can’t believe he’s done this, more than once, over and over, and it took him moving three states away from his only real support system to do it. If he thinks about it for too long it’s going to make his head spin, the story filled with contradictions and plot holes and twists and turns in the narrative that just don’t make sense. But it’s not a story — this is what happened, it’s what’s happening, and what’s more is that Eddie doesn’t want it to end. The siren’s call pulls him away from the shore; he wants to follow it out into the unexplored waters before him, even if that means finding something within the depths of himself that Eddie didn’t even know existed.

Maybe the barrier between him and the things that he wants that Eddie always thought was electrified was an exaggerated lie all along. Maybe he had only to reach out and be brave enough to touch it.

Eddie fumbles for the phone he left resting on the edge of the bed. His palms are slick. He’s nervous, but he’s not that nervous. Not anymore. There’s a lot of other things growing seeds in his brain; things blooming in his chest cavity; vines tugging against the current of the blood in his veins. When Eddie unlocks his phone, there’s a WikiHow article on how to put on garterbelts still there waiting for him.

He probably takes about two dozen pictures. If he had to guess. Some are as is: waist twisted, facing the mirror with his feet pointed in the opposite direction. Eddie’s hips canted backwards to show the curve of his ass, the clear star of this show, a thought that would feel more vain if it wasn’t so obvious. The absence of light in the bedroom casts shadows that turn Eddie’s skin soft and buttery, the perfect waning moon shape of his exposed asscheeks, firm with muscle but malleable under the right set of fingers. Shannon used to squeeze his ass sometimes when they’d make out. She liked to be the one to pin Eddie back against a wall too, or down against the bed, even though she was always smaller than him by a significant margin. It wasn’t aggressive. She’d exert no real strength against him. That’s just how they preferred it. Eddie never complained. He was content to be led where Shannon bid him.

(One time, she circled Eddie’s hole with her thumb while she was blowing him and Eddie had busted right on the spot, moaning long and ragged. He hadn’t disliked it — clearly — but he got kind of weird in the aftermath and it ruined the mood. Shannon never mentioned it again and she never tried it again either.)

Some other photos are of Eddie head-on, facing-forward with his back unbent and his hip tilted and his thighs flexed. His cock is the clear centerpiece of those, drooling all over itself in its soft fabric prison, blessing the front of it with a shadow of a wet spot, pushing against its restraints more and more as this impromptu photoshoot goes on.

Eventually, Eddie is on full display and fully hard as the shutter continues to click. He palms himself, allows it once, ah-ah-ing through his teeth against the pressure and soiling his hand with the sticky feeling of precome.

He takes one final photo of just that, the pressure of his hand smothering his cock. His hair is falling into his eyes and Eddie thinks, if he tries, that he might be able to make his gaze look hot and piercing. For who? He’s not sure. For someone, maybe someday.

(He thinks about it. He’s thinking about it when he’s taking that last picture. What it might be like to have a few fingers knuckle-deep in your ass, pushing and shoving against unforgiving muscle. Bigger than Shannon’s this time. His own. Someone else’s. Someone with bigger fingers than Shannon, who could get in at a better angle. Someone bigger than Shannon. Someone bigger than Eddie. Someone who could hold him down and make him take it.)

The photos live and die on Eddie’s phone for days before he works up the courage to look at them. By this point, he knows the cycle. Pushing at the boundaries until the edges are too worn-away, before the centre becomes too tender and collapsible. After that he needs to back off for a moment, allowing himself the space to breathe and the time to steady his heart against it until the determination comes back to him — and it always does. Eddie flicks through his Camera Roll on the couch in the living room lazily, feigning non-chalance for an audience of no one while his breastbone throbs in time with his pulse. His hand migrates slowly, as if being watched by a twitchy predator, until it finds the elastic waist of his basketball shorts. Eddie’s hand slips beneath, pressing to the rapidly thickening heft of his hot cock. His hips answer in kind, rolling upwards off the couch cushions, desperately seeking an unfound friction. Eddie’s breath picks up in his lungs, flowing from him in harsh bursts. His phone slips from his grip. It disappears between the gaps in the couch cushions. Eddie doesn’t care. He’s too preoccupied with rutting into his own open palm, the only relief he’s allowed himself in … is it near a month now? Has it been months? Time is only half-real when you’re alone in the desert. It’s all starting to bleed together. Eddie is groaning in the back of his throat and whining through his tight jaw. The crown of his skull presses painfully into the arm of the couch, shoving itself against the wood frame through the cushion fabric and making Eddie grind his teeth. He wants to come. But he can’t — he can’t come, even though he wants it so bad. Even when his inner monologue insists he give up on this fool’s errand of denying himself, even as his conscience calmly sits him down and tells him it’s okay, just jerk off, just come, please, come, please.

But he can’t. He can’t.

That’s the worst part, actually. That Eddie would gladly grant himself the oblivion of such a sweet pleasure, if only could find out exactly where inside of him it was hiding.

***

Eddie buys a tiny bralette in a matching colour a few days later, denting his wallet to complete the set. It proves a satisfying endeavor and an appealing sight when it all comes together. Even though he can’t help but feel a little bit foolish wearing it.

He won’t let it deter him. Comfort is built. You digest in segments to best face adversity. Eddie can take a break. He’s done it before; scampered away to lick his wounds when the stove got too hot. He can reset his expectations and work to broaden the way he understands the act of perceiving himself.

The work is hard but it is work worth doing.

And when the timing is right, Eddie indulges himself in a little trust of fate, of trust in the grand design of the universe. He was built for blind faith. He can trust that whatever he needs will be delivered to him when the time comes. He can trust that he’ll recognize it, and when he sees it he’ll know that the time is right.

It’s the same thought process that’s guided him this far.

***

The light above the pharmacy display won’t stop flickering. Eddie blinks hard to combat the eye strain. He reads through the names of the products in front of him. Poppy Petal Peach and Pretty Pink Diamond. The former is a fat tube of thick-and-sticky looking lip gloss, twinkling at him in morse code through its brightest specks of glitter, suspended in stasis amongst a sea of baby pink.

Eddie is completely out of his element. He looks down at where the Uber delivery app on his phone displays his customer’s order and feels it with even more urgency. He needs four items from this department, of which the merchandising spans several aisles, and Eddie barely knows where to start. He’s totally clueless, beyond what he can actually read, and this very first item is already giving him trouble.

His eyes flick from attention-grab to attention-grab. There’s a headache brewing at his temples. He spots a red lipstick named Big O and then, only a few colours down from that, another slightly darker shade called How’s Your Head?

Eddie grimaces. He turns on his heels to find an employee who can help him.

There’s a girl just a few aisles away restocking hefty bottles of value sized shampoo and conditioner. She is cheerful and naturally welcoming, nodding earnestly in response to Eddie’s request, following him back towards those neverending shelves of innuendos and makeup. In the glow of the fluttering bright lights, she takes the time to explain to Eddie the various tones and shades and colours. She explains to him what benefits emphasize which traits, highlighting a list of other things he might want to consider before making any purchases. Eddie lets her get through her whole spiel, until she’s smiling at him with her hands folded together and a sincere look in her eye, before he says, “I need some help picking out things for this delivery order, actually.”

The girl immediately deflates. Her eyes widening, embarrassed for having made assumptions. Eddie is urged to offer her some sort of lifeline. He reads her nametag.

“Wait,” he says, taking the opportunity to redirect the conversation, giving them something new to focus on. It’s not so often you run into someone who — “your parents named you Baby? Like that’s your first name? Bee-ay-bee-why?”

The girl — Baby, apparently — seems puzzled a moment, looking at Eddie suspiciously before it must reoccur to her that she’s wearing a nametag. “Oh,” she peeps, shrugging sheepishly. “Uh, yeah. That’s my name. I guess. My dad says he got it from a movie?”

“Dirty Dancing,” Eddie answers, before he slips effortlessly into his best Swayze impression. “Nobody puts Baby in a corner.”

The girl blinks up at him, unknowing. She has wide eyes and a sharp, slight face, like an infant bird.

“You haven’t seen the movie you’re named after?” He asks her. She shrugs at him again. Eddie scoffs, shaking his head unseriously. Of course she hasn’t. He’s old. He’s been someone’s dad for nearly fifteen years. “Your dad’s got good taste,” he concedes, sighing remorsefully and leaving it at that.

“Sure,” Baby agrees, her face still devoid of any recognition as she shrugs for a third time. But the change in conversation did what Eddie hoped it would do; she’s been distracted from her earlier embarrassment. Now they can move on from it — her, for assuming, and him, for having been assumed of — and if Baby clocks its obviousness, she doesn’t say anything. Instead, she asks him, “what was it you were looking for?”

They find all four items within five minutes, for which Eddie is deeply grateful. He tells Baby as much, and for all their earlier stilted conversation, she gives Eddie a genuine smile and a sincere parting as she wishes him a pleasant rest of his evening.

“Likewise!” Eddie calls back to her as she slips around the corner and back into the next aisle, returning to her half-stocked shelves of value sized shampoo and conditioner. Eddie — by some divine intervention perhaps, or a type of intervention not divine in the slightest, it’s always so hard to tell — finds himself once more in front of the same flickering lip gloss display.

He’s startled at first. His chest lurches, the taste sour, but Eddie ignores it. Swallows it back down into his stomach. His fingers are tingling. Trapped in the confines of his socks and shoes, his feet twitch.

He doesn’t rush away because that isn’t any less damning. He lets his eyes linger. He digs into the soft matter hidden behind the shell of his skull for the familiar faces of shame and of guilt. It’s unprecedented when they shrink from him, hiding in the shadows, cowering as if put there, as if hesitant to leave. The tube of pink lip gloss from earlier is illuminated at the centre of Eddie’s vision. When he blinks it’s bright enough to imprint itself on the back of his eyelids. Two shelves up, there is a component filled with something more milky-white, flowing with swirls of bright blue shimmers. Further still: rows and rows of expertly shaped waxy-textured tubes of opaquely coloured lipstick and cyclones of metallic gold spinning atop the smooth surface of a rose-pink powder. The colours convey similar attributes: soft, girly, coquettish and shy.

Pretty.

Eddie recalls the tube of clear-as-glass lipgloss sitting unassuming in his glovebox. It’s been awhile since it was left misplaced in his backseat. No one has asked for it back. He wonders if those three ever even noticed that it was missing, if they cared that it was. It had stumbled into Eddie’s lap so organically. And now, it seemed, it had the capacity to tempt him.

There’s still twinkles in the corners of his vision as he exits the store with the order he’s paid for. The sky is on fire — orange everywhere, shot through with long spindly clouds of yellow and pink — but when Eddie looks it’s like he can see the stars through all of it. Like they’re blinking back at him, communicating in dots and dashes.

He wonders what they might be saying. He wonders if he’ll ever get the chance to know.

***

Childhood offers its specific moments. Across eras, across continents, across living situations; there are situations that feel familiar to any life as it grows into something bigger.

Eddie remembers what it felt like when he started to realize he was different from his sisters.

It wasn’t just that they had different preferences — that Eddie liked pepperoni on his pizza and Adrianna liked cheese with extra sauce and Sophia didn’t really care for pizza at all. It was more integral than that. More inherent. The lines of division that weren’t so obvious when everyone is flat-chested, unaware of those fundamental differences between how the world treats men and women.

It wasn’t so much a switch that was flipped; more like a light that was dimmed, slowly and deliberately over time.

In even the most far-away memories Eddie possesses, he was always a brother. There is no time before that. It does not exist within him. No matter how far back he reaches or how deeply he digs, there is no secret chest of half-forgotten moments. Every snapshot of Eddie’s life is crystalized with his sisters’ images lingering in the corners. In the early days of elementary school (before Adrianna; after Sophia) Eddie would draw family portraits in sweeping smears of coloured-wax, each shade carefully mulled over with quiet contemplation before a selection was made. He’d depict himself as the tallest among them, smiling wide-mouthed under the swimmy rays of his corner-trapped grinning yellow-orange sun. He’d draw Helena across the page from him, her hair long and dark and her mouth a straight line. Flat and unmoving. Preserved that way in his mind. Between them, Sophia. Barely more than a squirling infant or an immobile toddler, he’d portray her as slightly older than she was without really understanding what he was doing, in the way that the passing of time is so elusive to a child. She’d be dressed in Eddie’s closest artist approximation of a pink princess dress, sometimes purple, and she’d be holding the hand of Eddie’s stick figure counterpart, clumsily drawn with only six fingers between the two of them, but always smiling.

Eddie’s sisters grew and he grew with them. As time went on, it became increasingly obvious that he would indulge them in almost anything. He’d hoard pocket change from his paper route to buy them something cool and sweet from the ice cream truck in the summer. During the school year, he’d arrange them a snack of crackers with roughly sliced morsels of cheese and pre-peeled orange segments every afternoon. He’d take them to the park and walk them three streets down in every direction so they could spend time at their friends' houses. He’d even circle back around hours later to pick them up again. He’d reach whatever they needed from the top shelf, even if he had to use the kitchen himself, and he’d aid and abet them in countless candy heists before dinner. When Eddie was old enough to learn to use the stove, it was him making the grilled cheese and heating up tomato soup for lunch every weekend, and when Eddie learnt to drive, he started taking them both to school in the mornings too.

It wasn’t all chores. Another thing Eddie took to naturally in his role of big brother was keeping his sisters entertained. He learnt how to have fun with them and he liked doing it. Whether it was memorizing Sophia’s favourite books so he could recite them near from memory, or helping Adrianna dig for worms in the backyard after fresh rainfall turned the dirt soft.

He’d let them dress him up too. That was a favourite of theirs. It was one of the few activities that suited both of their personalities and proclivities. Sophia liked to make someone into something beautiful and Adrianna found the whole process hilarious. Eddie couldn’t fit their costume dresses or their tiny plastic heels but he could wear a sparkly silver tiara, adorned with pink accouterments, and allow himself to be made up. A shimmery, milky-blue across the eyelids and halfway up to the brow, two vertical rectangle-shaped splotches of red on the apple of each cheek, layer after layer and entirely too much poor quality pink lipgloss. It smelt enough like bubblegum to turn your stomach and beneath that particularly pungent smell was a shred of something more like plastic.

Eddie can’t remember how exactly he felt about all of this back then. Whether it turned his stomach with that familiar nausea or if that ugly, unforgiving part of him hadn’t taken root yet. He doesn’t think he was born with it — but how do you track exactly at what point in your life the world starts forcing you to split off from who you really are? The purest form of self-expression that can only be experienced in childhood, before you understand the way things are built around you. Before you understand the status quo that you’d be upsetting.

He remembers what Helena always said, though. Maybe that was where it started. Eddie can’t remember the first time it happened but he remembers it happened often. The image in his mind is a hybrid of multiple instances, a chimera-likeness of his mother wearing different outfits with her hair styled different ways, the house decorated for different holidays, the way the room smelt or if the back door was open to let the breeze in. In one glimpse, there are stockings hanging on the mantel in the living. In the next, Eddie is wearing pajamas smeared with flour and his mouth still tastes sticky with syrup.

She never scolded them. Eddie remembers that too. They were only playing pretend, after all. She’d get this look on her face instead. The sharp cut of her eyeline, the straight line painted across her mouth. She mirrored the depictions immortalized in Eddie’s juvenile drawings. He wondered if his mom ever kept any of those, or if it was too much like looking in a mirror.

Unlike the unmoving family portraits, however, the longer Helena watched as Eddie’s sisters dolled him up, offering him sweet compliments through tittering giggles, the more her mouth would downturn in the corners.

“You can never let your father see you like that,” she would say, arms folded together over his chest. She’d be looking right at Eddie. “You know that, don’t you? That you can’t play this game when he’s around?”

His sisters would go quiet. They’d look at him from the corners of their eyes as they continued their work, albeit much less enthusiastically. “Yeah,” Eddie would answer, before his voice ever changed. “I know,” he would tell Helena. “I know we can’t.”

Maybe that’s when looking in the mirror started making Eddie feel nausea. When his habits become symptoms of an affliction he wasn’t willing to acknowledge.

Maybe then. Maybe later. Maybe the whole time.

***

If there’s anything Eddie’s learnt about himself since moving to Texas, it’s that courage always rebounds. That with hard work and steady hands and the right tools, anything previously thought impossible can be made possible again.

It’s as freeing of a thought as it is frightening.

“Good to see you around again.” The bartender deposits a rum and coke Eddie didn’t order onto the personalized bar napkin in front of him. The logo he covers, distorted through textured glass and sloshing liquid, is of a cowboy, gripping tight to the saddle of a bucking bronco. It’s the same bartender from the first night, Eddie recognizes. Hence the appearance of rum and coke without asking. A familiar anxious heat builds behind Eddie’s solar plexus, threatening to redden his complexion. “Barely got a glimpse of you last time.”

Eddie, somehow, manages to temper any oncoming flush. “Didn’t know I made that kind of impression,” he speaks casually. His mouth smudges against the edge of his glass as he takes a sip. It’s a double. He didn’t order that last time.

A smile unfurls across the bartender’s mouth. His eyes flick from Eddie’s face to his chest and then back up again. “I think you might make that kind of impression everywhere you go, sweetheart.” The accent that drips from his words isn’t Texan, but there’s something distinctly syrupy about it.

Eddie’s cheeks are burning. He doesn’t even realize until it’s already happening, until it’s too late to do anything about it. He doesn’t respond to the compliment. Just takes another long sip of his drink, while below the edge of the bartop where the bartender can’t see, his left leg bounces compulsively. It redirects the more frantic and caustic qualities of Eddie’s simmering nervous energy, helping him mount his defenses against it, allowing him to soldier on.

“My name’s Jesse,” the bartender says, tucking a rag into his back pocket and placing both his palms flat against the bartop in front of him. He’s tall, leaning over Eddie with a quiet strength in the outline of his arms and a sharp, sophisticated face. He’s got a tattoo on the side of his neck and a silver hoop in his nose. “What’s yours?” Jesse asks.

“Eddie,” he answers and it feels like a decision. A decision to accept the inherent humiliation that comes with vulnerability, with putting yourself out there in a new environment. Eddie leans into it; you never learn to find comfort if you’re never uncomfortable. Eddie’s gaze goes half-lidded and the tension in his mouth goes soft. He doesn’t notice but his leg ceases its endless springing.

Jesse tilts his chin up, looking pleased. When his mouth falls open, Eddie can see the red muscle of his tongue where it touches the bottom edge of his front teeth. This man is clearly interested, of this Eddie has no uncertainty, but the interest comes framed with a shade of mocking, just the right fit for him. Eddie’s stomach swirls in colours like a washing machine.

The lights in this place turn the whole scene warm and neon: a wood-stain yellow and a bright, angelic blue. “You sound like you’re from around here, Eddie,” Jesse remarks, blinking at Eddie, those same neon lights caught in his lashes. “But I’ve never really seen you around.”

It’s not a question. Eddie scoffs. He’s had more to drink now. The alcohol settles him like hot chocolate, sludgy and warm and spiced with cinnamon. “And you don’t sound like you’re from here at all,” he retorts, taking another sip. When the glass falls away this time, he finds it empty. “So where does that leave us?”

Wordlessly, Jesse crafts Eddie another drink. Eddie watches in a state of deja-vu as he drops a fresh glass onto the same scrap of napkin lying wrinkled on the bartop from earlier. Then, Jesse lifts his hand to his mouth and licks away a stray drop of who-knows-what off the bend of flesh between his thumb and index finger.

“You got me,” he admits. Lower, slower, more sultry. At least that’s how it sounds to Eddie. Maybe Jesse’s doing it on purpose, or maybe the rum is slowing down the synapses as they fire in Eddie’s brain. “I’m a transplant. What’s your secret? Someone keep you locked up in their basement for twenty odd years?”

Jesse’s jaw is sharp below the light fuzz of his half-grown beard. There’s grey in it. He looks competent. Confident with his hands and well-traveled, like he’s got good stories and an interesting outlook on life.

He also looks like he’d put someone in their place if they were asking for it. And there’s a lot of different ways you can ask to be put in your place, and a lot of different ways to do it.

“Nah, we ended up going in opposite directions.” Eddie muses, shaking his head. The silhouette of his and Jesse’s hands invade his peripheral: Jesse’s fingers spread wide against the wood grain, barely inches away from Eddie’s where they rest, curled carefully around the shape of his glass. “You came. I went.”

Jesse’s eyes are hot and shiny, like two polished stones. He licks his hips when he asks, “where’d you go, Eddie?”

“California. L.A.”

At that, Jesse hums, nodding as if he’s putting the pieces of something together. Eddie can’t think too long on the kind of things his life choices imply without him ever saying anything. Jesse leans in closer — casting a longer shadow, vocal chords dragged over sandpaper. “Well, Eddie Who Went to California,” he drawls, slithery down Eddie’s spine. “I guess it’s lucky for me that we both somehow managed to meet up in the middle like this.”

Distantly, Eddie is reminded of his time sitting poolside with Lulu. Of her compliments, the ones that sung in Eddie’s bloodstream without producing much heat. The contrast is immediately obvious and near immeasurable. Jesse’s compliments sit in Eddie’s guts like hot rocks. “Yeah,” Eddie says, working hard to keep his voice unaffected while his esophagus burns with hot coals. His breath comes like fire; hot from his nose and hot inside of his mouth. “Lucky you.”

Jesse smiles, this time with teeth. He makes Eddie another drink, replacing the glass Eddie hadn’t even realized was empty. He tells Eddie, “I get off at midnight, by the way.”

Later, in the back of the parking lot at almost one in the morning, Jesse presses Eddie into the side of his pick-up truck and feeds him his hot, wet tongue.

It’s strange at first. Like so many things in Texas, Eddie finds it to be an adjustment. He’s never been kissed this way. Not by a man, not by anyone. He’d be more uneasy, he thinks, if he hadn’t just set such a heavy boundary of resolve with himself earlier on in the evening. He had two hours to sit on his barstool and marinate on things before Jesse came to collect him. He was wearing a leather jacket this time, his keys clipped to his belt loop. By then, Eddie had considered — and reconsidered, and reconsidered — the merits of cutting and running. Of pretending this never happened. Could he do that to himself again? Wipe the tableau clean and pretend to not be left with the chalk markings? In the end, the pressure coalesced, and it gave Eddie’s decision to stay and wait and see this through the strength of a diamond, unbreakable to everything but itself.

Eddie has to tilt his chin up to push back against Jesse’s advancing mouth. He took less than ten puffs from a cigarette as he and Eddie traveled the length of the parking lot but he still tastes like it now. Sour nicotine and dry ash, flicking the tip of his tongue against the soft edges of Eddie’s palate. He groans harshly and Jesse pulls back, reeling an exhale straight from the pit of Eddie’s lungs as he goes. It scrapes through Eddie’s throat like cigarette smoke. He wets his mouth in search of some relief from the sting, swallowing hard around a mouthful of saliva, thick and enzymatic.

Hands frame Eddie’s face on both sides, dry skin coursing hot with buzzing-blood. Eddie anchors his hands into the edges of Jesse’s jacket and falls further back against the truck behind him. A door slams in the distance. Jesse takes the pad of his thumb to the shape of Eddie’s mouth, tracing it slow and deliberate, until he finds the ivory wall of Eddie’s barely exposed teeth. He presses his thumbprint to their blunted edge; his fingernail knicks the plush-pillow of Eddie’s red-flushed upper lip.

“You’ve got a pretty mouth,” Jesse says, the pressure of his thumb more insistent against the seam of Eddie’s front teeth. Harder and harder, until Eddie has no choice but to open for it obediently, allowing Jesse to slide past the fence-line of bones embedded in his skull. The taste of skin blooms salty over the front of Eddie’s tongue. “You wanna suck my cock?” He asks, eyes roaming Eddie’s face, hungry and dark.

It’s hot out tonight. Sweet beads on Eddie’s temples, threatening to drip. The cicadas drone on and on, filling his head like TV static and punctuating the staccato of his heaving breaths. He is molten beneath the cage of his skin; he wishes he could peel it all off and feel the freedom of it like a cool, sharp breeze.

There’s a moment of hesitation, before Eddie nods his response to Jesse’s question. “I haven’t done it before,” he admits, choosing honesty despite the inherent abashment. It’s pretty close to freedom. To acknowledge what he doesn’t know, to show how desperately he wants it without having to say it and even while he barely understands it. The words come out slightly underpronounced as Eddie attempts to speak around the intrusion of Jesse’s thumb.

Jesse’s pupils shudder. His grip on Eddie’s face tightens. He presses down against the hollow of Eddie’s tongue with aggressive intent. Until Eddie’s jaw reacts because it can’t help it — slipping open, spreading wider.

Though his hands are ungentle, Jesse’s eyes are melty with desire and his cadence drips over like warm honey. “That’s okay,” he tells Eddie, still so close to Eddie’s face that Eddie swallows his breath without trying. The flavour of a cigarette flutters across his tastebuds. “You seem like a real quick study.”

Jesse presses himself firmly against the length of Eddie’s body, knocking hip bone to hip bone close enough that Eddie can feel the thickness of his crotch. Something catches Jesse’s attention, though, because he quirks an eyebrow in Eddie’s direction, dropping his hand from Eddie’s cheek to drag it down across his flank, until he can stick two long fingers into the fabric of Eddie’s front pocket. What he pulls out, with some admittedly impressive dexterity, is small and oblong.

“What’s this?” Jesse asks. Eddie tries not to visibly swallow like a nervous cartoon character.

The tube of clear lip gloss. Eddie had pillaged it from the back of his glovebox before he had gone inside the bar. He was staring at himself in the rearview mirror for a long time, wondering if he might find a way to work up the courage and put it on. Ultimately, there was no managing it, but Eddie couldn’t bring himself to put the tube away again either. To shut it away, to leave it here to be thought about but never seen. How could he be sure it was real then?

He had forgotten he had stuffed it into his pocket. Until now.

“This your’s?” Jesse challenges, the shape of his eyebrow turned from mischievous to something more ominous and imposing. His thumb is still pressing down on Eddie’s tongue. He begins the slow process of fucking it in and out of Eddie’s mouth; crowding against the edge of Eddie’s bottom teeth before pushing back inside. “Hmm,” Jesse hums, watching himself work. Eddie knows his whole face is red. He thinks he might be trembling. His cock is so hot between his legs he worries it might start burning a hole through his jeans. “I bet you look good wearing it, don’t you? Will you put it on for me, baby?”

Lightning shoots the base of Eddie’s spine. His mouth drops open around Jesse’s thumb with a wet gasp. When Jesse pulls away, his thumb is soaked damp, the pad of it sort of dimpled and pruny. He uses the same hand to grip Eddie by the chin, pinching his cheeks together until his lips pucker involuntarily.

Too afraid to open his voice and search for the words, Eddie simply nods.

He expects Jesse to hand him the tube. Expects Jesse to watch, eyes like a hawk, as Eddie adorns himself with it. As he paints the picture that Jesse wants to see. But that’s not what happens. Instead, Jesse unscrews the matte black lid of the lip gloss, squeezes the tube to produce a fat glob at the tip, and presses the applicator to the poutiest part of Eddie’s bottom lip.

Eddie’s mouth goes slack as if he’s been dosed with novocaine. His moans, pathetic and quiet and clearly holding himself back. Jesse scoffs at him, smirking with that edge of mocking that slices just right. In the glow of the streetlamp hanging over Jesse’s shoulder, bugs swam like security detail.

“That’s pretty,” Jesse coos. His voice is meaner now, possessed by something darker and more demeaning. Still: there is sweetness below it, potent enough that Eddie can taste it with the tip of his tongue. “It suits you,” he tells Eddie, capping the lip gloss and sliding it back into Eddie’s front pocket. “You gonna suck my cock like that now?”

“Yeah,” Eddie breathes headily. His knees wobble, ready to drop to the pavement. He can’t decide what to do, can’t decide what exactly Jesse wants. Should he get straight to work or should he beg for it a little bit more? “Yeah, I— I wanna. I’m gonna, I’m gonna,” Eddie braces himself for the grit of the pavement, Jesse’s hands curling over his shoulders and pushing him where he wants him to go. It’s a level of casual manhandling that makes Eddie’s gut spike like a roller coaster, and he fumbles for Jesse’s belt quickly in response, feeling clumsy and foolish and horny out of his fucking mind.

Eddie settles into the dirt, body balanced in the cradle of his hips, and that’s when the familiar tension appears — his asscheeks split apart by the slim line of a lace thong. Just the sensation makes Eddie’s breath hitch. His nipples are straining against the confines of his long sleeve; his cock strains against the rough texture of the lace hiding behind his jeans.

He hadn’t managed the lip gloss in the car. But Eddie had managed the underwear, alone in his Texas home in the dark of a Texas evening. It was supposed to be hot out tonight. Eddie had no idea what it would feel like to wear something like that out in public, no matter how obscured and unknowable it might be. He and Buck had just hung up on FaceTime. Buck was telling him a story about Bobby — Eddie can’t remember what exactly it was, too distracted by this sudden new thought that had been commanding his attention since the night before. I’m thinking of going out tonight to look for someone to have sex with. I’m thinking of doing it while wearing women’s underwear. He very nearly confessed it when Buck asked him if he had any plans for the evening.

These were his plans, apparently. On his knees, freeing a stranger’s dick from his boxer briefs, perfectly uncomfortable in his own skin and determined to keep moving. Every nerve alight with each synapse firing. Skin and sweat and hair and ozone, the rich masculine scent of Jesse’s cologne in his nose, the vague taste of wax-and-vanilla in his mouth from the lip gloss oozing. It clings to the corner of Eddie’s lips, sticky and viscous and cloying, marking him up and leaving a mess about it. Eddie presses his lips together into a thin line just to feel the way they slip against one another. It’s smooth and unbidden; enjoyable, if a little unnatural.

Jesse’s cock is hot in his palm. He groans when Eddie slips it out, guttural and hoarse, one hand rising from Eddie’s shoulder to dig itself into the hair at the crown of his skull. He tugs hard. Eddie’s scalp sings with it. He moans, his mouth dropping open and his tongue darting out to taste the bead of precome at the slit of Jesse’s dick. It’s salty, just like the pad of his thumb was.

Eddie can hardly believe he’s doing this. There’s a dick in front of his face and he’s going to put his mouth on it and he’s vibrating with anticipation. But also — an odd sense of trepidation, nothing significant enough to make him want to stop, but a nagging sensation, a thought in the back of his head that won’t go unnoticed… he always sort of imagined the first time would be with…

“It’s not gonna suck itself,” Jesse jeers, in that deliciously demeaning way he seems to have truly mastered. Eddie wonders if it’s always like this with Jesse, or if he switches it up on occasion. Eddie thinks it could always be like this for him. His cock pulses. The panties feel tighter by the moment and he’s all wet inside of them. “Go on. Trust your instincts. I’ll make sure you know how you’re doing.”

Jesse’s cock is wide, most of the size held in its length. It’s quick to hit the back of Eddie’s throat once he swallows around the head. Jesse groans from above him, drizzling pride over Eddie like intermittent rainfall. His hand flexes in Eddie’s hair, tugging even harder, and Eddie sucks in a tight breath through his nose. His throat is spasming around the intrusion of Jesse’s cock and it’s barely inside of him.

“Fffuuuuck, baby, that’s good. Your throat feels like heaven.” Eddie preens further under the compliment, trilling high in the back of his throat, spearing pleasurable vibration through the length of Jesse’s cock. It drags a harsh gasp from Jesse’s chest. “Keep going. Yeah, just like that. You can take more, can’t you?”

Eddie can’t answer him; his mouth is too full. He hums instead, Jesse’s cock kicking in response against his tongue, and hopes that conveys enough assent.

Jesse’s hips swivel forward, and he fucks gently into the soft, spongy heat of Eddie’s throat, and Eddie figures he probably got the memo.

It’s hard to relax around the width of Jesse’s cock. Eddie manages it without gagging through sheer force of will, squeezing his thumbs in his fist until the entire lower halves of both of his arms burn. His eyes are wet and his nose is stuffy. He continues, pushing himself past the brink of uncomfortability to find the utopia promised for him on the other side. His dick bemoans its neglect, demanding attention where it leaks in his panties. It’s been so long since the last Eddie jerked off. Months.

Somehow, he barely misses it. Somehow, he couldn’t miss it more.

Jesse’s hands curl around the back of Eddie’s skull, each thumb poised against the jut of Eddie’s jaw below both of his ears. He holds Eddile still as he begins to slide his cock in and out of his mouth, slow and careful, moving like molasses as he listens carefully for the crests and falls of Eddie’s already laboured breaths. The lip gloss across Eddie’s mouth has smeared everywhere with spit and sweat, soiling the hairs at the base of Jesse’s cock. It’s curly, salt and pepper, same as the hairs interspersed throughout Jesse’s grown-in facial scruff.

“Pretty face like yours,” Jesse grunts, fucking Eddie’s throat with the long rod his cock, splitting Eddie’s teeth and denting the flesh of his cheeks. Eddie looks up at Jesse through a sheen of glass, his eyes and mouth embellished by the same quality of shimmer. “You make someone wanna ruin you.”

Eddie moans, hot. His throat constricts awkwardly and, for the first time, he gags, tears spilling over the hill of his bottom lashes. Jesse wastes no time; he thumbs across the tear track, smearing one more thing across Eddie’s face.

The compliments continue. You’re so fucking hot, he says, pushing past the resistance in Eddie’s throat. And sexy too, fuck, Eddie. You’re gorgeous. That’s why I gotta mess you up, he says, the head of his cock bumping Eddie’s gag reflex on the way back up. Looking at me with those pretty brown eyes, letting me fuck this sweet mouth like it’s mine, he says, slipping his thumb alongside his cock, widening the stretch of Eddie’s already stretched open lips and jaw.

Jesse doesn’t act like he really wants to hurt Eddie, but Eddie can tell that Jesse wants to push him. That he can sense the part in Eddie that wants to be pushed. And he slips into the role easily, telling Eddie what to do, using him how he pleases, like Eddie wants to be used. It’s good. It’s so good. It might be better, Eddie thinks, if he could cope with telling Jesse what was hiding behind his fly and button.

But that, in particular, is too much — too vulnerable and too fast. Eddie is already sniveling all over the man’s cock with no resistance, no fight to put up, only passive acceptance — he’s supposed to debase himself further? Jesse doesn’t need anything else from him. He has Eddie for all he wants: a warm body and a hot, willing mouth.

Eddie loves it. He realizes he’s never felt this way about himself before.

“I’m gonna come,” Jesse’s voice breaks around the admission. Finally, Eddie thinks, but I’ll miss it when it’s over. He takes the flat, fat of his tongue and presses it firmly to the underside of Jesse’s cock anyway, forcing a tight pressure against that thick, pulsing vein. “Shit,” Jesse exclaims, “you gonna swallow it, slut?”

The moan Eddie lets out is broken enough to have his eyes rolling back into his skull. Yes, he says without words, chanting it over and over even though his mouth is still full.

Jesse tilts his head back, into the night sky above them, and comes in pulsing ropes down the back of Eddie’s throat, loads thick liquid that streams straight into Eddie’s stomach acid. He swallows all of it, and he only coughs once, out of the corner of his mouth.

He doesn’t come. He makes a total mess of the panties he’s wearing — but he doesn’t come. Instead, he finds himself looking up at the stars. Saliva won’t stop filling his mouth and the lip gloss has made the entire bottom half of his face sticky and Jesse’s still pulling out from the velvet clench of his throat… and Eddie doesn’t know where exactly the thought came from, but all he can wonder is if Buck is looking up at the same stars as him right now too.

***

The house is pitch dark when Eddie makes it home. It feels cavernous, carnivorous and empty. He peels off his clothes in the hallway on the way to the bathroom, dropping sheet-ghosts like evidence across the newly installed hardwood flooring. The panties come off last, chaffing sticky against the shaft of Eddie’s soft cock and totally soaked with precome. Eddie leaves them in the sink, their chosen shade of red a particularly deep contrast to the off-white porcelain beneath.

In the shower, Eddie soaps up. Under his sweaty armpits; over the planes of his chest and abdomen; along the column of his throat, soiled with spit and lip gloss and other things; across the head of his cock, still sensitive enough to pull a gasp through his teeth.

Perhaps too much was too fast after all, or something like that. Eddie is ending this night the same way he ended so many nights all those years ago, trembling and fearful, a teenager who was too afraid of what understanding himself might truly mean for his future. It’s all so familiar: a locked bathroom door, the shower running, Eddie’s thoughts twisting and turning inside of his brain, nausea spinning in his guts like an oncoming hurricane. Virulent issues are best pulled straight from the root, like trees in hissing winds and violent rain.

He liked it. He knows he did. The guilt of such an admittance feels strangely like a pantomime; a suit tailored for Eddie that doesn’t quite fit right anymore. Did he outgrow it or did it outgrow him? Is he falling back into a habit merely because it existed first, before all this forward momentum, and the stitching still holds despite it?

But the thing is: Eddie liked it all back then too. Kissing Shannon’s lip gloss off her mouth. Playing dress-up with his sisters. He liked it even when he was running from it. He liked it even under the scrutiny of his mothers cold, critical gaze. Liking it was never the problem — or, perhaps it was the sole problem, depending on how you looked at it.

***

It’s hard to admit, but it does scare him. Makes Eddie retreat. Into himself, away from the light. He can’t tell if its rays offer forgiveness or judgement. He can’t be sure of anything, he thinks. Not when it comes to this. It turns out the barriers he once assumed dismantled — crumbled away to dust and ready to be forgotten — were still erected before him. Punishing, looming large and casting long shadows. Standing in the way.

Eddie is alone. He’s always alone. He’s done everything by himself for as long as he can remember. Defeat in the face of a forward charge leaves him feeling like he needs to lick his wound. What a rude awakening, to admit that a progression that once felt so inevitable was not, in fact, promised.

Needless to say, Eddie hasn’t exactly felt very proud of how he’s been handling it.

Hey! Long time no talk. How are things?

Buck sent the text a near-precise two days ago. Eddie has yet to respond.

He’s sitting on his couch staring at his phone. There’s a beer bottle that’s barely missing a few sips dripping sweaty condensation onto Eddie’s second-hand and scratched to hell coffee table. The light from the TV is blue and bright, playing a WatchMojo video called Top 10 Horror Movies Everyone Needs to Watch Once. Eddie’s not really paying attention to it and hasn’t been for some time. He’s not even sure how long he’s been sitting here. He’s pretty sure it’s been a little while.

Three months ago, Buck and Eddie’s text message thread served as an informal completed to-do list and a pseudo progress marker. Now, it’s like there are huge gaps in the narrative. Three months ago, Buck felt like Eddie’s only tether to some ancient, forgotten way of life. Something primal and perfect in its simplicity. Now, Buck is the stark reminder of something Eddie hasn’t yet worked up the courage to face, the temptation of a life he might just let himself slip right back into given the opportunity. Something complicated and messy.

Eddie, dealing in absolutes as he so often does, has decided has no choice but to face the guilt in purposeful isolation instead.

Guilt is solitary. Guilt is easy. As easy as breathing. Eddie knows the weight, he’s familiar with it. He knows how to take it on and carry it for himself as long as he needs to. Until it dissipates, mercifully, or until it calcifies and becomes a part of him forever. Like what happened with Shannon; like what Eddie did to his son.

It’s just a shame that Eddie’s theoretically opponent in this situation is Buck. One of the few people in Eddie’s life for which he finds difficulty in being withholding. His text message is so unsuspecting, so open and sweet and genuine. He levels no blame and doesn’t assume the worst. Buck is merely reaching out, no string attached, and offering his hand. It thumps like pain in Eddie’s chest, bowing his ribs as his heart constricts.

The guilt of isolation is different from the guilt of ignoring your best friend on purpose; Eddie may be well-versed in one, but he is atrocious at the other.

Sorry, he types out, sending without much further thought. He dedicates about the same amount of time to second guessing his follow-up. Been busy lately. But I’m good. How are you?

Eddie doesn’t expect an immediate reply. Across state lines and in different minorly slanted timezones, there are an innumerable amount of things Buck could be doing instead of texting. He could be working or exercising. Baking or sleeping or paying attention to someone else. He’s got a sister, a niece, a brother-in-law. Maybe he doesn’t feel like texting Eddie right now.

It only takes about fifteen minutes.

That’s okay! Buck answers. The message comes with a brightly smiling emoji attached, an expression oddly similar to one Buck could create in person. I’ve been good!!! How have you been??? Leave it to Buck to abuse punctuation to convey his excitement and urgency. Eddie gives a half-laugh to no one, smiling honest and timid down at his phone screen.

It flows after that. Conversation comes easy to them regardless of any down time, it seems, which is a relief. It helps dispel the cloud of remorse hanging over Eddie’s head. There's still a malignant nagging that remains in his chest, wet and clingy like a bad cough — a call to divulge things that Eddie can’t be sure he’s all that ready to divulge yet — but it manifests more as something apprehensive. A low heartbeat below the surface in comparison to a heavy, rhythmic pounding.

It’s manageable, at the very least. Eddie can work to ignore it.

LOL so you have still not jerked off yet BTW???

Well. Manageable was nice while it lasted. The blunt, casual nature of Buck’s question is precise, like a hollow needle that pierces the thin and fibrous layers of Eddie’s resolve until it reaches the yolk. For a moment, it feels like Eddie might crack, like the centre won’t hold, and all those secrets he has been attempting to keep to himself will come leaking out. I’ve been ordering women’s underwear from the internet. I take pictures of myself wearing them. They’re saved on my phone. I can send them to you right now. Do you wanna see? I also have a tube of lip gloss in my glovebox. I’ll put it on if you want. The other day I let this guy from this gay bar that I went to put it on me before I sucked his cock. I swallowed his load and thought of you right away. Isn’t that weird?

Keeping things from Buck is just unnatural to him. Eddie needs to accept it. That’s why he had to confess to him about the whole, uuuhh, y’know, self-imposed abstinence thing. As a band-aid, a stop-gap measure. Like cutting off a limb in an effort to escape the bear trap. But one secret always does seem to beget another, numbers on a lock box sliding into place one by one until the lid pops open to allow entry. If you share everything with someone eventually the stuff you end up holding back will weigh you down heavier, and that scale won’t tip back until you let it all go again.

Eddie expels a puff of air, shaking his head, indulgent of Buck’s… Buck-isms. Part of him wonders if he should be affronted that Buck would even ask. The other part of him — the larger, louder, stronger part — is already moving his fingers to type out a reply. Why do you ask?

Eddie sends it with the cocked-eyebrow emoji to keep things lighthearted. He burrows his teeth into his bottom lip as he waits for an answer, chewing incessantly. On his TV screen, Max von Sydow delivers a monologue to Jason Miller’s Father Damien Karras.

Just wondering. Buck says. And then: remember when I stopped that time? Because of the dono?

I’ve already gone longer than that. Eddie shoots back without hesitation, much to his own surprise.

Huh. Wow. Immediately after the first response comes through, the bubbles that indicate Buck is composing another appear. Their animation cycles, and the message materializes, as if from thin air. I was just remembering how good it finally felt to get off in the end.

Eddie chokes. He can’t believe Buck is talking about getting off with him. He can’t believe he’s playing along so easily and firing back so quickly. Some higher function of his brain that he barely has control over — but something that feels the most like him. His id, his ego and his superego, all wrapped into one, working together to give Eddie what he wants, even when he doesn’t know exactly what that is.

Trust me. I’ve thought about it, he tells Buck.

Minutes pass, long enough for Eddie’s guts to twist up and make him nauseous. He places his phone face up on the coffee table, breathing deep and constant, staring into its black mirror surface. Finally, it illuminates, vibrating across the wood just as a musical sting erupts serendipitously from his TV.

You should keep going, Buck says. Just to see how long you can last, y’know?

“Yeah,” Eddie says aloud, to no one but himself. Maybe I will, he types up into his phone, sending it to nobody besides Buck.

***

He has a dream about jerking off that night. Eddie, in his bed in Texas. In the real world and in his dreamscape. It’s hot like it is in Texas — but it’s also not really anywhere, a non-descript four walls that exist outdoors and indoors simultaneously, allowing for wind and sand to pass through them. Eddie is naked save for a baby blue, finely constructed mesh bralette, its strap digging painfully into the circumference of his ribs and the slope of his shoulders. The garment constricts, like a snake, like chains that hold Eddie to the mattress below him. He writhes uselessly, restless and worked up, spearing the hot air above him with his hot, hard cock. It leaks from the tip without pause, beading down the length of it, collecting in a pool over Eddie’s hips and taint and balls.

Buck is here, Eddie realizes, in the strange sense that that was something he already knew. Buck takes shape as Eddie becomes aware of him, remembering his presence, occupying a space he seemingly never left. Before Buck the space did not exist; now that he occupies it it becomes real. He’s sitting in a chair across a room that doesn’t exist, a room that’s just the desert, stretching endlessly in every direction and scorching beneath a beating sun. Eddie is covered in sweat, soiling the sheets with it, his hair plastered to his skull and temples and forehead. All the muscles in his body feel plagued by amorphous knots, stretching and contracting and moving around below the skin, while all of Eddie’s joints feel totally immobilized, plated with steel. The world is so close but so far. It’s everywhere but nowhere at all. They are everywhere, and yet they are nowhere at all.

The strangest part is that Buck never speaks. He never utters a single word. But Eddie — Eddie knows what he wants. He can feel it. Ideas forming in his brain, coalescing into some greater understanding. Limbs adjusted by an invisible puppeteer. Pleasure enhanced by a ghost who won’t touch him. Buck says nothing, does nothing, and still Eddie obeys.

It goes on forever — until suddenly it’s over and Eddie wakes, soaked in his own sweat.

He never comes in the dreams, even as he keeps having them. They become so prevalent that Eddie starts to worry he’s going to come in his sleep, that he’ll wake up to the shame of dirty sheets and a soft cock like some horny teenager.

But that never happens either.

***

Can you FaceTime rn? Eddie feels stupid to even be asking, too formal for the friendship he and Buck have. It’s late in Texas but in California it’s a little earlier. In the cascading glow of Eddie’s singularly illuminated kitchen light, his skin gleams warm and yellow, wearing nothing but a gym tank and a pair of loose fitting boxer shorts. Out of time, out of place. Anyone from anywhere.

He had dinner with his parents this evening. It was supposed to be the four of them, as per usual, but Christopher had asked to be excused at the last minute to go to the movies with his friends. He had asked Eddie for his permission, in a way so familiar it made Eddie’s throat stick with emotion. Can I go Dad, please? — and from the moment it happened, from the moment Eddie said yes, he could sense the sharpness of his mother’s pointed gaze as it dug into him. Well, we made all this food, she had said, her mouth pressed into a thin line, watching Christopher trudge back down the hall to grab a sweater to take with him, like Eddie had told him. Eddie had looked at Ramon, and his father had placed his hand on his mother’s shoulder and said, it’s okay, Eddie will stay and eat with us, thereby volunteering his son for the gallows of scrutiny. The thought of spending an entire evening alone with his parents settled like a rock in Eddie’s stomach, but he knew he couldn’t refuse.

Talk over dinner oscillated between simple, surface level conversations and topics that turned things more stilted and awkward. Eddie had no choice but to accept the humbling experience of being around his parents in this capacity — being in their home, sitting at their table, back in the city and the state he had once escaped despite their best wishes. Crawling back on his belly, subjugating himself below the suffocating press of their thumbs, eating from their plate just as he did growing up. Experiencing the full force of his mother and her nasty habit of dampening his spirit until the flame snuffed itself out. He can’t imagine how smug she must feel when she thinks about how Eddie came back in the end, just like she always said he would.

After dinner, Eddie helped Helena with the tidying. This was a remnant of his upbringing; many Diaz family dinners ended in Ramon taking the youngest two into the living room to play pretend games, while Eddie stayed behind with his mother to package up the leftovers, wipe down the table, and do the dishes. It was an interesting contradiction from his father. Eddie never really got a handle on it. These habits seemed at odds with the picture of a first born son Ramon must have had in his mind; maybe he would have preferred an eldest daughter.

And you’re all settled in? Helena had asked, fluttering around the kitchen as Eddie dried the dishes. Eddie had told her yes. He had told her he felt settled. And then, with some bravery, he told her he’d like Chris to move in with him. Helena had hummed in response, her tone obviously disapproving. Well, do you think that’s what’s best for him?

I’m his dad, Eddie had said. Of course I’m what’s best for him.

Helena didn’t answer. She kept flitting about the kitchen, ignoring the eye contact Eddie was attempting to pin her down with. But uprooting him like that, I don’t know. He wants stability, Eddie, and that’s what he needs. Not to be bounced around.

Are you saying I can’t give him stability?

Eddie, she said his name. Her face was red on the high points of her cheekbones, just below the fan of her eyelashes. She and Eddie had that in common. You can’t even give yourself stability. Moving back and forth across state lines, getting a job, and quitting, and going back again. Not to mention your lack of seriousness when it comes to finding a partner. Whatever that ends up meaning in the end.

Eddie halted in place. It felt as if he had just thrown himself on top of a pulled-pin hand grenade and it had exploded against his chest. What? He said, accusatory, the horror in his voice rising. What was that? Are you — are you trying to imply something?

Helena had sighed. Sweetheart, Eddie, I raised you. I don’t need to imply anything. She said it like mercy; to Eddie, it sounded more like execution.

Suddenly, his vision was red at the edges. His hands were twisted in the dishtowel he had been using to dry his mother’s plates for her. You don’t know anything about me, he had said, but even to his own ears it sounded weak and unsure. You don’t know who I am.

Once more, Helena said nothing. But the look on her face was sad. Pitying. Eddie didn’t want to be pitied. He had no use for pity, especially not from her.

Eddie’s phone chimes, hooking into his subconscious and pulling him back to the present. He looks down at it, cupped in his hands, and finds Buck’s contact photo smiling back up at him. It’s a FaceTime notification. Eddie answers despite his simmering unease, uncertain of what else there is to be done.

Buck’s voice is panicked, small and crackly as it filters through Eddie’s phone speakers. “Eddie! What is it? Is something wrong? Are you okay? Is Chris okay?”

On the screen, Buck is wearing a soft-looking grey t-shirt, his hair slightly mussed and Eddie’s old living room alive behind his shoulder. Eddie imagines himself there with him, sitting at the opposite end of the couch, nursing bottles of beer and talking about everything and anything and not all that much. That was so easy. Everything is harder here in Texas. Why did Eddie ever think coming here was a good idea?

“I’m okay,” Eddie assuages. “Everything’s okay. Christopher’s okay. Buck, I — sorry, I didn’t mean to worry you. I just… needed to talk.”

At that, Buck’s expression quiets, his panic replaced with something more like relief, edged with a mild concern. “That’s good. I’m glad you’re both okay,” he tells Eddie, that familiar reassurance that is gooey and sweet and cloying, inescapable like a pool of molasses, filling Eddie up and pulling him under its surface. “What did you wanna talk about?”

Looking back, maybe one day Eddie will be able to admit the truth of this Texas experiment; that it all turned out to be some elaborate exercise in vulnerability. In fortitude, in the abstract concept of bravery. In how far Eddie could push himself before he cracked. He’s had so many breaking points before this, he thinks, and somehow it’s never been enough.

Maybe this particular enlightenment has always secretly been demanding a leap of faith.

“I’ve been ordering women’s underwear off the internet,” Eddie confesses, and as that first secret falls out of his throat, so do all the others. “And — and wearing it, obviously. I’m buying it for myself. So I wear it and it makes me feel good and sometimes I — sometimes I take pictures of myself wearing it. Because of how good it makes me feel.”

Eddie feels his flush like a hot bath, soaking him from chest to hairline, pink from his cheeks to the crest of his collarbones. He’s wearing this sleeveless shirt — because it’s hot, it’s always so fucking hot in this goddamn desert — and it makes him feel so exposed, all this flesh on display. He wonders how easy his current state of undress makes it for Buck to put the pieces together; to imagine all the other displays of flesh and sin gathering dust on Eddie’s phone; unremarked by him, unknown up until just a few minutes ago.

Buck’s eyes are wide. His jaw is tight. Eddie can see it flex as he swallows, his throat bobbing through it heavily. “Eddie… you’re…,” he starts and flounders, trails off and tries again. “You took pictures of yourself wearing women’s underwear?”

“Lingerie,” Eddie elaborates, each secret easier than the last, like filling a balloon with hot air and watching it rise. Climbing quickly, reaching out for that freedom of an open sky. “I’m wearing lingerie in them. Like, underwear, sure. A-and these, like, bralettes? I guess that’s what they’re called. And — um, y’know, garter belts? That kind of stuff.”

Buck nods slowly, lolling his skull back and forth on the perch of his neck like one of those silly novelty bobble-heads. His mouth hangs open, and Eddie would swear his pupils are pitch-dark and significantly dilated, but it’s hard to tell through the visual noise and obscurity of an iPhone video feed. “Right,” Buck pinches the tuh sound at the end of the word sharply between the clench of his teeth. “Does any—does anyone else know about this?”

“No,” Eddie replies. Because it’s the truth. Jesse had no idea what was going on under Eddie’s clothes when Eddie was blowing him and Eddie hasn’t given anyone else the chance. “Just you.”

“Right,” Buck repeats, just as tight, licking his lips this time. “And you’re… telling me this…”

It’s a statement that sounds like a question, trilling up at the end. Eddie nods, resolute despite the storm of nerves and other dangerous energies swirling in his stomach, bubbling at the base of his esophagus, threatening to toss themselves up and out in what would be the most embarrassing display of his anxieties possible.

“Why are you telling me this, Eddie?”

Eddie doesn’t answer right away. Buck deserves the closest approximation to the truth that Eddie can possibly muster, so he doesn’t answer right away. Truth takes time, the way so many other things worth the effort do. And Eddie would like to think that in all this time he’s spent by himself, adrift and alone with no one but himself to hold anchor — that something has managed to turn inside of him. That he’s different now. That he has managed to plant deep roots where once there was something much more pitiful, more unnurtured and pathetic.

“Because I wanted you to know.”

Seven years. That’s more than what you can count with the fingers on one hand. By the time Christopher was seven years old, he was already familiar with the sting of grief that came from losing a parent. Too young for such sorrow but too old to be coddled by life. By the time Eddie was seven years old he had already taught himself how to use the stove, and he worries he might have spent the rest of his life afraid to touch it and end up burned. Seven years, it turned out, had this malleable quality of feeling like such a long time and yet still so terrifyingly short. Eddie could go another seven years without forcing this epiphany on himself, he thinks, if it weren’t for the fact that every day saw him and more frightened of what might be lost in the intervening floods. Pain is obvious, straightforward and constant; pleasure is fleeting, and the space it leaves behind is always rawer and wider and more gaping than the space it forced itself into.

And in the midst of all that: there is still the matter of courage. Of what courage is, of what it could be. And perhaps it means accepting the fear, accepting the capacity for pain, and striving for something better and higher and freer anyway.

“Eddie,” Buck articulates, a finality in those five letters that wasn’t there before. He says it with confidence, with understanding, with feelings it seems should be impossible to encapsulate within such few syllables. But he does it anyway, and Eddie hears it, and he grips his thigh tightly in response. How do you express what should be a simple thought that’s taken you seven years to fully realize? How do you commit words to a sentence you’ve been writing and re-writting since the very first day you met someone?

Buck has always chosen the path of least resistance. It’s one of the things Eddie admires most about him.

“Will you show me?”

Eddie screws his eyes shut, his nose bridge creasing and his mouth flattening. He feels, strangely, like crying. Like he could cry right now. But he doesn’t. “Okay,” he answers. His mouth and chest are barren and hostile like the desert; his tongue tastes of sandpaper, his lungs completely empty, the weightless absence of breathable air in the molten column of his too-humid throat. “Not right now. I can’t be — on the phone with you — but. But after. I can show you after.”

“That’s alright,” Buck agrees, nodding once more, more reassuring this time. The expression of what Eddie could have sworn was hunger in his eyes has been tempered. Sitting on a low-setting, trapped within the darkness of Buck’s pupil. Opposite that: his iris, cool and oceanic, conveying a gentleness and soothing encouragement. After so long spent wandering this lonely desert state, it’s no wonder the shimmery surface of an undisturbed, azure pool would be the closest approximation to Heaven Eddie’s mind could conjure.

Despite the inevitability of what they have decided awaits them on the other side of this conversation, neither of them rushes through it. Their dialogue continues, changes its shape, becomes easier and more practiced. They slip into threads of discussion they are familiar with: the goings-on of their lives, the world they occupy, separate but together, and the people who exist in their orbits. Eddie is a planet let loose from the gravity of the solar system that once held him so tightly, doomed to wander the universe until it finds its way home again. When Buck talks about Hen, or tells stories about Chimney and Ravi, or exposits some grand wisdom Bobby offered him without ulterior motive, jealousy bolts like a hot streak of white lightning. Eddie misses his friends. He misses the support system he had. A place where he could be safe, cared for, free to open his arms to the wind and lean into it. In L.A., Eddie can believe he fills a special place in people’s lives, and they let him do it regardless of how he chooses to live his own. Helena’s love (or, perhaps more accurately: her respect, her care and concern, these emotions that require something more deliberate than the bare bones concept of love between a mother and her son) had always felt so conditional, her expectations unattainable. Eddie’s friends never had any conditions, and their only expectations were that he try and be the best version of himself he could be.

“Tell them I miss them,” Eddie says, his heart giving a lamenting squeeze in his chest. He means all of them. He knows Buck knows he means all of them.

Buck’s safe softens. The smile he offers Eddie is small and a little sad. “I’ll tell them,” he says. “But they know, man. I promise. They all know. And they miss you too.”

***

These might be the most salacious photos Eddie’s taken of himself so far.

He won’t say I took these for Buck. Not even to himself. He won’t say it because his brain doesn’t let him. For all the ways Eddie’s been sorting through things, categorizing thought patterns and re-assessing memories, moving forward with greater contexts in mind — there is still so much left undefined. The distance makes it harder; a lack of tangible evidence, or tactile proof to support a hypothesis. The figurative aspects plague Eddie like spectres, showing him things he can’t be sure exist until they occupy a more physical space. Eddie may have been built for blind faith, but he’s always been more comfortable believing in the things he can actually see.

So he won’t say I took these for Buck, but the truth of the matter is that these photos did not exist on his phone before Buck took his confession. The truth is he doesn’t send them to anybody else. The great judges of the universe, whoever they are, can take what they will from those specific circumstances. Eddie, however, will allow the dots to remain unconnected, stagnant in the air where they hang above his head.

He took the photos in bed. The sheets mussed around the shape of his half-bared body, the mattress dimpled beneath his weight. The frame cuts him off at the chin, efficiently hiding most of Eddie’s face but not the blush that plagues it. Blood-flush crests down the slope of his throat to the jut of his collarbones and then further still, his chest all ruddy below the dainty bralette that lays flat against it. Adorned in subtle silk accouterments, Eddie’s nipples poke obviously through the near-sheer fabric. It’s only one part of the baby blue set he wears, ordered some time ago but having sat untouched since, tucked away at the back of Eddie’s drawer and waiting. He wasn’t sure for what at the time, but Eddie had enough faith to believe that he would know it was time when the opportunity finally presented itself.

Eddie twists and turns for the all-seeing eye of the camera, for whatever eyes exist on the other side of it, bending this way and that, trying and retrying shapes to see which one might be the most enticing. He presents his ass in the matching baby blue silk panties with one leg cocked up higher than the other, lace kissing the tops of his thighs and offering small glimpses at some of the most sensitive, shielded skin on Eddie’s entire body. He shifts again, lifts his hips off the mattress, stretches the length of his torso, considers the view of someone standing behind him or in front of him or on either side.

It’s a lot of pictures. More than Eddie has ever taken in such a state before.

They’re not for Buck but he does think about Buck when he takes them. That’s understandable, isn’t it? It’s not even the first time he’s done it. Thought about Buck’s hands, his mouth, his eyes. The dreams Eddie had where Buck sat across the landscape of a room that wasn’t even really there and told Eddie everything he wanted from him without words. The dreams where Buck gave Eddie everything and Eddie had responded with whimpering cries and the wet pearls of precome dripping from the head of his dick. I had a dream about you and I woke up hard. I keep having dreams about you and waking up hard. Eddie snaps another picture of himself and wonders if you can see the thoughts behind his eyes. He stares at the reflection of himself, of his body on his phone screen, and tries to imagine how it might feel to have these sorts of images delivered straight to your inbox.

He doesn’t scroll through the photos properly until hours after he’s taken them. Clean from a long, cold shower and tucked into the darkness of his bedroom, things feel familiar. Eddie sits, propped against his pillows and lit-up in the humming blue-glow of his phone screen, and thinks you can sort of tell the exact moment where his cock started chubbing up in his baby blue panties. He sends Buck a total of four: two from before it became obvious and two from after.

(I didn’t take these for you, Eddie types out, his chosen photos already sent out across the ether and hanging over his textbox. But I thought about you while I took them. In the final photo he sends, Eddie’s cock is curling almost obscenely, messing with the drape of the fabric of his panties, and he can’t tell if that’s a wet spot starting to form on the front or just a trick of the lighting. I didn’t take these for you but I thought about you while I took them. Eddie reads it three more times. Thinks about sending it, until the deep affliction of his nerves win out, and he deletes the message. The photos will exist by themselves. On their own. Pure and unfiltered, unburdened by the most complicated aspects of this whole arrangement, the things that prick at the base of Eddie’s skull like a wasp sting.)

Buck’s reply comes through after a few minutes. Wow, it says, simple and straightforward. Eddie bites his lip.

I like the colour you picked, Buck continues. Eddie’s face burns. He sinks against his mattress and pulls the covers up to his nose, his heart beating erratically against his breastbone.

You look good, Buck says, and then: pretty.

***

It catches — burning, blazing, hot on their faces. They keep it fed with sprinklings of kerosene, reckless and uncaring of the molten, fire-breathing beast they’re creating. The heat in Texas gets worse, like some sort of omen, but every simmering torridity finds itself broken in the end.

Eddie moves forward despite the sweat and exhaustion. He continues his slow repairs: of his home, of his relationship with his son, of his life. Things get better. Things are better, including whatever it is he and Buck now have going on.

They don’t really address the elephant in the room, too content to talk around it instead. Maybe because they’re not in the same room, so they can’t be sure it’s even the same elephant. Eddie remembers when his biggest fear was once the thought that truth would reveal truth would reveal truth in turn, and now here he is living it, and so far… so it’s okay. So far it’s nothing Eddie can’t deal with.

The Eddie from right now, at least. He’s not sure what this would have done to the Eddie from four months ago.

“—and this bouncer did not like me, don’t ask me why, so we got kicked out and then we somehow… I don’t know, we ended up at this gay bar? Which I didn’t think Ravi would be into, because he tells me he’s straight, but he wanted to go! And Eddie, man, this place? It was kind of kinky. Again, not the kind of thing you’d expect to be Ravi’s scene but he was insisting. Like, we should go, we should go! I can’t even remember how many drinks he had had by this point, for the record.”

Buck is weaving the tall tale of a recent evening he shared with Ravi while Eddie listens contentedly. He’s laying on the couch in his living, sprawled across it lengthways, with his hand tucked behind his head and his iPhone pressed to his ear. I’m trying to make friends, Buck had prefaced, and he had been working on things with Ravi. Eddie found it comical, especially in comparison to how quickly Buck had allowed himself and the rest of 118 to form ranks around Eddie. How easily that seemingly came. It didn’t even take more than forty-eight hours.

Earlier, Buck had detailed an abridged version of a casual run-in with Tommy Kinnard that had left Eddie feeling sort of… weird. Not jealous, because he wasn’t jealous, but his temples were warm as he listened and he was possessed by a sharp awareness he hadn’t experienced before. And he knew Tommy. He knew Tommy when Buck was dating him.

But they weren’t dating anymore, and according to Buck he had brushed Tommy off without much issue, allowing his night to move right along.

Eddie finds himself caught on a specific detail. “You don’t think straight guys go to gay bars?” He asks, his brow pinched. Buck can’t see him because they’re on the phone. On the other side of Eddie’s coffee table, one his many standing fan putters-on, a pitiful offering of feeble bursts of cool air from across the room.

“I mean — I don’t think they make a habit of it,” Buck replies casually, not sensing the hidden root in the line of Eddie’s questioning. “And it’s kind of looked down on, if I’m being honest. Being a straight guy in a space for gay people. Also, dude, I don’t know if you really got what I was saying earlier but this was, like, a kink club. There were guys outside in leather outfits wearing collars and stuff. I’m not the type to yuck anyone’s yum’s, obviously, but in that environment? Think of the sweat, Eddie. Thinking of the chaffing.”

“I went to a gay bar,” Eddie drops into the conversation unceremoniously, interrupting the flow of Buck’s storytelling. It rolls off his tongue with almost no effort, scattering breadcrumbs as it settles between them. “Not that long ago, either. A cowboy one.”

Buck, seemingly unphased by their shifting of subjects but surely phased by Eddie’s sudden admission, says, “you went to a gay cowboy bar?” with an unconvinced timbre. Honesty sings like a church bell in the back of Eddie’s skull, weighty and loud.

“I did,” Eddie tells him, his answer confident. He picks at a thread gone loose from his couch cushion. He got it second-hand from the thrift store, wishing the whole time he had just brought the couch he had in L.A. with him.

“Did you wear a cowboy hat?” Buck prods teasingly. Eddie snickers, hearing the twist of a smirk in Buck’s voice. When Eddie tells him no, he didn’t wear any distinctly cowboy-esque accessories, Buck kisses his teeth. “Ah. That’s a shame. That sort of thing always suits you.”

What other sort of things suit me? The question passes through Eddie’s but he doesn’t pose it. Veracity quickly coalesces a lump in his throat, though, and his mouth begins to move around words that sound to him as if spoken through a long, empty tunnel. “I don’t think I am, though,” he says cryptically. And then, more specifically: “straight, I mean.”

Eddie hasn’t heard or read or otherwise internalized many stories about other people coming out. All he really has are his own personal experiences, like a girl in his high school who told the whole class she was a lesbian, or his distant male cousin who lives in Colorado with his husband, and — well, Buck. He tries to remember what Buck coming out to him felt like: unexpected, obviously, but special because it meant Buck felt safe enough with Eddie to share that part of him. A real, honest part of him, something he couldn’t live without Eddie knowing. It meant that Eddie’s reaction was important. How could Eddie have let himself disappoint him?

He doesn’t know how Buck felt when it happened. Could never be sure of it, didn’t live in his head. Truth be told, Eddie hadn’t ever really thought of it like that. Until now, as his nerves ebb from him slowly, replaced with quiet resolve, and he listens closely for the first signs of any reaction. He expected it to feel more monumental, more earth-shattering and life-changing and unreachable. But all Eddie feels is featherlight, reaching for heights of freedom only attainable mid-flight. His inner cheek skin is soft and chewy beneath the worried press of his teeth, his chest tight and the flesh of his palms slippery.

Static crackles across the line in the suspended silence. Eddie waits as long as he can, waits until he feels like he’s about to burst, but then Buck’s voice comes through like a sunbeam, parting the clouds and rushing oxygen back into the room. “Okay,” he says simply. He sounds surprised — but absent any judgement, and void of any doubt. He believes Eddie, though Eddie’s not sure why he had any fear of not being believed. “What makes you say that?” The question is curious and open-minded, with perhaps some salt-lick of heat, right at the base of Eddie’s spine. There’s a lot of ways this conversation might go. Eddie’s not sure exactly which road they’ll be taking.

He sinks further into the couch, cocking his legs apart, folding one knee up closer to his chest while his opposite foot seeks out the smooth surface of the floor. It relieves some of the slowly building pressure between Eddie’s hips. “There was this…” Eddie starts, fumbling for a second as it occurs to him exactly what story he’s about to tell, his throat clicking in weak protest. “This, um,” Eddie clears the obstruction. “Guy,” he finishes, and waits. Buck doesn’t respond. Which shouldn’t be all that alarming, to be honest, because of course the story of how Eddie uncovered a dawning, late in life sexuality crisis involves a guy. “He was bartending. At the gay cowboy bar. His name was Jesse.”

“You remember his name?” Buck cuts in abruptly.

Eddie nods, remembering too late that Buck can’t see him. The folly of a phone call really is that you have to speak everything. “I do,” he vocalizes, offering Buck the answer to his question. Offering him the truth. “His name was Jesse, and he had this leather jacket, and he made me three rum and cokes while I was there. And then —” Eddie pauses, steeling himself for confession. “And then when he was done working for the night, he took me out to the side of his truck and he made me get down on my knees on the pavement so I could suck his cock.”

The breath Buck sucks in his sharp, fuzzy with phone static. The warmth in Eddie’s pelvis pools in his lower spine, reaching out towards the sweet centre of his belly. “You did that?” Buck asks, as if he had somehow heard incorrectly. Too timid to repeat himself, Eddie hums in the affirmative. “And you — you liked it? You liked sucking cock?” Buck says it cooly, like he’s asking Eddie if he’s enjoying the weather, or if he ate the cookies Buck gave him that faithful morning that Eddie left.

Casual, if a bit demanding.

Eddie doesn’t mind demanding. Honesty comes easiest when it means he’s just doing exactly what Buck tells him. “I liked it,” he asserts. “He wasn’t… he wasn’t really all that nice about it. I liked that too.”

“Yeah?” Buck drawls, syrupy and murky-dark, possessed by a hunger that exposes itself through his words. Eddie can hear as the rate of his breathing increases, heaving and heavy, consistent like the sound of a metronome. It draws Eddie in, farther and farther, allowing himself to be pulled places he’s only ever dreamt of reaching. “Did he smack you around a bit? Call you mean names?”

His tone is playful, like they’re swapping jeers and the jut of elbows into rib bones. “Why?” Eddie retorts, playing Buck’s game right back at him. “You need me to tell you every detail? Wanna know what made me like it so bad?”

Buck snorts, mildly put-upon. “I have my theories,” he teases, sounding smug. “I know you pretty well, Eddie.”

Not this way, Eddie thinks but doesn’t say. He rolls his eyes despite the flip-flopping of his gut and the sweat beading along his brow. This could be any of the myriad of other conversations they’ve had over the years. It feels like it could be. Nothing has changed, and yet something surely has. Eddie searches for the nervousness that was one consolidating inside of him to find it dissipating, broken off into chunks and turned to dust, left to be forgotten. All of sudden, it’s like there’s all this space to fill up. Like it was always there, it was just waiting for them to realize it, to force themselves to grow in and take it up, mold themselves into these new shapes.

“Whatever,” Eddie nudges back lightheartedly, wetting his lips as he continues to peel back the layers of his and Jesse’s encounter. “He also found this — this, um, lip gloss I had. In my pocket. And he… he put it on me. Before I did it.”

“Before you sucked his cock?”

“Yeah,” Eddie responds, somewhere halfway to a laugh, the muscles in his toes curling and uncurling. “Right. Exactly. That.”

“Sounds like you’ve been pretty busy out there in Texas, Eddie,” Buck speaks slow. “And holding out on me, man, I’m kinda wounded.” And then: “what did it look like? After he put it on you.”

The length of Eddie’s spine sings, like strings played taut across the long, lithe neck of a violin, sending a palpable vibration along the surface-level of his skin. Gooseflesh pimples despite the heat. The hair on his arms stands on end. Behind the soft, breathable fabric of Eddie’s gym shorts, his cock stirs. “I don’t know. I didn’t see myself,” he answers.

“What did Jesse say?”

The thing is: Eddie has to think about it. That night feels so far away and so odd to take in from this angle, looking back at it. To Eddie, it was something that happened and then it was over, and he hardly lingered on it otherwise. But the memories come as he summons them, real and true and in living colour. “He said that I was pretty,” Eddie recites, recalling how it felt to have such words levelled at him white he was in such a state. “He said I had a face that looked like it needed to be ruined.”

“Fuck, yeah, Eddie. Yeah,” Buck choruses, in the vein of something torrid. Growly, low, the words rambly and loose, half-shaped by way of Buck’s mouth and teeth and tongue. “You do, man. You really do.” It’s the most unraveled he has allowed himself to sound the entire length of this phone call. Then, matter-of-factly and unperturbed, he says: “I’m touching my cock right now. Thinking about you on your knees — s-sucking that bartender’s dick. Shit, Eddie, is that — is that okay?”

Eddie chews his lips. “It’s okay,” he says, nodding again, despite the fact that nothing has changed, despite the fact that Buck still can't see him. God, Eddie wishes he could see him. He imagines Buck palming his cock through his shorts, phone pressed to his ear and listening carefully. Eddie’s stomach plunges, fast and furious, until he feels like it might fall out of his ass. “I still — I still haven’t — um, gotten off. Since the last time we talked about it.”

“Eddie,” Buck calls, shaky and sticky like candy floss, forming to the ridges of Eddie’s brain, ringing like chimes in his head. Eddie Eddie Eddie. He’ll hear it on the wind now, calling to him like some lost forgotten lover, begging him closer, never leaving him long enough to allow him to forget. “Eddie,” Buck repeats, more insistent. “I feel — like a j-jerk for even asking but, shit, you’re doing it — you’re doing that because of me, right? Because I said you should. Because I … asked you. Sorta.”

Eddie's response is an airless yes that allows, for a moment — with his chest tight and his cheeks hot and his thighs quivering — for Eddie to feel weightless. His dick tens the fabric of his shorts obscenely now, arousal slick and sick in his boiling intestines. The standing fan on the other side of the room has been rendered all but useless, pathetic against such potent heat, to all this warmth trapped below the flesh. “I didn’t come,” Eddie goes on to explain, the very first signs of a high whine tinting the words. “When I blew the bartender, he came. I didn’t.”

Fabric whispers to Eddie from the other side of the line, fluttering like insect wings. He wonders if Buck is tugging at his dick in earnest now, rubbing the skin raw, spitting into his hand to ease the slide. He pictures it — knows the space, can slide the image right into place like a View-Master, staring at the light through the picture he projects behind his eyelids. But he doesn’t ask. It’s better this way: conceptualizing, allowing himself no further indulgence besides the information Buck offers without prompting. The rest can exist however Eddie wants it. Huge and unending and safely out of Eddie’s control. It’s better this way.

And regardless of all the things Buck may or may not be doing, Eddie holds to his unspoken promise. He does not touch himself. His dick demands attention and he ignores it, free hand poised palm-flat at his side, knuckles bent sharply in a physical manifestation of his rigid self-control. He thrusts upwards into nothing for the absence of gratification, just to squirm in his half-measure satisfaction, to feel the yield of the couch cushions below him. His blood is screeching, his body searching desperately for some kind of purchase. The root of Eddie’s desire is a snarling, feral beast inside of him, consumed by this lust it’s managed to cultivate from a single drop of blood. Heat and hands and hunger — it makes its demands like a thumping fist on the inside of Eddie’s ribcage but Eddie isn’t afraid. He’ll look it in the eye and refute its call.

It’s easier when you’ve had as much practice as he has.

Buck whimpers, broken like something over there doesn’t feel quite right, like he’s overstimulated by his efforts to keep trying, a rattling tin-can in a fleshless chest. Eddie keeps going, keeps talking, truth and truth and truth spilling out of him. Like bile. Like his own insides, pulsing in his hands as proof that he’s alive. “I told him it was my first time. He still made me — take all of him. I had to try so hard not to choke on it.” Buck’s vocal chords split around a hearty moan, tingling in Eddie’s eardrum across the impossible stretch of several state lines, rooting itself deeply into the soft lining of his belly. “But I didn’t. I barely even — heh — I barely even gagged. And he told me I was h-hot and sexy and that I had, uh, uh, s-sweet mouth.” Eddie resists the urge to turn over, to smash his dick and face into the couch cushions and rut his way to a sloppy orgasm like he can’t control himself. His hips buck without pause, without rhythm, and if he squeezes his eyes shut tight enough he can see an image of Buck through the bursts of colours. Above him, stroking his cock and about to bust all over Eddie’s chest and stomach. “And I — eugh — I swallowed. Because he — he called me a slut. Buck, don’t fucking laugh.” He can hear the puffs of air as they exit Buck’s nostrils. “And I—I—,” Eddie stutters, unmoored, his breath ripcord fast. Buck matches, whether on purpose or by accident, punctuated by the overwrought noises of his pure molten pleasure, his sick sense of desperation. “I didn’t tell him but I was… wearing, fuck, I was wearing panties. Under my jeans. I had on these… this red pair that I bought. They were made of lace.”

“Jesus Christ,” Buck groans. “Fuck, Eddie, oh my god, oh my god. What the fuck?”

“Sorry,” Eddie mutters sheepishly, turning his face slightly into his shoulder like someone’s timid puppy. He can smell the potent stench of his own drenched armpit. The warmth of embarrassment spins dizzy pink-heat circles at the centre of his cheeks, sweat dripping from his hair line in fat salt-slick droplets, low enough to dampen the feathery line of his lashes. “Was that — was that too much?”

Buck is swift to refute him. “No, Eddie, no,” he insists, forceful enough that Eddie has no choice but to believe him. He finds himself wishing for the visuals again, lamenting the fact that Buck is all the way in California. Is he in Eddie’s old bedroom? Laying on his bed in a space where Eddie once laid in his? Fuck, they’ve jerked off in the same places now. The bedroom. The shower. The living room. One adventurous evening in the kitchen when Eddie had shoved a hand into his pants and busted in his sink, washing the evidence down the drain in the aftermath along with his shame. He conjures up more images of Buck with his reeling imagination; Buck naked from the waist down with his shirt bunched up into his armpits, his pectoral muscles glistening with moisture and rippling with effort, his chest just as red and slick as the head of his cock where it disappears and reappears through the clench of his fist. See? When he doesn’t ask, anything can be whatever Eddie wants it to be. They aren’t apart. He isn’t alone. Like this, Eddie can be perched on his knees at Buck’s feet, his mouth watering, his tongue lolling out, greedily anticipating that very first taste of precome beading on the head of his cock. He can think about the thick dent of Buck’s dick in his throat and the sting of Buck’s hands in his hair. “It wasn’t too much,” Buck continues to reassure him. “I just… god, Eddie, I’m never gonna be able to stop thinking about you like that. Not for the rest of my life.”

Eddie smiles despite himself, pridefully triumphant even in this state. Even as his brain feels like it’s leaking out of his ears with how turned on he is, even as he continues to fuck his hips up into nothing. “Nobody knows except you.”

“Eddie, bud, you’re gonna kill me,” Buck chuckles breathlessly, before it trembles off into a rumbling groan. Background noises drift their way to Eddie delicately: the slap of skin on skin, wet and quick. Buck fucking his fist. Buck fucking his fist through thoughts of Eddie, sucking cock and wearing women’s panties. “You’re so fucking hot, man, it makes me crazy. Can’t you believe you went all the way out to Texas just to suck someone else’s dick. And now I have to think about it all the time, have to wonder why it didn’t get to be me.” It’s a roar of possessiveness, the noises in the background growing to their crescendo. Something fierce sparks behind Eddie’s sternum. He can’t stop humping the air above him, pathetic and useless but all he’s allowed. Buck hasn’t agreed to him going any further than this. “Those pictures you sent me — god, I’ve never seen anything like ‘em. Never seen anything like you.” Buck is rambling now. Eddie can tell from the rise in his timbre and the tension in his voice that his orgasm is fast approaching. “M’gonna send you something, okay, bud? Wanna see you wearing something I picked out for you. Okay? Is that okay?”

“Yes,” Eddie answers enthusiastically. Near-frantic, if he’s being honest. He’s gripping the edge of the couch cushion so hard his whole fist is buzzing with the effort. “Yeah. It’s okay. I’ll wear whatever you want, Buck. Whatever you pick out.”

The sound of Buck coming was once an abstract concept for Eddie. Something he could imagine an approximation of but could never be sure of its validity. But it calcifies now, over the phone, as Eddie listens to Buck choke his orgasm out over the receiver. Eddie holds his breath and listens carefully, cataloguing every hitch and tremble and strangled exhales. It’s beautiful. He’ll hold them close and keep them all to himself, every single one like a secret more precious than the last.

Seven years, Eddie thinks. That’s more than you can count on one hand.

“Shit, man,” Buck bemoans after a brief silence. “I don’t have any tissues. I’m gonna have to use a sock.”

“Ridiculous,” Eddie scoffs, shaking his head fondly. “You’re a thirty year old man.”

“I know, I know,” Buck responds, vaguely distracted. Eddie can hear rustling through the phone and imagines Buck shuffling around in whatever space it is he currently occupies. “Poor planning on my part, what can I say? In my defence, though, this jerk-off session was… a little unexpected.”

“Well, ex-cuh-use me,” Eddie delivers the non-apology sarcasm heavy. “If it makes you feel any better, big guy, I didn’t go into this phone call with any nefarious intentions.”

“Yeah, well,” Buck sing-songs. “Looks like you don’t have to do all that much to get me going anyway.”

“Just suck some cock,” Eddie retorts, chewing on his bottom lip as a devious smile curls the corners of his mouth, denting his cheeks. Buck coughs, a shoddy attempt at hiding his brief bewilderment. Then: “Did you mean it? When you said you’d send me something? Or was that your dick talking.”

“Oh, make no mistake, that was definitely my dick talking,” Buck answers matter-of-factly. “But he’s been having pretty good ideas lately.”

“So unlike him.”

“Careful, Eddie, he’s a sensitive guy. What if he’s still listening?”

***

After so many packages in so little time, Eddie’s kind of gotten over the dopamine rush that used to afflict him whenever they’d arrive. Turns out exposure therapy works — he’s forgotten the hesitancy and the nerves of being faced with the evidence of his own actions. Instead, Eddie finds himself in a race against his own anticipation, clumsy with haste to access the treasures hidden therein, their textures and colours and unique adornments. He used to feel sick to his stomach any time he’d unbox one of his little self-given presents. Now, he tears them open like a spoiled kid on Christmas.

But this one is different.

Tracking number says your package should be there by the time you get home today BTW.

Enjoy :)

Send pics.

It’s non-descript post-office packaging, which means Buck supplied the contents and bundled it himself. Eddie’s mind whirls with the possibilities. He didn’t just pick something off a website and ship it straight to Eddie’s address. Eddie’s not sure why. Maybe Buck wanted to be able to see it for himself? Maybe he went browsing in person to buy it. A spider-leg frisson climbs the length of Eddie’s spine as he imagines it: the polite salesclerk who offered him assistance, is there anything I can help you with, sir, and Buck, standing in the middle of the lingerie store, smiling wide with visible teeth and saying, I’m looking for a present for my girlfriend.

Just a plain brown cardboard box that could have anything inside of it, stamped with Eddie’s address. Eddie Diaz. El Paso, TX. What’s he so afraid of? Something nefarious for which he has no name? He trusts Buck, he reminds himself, and if there’s another thing Eddie’s learned over the course of this experiment, it’s that putting your fate into the hands of someone you trust isn’t all that bad.

Still: Eddie’s heart thumps rabbit-fast. He reads and rereads the address penned across the lid — Eddie Diaz. El Paso, TX. — until suddenly it stops looking real. Until it transforms into something different. His old address, the one Eddie had back at the house in California. The address Buck currently holds for him, the way he’s been helping to hold so many other things in Eddie’s life for so long. It’s the address that Buck, theoretically, sent this from — and for a second it’s almost as if Eddie receives it now from a past version of himself, a man begging to see his fantasy fulfilled. A fantasy that could have never existed if Eddie had never left.

He has to blink hard and shake his head clear before reality closes in around him again.

He’s stalling. Eddie knows he’s stalling. In the back of his mind is the foreboding cloud that tells him there is before he opens this box and there is after, and there are simply too many untrackable variables that keep Eddie from feeling one-hundred-percent comfortable.

But when has comfort brought him anything? He’s learnt that now. There is nothing to be gained in comfort; your life is only firmly within your grasp when you endeavour to find the soft boundaries of where you end and the person you can become begins. Push through the pain of touch-tender skin and long-held bruises and you’ll find what’s on the other side of it.

Eddie finds comfort in other things: in the familiar weight of the utility knife in his hand, the tip of the blade where he notches it against the plastic tape and swipes down in one smooth, fluid motion. The package gives no further protest. It parts easily, as if it had been waiting. Eddie expects to find very little within, save the scraps of fabric Buck promised to provide him, but Buck proves him wrong. He has carefully folded tissue paper over the items in the box, concealing them, and placed a card on top. It says Eddie’s name in Buck’s best clumsy attempt at a fancy scrawl.

Take a lot for me, Buck’s written on the reverse side of the card, in his usual handwriting. Underneath, he’s drawn a cartoon camera, its shutter-button pressed and the flash illuminated. Eddie’s smiles. He imagines Buck carefully drawing the cartoon at his dining room table, tongue sticking out in the corner of his mouth.

Eddie unfolds the tissue paper. The box looks like a black hole. He slips his hands in and pulls out a standard black cotton t-shirt. The collar and sleeves are loose, so it’s been stretch-worn, and when Eddie holds it up to his chest it looks slightly too large for him. He catches a whiff as he lifts his arms to examine it — spicy, salty like the sea.

And something undeniably Buck.

Eddie looks at the shirt more closely. There’s a small hole in the armpit and a lingering stain on the bottom hem line, impossible to see unless you were really looking for it. Unless you were the one sitting across from Buck as the mustard in his hot dog exploded out of a bite and landed on his pants, just barely missing his shirt.

It’s Buck’s shirt, Eddie realizes with a dawning familiarity. Christopher was with them that day, and he and Eddie had laughed themselves silly at the mess Buck made of himself. Yes, I know, haha, very funny, Buck had bellyached, his mumbles barely audible over the sounds of Eddie and Christopher giggling.

A shadow of fabric crumples to Eddie’s table. It’s not the shirt; the shirt is still in his hands. He puts it aside, hanging it over the lip of the box, and finds the lump of cloth where it landed. It unfolds, without much need for help, into the palms of Eddie’s hands. They’re a simple pair of black underwear. Cotton in the front to best cradle Eddie’s balls and his cock, and a delicate lace cut in the back, emphasizing waist and thighs and ass. The thong is strung together with a row of smooth-looking black-toned pearls.

Eddie thinks he might be dying. He would resist the urge to check his own pulse if he weren’t the only one in the room — but, as it stands, he is, and his index and middle finger fly instinctively to the spot on his throat that conceals his jugular. He finds proof of life there, a little more rattly than what could be considered ideal.

Buck has sent Eddie his own worn-soft t-shirt and a pair of lacy panties to match. God. Eddie could never even begin to conceptualize wanting such things for himself, let alone ever asking for them, but now presented with them in tangibility he finds there isn’t a single thing more he would rather keep. Buck will feel so close, the smell of him everywhere, in Eddie’s nostrils and against Eddie’s skin. Did Buck imagine it? Picture Eddie wearing nothing but these clothes Buck picked out for him and his own skin? Maybe, one day, Eddie could wait for him in their shared bed this way. Buck would come home after a long day and Eddie would call to him, a siren’s song from the cracked bedroom door. Buck could come in, find Eddie spread out, loose and happy, and he wouldn’t waste any time. He’d climb on top of Eddie, ruck the shirt up around his armpits so he could press his hands to Eddie’s hips, his chest, his belly. He’d find the seam of Eddie’s asscheeks beneath him and push past the soft-yield of the thong to find Eddie already prepped inside, waiting for him, waiting for forever, waiting all this god damn time. Buck could slip in easily, after that, fold Eddie’s knees to his shoulder, press inside of him, press in deeper, kiss Eddie hard. Kiss him everywhere, his cock fucking into Eddie consistent and endless. I love you, Buck would say, and then maybe Eddie could say it back.

Eagerness bursts in Eddie’s chest like warm shimmering bubbles, carrying him on weightless footfalls all the way to the bedroom. He scoops up both parts of Buck’s gift before he goes, bunching them up into his fists before setting them unceremoniously on the edge of the bed. Eddie drops his dirty clothes to his feet as he peels himself out of them, kicking them haphazardly towards his laundry hamper when he’s done.

He’s naked now, his cock taking interest, filling up slowly with the first few hot rushes of blood to the area. Eddie presses the heel of his hand gracelessly against the root of his dick, just to feel the tenderness, sucking in a gasp, and the length of his cock kicks against his palm in response.

One foot and then the other, Eddie reminds himself, and steps into the underwear.

They fit well, though Eddie is suspicious of how exactly Buck came to know his measurements so precisely. A lucky guess, perhaps, but that would be even more impressive. The straps dig into the meat of Eddie’s hips, but they’re not uncomfortable, just tight enough to really highlight the area. His cheeks eat up most of the fabric in the back, as Eddie’s come to expect, but the line of black pearls stretches perfectly over his crack, cold and enticing where they slip back and forth across the twitching muscle of his rim. The front section is comfortable enough for the weight of Eddie’s cock as it presses against it; it will stretch some to accommodate but the fabric is still thin enough that each and every hot touch will be both discernible and satisfying, especially at the tip.

The shirt comes last and it swathes Eddie in a cloud of Buck’s smell so hazy and gratifying that Eddie almost moans. Its musk is potent and real. Buck must have pulled it out of dirty clothes, and he must have worn it recently. Next time, Eddie should request one of his work shirts.

But for now this one is soft, casual, well-worn, the scent enough on its own to crank the pressure in Eddie’s guts, to tug on the invisible string from cock to belly more insistently. He swims in it; his and Buck’s body types are so different.

Eddie catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror as he climbs into his sheets, still mussed from that morning’s lazy, lingering slumber. The forecast for the day had called for stifling heat, and Eddie had lazed in bed until the last possible moment, when the high noon sun finally started beating down on him through the roof and the windowpane. The sun is gone now. Eddie’s body flashes by him in the orange and indigos of a late evening spent at home, alone in his room.

Alone with his phone camera. Alone with the ghost of Buck in the corner. Watching, offering his wordless instructions.

Eddie takes two photos — a taste — and does something he’s never done before. He sends them straight to Buck without a moment’s hesitation, still wearing the outfit, prepared for the consequences of the circumstances he has now presented. I’m waiting, he types out, hoping to God this isn’t going to be one of the times where Buck is actually busy, and ends up taking a while to respond.

Less than a minute later, Eddie’s phone is ringing. Buck’s contact photo is the same as always, smiling up at him obliviously.

“God, Eddie, man, please tell me you haven’t —” Buck blabbers in lieu of hello.

Eddie cuts him off gently, humming soothingly from his side of the line before he begins speaking. “I haven’t,” he tells Buck honestly. “I’m still wearing it right now.”

“Fuuuuck, Eddie. I bet you look so good,” Buck groans. His voice is more hushed than usual, straining against the nature of such guttural noises where he attempts to contain them.

“I could take more pictures,” Eddie offers, already sliding into place, lounged across the mattress with the sheets kicked away. He cups the heft of his cock loosely through his panties, thumbing across the tip. “I could send you more.”

“Mhmm,” Buck drones pleasantly. “Take more pics. Send them to me later. I wanna really look at these first two you sent me a bit. Make sure I really appreciate them, y’know? Like art.”

“Sure,” Eddie rolls his eyes. “And what should I do, then?”

“You could play with yourself,” Buck retorts, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

“Wait? Really?”

“Yeah, man. Why not?” Buck leers, his voice rustling up Eddie’s gut like spinning wheel, fusing threads of pleasure along his nerve endings, splintering off and spreading everywhere. Eddie feels each point like a hollow prick, like a press below the skin, reaching deeper and more intimate. “You intimidated by me last time? Think you can’t live up to such a performance?”

“No, I — anyone can pull on their dick long enough to come, Buck, believe me. There’s nothing special about that kind of performance,” Eddie fires back. He doesn’t really mean it, but then, maybe it’ll be an excuse for Eddie to get a repeat, one he can see in person. Buck is definitely the kind of person to rise to that sort of lighthearted taunting. Then: “it’s just,” Eddie hesitates. “I—I haven’t. Not for… well, whatever. For a while, man. You know this.”

“So what?” Eddie can imagine the shrug of Buck’s shoulders. “Why not do it right now? I think you’ve done enough to deserve it.”

Eddie pulls his bottom lip between his teeth. “You think so?” He asks, unashamed of it.

“Well, let me think,” Buck begins to enumerate. “You put on what I got you and sent me pictures of you wearing it,” — heat spinning in Eddie’s cheeks, heat boiling in his stomach, heat pooling between his legs — “and you were so patient for me to call and hell, I mean, you’ve been waiting all this time, Eddie. So, yeah man, I think you’re well within your rights to rub one out.”

“I—” Eddie starts, tongue unsticking from the roof of his mouth, but Buck doesn’t stop.

“You gonna rub one out for me, Eddie?” Buck asks. “Gonna play with your clit so I can listen to you come?”

“Wuh-haaat?” Eddie moans through his bewilderment, already palming his dick in earnest. He’s so sensitive, and burning hot to the touch, the edge of Buck’s shirt bunching up under his wrist as he fumbles with himself. “Buck, I don’t —”

“You said it yourself,” Buck extrapolates, “it’s been awhile since you’ve done this. Who knows what it’s like down there. Has your dick shriveled up?”

“Buck, that’s not fu-huh-ny,” Eddie says, but it loses its edge as his mouth softens from pleasure. His hand stops its proding; content to let Eddie cup himself loosely and let the rock of his hips do the rest. Every time his grip tightens involuntarily to relieve the pressure, the fabric of the panties bunches up, and it brings the smooth pressure of the black pearls right up against Eddie’s hole. “C’mon. Stop.”

Buck’s reply is as serious as it can be, as best can be conveyed through the soundwaves he emits through the phone. “Whose laughing?”

“You’re such an asshole, Buck.”

“I’m serious, Eddie.”

The worst part is Eddie believes him. But Buck is asking Eddie for something he finds difficult to admit, even to himself.

“Okay, whatever,” Eddie’s frustration, burning a heartbeat between his legs, gets the best of him. “If I said yes. What would — what would you say then?”

“I’d say you’re perfect, Eddie,” Buck drawls. “And that we can still make sure it feels good. Christ, just listen to you now.”

Eddie does. His breath rattles, ping-ponging from rib to rib inside his distended chest. Every so often, his hand drags down the length of his cock the right way, and his larynx squeezes a whine out of him. He sounds like a wounded animal, like a sad puppy. He’s humiliated, and yet everything below the waist feels like it’s been poured over with gasoline.

“Be gentle,” Buck chastises, a tone of warning. “She’s sensitive. Go slow.”

Eddie does as he’s told; his hand moving slower, his hold getting looser. He can hardly think straight. It’s easier to just let Buck tell him what to do.

“Okay, okay. What now?” Eddie asks, trying to sound like he’s levelling a challenge despite the threadbare quality of his voice, holding the words further back in his throat.

Buck scoffs. It’s not overly nice. Eddie’s mouth falls open, his tongue wetting the inner portion of his bottom lip. It’s dry, and tastes of salt where sweat has dripped. “How about you tell me what it feels like? Are you dripping, Eddie? Can you feel it soaking through the fabric? Is your clit all puffy and tender for me?”

Shame flays like a blade; it puts Eddie on the slab and saws below the sinew, parting flesh from muscle and muscle from bone, carving for taste like a butcher. He imagines Buck’s gaze might be capable of doing the same, if only he and Eddie were in the same room.

Resistance clings, holding Eddie back with chains around his wrists and ankles. Eddie flails where he’s laid back against the bed, still suffocating his cock with his hand, fighting against these jail-like phantoms. “Buck, man, I don’t —”

“If you’re not gonna use your dick properly you’ll have to figure it out some other day,” Buck chides, taunting and tempting. He wants Eddie to submit to his desires as much as he wants Eddie to be embarrassed by them. “What about your pussy, huh? Can you reach that? Tell me how it feels?”

“What do you mean, Buck, you can’t—” Eddie falters. He shakes his head against the pillows and tries again, “Buck, I can’t.” He reaches forward to try and find his hole blind, but there’s just too many obstructions, and his body won’t fold around itself the right way. Clumsy and huge, Eddie’s entire body feels swollen, pulsing like a bruise. “I can’t,” he repeats tenderly. “I can’t do this.”

“I think you can,” Buck refutes. “And you know what? I think it’s more than that, Eddie. I think you like it. I think you want it.”

He can’t. He can’t he can’t he can’t. Buck says it likes it so easy but it’s not. Maybe to him, a man who has never known the stick, only the carrot. Eddie grew up in the desert. Harsh, arid, unforgiving. He learnt to survive it the way the plants do: on limited resources and with careful control. A drop of water must sustain a cactus until the next one comes and who knows how long that will be? Repression is survival, there is a comfort in restraint. Buck, all big and huge and beautiful, has never known such a thing, has moved through life barreling through the brick walls that stood in his way. He ventured forth — and further and further and further still — operating with a sense of self-intuition so innate and honed and near impossible to replicate. Buck trusts himself. Eddie has never understood the art of such a thing. He ventured forth, out his front door, and found himself turning around and coming back home anyway.

But it’s felt so… good these last few months, for Eddie to surrender to what’s scary, to the image in the mirror that once turned his stomach. He’s been excavating these parts of himself he spent long stretches of across childhood and teenagehood and some of his adulthood burying, and there’s more of him down there. There always has been.

Buck’s not asking to get down into the dirt with him. He wants to help carry it all to the surface and let Eddie see it in the light of day.

“Buck,” Eddie moans, twisting like someone’s punched him in the stomach. “What do you — what should I…?”

“How about you lay on your front?” Buck supplies, following Eddie’s nervously stuttered lead. “With your knees tucked under you, you might be able to reach.”

Eddie follows the instruction, flipping unceremoniously and drawing his legs up beneath him. It cants his hips upwards, pushing his ass into the air and pressing his front deeper into the mattress. His wobbly inhales fill the width of his chest as best they can, stifled by firmness. “Okay, okay, I’m there,” he chants in veneration, desperate for the next direction. Eddie is ragged, his voice compressed the same as his breathing. “What do I do now?”

“Reach behind you,” Buck explains, dragging out the words like Eddie imagines he’d drag his palms across Eddie’s thighs and ass and stomach, covetous of all this bare skin. Buck’s shirt falls naturally from the angle of Eddie’s body, settling above the curve of his waist, exposing his lower back dimple and bunching up under his stomach. Eddie puts chin to chest with some effort, hoping to catch the scent of Buck through the advent of his t-shirt and the jagged quality of his breaths. “Find your hole and play with your pussy.”

“Ugh, fuck,” Eddie groans with the effort, groping sightless over the curve of his own asscheek, finding his crack and following the line of pearls tucked within to get his fingers where Buck wants them. He finds the subtly trembling muscle with some difficulty, pushing the smooth-surface gemstones aside to allow himself entry. He prods, a gentleness from his own hands, and waits for Buck to speak.

“Good?” Buck asks, responding to Eddie’s muffled, punched-out whines like a call to action. “Don’t go too hard yet. We don’t wanna be too mean. Rub yourself until you’re nice and loose. You might wanna get your fingers wet.”

Eddie stuffs two fingers into his mouth — sucking on them messily, loud enough for Buck to hear — moaning around the press of them against his tongue, the flick of blunt-nail edge against his soft palette. When he’s done, his fingers return to his hole — his pussy, like Buck said — with the accuracy of a heat-seeking missile. He rubs himself over with spit, sloppy and wet, each clench of his hole against his fingers like a shot of adrenaline delivered right between his lower vertebrae. Trapped in the sheer fabric of his panties, Eddie’s cock drips like a faucet. He drags the edge of it over the mattress, a whisper of pressure, enough to tempt without any clear path to fulfillment.

“You looked so pretty,” Buck says, and Eddie can tell he’s about to go on talking for a minute, his words full of air. Eddie doesn’t stop the nudging press of his fingers, elbow locked at full stretch, reaching back as far as he can manage. He rubs across the skin of his taint for a change in texture, and his body responds the same way his hole does, a shuddering clench around nothing. “In those pictures you sent me. All of them. The first ones you sent me, god, Eddie.” Eddie gasps at the pure fire with which Buck calls his name. “Well, you know how I felt about them, man. I’m sure. So pretty. Like a present, begging to be unwrapped. I thought about you when I jerked off the next morning. Finally busted imagining what it would taste like if I ate my come straight from your cunt.”

“Jeesus, Buck, that’s so…,” it takes a moment for Eddie to bubble the words up from his chest, smashed face-first into the mattress like this. His hair falls everywhere, across his forehead and into his eyes. His open mouth drools a puddle into the sheets. Buck’s shirt absorbs his sweat, mingling the two of them in ways unseen. “Dirty,” Eddie finishes, his exhale awestruck, his throat wide open.

“Says you,” Buck chuckles. “You sucked that bartender off in the parking lot, didn’t you? Let him call you names, let him make you wear lip gloss. Did he call you a good girl?” The only answer Eddie can offer is wordless, strangling a moan into the receiver of the phone that’s currently pressing indents into his cheek-skin. “Is your cunt wet, Eddie? Are you playing with it for me?”

“Yes, yes,” Eddie wails, his middle and index finger working himself over in earnest. He’s never come this way before. Doesn’t know if he can, doesn’t know how long it would take to find out. So he asks, “what now, Buck? What next?”

Buck huffs out another laugh, more astonished than the last. “Don’t worry, Eddie. I told you I’d help show you how to make it feel good, didn’t I?” And then: “relax, okay, bud? This is gonna take a minute.”

Eddie shivers all the way from his sweaty hairline to the taut, curling muscles of his toes. His spine sings with it, curling like a pleased feline. Eddie recentres in anticipation of Buck’s words: spreads his legs further, despite the protests of his thighs, dimples the mattress as he sinks into it. His chest is hot, burning, and Eddie tries to suck in as many cool, calming breaths as he can, waiting for Buck to speak. Waiting on instruction, on order, on directive.

***

Eddie sleeps better than he has in months, which isn’t exactly surprising. What else would you expect from someone after they’ve had their first orgasm in months? Buck praised Eddie through every moment of it when it finally came, the tension of Eddie’s body ratcheting up tighter and tighter until his muscles gave out and he was melting. And Buck was cooing in his ear, saying nice and pretty and filthy things.

The next morning, over a steaming mug of black coffee with three sugars and a slice of toast with peanut butter, Eddie sends Buck more pictures.

Fuuuuuuck, Buck texts back, flushing Eddie’s cheeks bright pink before he even finishes breakfast.

Then, not-so long later, as Eddie is orienting himself in the driver’s seat for a full day of working Uber:

I miss you, Eddie.

He chews on his lip thoughtfully. Takes the phone off where it was sitting on its dashboard stand and texts back, summoning some bravery. Miss you too, Buck.

Eddie thinks he might love him. He’s just not sure yet.

***

Life picks up speed until it’s flying down the highway. Eddie keeps in step with it as best he can, but after so much time spent slow-crawling on his knees through molten desert sand, it’s a bit of head spin. He can’t even be sure he still possesses the strength to stand.

“Do you miss living in California?” Christopher asks over spaghetti dinner one evening. It’s been a week since he took up permanent residence in Eddie’s spare bedroom. Helena had been affronted. Eddie didn’t care.

“I miss the beach,” Eddie admits, cutting into the soft sphere of one of his meatballs length-ways. Buck had been on FaceTime with Eddie while he prepared dinner, helping with the recipe, which really meant he spent most of his time reassuring Eddie that his dinner would not come out totally ruined. It didn’t. “And I miss our friends and the cookie dough ice cream from that place we really liked and, god help me, I kinda miss those monstrosity California burritos.” Eddie smiles at his son, reaching over to push Christopher’s overgrown bangs out of his eyes. Eddie had worn his hair long as a kid, too. Why he stopped, he can’t remember. “But I’d miss you more than all those things combined if I wasn’t here with you.”

“Okay,” Christopher nods, his face solemn. He pauses for thought, eyebrows creased below the frame of his glasses. Eddie takes another bite of his spaghetti, chewing slowly as he waits on Christopher politely. “What if you didn’t miss me, though?”

Eddie’s face melts, warm-hearted. He swallows his mouthful before he speaks, because in this house they practice good table manners. “That would never happen,” he tells Chris, shaking his head. “I miss you even when you’re just in the other room.”

Christopher scoffs. “No, Dad,” he makes a face, the long-suffering teenager and his loving dad, “what I’m trying to say is… if we were both in California, then you wouldn’t have to miss me. Because I’d be there with you. Right?”

Christopher looks at him expectantly. Eddie presses his thumb into the ridges of the forks he’s holding, the tangible texture against his fingerprint enough to be grounding. He’s here. He’s not dreaming. Is Christopher saying what Eddie thinks he’s saying? A request Eddie thought might never come?

“You’d want that, bud? You’d want to come home with me?”

Home. It’s out there. It’s waiting for them. Here, in El Paso, there are only memories of a broken past. Everything living and breathing and beautiful is waiting for them back where they came from.

Christopher shrugs, an expected level of non-chalance for his age, especially in the face of big, complicated emotions. “I guess,” he answers non-committedly. Eddie knows what it means. Yes, I want that. Because Eddie’s known him almost his whole life, and at this point Eddie knows him best, and Eddie would never expect Christopher to be anything besides exactly who he was born to be. “I miss the beach,” he echoes Eddie’s earlier statement.

“Then let’s go to the beach,” Eddie says, voice wet, eyes shiny, smile wide. “I’ll get us back before summer’s over, and will go as many times as you want, okay?”

Christopher nods. Eddie throws an arm over his shoulders and pulls him in close, and Christopher barely protests, just groans a little as Eddie tucks him under his arm. They slot together like they always have, like father and son, like the closest orbiting planets in a solar system, passing each other by on occasion but always liable to come back around in the end. Eddie presses a kiss to Christopher’s forehead. “I love you, kid.”

And from his spot jammed into Eddie’s chest, Christopher mumbles back, as sincere as he can be about anything, “I love you too, Dad.”

***

In the end, Eddie leaves everything more or less up to the agents of fate.

His realtor is a severe-looking woman named Clementine, who introduces herself in slightly accented English with an unexpected emphasis placed on her T’s. She wears her hair in a straight-cut bob with a heavy bang, complimentary of her smart wardrobe and the shade of lipstick she wears on the daily. She’s the last variety of person Eddie would expect to find in Texas, but she has experience servicing clients who are living out of state, and she’s as eager to get to work selling his house as Eddie is to vacate it.

He finds the movers from a flyer on the community board at his grocery store. They’re a small, family run business and they charge by the hour. When Eddie calls, the guy asks a lot of questions, and after they’ve been talking for some time he makes a suggestion. “If you’re looking to get out as quickly as possible,” he explains, “I’ll let you know, my wife is a professional organizer. She can bring a couple’a extra hands with her and they can pack up all your stuff. All neat and orderly, like I said.”

It’s an extra fee, but they’ll bundle it with the movers for him, and it has the added advantage of bringing Eddie’s move-out date up by a significant margin, so he agrees. It feels a little like cheating, like he’s outsourcing all the worst parts of moving but, whatever. Packing’s annoying. He’s supporting a small business.

They fly back to California carrying almost nothing, besides what can be fit into a few suitcases and some assorted carry-on baggage. They leave everything else behind — things they may see again, and other things they may not. Eddie doesn’t mind it either way. His journey to Texas had felt so weighty, a heavy bulk he carried reluctantly. Heavier and heavier the longer he spent carrying it. Returning to L.A. is much the opposite; a sense of freedom as light as air, carried along to them on a wafting salt-breeze.

Eddie’s not sure what it’ll be like when he and Buck finally reacquaint. Or, that’s not true. He knows what some things will be like. He knows Buck will still be his best friend. That he’ll pick them up from the airport, waiting in Arrivals with that goofy smile of his and his arms outstretched. He’ll help carry Christopher’s bags, and they’ll drive back to South Bedford with the windows down, and the air will feel crisp and clean and rich with ozone. In truth: nothing will be that different — but it'll feel different, all the way down to the atoms. To the very fabric of the elements that make it up. Everything is different, everything changes. In ways that are subtle and not so subtle, from the blood pumping beneath Eddie’s skin to the eyesight with which he filters in the world around him. And what then? At the end of that road, when Eddie and Buck are living in the same house for a god knows how long, when Christopher surely leaves them alone to be with his friends? What then? Is Eddie expected to know? He’ll be paralyzed by choice. Kiss him? Drop to your knees and suck his cock? It’ll only be his second time doing it. Does Buck want him in person, or was this only attainable because of the lack of physical consequence? Eddie would be humiliated. Each phone call with Buck has left him wanting more and more and more. What if Buck has decided, without consultation, that he wants nothing at all?

It wouldn’t be fair.

Eddie would find a way to live with it regardless.

But then Buck meets them in Arrivals, goofy smile, open arms. He hugs Christopher first, ruffling his hair, before pulling Eddie from the grip of his own reluctance and into the circle of his arms. He smells like the t-shirt he sent. The one Eddie packed into his carry-on, so he could check and re-check and be one-hundred percent sure he still had it. Buck presses his nose to the smooth stretch of skin behind Eddie’s ear, right up against his hairline, and Eddie can hear him suck a tight inhale through both his nostrils. “I missed you,” Buck mumbles, and Eddie feels reassured and desperate for Buck to kiss him all at once. He knows he won’t, he can’t, but still. “God, Eddie. I missed you a lot, man.”

“Yeah,” Eddie says, squeezing his arms around Buck’s shoulders, feeling the yield of flesh and the firmness of muscle. “I missed you too, bud. I missed it all.”

***

He kisses Buck for the first time two days later. Morning descends and, god, did Eddie lament the absence of such a beautiful orange glow in his kitchen in Texas. Buck is bathed in it, stirring pancake batter with the bowl tucked under his arm and a huge plastic spoon, and Eddie just… goes. Steps across the floor and presses his mouth to Buck’s, ignoring the bulk of the objects between them, ignoring the mess of swiping across pancake batter and getting it on his shirt. Buck’s lips are soft, his mouth warm. Eddie sighs as Buck seeks him out, following into the kiss like he won’t let Eddie end it. His tongue breaches the seam of Eddie’s teeth and flicks against the skin on the inside of Eddie’s bottom lip — and that’s what finally does it, causing Eddie to duck away from him with a flush in his cheeks. Buck isn’t visibly disappointed, though. Quite the opposite, actually. He’s fucking beaming.

Eddie clears his throat. “Eyes on the prize, bud,” he garbles, gesturing to the bowl of sufficiently whipped pancake batter in front of him. When Buck pointedly does not turn his gaze away from Eddie, Eddie swats his pectoral muscle with the back of his hand. The blush on his cheeks has yet to subside. Regrettably, he thinks it might actually be getting worse. “I’m serious. If those pancakes aren’t ready by the time that kid wakes up, he’s gonna be grumpy.”

Buck looks over Eddie’s shoulder to the digital clock display on the stove, reading the time. “It’s 9:30 in the morning and we’re dealing with a teenager,” he says incredulously. “I’ve got another hour and a half. At least.”

Sure enough, Christopher rouses from sleep around 11AM, still digging sleep crusties from his eyes as he takes his place at the kitchen table, a big slab of fluffy pancakes laid out before him.

“Got that syrup you like, bud. The one from Canada.” Buck nudges the tin can — which depicts a snowy landscape and red cabin below the logo, matching the line of red text near the bottom that reads PRODUIT DU QUEBEC, CANADA — in Christopher’s direction. Eddie had never seen maple syrup in a can before Buck introduced it to them. Christopher, still too sleepy for words, grunts his appreciation, and pours himself a hearty serving.

Eddie looks on in fondness. Beneath the table, he presses the bottom of his socked foot to the top of Buck’s, easy from where Buck sits beside him, and Buck turns to him and smiles — mouth full, lips sticky and shiny with syrupy.

***

They have sex for the first time (excluding a fair few instances of half-asleep shower handjobs and the singular blowjob Eddie had allowed Buck to give him against the back of the bedroom door when they should have been getting ready, one fist in Buck’s hair and the other’s knuckles stuffed between his teeth) a week and a half later. It’s a fruitful distraction from the minor spiral Eddie experiences after Christopher asks him if he can go to — like, a party, a real one, with his friends. “He’ll be back by his curfew,” Buck reassures him. “He’s a smart kid.”

Buck puts Eddie through the mattress after that, just as Eddie had once imagined, his knees folded up by his shoulders, his hips raised, Buck pressing Eddie in half with his hands around the back of Eddie’s thighs. They trade good-spirited jabs up until Eddie’s euphoria steals his voice from him, turning him into a whimpery mess, and Buck’s words take on a sharper, harsher tone. You feel me in there, bud? Filling up your pussy? Feels good, huh? Just like I told you it would. What is your dick even good for these days? Eddie comes so hard his vision goes spotty and his hearing blots out. Submerged beneath the thick, sticky surface of his pleasure, he waits patiently for Buck to pull him out of it, blissful and warm and sated.

***

At work, they keep things to themselves. At least for now. Eddie doesn’t think anyone will care, beyond the H.R. paperwork that will surely be required of them, but it’s nice to hold something close to his chest. Something good, something he’s excited to tell. He’s so used to hiding from his secrets, from being terrified of them.

Buck indulges him, though he does a poor job at hiding the ways their shared silence on the matter makes him want to vibrate out of his skin, much to Eddie’s amusement. Buck understands. He’s just excited. Eddie can’t fault him for that. It’s just that all of this still feels so brand new, like they’ve just begun to bridge the gap between fantasy and reality, and Eddie isn’t in any kind of rush to give that up. There were so many aspects of his life that brushed right by him because he had never learnt the skills to savor them. Only to run, and run and run and run, until he wasn’t sure what he was running towards anymore, until he was only running away from himself. Eddie doesn’t want to run. He’s tired of running. Running has only ever taken him to places like deserts where he never wanted to go.

“We’ll tell them soon,” Eddie tells Buck on a day he’s particularly keyed up. They’re alone on the couch in the loft, everyone else gathered elsewhere or not paying attention, and Eddie reaches subtly across the couch to thread his fingers with Buck. “I promise,” he says, and squeezes the best he can manage.

“I’m not trying to rush you,” Buck clarifies, squeezing back, its efficacy lost in their messy entanglement of digits.

Eddie nods because he knows it’s true. He says as much, still nodding. “I know. And It’s not about you, okay? It’s not about us. It’s about — it’s about me, okay?”

Buck gives a reluctant smile, mouth folded half-flat, but there’s no judgement or nervousness in his eyes, just a sense of child-like impatience. “I know,” Buck repeats Eddie’s words back to him, lower lip jutting out boyishly. “I wish I could kiss you right now.”

Eddie grimaces in an exaggerated tease, snatching his hand away from Buck’s and swatting his bicep before he sees it coming. Buck makes a wounded face, rubbing the spot where smacked and whining pitifully. “Well, I hate to break it to you, bud, but there will be no P.D.A. Not at work, not even after everyone knows.” Eddie details firmly, and when Buck frowns he smacks him again, chuckling despite himself. “Weirdo. Just kiss me at home like we’re a normal couple.”

“Oh, so we’re a couple?” Buck asks with lack of care for his volume. He raises his eyebrows, tucking chin to chest so he can look up at Eddie from beneath their shadow. A genuine smile is curling up the edges of Buck’s lips.

Eddie flushes. “Shuddup,” he mumbles, and then, even quieter. “Whatever. Yes. We’re a couple.”

Buck leans in closer. “And I can kiss you when we get home?”

“Yes, Buck,” Eddie answers, exasperated. Buck celebrates by pumping his fist, jumping up from the couch with a woop! of celebration, and letting his long legs take him away, Eddie doesn’t even know where. He just watches him leave, rolling his eyes with nothing but sick affection in his heart.

***

He ends up telling Hen first, a slurred whisper into the shell of her ear, half-drunk at a wine and cheese night hosted at the Buckley-Han residence. Eddie’s sure his face is as red as the stain on his teeth, but he’s so happy and so warm, stealing glances at Buck from across the room, knowing they’ll be going home together.

Eddie had some hope this particular truth would be some kind of revelation. That’s how it felt when he thought about it; wholly improbable under any other circumstances, a far-off dream somehow brought to fruition. Hen is hardly phased by it.

“You and him?” She gestures in Buck’s general direction with a tilt of her head, her eyebrows raised. Eddie follows to where Buck stands, leaning back with one hand braced against the kitchen counter behind him, speaking with his sister and his brother-in-law, none to the wiser. He looks big, and strong, his grip loose around the neck of his beer bottle. When Eddie turns back to Hen, the look on her face is incredulous, and Eddie kisses his teeth before he huffs out a laugh. He hadn’t realized he could be so obviously. “I think you could do better,” she tells Eddie, dead-pan in her sarcasm.

Eddie knocks into her shoulder with his own and the mask cracks. She smiles good-naturedly, reaching over to grip the back of Eddie’s neck in a firm, grounding hold, and pull him back her way.

Later, in the car ride on the way home, Eddie’s head lolls against the passenger seat. Buck had less to drink so he could drive them home, but Eddie feels loopy and loose. He feels happy.

“I told Hen, by the way.”

Buck’s eyes cut to him from the passenger seat. “Oh,” he squawks, his shoulders rising protectively as his mouth corkscrews a moment. “Well. I, uh. I told Maddie.”

“Right,” Eddie nods, a maniacal grin quickly splitting his face. He tries to control it as best he can, the row of his top teeth pressed into his bottom lip, but still it breaks through. “And your sister is going to tell her husband, and we all know how that goes, so basically…” he trails off.

“Basically, everyone knows,” Buck affirms, nodding resolutely as he finishes the thought. “Yep.”

Eddie can’t help himself. Some parts the wine in his belly, some parts the warmth in his chest. He laughs. Guffaws, into the open space of Buck’s truck cab like he’s found a joke unexpectedly funny. Buck looks at him like he’s gone insane. But Eddie can’t help it. He could never help any of this. That’s what he learnt, after all his time away.

He just never expected it to be this easy. Who knew it could all be this easy?