"I didn't even think you'd seen Tommy until—"

His words got stuck in his throat, they still didn't seem real. Until the funeral.

Buck swallowed, taking a few steps towards the wall and leaning against it.

"Did I forget to mention that... we slept together?" he closed one eye and looked back at Eddie like he was waiting for the lecture.

While usually Eddie would have had one ready to go, he paused for a moment as he pondered whether it was the right time.

"You did forget to mention it," he said instead.

"It just didn't seem important, not with everything you were dealing with at the same time," he said.

"You know friendship works two ways, right?" he asked with a gentle smile and a tilt of his head. "Just because I'm going through a rough patch doesn't mean I don't want to hear about your life and what's going on with you. I mean, if it did, we might never talk about you."

Buck let out an echo of a laugh, and even that after the week they'd had sounded warm in his ears.

"Yeah I know," he said.

"That's... not the only reason you didn't tell me though, is it?"

He looked back and chewed on his bottom lip a moment, contemplating his reply.

"He... may have implied that he had a better chance of making it work with me... now that you're not here," he said slowly, and Eddie just blinked back at him as he let the words register.

"He implied that?"

“Buck, please,” Eddie says through clenched, sore teeth, holding back his hurt and frustration as best he can. “I’m not–I really don’t understand what is going on. There’s no pretending here, man. You gotta know that.”

Silence.

It’s contemplative and full. And the pressure of it is too much to take.

“You know me,” Eddie tries again.

The words sound pathetic to his own ears, ringing loudly with a type of desperation and vulnerability he once swore he would never reveal to anyone ever again. And of course it’s Buck that yanks it out of him, setting fire to the kindling Eddie has been painstakingly gathering for years now.

“Doesn’t really feel like it,” Buck says quietly.

Eddie clamps his mouth shut tight over what is begging–raging–to spill out of him. An unsettling soreness builds up in his jaw, everything he wants to say but shouldn’t building up in the bone and muscle and eating away at him.

He has to release some of it though, because it hurts to think Buck doesn’t feel like he knows Eddie, that they apparently aren’t okay and Eddie had no fucking clue.

“Really?” he asks, scooting to the edge of the couch, his blood scorching beneath his skin so much so that he must be flushed crimson. “Because it feels like I should be the one saying that. I sure as shit can’t figure out who I’m talking to right now or what this is about. So just fucking tell me. What is going on, Buck?”

maddie + her neck scar in 8.11

Tim just posted a new still of Eddie on his facebook! ✨