i know this is tumblr and we’re all playing perverts but i just think some of you would be excellent company for a late night walk and a four hour conversation about absolutely nothing
was considering my ideal 'eddie finds out about The Competition conundrum' scenario but now i am stirring a big simmering pot of ruminations in my Mind about a world in which eddie is not in the dark about tommy seeing him as competition, not because buck tells him about that conversation, but because he himself already had a similar one with tommy.
'he stopped talking to me after you and i broke up' as a slight lie of omission because eddie stopped talking to him after a conversation that took place at buck's loft the day after the billy boils incident while buck was busy poking at his face in the mirror and the other two were just sort of awkwardly sharing space in their collective BoyFriend's home like
"I'm sorry you had to drive all the way over here, man. I told him I could handle it."
"No big deal," Eddie shrugs, arms crossed and leaning back against the counter. His med bag is still open on the table and he's intermittently sipping a coffee he made for himself without asking permission.
"Right," Tommy pulls a face that he's pulled at least half a dozen times since Eddie arrived. He doesn't elaborate.
"I just mean," Eddie pushes up against the tension in the air, "it's what we do. He'd show up for me the same way."
"No," Tommy laughs drily, "I'm not confused about that, trust me."
Without tearing his gaze away from that look on Tommy's face, the one he's still pulling in a slightly different font, Eddie reaches out and picks up his coffee from the counter with practiced, blind ease. He frowns as he takes a long sip. He isn't sure what to say to that and so he doesn't say anything at all.
He doesn't need to, really, when Tommy goes on all on his own.
"There are some situations where you don't show up for each other though, right?"
"Not sure I catch your drift," Eddie chuckles, head tilting with the momentum of his confusion.
Tommy studies him, like trying to suss him out, and then sighs.
"Nevermind."
"Okay," Eddie lets it go.
He tries to let it go, only, Tommy is trying to win some foot-in-mouth contest, apparently because--
"I'm just trying not to feel like I always have to compete for my boyfriend's attention, I guess is what I'm saying," he blurts out with a large, half-aborted gesture that startles Eddie aback with his mug halfway lifted to his lips.
He lowers it carefully.
He pulls a face of his own.
"Compete with who?"
Tommy stalls for a beat before he barks out a laugh. He looks at Eddie like he thinks he's stupid or something, which isn't the most pleasant experience. Eddie has gotten along just fine with Tommy for months, now, but all of a sudden it feels like Tommy isn't getting along with him and Eddie can't parse why.
"Come on, Diaz," he scoffs, "you're not that dense."
He's looking him up and down like he's reading him and Eddie doesn't care for it at all, actually. He feels transparent and he feels brittle and he opens his mouth to say something, although he has no hope of planning ahead for what, only--
"Eddie! C'mere for a sec!" Buck calls, loud and demanding from the bathroom upstairs. "Bring your bag!"
Tommy's once-over breaks, but only because he shakes his head with this frigid sort of unsurprised frustration, and only then does Eddie pick up what he's been putting down.
His jaw hinges open, just ever so slightly, and he understands the meaning of gobsmacked for perhaps the first time in his life and--
"Eddie?!"
"You gonna keep him waiting?" Tommy asks with an edge of mockery and Eddie purses his lips as he sets down his coffee and trades it out for his med bag.
He strides forward, but as he passes by, drops hand to shoulder.
"I'm not competing with you, Tommy," he says flatly with barely a pause in his step to do so.
He's a third of the way up the staircase when he catches the sigh at his back and hears the mostly-muttered, "no, you're really not, are you," that chases him up.
In all technicality, they're on the same page, but they don't really talk much after that.
Anyway, it's only a couple weeks later when Tommy breaks up with Buck, when Buck shows up on Eddie's doorstep, when Eddie is the first one to get him to smile and laugh again in a post-breakup world to the tune of loud, loud music and where are your goddamn pants, man?
It's the beer, probably, and the dancing endorphins, that makes a ghost of a thought drift across Eddie's brain:
Hey, man, c'mere. Listen. Get in real close, this is important.
You're gonna make stuff again. You're gonna make stuff you're proud of. You're gonna make stuff you're excited to share. You're going to feel that overwhelming drive to create, not just the frantic I want to want to you're stuck in now. You're going to have awesome ideas, and you're going to make them into reality. You're going to create again. You're still an artist. You're still a writer. You're still home to the same passion you had before. You'll find it again. It's not gone. It's just resting. Let it rest. You're going to make stuff again. I promise.
Brain fog is not an adequate descriptor, actually. Fog can be kinda nice and beautiful and ethereal and refreshing. The thing we’re describing is more like a brain BOG; everything moves slow like you’re wading through water, it’s clunky and heavy and you keep getting stuck in the mud. It’s uncomfortable and inconvenient and everything takes so much effort. You lost a shoe, probably.
If you embroider or hand sew in your bed, you may think to yourself, "I'm just gonna set my needle down real quick next to me/on my chest/literally anywhere except inside the project or on a needle catcher and I'll get it in a minute, it'll be fine." But it won't be fine. You'll lose the needle and then you'll have a loose needle just in your bed. Haunting you. Waiting for you. Craving your flesh and blood.
gender essentialism is soooo funny bc it's like "this is what women are like" and you're like "I've met women and many of them, if not the majority, have not been like that" and it's like "well women SHOULD be like that" and you're like "why should women be like that" and its like "because that's what women are like"
[Image ID] screenshot of tumblr tags that read "#it's natural btw. that's why we have to enforce it with coercion and violence and even legislation at every turn' bitch what" [End ID]
i genuinely don't think there's much, if anything, hotter than someone clearly having a blast doing something they're really good at. doesn't really matter what it is. the combo of competence and joy is absolutely lethal to me
amandla
2087
turnnoffyourmind
titsay
dailybridgerton
stormborns
theartofmadeline
