where the love light gleams
my 911 holiday gift exchange for leah @reindeereddie. merry christmas, my love!
The lights are Christopher’s idea, brought up over Buck’s mac and cheese one night in early December. It’s Bobby’s mac and cheese, really, taught to a Buck Eddie had never known over countless probie shifts and patient hands on the electric burner—but that night it was Buck’s, because he cooked it here, in Eddie’s kitchen, in the blue casserole dish with white flowers around the rim. All afternoon the house smelled of it, gravitating Chris to the kitchen table to do his homework, Eddie from the laundry where he’d been half-heartedly trying to soak out a red wine stain.
“No luck?” Buck asked, like he genuinely cared about Eddie’s stained tablecloth, which he probably did. He looked earnest over the stovetop, curls cowlicked to his forehead from the steam, and the sight of him in a pink KISS THE COOK apron made Eddie want to do something stupid, like try and tuck his hair behind his ear. “I’d offer to help, but I, uh,” and he flicked a glance over at Chris, making sure his headphones were on, “don’t know shit about laundry. I just avoid red wine.”
“Thanks for the tip,” Eddie replied, dryly. “If only I had my time machine.” He ducked the piece of macaroni Buck lobbed at him in return.
(“Huh,” Buck said, as it stuck fast to the kitchen wall. “Al dente.”)
They ate on the good plates, the ones with pink and gold trim Eddie keeps in the corner cupboard and saves for special occasions. The mac and cheese was perfect, straight from the oven—creamy and warm and filling, just right for a winter’s day. Buck’s ears went red when Eddie told him so, fiddling with the string on his hoodie.
They all had seconds, Eddie talking Chris down from thirds, and it was after, the plates stacked in front of Buck while he psyched himself up to standing, that Christopher asked, “can we see the lights this year?”
Eddie blinked, a little nonplussed. “Sure, bud,” he replied, meeting Buck’s gaze over the table. “But we—we already do that. You didn’t have to ask.”
And Christopher looked at him, exasperated, expression so Buck-like Eddie’s breath caught in his chest. “Can Buck come see the Christmas lights this year?”
Heart, meet throat. Eddie swallowed it down, because God—he wanted. He wanted this Christmas with Buck like he wants every Christmas, lights and the tree and a popcorn to cranberry ratio of 5:1 and trifle soaked in too much alcohol, knees knocking together on Eddie’s second-hand couch while they watch It’s A Wonderful Life. And the thing is—sometimes when Eddie looks at Buck, he thinks maybe he wants that too. But it’s been almost a year since they’ve both been single, eight months since Eddie returned to the 118 and seven since they kissed and made up and Buck hasn’t said a word. He’d slid Eddie’s key back onto his ring and taken Chris to the zoo six times over the summer and helped Eddie build a swing for his back porch and fixed the leaky pipe under Eddie’s abuela’s call-me-Isabel, Buck sink. Eddie buys the brand of oat milk Buck likes even though it’s never on sale and he keeps a tin of green tea by the spice rack and Buck’s favourite mug in the cupboard, the one shaped like a frog he says looks like Eddie. He switched out laundry powders back in June because the one he’d been using gave Buck hives, and Buck pulled him from a collapsing staircase during a five-alarm in September that had Eddie clutching at his elbows so tight they bruised, eyes wide and desperate and blue, still so blue, behind his SCBA. One time Chimney took Eddie’s phone and scrolled back in his text chain with Buck for a whole minute and only reached last Tuesday and still Buck hasn’t said a word.
Only, well—it’s not like Eddie has, either.
That night Buck didn’t answer Christopher’s question right away. He looked at Eddie, instead, like he was asking what to say—Eddie, who shrugged even as he was seized by the desire to, like, hold Buck’s hand tenderly over the leftover bread rolls. Your call.
Buck’s gaze cut down to the table then back up again, and a smile unspooled on his face that seemed almost too big to fit as he said, “yeah, Chris, I,” and looked over at Eddie again, “I’d love to.”
