okay, so! i was trying to think of an eddie pairing with an already established character and how it would work/what he needs in a relationship as opposed to what he thinks he needs or what he thinks he should be looking for. the big problem with eddie imo is he tends to pursue women he thinks would fit into a mother-wife mold; i.e. someone to fill the void left by shannon as his wife and christopher's mother. someone who will fit into the nuclear family eddie thinks he should have that he missed out on because shannon was in the process of leaving him and then died without any resolution. so i started thinking about a character with the sort of personality/traits/etc. that might get eddie off a hamster wheel of his own making and came up with a few ideas, but the one i decided to go with was taylor. taylor's ambitious, cares about her job (and honesty/truthfulness), she's also compassionate but has an edgier side too. she seems like a good candidate to snap eddie out of his current malaise when it comes to relationships.
Perhaps a bit naïvely, Eddie had thought he’d never have to see Taylor again after she and Buck split up. He’d managed to avoid her book in the months since it came out, somehow becoming the only person in the greater Los Angeles area who didn’t run into a life-size cardboard cut-out of her face or stacks of her book confronting him every time he stepped out of his house.
So, he’s a bit unprepared when he uses his key to let himself into Buck’s apartment and Taylor’s sitting at the kitchen island, a cocktail glass in hand. And Buck is leaning back against the stovetop, nursing a beer.
“Uh,” Eddie says, glancing back toward the door for a moment, wondering if he’s walked into the wrong apartment by mistake (which doesn’t even make sense given that he was able to use his key and Buck and Taylor are both studying him like he’s a bug under a microscope). Eddie gently shuts the door behind him and tuns back to face them. “Bad time?”
Taylor’s neutral expression morphs into something verging on predatory. “Would you like to go on the record regarding Captain Vincent Gerrard of Station 118,” she says, way too slowly, as she runs a fingertip along the rim of her empty cocktail glass.
Oh, Eddie realizes, eyes drifting from her glass to Buck’s half-empty beer. They’ve been at it or a while. Eddie leans the plastic bag he’d brought with him—souvenirs for Buck from Chris’s stay in El Paso—against the wall near the door and gives Taylor what he hopes is a sincere enough smile.
