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She finds herself on the floor again. There’s still barely any furniture in this new place. That’s not why she’s on the floor. She’s laying in-between the couch and the coffee table. Here’s what she has: couch, coffee table, armchair. Hen’s old rug. Bed-frame. She’s not even laying on the rug. She’s laying on the hardwood floor, in her underwear. She’s thinking about buying a kitchen table. She’s not as lonely as she’d thought she’d be. But Bobby was like her Dad, so. Her like Dad is like Dead. Her like Dad has been like Dead for like three months. Quarter of a year. Sometimes it’s getting more normal, and sometimes it’s getting worse. And she hasn’t even got any socks on. And Maddie calls.
She looks at the phone, beside her head, buzzing. Feels the buzzing reverberate through the wood, onto her cheek. Maddie’s name. Really old picture, before she and Chim got together; Maddie when she’d just got back. Maddie eating spaghetti in Abby’s apartment. Buck finds herself picking up.
“Yello,” Buck says in a goofy yuppy voice.
“Eva,” Maddie says very seriously.
“Oh boy,” Buck groans, sitting up. She leans back against the couch. “What?”
“Not ‘Oh boy’,” Maddie complains. “Not ‘What?’”
“Okay: Hello,” Buck tries.
“Hello,” Maddie sighs. “How are you doing?”
“Good,” Buck says. She tries pushing her curls off her forehead and her fingers get immediately greasy and entangled, so she aborts. “I’m good, how are you?”
“I’m exhausted,” Maddie groans. “I’m eating cold toast and banana in the bathtub because apparently Jee hates bananas now even though yesterday they were her favourite thing. And I have baby puke in my hair and my husband has confiscated my baby because he thinks I’m going nuts even though”- she shouts this next part like it’s meant for Chim to hear- “I am the least nuts person I know right now!” She takes a bite of toast. “No offence.”
“Taken,” Buck says pleasantly. She feels and ignores a tiny stab of familiar jealousy. Maddie has two babies, a husband, a bathtub. She pulls her knees up to her chest. “If you’re in the bathtub, why don’t you wash the puke out of your hair?”
“Because I’m exhausted, Buck. And my little sister won’t reply to my texts.”
“Sorry,” Buck relents.
There was a deficiency. When Buck was a little girl. In her house. There was a deficiency she could not understand. She had only a sense of her own defection. No sense of what, how. How anything could be fixed or amended. What she was making up for. What she was not making up for. She only knew that she fell short. She only knew that there was something. Something that Maddie had which she could only pretend to have. She only knew that Maddie loved her, anyway. She worshipped her sister. She resented her shortcomings. She never hated her, not once, until the night she left, when she hated her fiercely. Until she came back. After which, she never hated her again.
“Maybe I’m just busy doing something awesome,” Buck tries.
“Are you doing something awesome?” Maddie asks, like she knows the answer.
Buck looks around. “I’m thinking about putting some socks on.”
It’s meant to be funny. Maddie doesn’t laugh. She does say “Ha, Ha.” Then, a tinny splooshing sound through the phone. Then nothing, Then another splooshing sound.
“Did you just try to drown yourself?” Buck asks. “Maybe Chim’s right.”
Maddie actually does laugh. Loud and long. If they were in the same room, she’d be finding something to beat Buck with, like a pillow, or maybe even a book. “You’re such a jerk,” she finally chokes out. “Can you do something today?”
“I am doing something,” Buck smiles.
“Can you do something outside of the house with someone you love, please?”
“Okay.”
Buck lays back down. Her eyes are hot, suddenly. Suddenly, she thinks she’ll cry. Swallows it. Maddie stays quiet on the phone. She’s good like that. Buck listens to the sounds of the water, of Maddie eating. Her eyes get hot again. It’s just that she doesn’t want to do anything.
“Ev?” Maddie tries, eventually.
“I’ll go furniture shopping,” Buck decides. It comes out a little wobbly, but not too bad. One errant tear spills down her cheek onto the floorboard.
“Okay,” Maddie approves. “That’s check one.”
“I’ll ask Eddie.”
Maddie’s quiet. Different kind.
“Oh, what?” Buck snaps, sitting halfway up again.
“Nothing! Good, that’s good!”
“What?”
Maddie chews toast and banana loudly. “Just. Things are good, with you two, then? You’re not-“
“You’re eating baby food. For no reason,” Buck retorts, finally actually getting to her feet for this. “I’m gonna get an Erewhon smoothie! I’m going to get the Gabriette Erwehon smoothie and you don’t even know who that is!”
Maddie makes an incredibly affronted noise. “Well you have terrible credit! I have good credit, which is why I’m eating baby food!”
“What?”
“I mean, I’m eating baby food, and that’s why!”
“Well,” Buck struggles for a second, because that’s kind of true. “ Well, you don’t know who Gabriette is!”
“Yes I do!” Maddie’s kind of yelling now, in this special kind of agitated way Buck’s never seen her do with anyone else. “She’s a singer!”
“No she’s not!” Buck crows, delighted.
“Fuck!” Maddie shouts, a little distant like she’s moved the phone away from her face. Even more distant, Chim’s voice carries through the door- ‘Everything okay, honey?’. “I’M FINE!” Maddie yells. Buck laughs at her again.
“Okay, Grandma,” Buck keeps laughing, walking to her bedroom, while Maddie makes outraged sounds. “Well, I’m going to put socks on.”
“Okay,” Maddie sighs. “And then you’ll get your smoothie? And go to the furniture store with Eddie?”
“I will. And if Eddie’s busy, I’ll call someone else. And I’ll see you tomorrow for dinner.”
“Alright. But you’ll come by sooner if you want?”
“Do you want me to come by sooner?”
“I want you to be healthy,” Maddie says, slightly desperately, suddenly serious. There was a deficiency. When they were girls. When they were little girls, there was a deficiency. But not between them. Never between the two of them.
“I’m healthy,” Buck assures her. Maddie makes a noise. “I’m going to be healthy.”
“Okay,” Maddie accepts, after a while. “Okay. I love you. I’ll send you money for the smoothie.”
“You don’t have to pay for my smoothie, Maddie-“
“You have terrible credit, Buck!”
“God, then I won’t get the-“
“No, you need to get the smoothie! You’re getting the stupid smoothie, okay? Will you just let me pay for your Gabribetty smoothie?”
“Fine,” Buck laughs. “Fine. But I’m cooking tomorrow and bringing the ingredients.”
“Fine,” Maddie says. “And take a shower.”
Buck hangs up.
It’s a school day, so Eddie is predictably unbusy, and meets her at Erewhon, despite hating the place. She grumbles all the way through the line, and orders a Hailey Bieber.
“I have a teenage son,” Eddie says, when Buck tries to tease her, “and you’re you. Of course I know who Hailey Bieber is. I’m pulling for her and Justin to figure things out.”
“Oh. That’s nice,” Buck smiles. She’s distracted enough that she doesn’t notice Eddie pulling her card out to pay until it’s too late. “Eddie! Maddie sent me money for that-“
“Well she can get the next one,” Eddie waves her stupid lovely hand, and then uses it to steer Buck to the collection area by the small of her back. Buck steals Eddie’s sunglasses off her head and huffs.
Then, through the tinted frames, she looks at her.
Eddie fusses with her hair like Buck removing the shades could mess it up when it’s this short. She’s been keeping it at that almost-buzzed length again. It looks really good like this, although Buck kind of misses the times when it was a little longer at the top and without product it would be feathery and fluffy. Then, she was always combing it off her forehead, and it made her look like a boyband member. Or, styled, a black and white film star. Eddie puts her hands on her hips, now. She has a very small smirk on her face looking at Buck in her glasses. Maybe thinking Buck looks silly, or maybe that she looks okay. Maybe checking out her own reflection in the frames. She’s wearing the cut off black tank, and nice sensible jeans. She looks clean, amused and handsome. Her arms are perfect, and she has some kind of shmutz in one of her eyebrows. Buck acknowledges the terrible clenching feeling around her heart and then puts it away for now. Brushes out the shmutz.
“What- did I have something?” Eddie starts running her fingers across her forehead.
“Goop,” Buck says. Sniffs her fingers. “Moisturiser.”
“So, not ‘goop’ then, that makes it sound gross-“
“Speaking of Chris,” Buck barrels on. “How’s Chris?”
Eddie gets a sentimental look on her face. “Chris is good. He says you keep sending him really funny Reels.”
“My algorithm’s really good right now,” Buck grins. “Did he show you the one with the-“ Buck starts cracking up before she can even say it, “the little monkey and he- HA!” She’s bent over, wiping tears from her eyes. Eddie rubs her back.
“Yeah. It was good,” she says. This excruciatingly fond tone of voice that Buck can’t take to heart or she’ll have to go and lie down, so she just keeps thinking about the monkey. Eddie gets the smoothies while Buck collects herself. They escape Erewhon.
They walk down Melrose, shooting the shit. It is an exceedingly clement day. There’s a gentle breeze, wafting gorgeous smells from restaurants and cafes. The sun peeks unoppressively between the trees and cascades through big glass windows onto exquisite footstools, lampshades, mock bathrooms where Eddie pretends to brush her teeth. Everyone around them seems to be doing the same thing- browsing, unalarmed, reaching out to run their fingers along well made cloths and smooth stone countertops. With each furniture store they enter and leave, despite the pleasantly ambling and lazy nature of the activity, despite how dithering around with Eddie is probably Buck’s favourite activity in the world, a feeling of morose doom starts to settle heavy on Buck’s chest.
It starts in her stomach. It starts when Eddie makes an offhand, benign joke about Chris going to college. How he’s threatening to go out of state any time Eddie pisses him off. It starts before that. Buck’s mind can’t stop running away from her, lately. Into the past and the future, unpermitted. It runs away without her knowing and regurgitates random memories or imaginings, like a dog bringing dead birds to her door. Sudden and perfectly realised video clips of things she hasn’t thought about in years, like her Grandma’s weird yard with the overgrown pond, or a hostel room in Peru. How the sheets had smelt, or some guy she’d only seen in the dark, taking everything out of his suitcase, examining it, and putting it back in. It gives her this sick, weird feeling in her stomach. She pictures, unbidden, Chris’ high school graduation, then Jee’s. Herself, on the floor, in her new apartment, older, still without a dining table. More recent images play in supercut, Tommy’s face when she’d fucked her in Eddie’s room, Athena taking her hand at Bobby’s funeral, Bobby in the station kitchen, Bobby in his home kitchen, Bobby in the hazmat suit, telling her to leave. She sits down on a fake bed set up to display silk sheets and pillows. There’s no mattress, underneath. It’s just hard wood. She sits down hard.
“Ouch,” She says, bruising her coccyx.
“Oh,” Eddie says, sitting down next to her. “Yeah, I think you’re not meant to sit on this.”
Buck doesn’t say anything. Eddie rubs her back. Buck wants to shift away from the touch, because her heart hurts terribly, but she can’t bring herself to betray the easy intimacy with which Eddie does it. She irritatedly acknowledges the validity of Maddie’s judging silence on the phone. Bucks therapist thinks she needs to distance herself from Eddie to make room in her life for someone who can give her what she really wants. Buck hasn’t ever really gotten what she really wants. She’s spent her whole life gritting her teeth and holding on until the time that she might get it, the babies, the bathtub, and she’s starting to feel like it’s never going to come around. She had wanted a parent to teach her to make spaghetti. He had taught her to make spaghetti. And then he had died.
“Oh, honey-“ Eddie says, and Buck realises she’s sobbing. She’s still wearing Eddie’s stupid sunglasses. She takes them off.
“Oh, what the fuck,” Buck says, wiping her wrists across her eyes. She regrets wearing mascara. Her eyes hurt.
“Honey, hey, you’re okay,” Eddie tries, going to wipe Buck’s face with her own hand, and Buck does pull away then. She can’t take that, probably. She stands up. She thinks about sitting on the floor, but she’s not completely ridiculous.
Eddie fishes a water bottle out of her bag. It’s one of those very chic little cross body bags. It’s one of Chris’ old water bottles. It’s camo green with dinosaurs and a straw cap. Buck accepts it, screws off the top, and chugs the whole thing.
“Okay,” Buck says, coming back to herself. She remembers how, unbelievably, these feelings come and go. Move through her. It is so hard to believe. A shopping attendant hovers close by, “Sorry, I’m fine,” Buck calls out.
“Alright,” The attendant says. Then, turning to Eddie, “Um, sorry, the displays are not really strong enough for-“
“Right, sorry,” Eddie says, standing up.
“They’re just meant to show what the bed would look like-“ she continues.
“Got it,” Eddie concedes, getting a little edge to her voice. Puts her hands up to show how she’s not sitting on it anymore.
“It’s just, we don’t sell beds in store, we only sell them online. So we only have these to give an idea,” the attendant, amazingly, goes on.
“I’m. I hear you-“ Eddie insists, sounding almost painfully baffled.
“Eddie, could you just not sit on the display bed? It’s not a bed,” Buck asks, turning to her, then turning back to the attendant who nods gratefully. “I’m so sorry, she can be so stubborn.”
“Oh, no, I’m sure,” the attendant laughs, “you understand, we just don’t want the arrangement getting messed up, or…”
“Oh I understand. I, she wasn’t understanding, I don’t think, but I understand. I’ll just try to explain it to her,” Buck says patiently.
“Thank you,” the attendant tells her seriously, and then moves on.
Buck turns back to Eddie and grins. She has this look on her face. “I am so impressed by your ability to give me shit, no matter what state you’re in,” Eddie says, shaking her head. Why does she sound like she’s actually impressed? Buck’s heart hurts.
Buck wipes her face one more time, puts the shades back on. “They only sell the beds online, Eddie,” she says. Eddie marches her out of the store.
They give up the hunt. Why were they even looking on Melrose? Buck can’t even afford a smoothie. Eddie asks her if she wants to go home. Buck doesn’t want to go home yet, even if Eddie means her own place, which Buck suspects she does, so they go to LALA’s. It’s a weird time to eat, mid-afternoon on a weekday, so the patio’s almost empty. They get grilled steak sandwiches and share fries and a big oily salad. Buck feels safe and held when the waiter tells them it’s free refills on the strawberry lemonade.
“What happened?” Eddie asks.
Buck sighs around a mouthful of bread and meat. She’s vaguely meant to be Keto, right now. Right now, she thinks, she’s of sound mind, and Keto doesn’t matter. “I think I’m getting my period,” she says.
“Okay,” Eddie nods. Then, calmly, seriously: “Could you tell me… anything?”
Buck hasn’t really been doing as her therapist suggested, putting any real distance between them. Not the kind of distance that lets you get over someone. But she’s been doing something. There’s this whole thing now, the kind of thing she’d want to talk to her best friend about, this big, big heartbreak she’s been going through. Giving up an unrequited love she hadn’t even realised she’s been harbouring for seven years until quite recently. Until Tommy scoffing at her in Eddie’s kitchen, until Maddie, much more gently scoffing in her own. Eddie’s the person to whom she cannot say it. And so there’s been a lot of not saying. And Eddie’s not stopped asking.
“Well. I miss Bobby,” Buck offers, not untrue. Eddie makes a motion to touch her, but Buck keeps her grip on her sandwich. Makes a big show of moving it around, so she can’t be touched. Takes a sip of lemonade.
“I’m sorry. Me too. I’m sorry,” Eddie says. Buck nods her head. She watches the only other people on the patio. This older couple with a middle aged woman. Daughter. It’s nice. They’re being nice with each other.
“I’m finding that everything is. Hurting my feelings, all the time,” Buck says. “But I’m doing a good job of like. Feeling it and then. Trying not to get caught but just. Feeling it and then.” She waves her hand through the air. Eddie’s face collapses into this thing. This face. This expression which no one else in the world has ever looked at her with. Well, maybe Maddie, once or twice. Maybe Bobby.
“I see that, Buck,” Eddie says. “I’m proud of you. You’re doing really well.”
Buck nods, swallows another bite of her sandwich. She attacks the salad with her fork, takes a big bite of that too. She eats a fry. “Yeah, I’m awesome.”
“You are awesome.” Eddie agrees.
This leaping feeling comes, out of nowhere. She figures it can’t be better not to talk about it. With Eddie, everything is always better after they talk about it.
“I think I’m probably in love with you,” Buck says, like a person in a movie.
Eddie freezes. Like, fork halfway to her mouth she freezes. It’s silly. The sun is getting calm in California, mid afternoon. Weekday. The other trio on the patio cheers their newly refilled sodas. People pass them by, laden with shopping bags, holding hands, children on their backs, talking on the phone. This is the world they live in. Buck has been thinking, incessantly, for the last six months at least, ‘this is just not the world where I get what I want.’ Had realised, one night, after Tommy in the kitchen and Maddie in the kitchen. She’d really stopped to think about what she’d really want. It hadn’t come to her as succinctly as she’d just said it out loud. She’d just been thinking, about living in Eddies house, about Eddie and Chris in Texas, about the hole in her heart. ‘I guess,’ she had thought, ‘if I could have what I want, then I would be married to Eddie.’ And since knowing, it had been impossible not to know.
And then Bobby had died, and Eddie and Chris had come home, and Buck had moved out. Things had changed so quickly, and this had not changed, this knowing, and she had known. Separate to the deficiency, separate to her need to lay on the ground, regardless of babies, the bathtub, separate from Bobby, separate from all of those things, despite of course, being also very much entangled with all of those things. She had known, knows, what she wants, what she would want, in that world. The world where she could get what she wants.
“Probably?” Eddie asks.
“Definitely. I’m definitely in love with you,” Buck says. Eddie puts her fork down.
“Buck, can you please take off your sunglasses?” Eddie requests.
Buck hesitates. “I’m going to look like a member of KISS,” she reminds her.
“Buck, please.”
Buck takes them off, sets them on a napkin. She meets Eddie’s eyes.
“You look beautiful,” Eddie says. “You always look beautiful. And I’m in love with you too.”
Buck wraps her arms around her own head, rests them at the edge of the table, and makes a pathetic sound. “Oh my god,” she says. Her heart is beating in her head like she’s on drugs, and she’s crying again. She hears distantly the sound of the chair scraping, Eddie shuffling herself along the bench to come next to her. Eddie saying baby, baby, baby. Eddie untangles Buck’s arms and takes her head between her hands and wipes at her face briefly with her thumbs before thoroughly, thoroughly kissing her.
At home, Eddie fucks her, slowly, tenderly. Well, first, she lays her out and looks at her. She takes Bucks bra off without taking off her tee shirt. Then she tugs the tee shirt up, slowly, and groans when her tits finally spill out. She touches her nipples until she’s squirming. She takes off all of Bucks clothes and then puts the sunglasses on her. This makes them both laugh, and then she takes the sunglasses off. She pulls Bucks leg up over her shoulder and looks at her. Buck tells her she’s a perv. Eddie begs to eat her. Buck benevolently acquiesces. Eddie eats her until she’s begging. Buck takes Eddie’s shirt off, and sits in her lap, and messes up her jeans. And then Eddie takes off her jeans, and Buck messes up her boxers. She puts her hand inside Eddie’s boxers. She touches her gently, and then Eddie holds her hand still, and grinds against her until she gets what she wants. Buck almost gets off on that, grinding on Eddie’s bare knee. Eddie takes Bucks hand out of her shorts and puts Bucks fingers in her own mouth so she can taste her. Buck almost gets off on that, fingering herself. Eddie pulls her fingers out and puts them in her own mouth. And then she fucks her. Slowly, tenderly.
They take a long time in the shower. Eddie cleans her thoroughly and then she holds her between her legs, for a while. Pressed up against her back, kissing her shoulder, holding her. And after all of this, once they’re dry and dressed and halfway to napping on the couch, Christopher comes home.
Buck gets a feeling like she’s never felt before, an actualised feeling that she’s always cradled, right in front of her and only just away. Looking at his face, his curls spilling over his forehead. She gets this whole feeling, and if she wasn’t already laying down, it would bring her to her knees.
Later, in-between dinner and bed, Buck finds herself on the floor.
Being a firefighter regiments and segregates your life in the strangest way. At work, she can forget, for a moment, or her body forgets, that she exists outside of this version of herself. She lives at the station, she goes into the fire, she knows exactly what to do. No one else, nothing else, exists, but the moment. What would she ever wear besides her uniform? On days off, that life seems like another person. The gore and action fade away, compartmentalised, and she has to live in the world.
Each life escapes the other. It has been, for her, often, a perfect balance. Other times she is sure it has made her a little bit nuts.
When she was a baby, she wasn’t meant to be in the world. When she grew up a bit, this feeling was uncomfortable. She closed her eyes and jumped out of trees and wondered if she’d ever grow up big and strong.
She never hated her sister, but she often had this thought. That Maddie had no idea what it was like to be Buck. To have to be Buck.
She knows herself. She has spent a lot of time sitting down with herself, trying to be gentle. Trying to understand. Up a tree, up a ladder, into the fire, across the world, into somebody’s bed. She’s followed herself around.
Buck finds herself on the floor, in the world where she gets what she wants. Her Dad is dead, and her sister is calling, and Eddie comes and finds her, and gives her a look which means, fondly, ‘what are you doing down there?’