Part 2 of the Love Lies Waiting series.
Synopsis: Set a few months after I Will Not Take These Things. More or less. At least that’s what I envisioned when I wrote it, but this isn’t a tearjerker. It’s still pre-slash, but Chris is still very slow to see things as they are. It’s just a little PWP that’s nice and quiet and makes me happy.
I hate pickled beets. He knows this.
Without asking, or even thinking, he reaches over and stabs them off of my plate, depositing them on his, and then second-glances to see if he’s missed any. Ah. One stray he rounds up with a deft touch of swift tines so it can join the rest of the slimy purple herd.
In turn, I meticulously begin fishing out the mushrooms from his wild mushroom sauce. Why he got a filet with mushroom sauce when he hates mushrooms is something, perhaps, only he understands. He likes the sauce without the mushrooms. Trying to explain that the sauce still tastes like mushrooms, that it is, in fact, teeming with malevolent mushroom essence, is a waste of time.
He orders what I order, and most of the time I order for both of us. He trusts me, and it makes it easier – to order two of everything.
Not that he wants to send the waitress away faster than she is inclined to go. Or he used to not. Used not to. Whatever.
There was a time he’d have a whole flock of waitresses either hovering over us or passing by every chance they got just to see if we needed anything. It is a universal truth that a man gets better service with Buck around.
I take the lemon out of my tea with my spoon, and he picks it up without breaking stride in the conversation. Then he uses his spoon to weed out all the damnable lemon seeds, while I fork out half the ice he has in his other glass, and put the cubes in mine. He likes to chew ice after dinner. Drinks, dessert, or not, he’ll crunch ice in a way that makes Ezra grimace and scowl. I think he might do it a bit louder when Ezra’s around, because that’s just his way of telling Ezra he loves him.
I hand him my extra butter, and he hands me his dish of chives, and I wonder how many times it is we’ve done this weird dinner ritual without ever bumping hands. All the while, he’s bitching about the new Policy sent from On High that requires all agents of any rank to attend sensitivity and diversity training. And all the while he’s bitching about it, I can’t help but think that if there is one person on this earth who doesn’t need an education in sensitivity, it’s Buck.
Yeah, he can be crass as hell, and perverse, and as non-politically correct as any ten men, but insensitive – never. He’s the only man I know who’s not ashamed to cry. And no one who really knows him could ever accuse him of being sexist. Arrogant, maybe. Cocky, certainly. But hell, no one who does what we do for a living can afford not to be. Bunch of macho lunatic adrenaline junkies, all of us. Well, maybe not JD. But he’s learning.
It’s not unlike Buck to let out a whooping rebel yell when the job’s done right, or to punch his hand through a wall when it’s done wrong. And it’s less like him to ignore the scent of a woman anywhere in a fifty yard radius, but I have yet to seem him mistreat one, or to so much as speak ill of one.
I don’t think he knows how.
He’s not drinking beer tonight. Because I’m not drinking beer. He didn’t say it, but I know that’s why. No sense dangling the carrot in front of me like that. We may drink a little later, but not much, not as much as I used to. Less even now, unless it’s after a good bust and we’re all at the saloon, with the rest of the ATF toasting us from around the room. And even then, he’ll make sure he drinks less than I do, so he can pour my sloppy ass into his truck and chauffeur me home. And then he’ll help me out of the front seat, arm around my ribcage, and coddle me into the house and out of my shoes.
Usually I wake up to a glass of water and a bottle of aspirin, and the quilt tucked up tight under my chin.
There was that one time that I woke up with my boxers on backwards, sideways on top of the covers, with a wide assortment of affectionate parting gifts littering the quilt, and three rolls of toilet paper wrapped around my arms and legs. Paperclips, the tongs from my grill, a pair of women’s panties (whose origins I dare not ask), the riding crop from the barn, the stuffed lion Vin won at a carnival (wearing Josiah’s Frankenstein mask from last Halloween, truly disturbing), laces from nearly every pair of shoes I owned, Christmas ornaments from a box in the attic, and plenty of tinsel, the rooster from the top of the weather vane on my garage, a raunchy magazine (with dog-eared pages), and about a zillion balls of wadded paper, some with notes ranging from lyrics to cheesy love songs and famous sonnets, Ezra’s touch, to one that simply said ‘Nice Tattoo’ (the one on my hip that no one was ever supposed to see).
The bastards had outdone themselves, and though I can picture it clearly, I don’t want to think about an unsafely intoxicated Vin Tanner scaling to the top of my garage and wresting the weather vane into submission.
There had been a post-it note on my forehead that said ‘Take a shower – you reek! Love, Buck’.
That pretty much sums it up. Not the stink part, but the rest of it. He’s had his arm around me carrying me for longer than I like to remember.
Only, it’s not so bad, anymore. The remembering.
He’s talking with a wad of steak in his cheek, gesticulating with his fork, stabbing at unseen bureaucratic enemies in the air. It makes me smile. He looks just like he did when we were twenty. A few more lines, a few gray hairs here and there. I know I’m responsible for the majority of those. About fifteen extra pounds, mostly muscle, and a little bit of the world-weariness that affects us all. Some more than others.
But Buck, he’s got a fire for life that not even I’ve managed to choke out. He devours life like he’s eating his dinner, packing it all in and talking right through it. You’d think that he can’t even taste it at the rate he eats it, but with him, he can’t taste or touch or feel enough. There is no such thing as too much of a good thing. That’s just how he is. Rapacious.
I used to wonder how he found the energy to keep up with himself, to keep that fire stoked. But now I’m just glad it’s there. I’m glad he’s here. And that all that life has finally begun to rub off on me.
“Fuck them,” he says, the words unmistakable through the morass of potato and asparagus. “Here,” he says, handing me the stalks. He only eats the nubby green ends of the asparagus and gives me the rest. I lift my plate without second thought, and he keeps talking, dropping the vegetable shanks from an unnecessary height, just for added emphasis on the words he hasn’t stopped saying.
“They need to come down to our level and see how we work, what we do. Then they can tell us that we need diversity training. Shit.”
Yeah. Can’t get much more diverse than Team Seven. A black ex-field medic with political tendencies so far left they must eventually wrap around. An ex-hippie, ex-seminarian, philosopher-psychologist who believes in reincarnation. An undercover agent who used to live in Venezuela and has a Chinese fiancée. An openly homosexual, part American Indian sharpshooter. And a Catholic kid-genius who graduated college at nineteen. And then me and Buck. Shit is right. Like to see them try to fit all that into a mold.
Buck takes a drink of tea and chomps on a piece of ice, and I can tell that we’re gonna need something else to drink later. He’s working himself up into a nice lather over this nonsense. Better get it all out now than to let it build up, or let it explode at the wrong moment.
Christ, I’m glad I didn’t say that aloud. He’d be tempted to smack me upside the head, and I’d deserve it. I think he gave me that very advice for about four years before I let it happen. It was accidental, what brought it on; an accident, on the freeway. Three cars. We saw it happen, and we pulled over, leaping from the truck, jumping the divider, calling an ambulance, and running to do some triage. I called Nathan. He helped me over the phone.
There was a woman and her son – the woman unconscious and bleeding, the child basically uninjured and screaming. And the car caught fire. Don’t think I can describe what went through me when we pulled the two of them out and got them to safety. Don’t think I can forget what it felt like when the woman opened her eyes and asked for her son. And she held that child with the one arm that wasn’t broken and thanked me. She thanked me for saving them.
And she asked me if I had any children of my own. I didn’t have the heart to tell her.
When Buck and I got home, I cried like I never have. I cried until I thought I had bruised ribs. I looked like I had a bruised face. And Buck cried too, as unashamed as I was totally embarrassed, and he held onto me until the shaking and sobbing stopped. And then he held onto me some more.
And it was the first time he’d ever held my hand. Physically anyway.
Since then, it’s odd, all I’ve wanted to do is find a way to make him take my hand again. Those hands, larger than mine, as good at doing manly, tough stuff as they are at doing softer, tender stuff. But in the past months, I’ve begun to think that maybe the soft, tender stuff is manly too. He seems to think so. And it occurs to me that I think of him a lot softer and more tenderly than I ever think of any woman.
Maybe I’m getting old.
He pushes his plate away from him and then looks at mine, and I wait for it, what I know he’ll say. What he always says.
“Damn. I ate too fast. You’re not even half way done.”
I smile, and pop another bite into my mouth. He always eats too fast; I’m always half a step behind. Seems like I’ve been playing catch-up for a damn long time. But I don’t mind. Letting him lead sometimes.
He starts chewing on ice, and a silence trickles down, and it dawns on me that we’ve been doing a lot more of this lately, this ‘just the two of us’ thing. Dinners at places we haven’t tried. Movies. Mending fences at the ranch. Sprawling in front of the TV.
Not that he hasn’t always been a part of the family, a part of my life. His home is mine. Or, wait. My home is his? Shit.
“You know what the worst part of it is,” he asks, drawing me out of my thoughts of home, “One of those pencil-pushing, stuff-necked suits told me that we need to take this course cause we need to know what to call people. What the fuck? I told him that I call them by their names. You should have seen the look on his face.” He snorts. “I don’t think that ever occurred to him.”
He glances around and, quick as a flash, drags a forefinger through the evil mushroom sauce and slides that finger into his mouth, eyes twinkling with mischief, like he knows it’s naughty and that’s precisely why he did it. Never stopped him before. Actually, that’s why he does a lot of things; I know this for a fact. Usually he does it for women, drawing it out, the way his lips split around it and his mouth sucks on it, the way his tongue pokes out just a little as he withdraws. Just to make sure he didn’t miss any.
And I wonder how he manages to always keep his moustache clean, the way he eats.
I realize that he’s gone quiet again, just watching me watching him, and he smiles. It’s a smile I’ve come to know more and more, and never realized I missed. It’s his smile that he has for me. The one that means ‘this is nice, isn’t it?’
Yeah it is. Maybe that’s why we’ve been doing a lot more ‘just us’ stuff lately.
I decide I’ve had enough to eat, and I shove my plate his way, knowing he’ll eat what I haven’t. And he does. His ice is melting. I catch a waitress and as her to bring two glasses of whiskey, doubles, and a glass of ice.
“So, what are your plans for the rest of the weekend?”
Buck looks up and around, chews, shrugs. “Not much. Have a date Saturday, but I can cancel.” An offer I’ve heard before.
He’s been doing a lot more of that lately too, canceling his dates. Times were he had a date every night of the week and twice on Saturday. Ok, not that often, but close enough.
“JD’s out with Casey at Nettie’s this weekend.” Buck chuckles, low and lewd. “She makes them sleep in separate rooms.” He’s grinning now. “Remember how often you used to sneak Sarah out of her …” His words drift off, mid-laugh. “Sorry, Chris.” He reaches over and his hand is on top of mine now, on top of the table.
I turn my hand over. Palm to palm is nice. “Don’t be. It’s ok.” I look down at our hands and smile at how much more tanned his is. “I used to throw pennies at her window until she would come out and climb onto the roof of the front porch. And then I’d catch her. Mostly, anyway,” I admit sheepishly, “and we’d giggle like little girls trying to pick all the stray pennies. When Hank took out those bushes, he never could figure out where all the money came from.” I laugh now, out loud, and Buck curls his fingers down against mine. “I think she said there was about two dollars out there.”
He smiles again, one I haven’t seen, or at least not directed at me, and I surprise myself by actually saying the thing that blurts into my head.
“I’ve missed this.”
He puzzles, frowning a little, tilting his head in a way that reminds me highly of Vin.
The waitress arrives at the most damnably inopportune moment, and our hands are back on our sides of the table faster than I can tell him that I don’t mind. One of her eyebrows is raised, and so are my hackles. I glare, but it loses some of its intensity in the heedless clumsiness of the moment. She seems to think that’s amusing, or sexy, and she grins, teasing and dark. And then she looks at Buck.
Buck is smiling at her, but it’s nothing like his normal Don Juan come-hither, panty-dropping smile. It’s patient, quiet. But underneath it carries its own warning. One more subtle. One so subtle that I doubt anyone would notice it but me. The one that means he’s dead fucking serious about whatever it is, and she’d better believe it before he punches her.
I’ve never seen him look like that at a woman.
That’s the smile he reserves for suspects who piss him off. Or for drunken assholes who are harassing a woman at a bar. It means back off before I- ….
Woah. It means back off of what’s mine before I put you in your grave.
Startled, she leaves us our whiskey and the ice, and I think I’m startled as Buck’s expression changes and he shoves my tumbler closer to me, raising his own. “I’ve missed this too,” he says.
Though I know he doesn’t mean it the way I meant it, not what I meant when I said it. He’s been missing us. The old us. The way we were. I chuckle as immediately Barbara Streisand floats unbidden into my brain.
“What?” His brows furrow even as his eyes smile bright. “What’s so funny?”
I lie. “I was remembering waking up wrapped in toilet paper staring at Frankenstein with a tail.”
His grin is huge and obnoxious. “To good memories,” he toasts, raising his glass a little higher, a soft, wistful look flitting across his face.
“To good memories.”
We drink. He chews on a piece of ice, rolling it around in his cheek before cracking it between his molars.
“You think we can get JD and Nathan to rig up a closed-circuit network so we can play poker during the classes?” He looks at me hopefully. Full volume entreaty with his all-too-blue, baby puppy-dog eyes.
Wish I could say I wasn’t affected by it. “Yeah, I bet they could,” I admit. But my eyes are telling him that I’ll have his ass in a sling if he attempts such a thing.
He wilts a little. Only a little. “Do you think I could get out of it if I slept with the instructor?”
“What if the instructor’s a man?” I propose, leaning back, secure in my taunting victory.
A couple more swallows, and he’s swirling his ice in his glass. He does this when he wants to say something and can’t. Not that this particular affliction ever troubles him often. His gaze drifts aimlessly across the table top and out into the dim and noisy corners of the room. His deep eyes gloss over, unfocused on something distant, to the point I can tell he’s no longer seeing anything in this room at all.
Then he nods, at something he isn’t sharing.
“You ready to go home?” he asks. And I don’t have to ask which home.
I never question for a second which home he means. The ramifications of that should be terrifying. But they’re not. It comes to me then, what I was trying to figure out before. It doesn’t matter which house, cause home is no longer just a house to me.
“Yeah,” I answer. “If we hurry, we can even catch Adventure Inc. reruns on the WB.”
He cringes a little, his expression equally pitying and pitiful.
“Better than Buffy,” I respond in all seriousness.
His eyes narrow, wicked slits of misbehavior threatening something dire. I’m the only one who knows that JD got him addicted to that show.
We each grin at how well we know each other.
He grabs the check before I can, and doesn’t even let me see how much it is. Doesn’t matter that I make more, or that I invited him. He does this a lot lately, and if I didn’t know him better, I’d think it meant more than it does. Means a hell of a lot as it is.
He tips too much, and lets me go first out the door.
Steeping outside, he cracks his back and stretches, taking a deep breath. “Think we can take the horses out tomorrow?”
“Sure.” I dig my keys out of my pocket and whip them away when he reaches for them. Cause I knew he would. “Anywhere in particular?” I ask on a grin that says I’m still too fast for him, even at this age.
He shakes his head, mouth curving into a moue of indifference, pretending not to care about either the horses or my keys.
“Yeah we can do that.”
He nods an okay, and then, “I’ll tell Kim I can’t go with her tomorrow. Didn’t want to go see a musical in the first place.”
“You want to pick up some stuff from your condo for the weekend?” I offer. This would make the third weekend in a row he’s spent with me.
He shakes his head, looks like he’s thinking about it for half a second, “Nah. I’ve got all I need with you anyway,” and then cracks me the tiniest grin.
Funny. I was just thinking the exact same thing.
“You sure you won’t let me drive,” he yells from his side of the truck.
I snort. All these years and he never gives up trying to get me to give in. I hope he never does.THE END
Continues in Cloudburst