“Do you ever think about them?” he asks.
Eddie blinks. “About what?”
“Your hands.”
A beat. Two. Eddie’s face doesn’t change, not exactly; it tightens the way metal does when it cools too fast. “Buck.”
Buck’s first instinct is apology—always apology, for wanting, for needing, for being a problem someone has to solve. He swallows it because it’ll taste like shame, and he can’t add that to the soup inside him. He tries again, softer. “They do a lot. I think about that.”
Eddie looks at him for a long time. It isn’t angry. It isn’t warm. It’s incredibly aware.
“Okay,” Eddie says.
Buck nods. He can hear the dryer’s drum still. He can hear his own pulse. “You scraped your knuckle on that metal cabinet at work. Did you clean it?”
Eddie glances down at the hand in question, the right, the split-white nick near the index knuckle. “Yeah.”
“Can I…?” Buck hears the invitation leave his mouth and realizes he didn’t plan the question; his body had been lining up to it all night, like backing a rig into a too-narrow bay and trusting muscle memory to keep fenders intact.
Eddie’s jaw shifts. His eyes cut to the hallway where Chris is asleep. He doesn’t move his hands. He doesn’t move them away, either. “Buck.”
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