#also can we say that buck's exercise kink is canon now? yes?

[firehose118]

i want it all

rated M | 1k | bucktommy

Tommy kisses him and his first thought isn’t I don’t understand what I’m feeling. His first thought is oh, this feeling is being attracted to men. I know this feeling very well. It hits him hard. All at once he understands why, in the early days of firefighting, in his Buck 1.0 era, after a hard session at the West Hollywood gym he'd joined when he first moved to the city, surrounded by some of LA’s hottest men—working out and eyeing him in a way that Buck had thought at the time was purely competitive, purely comparing bodies and workout strategies and their effects—why he would be on Tinder, his hands shaking with desperation as he swiped right indiscriminately, before he even left the locker room; so pent up with what he thought was adrenaline but was actually lust, honest-to-god sexual frustration from watching these hot men get hotter; from watching them flex their big muscles and pant open-mouthed and loud as they ran on the treadmill and seeing them sweat through their clothing that then clung tight to their ripped bodies and catching a wink from them as they grunted and dropped weights on the floor in front of him.

{read on ao3 or below}

He gets why he never felt like he could cool down in the open showers afterward; watching through the steam as other men ran soap over their toned naked bodies and made eye contact with him, looking him up and down and letting him know in no uncertain terms that they liked what they saw; that it wasn’t a nod of appreciation from them for all the hard work he’d put in but more of a come hither, a come get this, a come and see what else our bodies can do together. He knows now why those looks would rush through his body and go right to his dick and fuel him the next day as he lifted and stretched and ran; why he felt such a deep craving to attract more and more looks from these other men.

He recognizes now that he’d leave the gym with more energy than he’d arrived with because he’d spend the whole workout in a deep haze of homoerotic tension, pushing himself harder and faster and lifting more weight just to see how many eyes he could get on him, how many winks and whistles and damns he could direct his way; how much admiration he could get from these hot guys, how much envy he could invoke in them; as measured, of course, by how many numbers he could get from guys asking to be gym buddies. It was never less than three a day. His record was ten. His phone was filled with the numbers of men he’d never called because he didn’t know at the time what it was they’d really both wanted from each other.

He can understand, now, that he never left the gym without a making sure he had a hookup with a woman lined up directly after because what he really wanted to do after marinating in overwhelming lust for an hour was fuck those gorgeous, sweaty men at the gym who looked at him like they wanted to eat him and flirted with him and got into his space and adjusted themselves in their shorts as they spotted him on the weight bench and slowly jerked themselves off in the shower across from him and asked to see him outside of the gym. He wanted that so badly and it's not like he was ever dissatisfied with the sex he had with those Tinder women—it was always good, always amazing, though never as bone-deep great as the intimacy he shared once he settled down into monogamy was—but he knows now why it never felt like it satisfied the itch he was trying to scratch.

He knows this feeling. 

He knows this feeling not just from years ago; not just from Buck 1.0 but also from before that and from Buck 2.0 and 3.0 and 4.0 and whatever he was the first time he set eyes on Tommy. He knows that feeling from the butterflies in his stomach when Tommy made fake mouth static at the fire chief; from the way he couldn't let himself look at Tommy too much while he gave him the tour of the 217, even though there was nothing in that whole hangar more worth looking at than Tommy's face; from the way he felt his breathing speed up when Tommy offered him flying lessons and his first thought was I have to spend more time alone with this guy; from the way he felt himself flush and smile when Tommy said his name and gave him a fist bump and showed off his strong arms in that cutoff sweatshirt; from the way he went all hot and sweaty in a way that had nothing to do with the heat or the exercise when he slammed his huge body into Tommy's while they played basketball and Tommy didn't even flinch, just looked at him like is that all you got?

He recognizes what it is now. Tommy kisses him and he gets it. He might be new to kissing men but he’s not new to this feeling.

It’s nothing but an absolute relief to understand where to put it after all of these years; how to categorize it and what it means about him that he feels it. He’s not secretly aggressive, he’s not overly competitive: he’s just really, really, deeply bisexual.

His eyes are all-the-way open for the first time in his life. He has a date with Tommy and he can’t wait to find out what he’s been missing out on.