Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

2004.

“Ma, I have something to tell you.” Eddie says into the receiver.

“Oh, Eddie, I waited for this day for so long!” Sonia squeals down the line. “It’s about time, you know. A woman gets antsy in an old house without any grandchildren and a twenty-seven year old son!”

“What?” Eddie asks, dumbfounded, holding the landline an arm’s length away from his ear. Sonia’s never been good at regulating her volume — it’s like she thinks she has to project her voice across all the miles between them.

“Who’s the lucky girl, Eddiebear?” Sonia coos.

“Um.” Eddie fiddles with the phone cord. It curls around one of his fingers. “Ma, there is no lucky girl.”

“Oh.” Eddie can almost see the way her face falls at the news.

His mother has never been good at reading clues, but there is a part of Eddie that wonders how she hasn’t guessed it yet.

It’s not like he’s made his sexuality a particularly subtle affair. It was something school bullies had guessed before he did, like they could smell it on his skin, a weakness as tempting to cruel children as blood in the water to a shark.

And sure, Eddie’s not exactly waving a pride flag, but he’s not the picture of the heterosexual ideal, either. She’s right: he’s twenty-seven and he’s never had a girlfriend, save for Sonia-arranged dates with daughters of her church friends. Even those dates hadn’t really gone anywhere; the girls seemed to sniff it out of him as quick as the bullies could. It was just something about him, something he couldn’t see himself but was somehow clearly evident to everyone around him.

Sonia shared the same blindness that he did, maybe because of her proximity to him, which prevented her from seeing the bigger picture; she was the only person this side of the Mason-Dixon line who hadn’t gotten the hint.

“I—,” he starts, frustrated, and then stops. Reminds himself to have patience with her; she’s not in the best of health right now (early onset heart disease, the doctor had said) and he doesn’t want to give her a heart attack. He eases into it. “I’m not sure there will be a girl, Mama.”

“What? Why?” She asks, sharply, and doesn’t give him time to answer. “You’re a wonderful, sweet boy! Any lady would be lucky to have you. I don’t know what’s wrong with these New York women if they can’t see that! Oh, Eddiebear, if you’re not having any luck with dates out there, you should come back home. You know, Mrs. Archibald down the street has a daughter about your age — they used to come over for afternoon tea, remember?”

“Uh— yeah, Ma, I remember,” he acquiesces, and then follows it quickly with: “But I’m not exactly going on dates here, either.”

“Too busy with work?” Sonia asks, sympathetically. She speaks with a placating tone that one might use with a child. “They shouldn’t be working you that hard, Eddiebear. You need your rest, too.”

“No, I only work— it’s a regular 9-to-5, they’re not overworking me.” Eddie sighs out, rubbing at his temples with his free hand.

“Then why aren’t you going on dates? You’re not ill, are you?” The worry that drips in her voice threatens to make Eddie sick to his stomach, if he wasn’t already feeling it.

“I don’t want to,” he says, simply, around the thick lump in his throat. “I don’t want to be with a woman.”

There’s a long silence on the other end of the line. The smooth side of the phone grows damp in his clammy hand.

“Eddiebear,” her voice is high and sweet, in a lilt that Eddie’s intimately familiar with. It’s a lilt that says come give your mommy a kiss. It’s a lilt that says you know better than that, don’t you? “Yes, you do. Of course you do. New York’s really gotten in your head, huh? You need to come home. You were always a little ladies’ man here! What about all the girls that hung around you? And you used to love that — Celine Dion, right?”

Eddie doesn’t mention that Sonia had always disapproved of him hanging out with girls. She’d always suspected them of tainting him, making him unpure. Girls never just want to be friends with a boy, she would chide. I know these things, Eddiebear. They mature faster. They only have bad intentions. And, now that he thinks of it, she hadn’t been particularly fond of Celine Dion, either. Godless music, she said, but the woman can sing, that’s for sure. Eddie’d had to agree with her there.

“Mommy,” he pleads. Doesn’t notice how high his voice has gotten to meet Sonia’s note, some sort of fawning response like the sweeter he is the less harsh she will be, making himself delicate for her, don’t hurt me mommy I’ll shatter like fine china. “I’m gay.”

It’s not a word Eddie particularly likes to use. It may be true enough, in that detached, clinical sense: Eddie Kaspbrak has all the traits of a homosexual. He longs for the touch of men — one man in particular, but Sonia need not know that detail (if nothing else, that would be a certified heart attack inducer). He does not desire to be a husband to a wife. He’s never had the constitution for two and a half children running around. He’s gay. Sure. That’s a good enough word for it.

“Are you?” And her voice has gone cold, chillingly toneless. Still with that average pleasantry it always holds, even when she’s screeching at the top of her lungs. "My little boy is a fairy? Is that what you’re telling me? My baby boy, who I nursed with milk from my own breasts, is a dirty little cocksucker?”

Eddie flinches, yanks the receiver away from his ear. It’s not the first time he’s ever heard her swear. It’s not even the first time he’s heard her use those words; fairy, cocksucker, fag. All words that were mainstays of her vocabulary in the mid-eighties. But when she used them, they were always carefully removed from Eddie. Never directed towards him. He was her good little boy. He still is, even now.

“Oh, my Eddiebear, I knew this would happen,” she’s sobbing down the receiver now. “I knew it, I knew it, I did. When your father died I knew you’d grow up odd. It’s my fault, isn’t it? I tried so hard to protect you. I did my best, didn’t I? I tried so hard to be a good mother, but a boy needs a father, or else he turns out like this.”

“It’s not your fault.” Eddie says, sounding faint and far away to his own ears. He has no idea how this has turned to him comforting her.

Sonia sniffs. “Who is it, then?”

Eddie stills. “Who is what.”

“Who’s the man shoving his dirty cock inside you?”

“What?”

“Infecting you with AIDS and HIV and hemorrhoids and— God knows what else.”

“I don’t— Ma, I haven’t done anything like that.”

“Haven’t you?” She asks, accusatory. “Don’t treat your mother like she’s stupid. I know what happens in the cities. The kind of sick, disgusting behavior fags engage in.”

Eddie’s stunned into silence. He hadn’t thought it would be this bad.

Sonia is— usually sweet. Sweet to a point of overbearing, but sweet nonetheless. Harmless. Never cruel, not as far as Eddie can remember. Maybe once or twice before, she’d screeched out a refrain of why would you leave me, Eddie? I need you, I need you, you can’t leave me! back when Eddie’d made the decision to go to NYU, but since then she’s been subdued, if not downright pleasant, over the phone. Maybe it has something to do with her recent medical status.

“I can’t believe you,” she says, horrified. “I can’t believe you’d let some— degenerate man put himself inside you and defile my little boy.”

“I’m not—” Eddie doesn’t even know where to start here, with I haven’t let anyone do that or I’m not a little boy anymore. “I am not your little boy.”

“No,” she hisses, voice crackling over the line. Eddie jolts as if stung by a wasp. “You’re not.”

“Okay,” he says, carefully. There’s a strange lightness that comes over him, then, lifting from his toes to his forehead. It feels like what he’s been waiting his whole life to hear. “I’m not.”

“I don’t understand.” and she’s sobbing again, breath hitching in that heavy way, and Eddie can almost feel it from all these miles away, the way her arms would encircle him as she cried, holding him tight and close until he felt like his ribs might crack under the pressure, “I don’t understand what happened to my baby.”

“Nothing, Ma. Nothing.”

“Don’t lie to me, Eddie,” she snaps, suddenly, sharply. Eyes overflowing with tears one moment, dry the next. “Something had to have happened. One moment, you were a happy little boy, you were my sweet, shy, well-behaved boy. The next, you wanted to speed off to New York, and now you’ve got all these horrible ideas in your head, and now you don’t even want to be my little boy anymore. How could you do this to me? How could you do this to your sick, old, dying mother?”

“I didn’t mean to hurt you, Ma. I just thought it was something you should know.”

Eddie feels, somehow, remarkably calm in the face of her hysteria. In his foggy memories, he can recall bursting into tears or hyperventilating under the stress of his mother’s disapproval — a disapproval that was much less sharp back then. Maybe it’s because of the sharpness that he’s able to relax. The threat of being cut free no longer hangs above him; his marionette strings hang loose by his sides.

She’s a harmless old woman who can’t leave Maine without her C-PAP machine. He’ll be alright.

And maybe what Eddie’s feeling, at that thought, is… relief.

That’s it, isn’t it? That’s the feeling that’s washing over him as Sonia prattles on and on over the phone. It’s like all this time he’s been holding his breath, holding himself back, holding himself taut on the ever-thinning balancing beam of what Mommy wants. He doesn’t have to anymore.

She’s still talking, words turning to static through the receiver, just an undistinguishable mess of Sonia-buzzwords. Eddie picks out words like baby, and betrayal, and heart attack.

“I’m sorry, Mommy,” he says, clear and calm through the static.

That seems to catch her off guard enough. Her tirade cuts off abruptly, stopped in its tracks, like Eddie’s just said the magic words. It’s ridiculous how easy it is, how well it works. Three simple words and it all stops. You don’t even have to mean it.

Eddie pulls the receiver away from his ear enough to look at the phone like he’ll be able to see her expression through it.

“It’s okay. It’s okay,” she says through a watery voice. “You need to pay the copay on my latest cardiologist appointment. They’re saying I’ve got an arrhythmia. Don’t know how long I have left.”

Eddie swallows, thickly, and, for the first time, doesn’t feel that distinctive terror of my mother will die some day. Instead, he just feels pleasantly far away, free of the weight of her, even though he knows that probably makes him a terrible person and a worse son.

“Okay, Mommy. I will.” He wonders how few words he could get away with in a conversation before she would notice that he wasn’t saying anything at all. Okay, Mommy, sorry, Mommy, thank you, Mommy. That’d only be five separate words, really. “I’m getting another call.”

“Alright. Bye, then. I love you, Eddiebear.”

Eddie hangs up the phone. His heart is practically beating out of his chest. The phone starts ringing again as soon as it’s hung up. He takes it off the hook, and then clicks it back on. It stops ringing, then starts again. Eddie stands there and hangs it up again. A shiver of adrenaline runs up his spine as the phone rings, and rings, and rings again, and then finally, stops.

Eddie exhales, audible in the silence of his bedroom.

Then he picks up the phone, and dials another number.

Richie answers immediately, an obnoxious yellow? overlapping with Eddie’s “I want to go out.”

A beat. And then, sleazy and dripping in a false surfer’s confidence; “Alriiiiight, duuude, let’s hit the waaves!”

“Can you take me to— I don’t know. Someplace you go.”

Eddie swears he can hear Richie’s mouth audibly click open, then closed.

“Sure, alright,” says Richie, with a measured amount of coolness.

Richie tells him an address, and Eddie copies it down with pen on paper, and sure enough, he doesn’t recognize it. They go to bars together, sometimes, usually one or two of the same, every couple of weeks. Catch up over drinks, the way college friends do. That’s what they are, college friends. But if Eddie’s honest, it always has felt different with Richie than with other college buddies. Than with Zach or Dave, who Eddie’s seen a handful of times since their graduation, and only felt a simmering sort of disaffection towards.

But Richie was. Well. Richie was the guy who got Eddie thinking he was gay. Not that it wasn’t something Eddie had thought of before, but always with that same detached feeling: being gay was just something to be called. It meant nothing to him, the way it meant nothing when people talked about marriage and love. Richie was the guy who got him to attach a meaning to that word. To attach a slow pull of desire to that word.

Richie makes Eddie feel like he isn't Sonia Kaspbrak’s son at all.

Tonight, that’s what he wants the most.

The bar — club, whatever it is, is all pounding lights and slivery, half-naked shapes of people. Men, Eddie thinks, again with that same sense of detachment. There’s a disco ball at the center of the dance floor, shining squares of light on to a million bare chests that shine back.

Richie’s waiting at the bar, standing there with a drink one hand and the other stuck in the front pocket of his jeans. His eyes are just flitting across the crowd of people when Eddie approaches.

“I didn’t think this was your scene.” Eddie says. Richie doesn’t need him to say hello and how are you.

The other man does startle a bit, and then rights himself, yanking his hand out of his pocket and scratching the back of his neck. “Whaaat? You didn’t know? This is my spot, man, this wis where I am every weekend, getting shirtless and sweaty and snorting coke off of oiled up six-packs.”

It’s weak, even for Richie. Eddie knows he’s struck upon something.

“Are you?” He asks, amused. “Your collar’s buttoned up to the top, poser.”

“Well, I'll pop a button or two for you, Eds. All you gotta do is ask.” And Richie grins that big, lecherous grin, the one that always makes Eddie feel like he's teetering on the edge of something. There's a low, sweeping feeling in his stomach.

Eddie thinks, vaguely, that he should be more scared than he is. Scared of Richie, scared of this place with its flashing lights. Scared of what could happen here. But he's not. Because tonight he's not himself. Tonight he doesn't have to be.

“I think you're too chicken, Tozier,” he hears himself saying. “C'mon. Take it off.”

Richie’s eyebrows shoot up, disappearing under his thick helmet of hair cartoonishly. “Oh, wow. Okay,” he replies, and he sounds a little breathless about it. “You haven't been drinking, right?”

Eddie scoffs. “No. I drove.”

Richie hums like he's not convinced by this, but Eddie wouldn't lie. Not to Richie, anyways.

But the next moment, Richie isn't Richie anymore; he's Lady Bia, a rich noblewoman whose name is meant to be a play on the word ‘labia’.

“Well then, Sir Edward, that is a very forward proposition indeed!” He gasps out, clutching at invisible pearls. “To think that a decent woman of my stature might so easily show her bosom to any measly peasant. Who doesn't even say please.”

Eddie rolls his eyes, biting back a smile. “Fine. Please, Richie.”

Eddie doesn't think he's imagining the red flush that steadily creeps up Richie's neck, though it looks more purple than not under pulsing strobe lights.

“Jeez.” Richie says, and Eddie finds delightedly that the Voice has melted out of his mouth, leaving him defenceless. He clears his throat and she's back just as quick as she'd disappeared. “Well, dahling, I'll do it just for you, then. Since you asked so sweetly.”

Richie’s hands, large and fumbling, follow a path from his collarbone to his chest, popping three buttons of his shirt open along the way. It's a dark smattering of chest hair with intervals of flushed pink skin. Eddie is fucking entranced, watching this unveiling with rapt attention. He thinks of the time his coworkers had proposed going to a strip club, on a work trip, to let off some steam, and he’d felt nothing, watching the strippers twirl on their poles, except for a sense of fascination for the ways a human body could twist and bend. It's the polar opposite now; just this small peek at a part of Richie’s body has Eddie wide-eyed, heart beating steadily faster with every glimpse of skin that slips through. He's still below 160 BPM; no cause for concern just yet.

“Eyes up here, Kaspbrak.” Richie says, an uncharacteristic wavering in his voice. Eddie shakes himself out of it. He orders himself a glass of wine.

They float around each other for a while, drifting closer as they chat about nothing. Eddie doesn't mention his mother. He never does, but usually it's because he doesn't have a reason to. Today, when Richie asks, so how's it going? Eddie considers it. Considers saying my mother called me a cocksucker, and the worst part is that I think I could be. If it was the right cock. But he doesn't. In his mind, Sonia and Richie are two things that never mix. Sonia stays in Maine and Richie stays in New York.

Sometime in the night, a man approaches them. The man doesn't introduce himself, just sidles right in between them and smiles at Eddie. His eyes quickly scan Eddie from head to toe, and Eddie feels suddenly out of place — he really sticks out here, in his slacks and tie.

“Haven't seen you ‘round here before, eyebrows.” The man utters, in a drawl that reminds Eddie of another one of Richie's insufferable Voices; Sweet Johnny, a salt-of-the-Earth ‘feller from Georgier’.

He's taller than Eddie but shorter than Richie, and his hand drifts casually over the small of Eddie's back. The closeness startles him, and he jumps a little, like there's electricity in the man's touch.

“Oh,” says Eddie, dumbfounded. He has no idea why this man is speaking to him. “Yeah, it's my first time. I'm here with my friend.”

He waves over at Richie in a silent, desperate plea to not be the center of this stranger's attention anymore.

The stranger nods at Richie in recognition. Eddie feels like he's missing something here.

“Ah. Yeah,” Richie agrees, and wow, that's a fucking sight. Richie Tozier lost for words.

The stranger hums, a deep thrumming sound. “You open?”

The expression on Richie's face shutters as Eddie watches, eyes flicking between the two of them. Richie's easy smile dips into a pressed line.

“No, man.” Richie says, flatly. Nothing else about this interaction makes sense to Eddie, but he at least recognizes the get lost in his tone.

The man shrugs, raises his eyebrows at Eddie like they're in on some joke. “Eh. Worth a shot.”

And then he's scuttling off, and Eddie's left bewildered in the dust.

“Sorry, Eds.” Richie looks ashamed, dropping his gaze down to the bar countertop. “This was a bad idea. Shouldn't have brought you here.”

“What?” Eddie feels a spit of anger spark to life in his stomach. He wasn't brought anywhere; he was the one who wanted to come. “I'm fine. I signed up for this. I can handle weird shit. It's New Fucking York, for fuck’s sake.”

“Y’didn’t sign up for getting hit on by Ol’ Texas Roadhouse McGee. Mr. Guns and Roses. Fucking— Bear Arms Bare Arms.” None of it is Richie's best work. He's scrambling to find the name that'll suit the guy, like naming him the right way will make him seem less intimidating. But Eddie's stuck on the first part of the sentence. Getting hit on. Is that what that was?

It's a concept that is entirely foreign to Eddie. He doesn't think of himself as a guy who gets… attention like that. Who people look at and want. Sure, he'd like if Richie looked at him that way, but that's something that's carefully detached from his actual body; more of a vague concept that floats around him without any concrete understanding of what it would actually mean. To be wanted. To be touched. Eddie feels the ghost of the man's hand where it'd touched him — such an odd place to brush against, the base of his spine. The feeling spreads from his spine to his shoulders to his limbs, filling him with something new. It’s odd, to be twenty-eight and still feeling things you’ve never felt before.

Eddie thinks of Sonia saying I can't believe you'd let some degenerate man put himself inside you.

Truth be told, Eddie hadn't thought about it until the moment she said it. Hadn't considered what it would look like, what it would feel like. He's curious about it, now. About whether he'd really like that. There's only one way to find out, he supposes.

He knows he's a late bloomer. But it's better late than never, right?

Richie's fidgeting under Eddie's watchful gaze. Tracing shapes into the bar countertop, eyes flicking to Eddie's and then away again. Eddie can tell he wants to say something.

Eddie puts together the evidence with an objective eye.

Richie told the guy no when he was hitting on Eddie. Richie unbuttoned his shirt and flirted, even if it was under guise of bad jokes and a shitty impression. And, with a sense of fascination that's growing sharper by the moment, Eddie registers that Richie has, in fact, invited him to a gay bar.

It all points to a very curious conclusion indeed.

“I knew what I was signing up for.” Eddie lies, voice low in a way that he hopes is enticing. “And I don't want to go home.”

“Okay,” says Richie carefully, but Eddie's sure he can hear a shake in it. “Let's stay then.”

Fuck it. Fuck it. Fuck it. Eddie turns back to the bar and waves over the bartender. Orders himself another glass of wine.

Richie's eyebrows are raised high when he looks at him again. Eddie can tell he has something to say, about how Eddie's gonna need to drive home, but Eddie decides he doesn't want to hear it.

“Let's go dance. C’mon.”

Richie looks at him all wide-eyed with a parted open mouth. Like he's grown two heads and sprouted a tail to boot. Eddie thinks it can't be that strange. Eddie Kaspbrak likes to have fun too, sometimes, alright? Eddie Kaspbrak likes men and gets hit on in skeezy gay bars and doesn't say I love you back to his sick mother on the phone. Eddie could be that guy, if he wanted. Eddie could be anyone he wants.

Eddie Kaspbrak walks into the dance floor with Richie Tozier trailing behind as if pulled by a leash. It's thrumming in Eddie's veins now, the need to prove something to someone somewhere.

So they dance. It's mostly sweaty and gross and somewhat nausea-inducing, the flashing lights on the back of Eddie's eyelids and the bumping bass in his teeth. The feeling of strangers’ sweat-slick skin sliding against his nice work shirt.

But that doesn't matter. It's perfectly bearable. And it's all made better, because Richie's looking at him, dumbly in awe. Like Eddie's the fucking disco ball. A guy could get drunk on that kind of attention. Addicted, maybe, if he was that kind of man.

Eddie presses himself to Richie just to watch the way Richie’s hands move to meet his body. Like he's doing a physics experiment, just putting magnets together and seeing if they attract.

They do attract. They fit together perfectly, like puzzle pieces.

That night, the first time they fuck, Eddie tells Richie that he wants his cock inside of him like it's something he came up with all on his own. Like it just occurred to him out of nowhere. Like hey, I noticed you've got that thing and I've got this place for it. Why don't we try putting it all together, and see how it goes?

Richie seems utterly bewildered by all of this, but eager to fall in line without question. Eddie appreciates that, because he doesn't know how he would begin to explain this. If he did explain it, he's certain Richie wouldn't find it nearly as endearing as he seems to.

In the end, it's nothing like Sonia said it would be at all. She'd made it sound like a violent thing, someone shoving inside of him like he’s a fragile China vase that'll break with one well-timed thrust. But if anything, he's the one breaking Richie. Eddie’s quiet and focused, but Richie’s making all these punched out noises that come out like sobs, like he's cracked open with the feeling.

When Eddie comes, legs locked around Richie's middle while the other man's tears drop onto his own face, he is the most himself he's been in years. He's terrified and shaking and Richie is sobbing into his shoulder now and he's almost certain that this shouldn't feel like the aftermath of a housefire, but it does. It feels like he's lost everything, but the rest of his life is in front of him. Dangerously free.

He feels real in Richie's hands. That's what it is. He feels real.

Chapter Text

2006.

The phone starts ringing off the hook, on the wall on Eddie’s side of the bed, at 7 A.M. sharp — like it does every morning in la abode de Kaspbrak.

"Fuckin' A, Eds." Richie mumbles into the 400 thread count pillowcase he's headfirst in.

"You wouldn't have to worry about it if you had just left last night when you were supposed to." Eddie responds, already bitchy at this early hour. He picks up the phone and his tone switches completely. "Kaspbrak speaking. Yes, Mr. Johnson, I'll get it done within the week, I promise. I'm on my way to the office now. Okay, alright, thanks for letting me know, alright. Goodbye."

Richie waits for him to get off the phone to start bitching right back. "You give a man the greatest dicking of his life and all he says is to get out of his apartment. Wow. You know, I gotta Mr. Johnson for you right here if you want it."

Eddie wrinkles his nose as he slips out of the bed. “Get out of my bed. I need to fix my sheets.”

Richie half-rolls off of the mattress onto the floor, pulls himself off the ground and finds his leg tangled in the pair of slacks he’d slipped off of Eddie last night. He blinks through his glasses-less, sleep-blurred haze as he tries to untangle himself, making out the pinkish blob of Eddie in his underwear scurrying around the room hastily. Richie pulls himself free and reaches for his glasses, shoving them sideways over his face - just to try and catch a glimpse of Eddie. It’s rare in these frazzled morning hours. At least at night Eddie seems to slow for a moment, just enough to be tangible in Richie’s hands, but in the morning he’s fleeting and fluttering like a hummingbird, never still enough to catch.

Eddie rushes past him, grabbing the pair of slacks right out of Richie’s hands like he’s a glorified clothing rack.

“Alright, I can tell when I’m not wanted somewhere,” says Richie, hands held up in acquiescence.

“Clearly not, because otherwise you wouldn’t still be standing there with your dick out like an idiot.” Eddie snarks back, already buttoning up one of his approximately one thousand pristine white button-ups.

Richie sighs and pulls on his boxers and pants, hopping around as he does.

Their relationship is pretty complicated, to say the least. Or really, it's quite simple: Eddie just wants to get fucked, and Richie is willfully stupid about the whole thing because he's an emotional pervert who wants disgusting, unnatural things, like kisses on the cheek and human connection, so he lets himself think everything is more than it is. But it's really just this — this is all the thing between them amounts to. It's just Richie pulling on his shoes, hair still mussed and still smelling of sleep and sex, and then letting himself out of Eddie's apartment without so much as a goodbye.

It also, probably, has to do with the fact that Eddie is gainfully employed at an office with a data entry job — as far as Richie can tell, he got hired right out of college — and at thirty years old, Richie is more or less unemployed. He prefers to call himself a freelancer. An entrepreneur, if you will, in the art of generally mediocre impressions of characters in movies from the 80’s, because he doesn't really bother to see new movies anymore. If you wanted a real solid Doc Brown impression, he’syour guy. For anything else? You’reshit outta luck, pal. Richie is pretty sure this… uh, quirk of his, is at least part of Eddie's reasoning for why he’s not exactly chasing him down to confess his love in the middle of a figurative airport right now.

But it's okay, really. Because no matter how many times he's kicked out of Eddie's apartment like a bad dog, Richie knows that Eddie will always come crawling back to him again. Like clockwork, reliable and consistent, like pretty much everything else Eddie does, down to his midday snacks and bathroom breaks; Richie wouldn't be surprised if “have sex with Richie” was pencilled in his neat little daily planner. All Richie needs to do is wait around, and he's damn good at that.

Sure enough, Richie takes his ass home, and sets himself up in his home recording studio. It’s a closet — a little on the nose — that he’d transformed with shoddy soundproofing on the walls and a single microphone connected to his laptop. He uses the laptop’s webcam to record a video of his faux-radio show, which he posts on the World Wide Web to an audience of approximately fifteen loyal watchers. But fifteen is still a pretty sizable amount, he thinks; he barely even knows fifteen people in real life. His dream is to have his own radio show on-air, like David Pakman, only he wouldn’t talk about boring shit like politics, he’d talk about movies he found in the back of Blockbusters that no one else had ever watched, and mixtapes he found tucked into the corner of the thrift store’s junk pile. That's his passion: things that are easily forgotten, things that lose themselves to time, things that may never be recovered, but that live on in the minds of the few people who happened to touch it, too.

Richie clicks the big ON button on the recorder, and waits as it boots up with a series of boops and whirs. He closes his eyes, and imagines a big neon sign that broadcasts that he is LIVE FROM NEW YORK, and starts to do what he does best: talk.

“Hey folks, it’s Richard ‘Dickcheese’ Tozier, coming to you hot and ready from the same place I always am. Hope you’re all having a fan-fucking-tastic one. Today’s topic is gonna have to be that horrible thing-- love. Why? because it’s February, the month of love, of course!” Richie pauses here, looking over at the corner of the closet with a spiderweb creeping up the wall. “But first I’m gonna give a thank you to my most loyal listener: Mr. Eight-Legs Mcgee over here. Thanks for tuning in, couldn’t’ve done it without you. Now, you might think it’s absurdly tragic to be recording a video in a dark closet about love when you haven’t come close to the real thing except for 10-minute hanky-pankies — that, coincidentally, also take place in dark closets — in about twelve years. And you’d be right, dear listener, for that assumption, but you’re here listening to it, so what does that make you, eh?”

“So, because I know you’re as lonely as I am, I’ve gotta couple 8tracks and films for you to fill your regular old February fourteenth with,” Richie inhales, and begins to read out his list. The Web is a great thing, for Richie Tozier in-between jobs: forgotten things pile up every corner, and all you have to do is click a couple times before you find them: hidden gems of creation, everywhere. His loyal listeners are geeks and freaks of a similar caliber who comment on his videos, things like Awesome vid TrashMouthTozier! Have U listened to Rob Gray & The Pennywisers? They’re a pretty sick underground band, real funky sound - U should check them out ! to which Richie responds, They should probably be called the Peniswisers , bc they suck penis LOL.

On occasion, and usually from a viewer by the screenname of CLKGTR76, Richie receives hate comments. Or what he thinks are hate comments, anyway. One notable comment Richie received read only: How can 1 person manage to have the bad taste of 30 high school drop outs ???

He has the option to remove the comments from his videos, but like any well-adjusted thirty-year-old man, Richie finds the verbal (or in this case, textual?) badgering kind of endearing. He’s pretty sure it's because the last ten years of his friendship with one Eddie Kaspbrak have permanently altered his fight or flight response — or whatever you call the response that makes you angry when people are mean to you — and replaced it with a strict ‘pinching cheek’ response. So he keeps the comments.

“Well, I hope everyone has a quite literally banging Valentine’s day. This is Rich ‘MotherFunker’ Tozier, signing off for the night.” Richie takes a beat, staring into the camera, before he ends the video with a soft click. He saves the video file, presses the off button on his microphone, and takes a deep inhale.

This part is always the worst - the silence after his own voice. He’d tried stand-up comedy for a couple years in college but never struck gold. The jokes were easy, it was easy to talk, but what was hard was the silence. The coughs and hums from the audience. Richie wasn’t as prone to panic as Eddie was, with his asthma attacks triggered by a hair, but in that moment where the silence pressed in on him like fingers curling around his vocal cords — he would start to feel it. A squeezing feeling on his throat, like if he didn’t speak immediately, he never would be able to again. Apparently silence is an important thing in comedy, though, to let a joke land and shit. You’re not supposed to talk like an auctioneer. Who knew?

So Richie puts on some music, and waits, and waits, until he hears that knock at the door. He gets up and looks through the peephole like he doesn’t know exactly what he’ll find. It’s Eddie, of course, standing there, still in his work clothes, with a furrowed brow and a plastic bag hanging by his side with a big yellow smiley face on it and big blocky text underneath that reads THANK YOU. Eddie has that kind of face that always looks a little worried, or a little constipated, or like he can’t quite decide which exactly. Richie swings the door open and grins wide at him.

“Back so soon for seconds?” He crows with a flourish. “I knew you couldn’t get enough of me, sweetpea.”

Eddie makes a face like he can smell Richie’s dirty sheets from here. “You know what, I just remembered I can’t stand you.”

“All it took was an eight-hour workday to make you forget? And you say I have the memory of a goldfish? Oh, baby, we have got to get you evaluated for early-onset dementia. Have you been smelling toast lately, too?”

“That’s a symptom of a stroke, not dementia, you fucking jackanape.” Eddie snaps, pushing past Richie into his apartment, not even sparing him a glance.

Richie can’t help himself. He’s smiling from ear to fucking ear, and it really is concerning, and he should probably go to a doctor about it because it can’t be normal to be this delighted by someone who’s about five seconds away from stabbing you straight in the balls. He reaches out and flicks Eddie on his forehead, just to have something to do with the overflowing desire to fold him into an origami bird.

The door shuts behind them. Eddie’s beelining it to Richie’s kitchen, and Richie’s padding after him like a cartoon love-ridden dog, hearts practically popping out of his eyesockets.

Eddie pulls a bottle of wine out of the plastic bag like a magician pulls a bunny out of his hat. It’s a fucking cabernet, because that’s the kind of person Eddie is now. From the baby-faced cherub from hell Richie met in college, to a guy who asks his co-workers for wine recommendations and jots it down on a sticky note.

“I, uh…” Eddie shuffles on his (socked, so cute, he wears socks) feet now, pushing the bottle over towards Richie. It’s then that Richie registers two extremely curious facts: one, that this a gift. For Richie. From Eddie. It’s not tied with a bow, but he’ll take what he can get. And two: that Eddie is feeling shy about this. Richie’s known Eddie through every explosive emotion in the book, and shyness is not one that he’s familiar with. You could argue that Eddie got flustered, that he was prone to red cheeks and ducking his head so he wouldn’t have to look anyone in the eye, but you could not argue that Eddie Kaspbrak, by nature, was shy. He was afraid of plenty of things that went bump in the night, but he was rarely, if ever, afraid to speak his mind. Lord knows, if Richie didn’t know anything else in the world about Eddie Kaspbrak, he at least knew this.

“This for me?” Richie improvises in the silence. “Gee wilikers, Edster. If I didn’t know better, I’d think ya had a soft spot for me.”

“I don’t.” Eddie says, the beaver dam in the back of his throat finally breaking, because Richie knew he wouldn't be able to resist a chance to hit him where it hurts. He squares his shoulders and announces: “I just thought we could, y’know, celebrate. Because you got that job.”

Ah. It had almost slipped Richie’s mind -- two weeks ago he’d finally caved under the ache in his pockets, and applied to a job at the only bar he frequented anymore. Richie wasn’t a guy with a lot of pride to lose, but he couldn’t pretend a part of his ego wasn’t a little bruised about it. Bartending was a job that, in his mind, was fun when you were in your twenties, doing tricks with the shaker for drunk girls to giggle at, and then after a certain threshold -- maybe 28 -- became mostly depressing. Richie couldn’t think of any place that was more suspended in time than a bar, where people came and went while the world went on outside without you and all you could do about it was drink. A bar, he thought, was a very good place to be forgotten and never found again.

So, yeah, it wasn’t much of a reason for celebration.

But it was something. He couldn't sit around being nothing forever.

Richie coughs to clear his throat, replacing whatever forlorn expression that may have settled on his face with a big, classic grin. “Aw, shucks, thanks,” he reaches out and places a friendly hand on Eddie’s shoulder, squeezes, and immediately hates himself for it. “Y’know, when I start raking in the big bucks you won’t have to buy me anything anymore — I’ll be spoiling you, baby.”

Eddie makes an expression like Richie’s said something completely nonsensical, but he can’t hide the way the edges of his mouth lift anyway. “I’m flattered. You’ll really be spoiling me on your $5.15 an hour salary,” he says, and then he schools his expression,flattening his mouth and turning a serious gaze on Richie (oh, Lord, here we go), “You know I don’t feel bad about buying you things, right? You’re my friend, not a fucking— tax guy demanding half my check.”

At anyone else, Richie would have laughed wide-open directly in their face, but there’s something in the crinkle around Eddie’s worried, dark eyes, earnest and sweet despite everything, that begs him to concede. “‘Course, Eds,” he all but mumbles, feeling sufficiently scolded.

Eddie grabs the bottle of wine back from his hands (why did he even give it over to him?) and pulls out the cork with a wine opener — that he also, assumably, brought from home, because there was no way in hell Richie owned one. Eddie’s sleeves are pushed halfway up his arms, crinkling in folds around the crook of his elbow. That’s going to need ironing, he wants to say, but instead he’s just staring at the freckles and moles that dot along the length of Eddie’s forearms, sun spots that have clustered on his skin from a childhood spent in the sun. That’s what Richie thinks, anyway. He doesn’t know much of anything about Eddie’s childhood. Wonders if he can’t remember his, either.

Richie pulls his eyes away (even though he’s allowed to look - they’ve had sex, for fuckssake - it makes the backside of his neck feel hot with shame nonetheless) and reaches into a cabinet above Eddie to grab two wine glasses. He has plenty of wine glasses. They’re really the only cutlery he uses. He drinks coffee out of wine glasses, sips the hearty chicken soup that good old Mags Tozier sends frozen in the mail when he's sick, pours Doritos into ‘em to use as a party bowl — if you count one guy alone in front of a TV as a party, which, yes, Richie does.

Eddie pours out a glass of wine for each of them, and then goes on marching to Richie’s couch, like he knows Richie will be following him.

(Richie is, but that’s besides the point.)

Richie slings an arm lazily around the back of the couch, the other hand cradling his wine glass delicately in between his pointer and middle. Eddie’s sitting as far away from him as is humanly possible, tucked into the far corner of the couch like he’ll catch whatever gay shit Richie has if they breathe too close to each other, his hand a tight fist curled around the stem of his glass. Richie doesn’t take it personally, because he knows it’s for show.

This is the dance they do. It’s very intricate, really. Eddie comes over, or they go out, and he’ll act all standoffish for a couple hours, pained and grimacing like someone’s holding a pistol to his head. But he’ll stay, every time, like there’s something drawing him to Richie that he can’t resist, or more likely, like this is his only option. Richie’s not dumb enough to think that there’s any real amount of desire here — it’s just easy. It’s accessible. It makes sense. Eddie is a logical guy, and sure, he could probably seduce any sensible man in the Metropolitan area with a working dick, gay or not, but why do that when his best friend has a perfectly working dick right here?

So Richie goes through the motions. He plays the part. He’s good at this, if nothing else.

“Anything exciting at the office these days, Eddington?” He asks, tossing his head back to take a sip from the glass. He gurgles it in his mouth, pretends it’s hard liquor.

Eddie scowls, as predicted, looking like one of those flat-faced cats that has definitely been bred far past what evolution intended. “Cheryl still thinks I broke the fucking coffee machine. I keep telling her I barely even use it, because it’s shit quality anyway, I brew my own damn coffee at home, but she just keeps saying ‘well, whoever broke it should pay for it’,” Eddie takes a dainty little sip from his glass, and then barrels on: “Personally, I think the office should pay for it, and get a better quality one that doesn’t break after a month, but they’re not going to do that. Because they love when it fucking breaks.”

Richie nods solemnly. “The rich keep getting richer, and the poor keep drinking bad coffee.”

There’s a wrinkle between Eddie’s eyebrows, and he sighs while he loosens his tie. Richie’s eyes track the movement with a laser-like focus. “I don’t even give a shit. It’s not my problem,” Eddie says, in a tone that makes it seem like he does very much give a shit. “God, Rich, would it kill you to open a window or something? It smells like weed and mothballs in here.”

“Wait, really?” Richie asks, putting on a concerned frown. “That’s my nicest candle. The ladies go positively hogwild for weed and mothballs, dontcha know?”

Eddie's already moving again, as soon as Richie starts talking, cracking open the window (Richie only has one window) by an inch. Richie's convinced he didn't even hear him when Eddie turns around and asks, “Do you actually have a candle?”

“Well, no. But we don't need a candle to set the mood, Eddie baby.” Richie reaches an arm out towards him over the back of the couch, making a grabbing motion. Come closer. These are choppy waters. Eddie doesn't like to talk about what they do in bed, out of bed. Richie tries not to push it — he isn't in a place to judge anyone else for their sexual dysfunction, least of all Eddie — but sometimes it just slips out.

“Figures,” mumbles Eddie, shifting out of Richie's reach and plopping back down onto the couch with a sigh. Here's the nice thing about having Eddie around (besides the view): Richie doesn't have to talk. Eddie could talk for hours, talk until your ears fell clean off your skull like leaves off a tree in the brisk mid-September wind, talk until his mouth went dry. Eddie was the only person he knew who rivalled Richie himself in that aspect. Of course, Richie would never stay silent. Not when Eddie was around. But trust that if Eddie was around, there would be talking after long enough. Richie counted in his mind during the silent seconds, betting on how long it would be until Eddie burst out with another nagging comment; and we should be good for a go in three, two, one…. “Did you know there's five fucking ‘pick up your dog's shit’ signs outside of your apartment? I counted. And not a single person in your neighborhood follows them. I swear to God.”

“Hey, man. It keeps my rent low, so I can't complain. I say, let them shit cake!”

“It's awful, Rich.” Richie likes when he calls him that. It's kind of Eddie's equivalent to the endless vomit-waterfall of endearments that Richie can't stop from coming out of his mouth. “That's probably attracting flies, and the flies are laying eggs in the shit, and the eggs are- giving birth to maggots, and now your sidewalk is teeming with maggots, and they're probably crawling through your fucking rustic brick walls as we speak.”

Eddie's eyebrows are drawn tight as if they're elastic in a waistband being pulled by a drawstring. Richie desperately wants to find the knot to unwind them. He says, “Oh yeah, sweet cheeks, talk dirty to me. Tell me more about all the diseases I'm going to contract.”

Eddie's big browns crinkle into a squint at this. There's a challenge in his eyes, like you're all talk, Tozier, aren't you? He takes another, large gulp from his glass of wine. Richie follows suit. He wants to shrink down and follow Eddie down the rabbit hole.

“I'll tell you plenty.” Eddie says, but his voice has hit a lower, slightly huskier register. Eddie's always been more of a lightweight than Richie, since their college days, due to the obvious (Richie is sort of a Bigfoot-esque beast that terrifies most people that bestow their gaze upon him; Eddie is a lithe, sleek little creature that runs so fast you can hardly catch a glimpse of him), but it always catches Richie by surprise — the wine has only just started to make him feel warm in the cheeks, but Eddie's flushing from head to toe, and body starting to stretch from its tightly curled place in the corner. Eddie continues, “Typhoid. Cholera. Dysentery, like you’re on the goddamn Oregon Trail. Do you want to live like the settlers on the Oregon Trail? Tuberculosis. Gastroenteritis. Syphilis. Malaria. Conjuncti-”

The words fade to fuzz in the back of Richie's mind somewhere around Tuberculosis. It feels like he's watching Eddie's lips move in a slow-mo haze, curving around letters in that empathic, defined way he always does. He enunciates every syllable. Who does that? What a freak, Richie thinks, and wants him so bad he fears the force of it will awaken the latent telekinesis he was sure he always had, and start throwing unwashed dishes around the room in wild circles. Needless to say, he ensnares Eddie's ankle with his hand, and yanks him towards himself.

Eddie lurches forward, caught off guard. His sweet pink lips are open in a circle, and his eyes are so wide, and the tightness between his eyebrows and in the dimple of his cheek where Richie knows he anxiously chews the skin has disappeared. Eddie's face, without all the stress lines settled into it, is just so open and responsive and so — expressive. Don't get him wrong — Richie is entranced by every version of Eddie, but this version is by far his favorite. When he lets the charade drop, for even a moment. When he lets Richie in.

“Shut up,” he says, even though he’s never wanted anything less than for Eddie to be quiet — if he’s honest he could probably have orgasmed right there, listening to Eddie listing insect-borne diseases for ten minutes in that tipsy voice where his mouth starts to tilt into a pout. That’s an untapped market for sure — Eddie could probably make some real big bucks on that. Richie thinks about the amount of people who would probably love it, how tapes would fly off the shelves, and leans in and presses his lips to Eddie’s insistently.

Eddie’s ready for it. He’s been waiting for it, Richie can tell, but he rarely makes the first move on nights like these. Again, Richie is not in a place to be judging the sexual hangups of others. If Eddie needs him to be the one to make the move, so that he can have plausible deniability about their repeated homosexual encounters, then so be it. Richie would probably hang from the ceiling fan naked while it was turning, swinging his dick in a windmill, if that was what got Eddie off.

Eddie’s arching up into the kiss, somewhat folded in Richie’s lap now, with his ankle still clasped in Richie’s hand (and oh, it fits so beautifully, Richie’s whole hand wrapped around it, he can feel the knob of the bone there with his thumb, feel the way the muscles work nonstop under Eddie’s skin. He’s in constant motion, even there, anywhere he’s touched). Eddie’s torso is stretched across Richie’s in an attempt to meet his face where it is, and it’s probably not super comfortable, but their lips are locked together, and Richie wants to make a little nest of twigs and leaves inside Eddie’s mouth and lay eggs for spring. Or whatever. The metaphor is hard to follow, but Eddie’s mouth tastes like cabernet and that brand of mint toothpaste that Richie is so familiar with from the amount of it that gets inside his mouth, too.

Richie’s hands are wandering constantly around Eddie’s compact little body, pressing into the dimples he can find in the expanse of skin on his back, crawling up his leg and grabbing him by the underside of the knee.

Eddie’s hands are fixed, firmly, with a deathgrip in the fabric on either side of the collar of Richie’s shirt, like if he lets go Richie will have a come-to-Jesus moment and decide he doesn’t want this, after all. Good thing that’ll never happen. Well, Richie will have a come-to-Jesus moment if they keep this up, but a very different kind. Less sky opening with rays of light shining down and more jizzing in his pants with the force of a thousand suns.

In between kisses, Eddie’s mouth barely leaves his for a breath. He’s insatiable, like he’s been dehydrated for five days and the only viable source of water for a thousand miles around is the saliva from Richie’s mouth. And, well, who is Richie to deny a dying man? He opens his mouth against Eddie’s and lets him drink.

Richie pulls Eddie against him again, this time with one arm encircled around his back and the other wrapped around his neck in what would normally be a headlock, but in this context is just a hand bracing the back of his head. Richie is so fucking obsessed with the way touching Eddie feels, the way he’s warm and the fuzzy skin on the back of his neck, the way Richie’s fingers can touch the place on the top of his head where babies are soft and you can feel their brain. (He can’t feel Eddie’s brain, not really, but it’s a nice thought. That he’s so close to it, to the things that keep Eddie moving and working, his inner mechanisms. That’s really what Richie wants to touch the most, and this is just about the closest he can get.)

Eddie settles on the couch, their mouths momentarily pulled away from each other. One of Eddie’s legs falls between Richie’s, the other perched atop Richie’s thigh, and if Richie lets himself move a little closer in between Eddie’s legs, he can feel a tell-tale hardness. Welcome to the party, little buddy, he thinks vaguely in the direction of Eddie’s dick. Eddie’s ass is halfway-off Richie's lap, and that just won’t do. Richie lets his hand smooth down the fabric of Eddie’s shirt, landing on the back pocket of his slacks.

In this position, he’s almost cradling Eddie, but in turn, Eddie’s almost cradling him too. He has to lean upwards into the kiss now because he’s been pushed down by the force of Eddie’s movement, his back bent awkwardly against his trusty old couch. It’s going to hurt like hell tomorrow, but for now it’s good. It's real good.

“Wanna scissor?” Richie asks through his haze, head knocking back against the cushion behind him.

Eddie laughs in his face, hot puffs of breath on Richie’s nose. “Not exactly what I was thinking,” he responds.

“Let’s do it, baby. Ass to ass--” he’s saying, when Eddie presses his face to his own again. Richie’s fucking esctatic to be interupted when it’s like that. Eddie’s his favorite heckler.

One of Eddie’s hands has found its way to his leg and is cupping it around the curve of his muscle, and Richie never wants either of them to move. He wants them to die in the middle of this kiss, their lifeless bodies slumped against each other, his left leg still hanging off the side of the couch as it festers with fungus. It would take a while for people to find them. Richie knows some people, but none well enough for them to call in a wellness check. He supposes Eddie would probably have his boss looking for him — as far as he knows, Eddie’s never missed a day of work in the six years he’s been at the company (Richie still couldn’t tell you exactly what it was he did for work, but he was good at it, whatever it was), but who would know that he was at Richie Tozier’s place, anyway? He’d be declared missing, and then the eighty-six-year-old lady who lives next door and always complains that Richie talks to himself would finally notice the silence, and then her cat would notice the stench. When they found their skeletons they would be positioned exactly like this.

Eddie gets impatient, panting into his mouth, “Do you want to fuck me or what, Rich?”

“Jeez. Testy, testy,” Richie responds, putting on a cool and suave grin (very convincing, Tozier) to look up at Eddie. In reality, his heart is beating out of his chest. It never gets less anxiety-inducing. There’s always that feeling that he’ll do something wrong and ruin it, like there’s a big red buzzer somewhere on Eddie’s body, and if he presses it, a trap door under the couch will open up and swallow him whole.

(It’s why he follows Eddie’s lead, most of the time. He thinks that if— if he does let himself follow the ravenous feeling in the center of his chest, he’ll do or say something he can’t take back.)

But Eddie’s asking, and Eddie wants this, he reminds himself — though more often than not, it feels like he’s somehow tricked him into this anyway. So, he’ll give it to him.

Richie lets his hand fall from the spot on Eddie’s head, pawing down his side and uprooting his perfectly tucked, now rumpled, shirt from his waistband. When he puts his cold hand on Eddie’s uncovered stomach, he can feel the way he jolts, his muscles jumping under the skin. Eddie hisses, “Do you have any blood circulation?”

“‘Fraid not, Edsworth. It’s all gone to my dick.” Richie declares, unzipping Eddie’s pants in one swift motion. It’s a beautiful sight to see. Eddie’s so hard that it must be aching, dripping steadily from the tip. As soon as Richie gets his hand on his dick, Eddie’s squirming on top of him.

“Any more catty comments to make?” He asks, letting his thumb swipe over Eddie’s slit. Eddie punches his shoulder and then buries his face in the crook of Richie’s neck, shuddering. “Thought so.”

Richie’s a bit doleful about not being able to see Eddie’s face anymore, the way it’s surely scrunching up now, his wrinkled naked mole rat face, but this view is great, too. Eddie goes as red here as he does up top. He starts pumping his hand in earnest now, mumbling half to himself and half to Eddie’s dick. “Aw, someone was getting desperate. Sorry for making you wait so long, buddy. Don’t worry. Your old pal Richie’s here to save the day.”

Eddie un-buries himself from Richie’s neck. He’s completely flushed up to his cheekbones, eyelashes fluttering while he tries to collect himself. It’s adorable. Richie’s addicted to being the person who can elicit this from Eddie. It’s hard not to let it get to his head, to creep into his ears and whisper this must be special. Moments like these are dangerous, because Richie can almost convince himself that there’s a deeper intimacy to them, something more than just skin-deep, something more than two warm bodies seeking out the heat of another.

“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t talk to me like a dog,” Eddie complains, when he regains his composure.

“I’m not talking to you,” says Richie, incredulously. “I’m talking to my good friend, Schlongington.”

“Not your best work.” Eddie responds, and then slaps Richie’s hand away from his dick. He reaches for Richie’s pants, palming at the zipper like a cat trying to get into a box of treats. He finds it eventually, but Richie can tell the frustration is building, and it comes to a head (no pun intended) when he gets a hold on Richie’s cock. Eddie always moves faster than Richie, and suddenly they’re moving at Kaspbrakian speeds, his hand (finely bird-boned and well-moisturized) wrapping around Richie’s dick and pumping away like a jackhammer.

Up, up and away! Richie thinks nonsensically. Prepare for liftoff!

Eddie isn’t making eye contact anymore (not that he usually does), but he is making contact with Richie’s one-eyed monster, if you know what he means. His third eye, if you will. His eye on the back of his (cock)head. Richie could keep these going all night, probably. The feeling of Eddie’s skin on his is making him feel a bit loopy, and the determined frown on Eddie’s face isn’t helping. Like Richie’s a math problem to solve.

“Yeah, find my coefficient, baby.” Richie grunts out. “Raise my exponent to the fifth fuckin’ power.”

“What?” Eddie asks, finally lifting his gaze to look at Richie. His Crested Owl eyebrows are furrowed deeply, and that bit of concern in his eyes makes Richie even harder. If that’s even possible.

“Nothing.” Richie just mumbles back, and adjusts his hand on Eddie’s ass. His arm has started to lose feeling, and he wants Eddie closer, wants him on top of himself. He tries to communicate this through poking Eddie’s asscheek insistently. When that doesn’t work, he takes his other hand (the one still wet) and pulls Eddie again, both hands gripping him by the ass to bring him up to sit on Richie’s thigh.

“Tell Santa what’s on your wishlist,” he says, in a gruff voice.

Eddie wrinkles his nose, his palms resting on Richie’s chest again. “What I want requires my pants to be off, if you’d let me go.”

“Have you no Christmas spirit?” Richie asks, but lets him go anyway.

“It’s February,” Eddie’s voice is muffled behind his shirt as he pulls it over his head and chucks it off. It’ll definitely be wrinkled, but that’s okay because Eddie has a million shirts that look the same (but he insists aren’t) hanging in his closet like a cartoon character. At least Richie has the audacity to wear the exact same shirt every day. Like a true God-damned American patriot.

Then Eddie is rucking his slacks down his thighs, and Richie’s brain short-circuits like a cheap radio. This channel is no longer receiving signal, no-siree, there’s an exposed wire and it’s sparking up! Call a sexy firefighter!

Skin bare and taut over tight muscle, Eddie plops back down into Richie’s lap. Richie likes this angle a lot -- it’s fun to be able to look up at Eddie for once. In other contexts, Richie is always leaning down to Eddie, tilting his head downwards at a firm ninety degrees like a wilted flower, bringing his shoulders up high so he looks more like the Hunchback of Notre Dame than a lovesick fool. If nothing else, the angle is easier on his back, for sure.

Richie’s caught up in watching Eddie’s determined, dead-set face with a big goofy grin on his own when he realises that Eddie is currently pushing his pants down for him. He lifts his ass off the couch so that they can be pulled down. He would try to be a useful, active participant in this experience, but whatever part of his brain makes him want to be helpful (and let's be honest, that was already a very very small portion of his brain) fizzled out long ago.

He does, however, find it in himself to stick a hand between the couch’s cushions and root around until his fingers curl around the cool, cylindrical bottle stuffed deep down in there.

While he’s searching, Eddie is stuck to him like velcro, the naked lines of his body pressed to Richie’s slumped, mostly clothed figure. Eddie doesn't seem to mind, skin slick and lips mouthing down the outstretched curve of Richie’s neck. Richie sends a thank you to whatever deity is looking out for him, because he knows he certainly did nothing to deserve this, but maybe it's an apology for the rest of the bad hand he's been dealt.

Richie pulls out the lube and, overtaken by the ghost of his fourteen-year-old self, holds it over Eddie's head. “Come on and get it, short stuff,” he taunts, looking into Eddie's dark, blown out eyes as his face crinkles into annoyance.

It doesn't exactly have the intended effect, with Eddie on his lap, because he just lifts himself (and Richie’s eyes drop down to watch how Eddie's thighs flex to hold the weight of himself up, thick lines of muscle clear under the skin. God, he really is a runner) upwards to grab the bottle from Richie's hand.

Popping the bottle open and dribbling the clear, viscous liquid into his palm, Eddie snarks: “Stop trying to cockblock yourself, idiot. It's like you don't want to have sex with me at all.”

It couldn't be more untrue, and so uncomfortably close to the truth at the same time. Richie is always terrified of the intimacy of it, of actually getting to be this close with Eddie, thinks that if he were to just let himself fall into it, his brain would realize that it's Eddie, and something too honest would tumble out of his mouth. But at the same time, he wants it incessantly, insatiably, all the fucking time. Of course he does.

He groans as Eddie slicks up his cock with his right hand, thoroughly coating it. With that same hand, Eddie reaches between his own legs and touches himself in that deep place inside of him. He's holding himself, hovering over Richie's lap with two fingers stuffed inside,and Richie can't quite take it anymore. Richie stares up at his face in awe and wonder, watching his eyes flutter with each stretching movement.

In a desperation to be the one making Eddie react, Richie wraps a hand around Eddie's cock and tugs, once, hard and fast just the way Eddie likes it. Eddie gasps and pulls his fingers out of himself. In one swift motion — Richie can't tell if Eddie sits on his cock, or if he pulls Eddie down by the thigh, but either way that's where they land; with Eddie split open on his cock, thighs spread wide over Richie's lap.

And then there's no more talking. It's just movement, Richie intoxicated by the clenching of Eddie's muscles, Eddie moving at a breakneck speed, fucking himself down with a crazed fervor. They're both gasping, panting with each thrusted movement, and Richie can already see Eddie's thighs shaking with the strain. He puts one hand high up on Eddie's leg, uses the other one to stabilize himself against the couch, and then they're off to the races.

It's all just the sensations of sweaty skin and precum dripping against Richie's exposed stomach. They're moving to meet each other in the middle of each thrust, Eddie lifting and dropping down in time as Richie pulls out and shoves back in. He's enraptured with the sight of it, the laid plain and bare evidence of their connection, skin-deep as it may be. He lets his gaze slide slowly upwards, resting on Eddie's cock trapped between them, his shaking legs, his straining muscles, his arms wrapped around Richie in a death grip, and then finally his eyes rest on Eddie's. They're clenched shut, his pouty mouth dropped open, his forehead scrunched in that familiar way. Richie’s doing that-- Richie’s the one doing that to him, and he's addicted to the thought.

Richie thrusts a little harder, and reaches between them to grab hold of Eddie's cock again, just to hear the way he inhales, tightens his legs around Richie’s hips like he can't take any more. Richie draws him in even closer, hand still trapped in the space between their bodies, his face finding the skin of Eddie's shoulder to sink his teeth into. This is the part he's scared of. The part where he gets intoxicated with it, where he thinks, for a moment, that Eddie is in the palm of his hand. That Eddie's surrendered some part of himself to Richie, and surely that's for a reason, surely that means something, and Richie knows exactly what he wants it to mean. That's the problem.

He jerks Eddie off a bit faster. He can feel it in the way Eddie's clenching down on his cock in quick pulses can hear it in the quickness of Eddie's hiccuped intakes of breath, the way they border on soft moans, that Eddie's losing control. Eddie finds it hard to let go, during sex, Richie thinks, from a few too many years he spent cooped at home with his overbearing bullhorn of a mother. Eddie's always biting his lip to not let his pretty little whines escape, his eyes darting around like he expects to be walked in on any minute, so it's a true gift when he gets like this: open and unbridled, chasing his pleasure like he has nothing to lose. Richie revels in the way Eddie grinds his hips down like he can't get Richie deep enough, bucking wildly into the grip Richie has on his dick. He's crumpling over Richie, bending down and burying his head into Richie's hair. Richie can hear his breath so close to his ear, now, and it makes him want, more and more.

He quickens his pace to hear Eddie's breath accelerate with it, and presses a kiss to the sensitive part of Eddie's neck, right under his ear. Eddie shivers, and with a brilliant gasp, comes on Richie's stomach.

It flicks a switch in Richie's brain, and then he's fucking Eddie in earnest, with fast little thrusts that betray the fact that he's only chasing his own satisfaction now. In the aftermath of his orgasm, Eddie is about a thousand times louder, punched-out, whiny moans following every thrust. Richie’s face is buried in the crook of Eddie's neck, teeth grazing the taut muscle there. Eddie's head is thrown back, and his neck is so long, Richie thinks, like a sexy Twizzler.

He's overcome with it, overcome with the sweetness of Eddie opening himself up to pleasure despite how often he was denied it, overcome with how much he wants this, overcome with the sweat built between them, overcome with how he'll probably get hard every time he sees a couch for the rest of his life. He groans in Eddie's ear, buries himself inside of him, and whispers, so quiet, but not quiet enough for Eddie not to hear:

“God. I love you.”

and then comes, brilliantly and brightly, squeezed by the tightness of Eddie's muscles as he drinks him in, just as eager to be a vessel for Richie’s pleasure as Richie was to be his.

Richie’s head drops against Eddie's chest with a thunk, breathing hard. He's getting a little too old for the speed that Eddie likes. It might be time to retire the old ‘shacking up’ for the more age-appropriate ‘making love’.

Eddie is still as an unswaying tree above him, still tangled in Richie's arms. The sticky, tacky mess between them is drying quickly, and Eddie is just sitting there. Richie waits for Eddie to push him away, to become a flurry of movement as he goes to grab a towel and wipe them both down, to go take a shower because that's so fucking gross, Richie, why would you come inside me, ugh. But that doesn't happen. Eddie is still, and Richie knows something is wrong, because Eddie is never still.

Richie tilts his head back to check that Eddie isn't freaking out or anything — and Eddie is looking back at him with the strangest expression. Richie immediately feels caught, like a dog who pissed on the good carpet. He starts to wrack his brain, replaying the jumbled memories of their sex. Maybe it was the bite. Maybe that was too far, maybe he should have asked, even though Eddie always shivers with delight when Richie's teeth brush his skin or his lips. Maybe Richie waited too long — Eddie had been getting impatient, had said that Richie was cock blocking himself. Maybe he thought Richie didn't want him enough — but that was a ridiculous notion. Surely, even if Eddie had had that misconception before they'd fucked, it must have been resolved by the time Richie came deep inside him and—

Oh.

It hits Richie like a bucket of cold water, and he reels away from the other with a sudden movement, as if touching Eddie would burn him. Burn him with Richie's horrible feelings, with his love, holy fucking shit. Good going, Tozier. Hey, it was a great run, at least, this time. Ten whole years of friendship, but all had to end eventually, right? It was only a matter of time before it slipped out of Richie’s mouth.

Eddie isn’t speaking. Why the fuck isn’t he speaking? Richie feels a single bead of sweat form at the back of his neck and slide down.

“I… uh…,” Think, Tozier, fucking turn on your worthless brain and talk like you always do! Maybe he didn't even hear it. It was muffled, right? Maybe he thinks you said ‘I love stew’ like you got suddenly hit with your love of a hearty soup while you were orgasming. That's fucking stupid. He doesn't think that. He knows exactly what you said and he's just looking for a way to let you down easy. But you don't need to be let down easy because you fucking know already. Just be honest. “I wasn't talking about you, specifically. You know that right? It was more like the general you. The royal you.” You fucking idiot.

“Right. You were telling ‘the royal you’ I love you, straight into my ear?” Eddie responds, finally, his tone dry and cold. It’s now that he climbs out of Richie's lap, leaving his dick cold and limp, his stomach still sticky with come.

Richie is helpless, like a ragdoll, frozen in place. His hands twitch by his sides, feeling the familiar tug that tells him to reach out, grab Eddie, pull him back into his lap. But he never follows the tug. He doesn’t trust himself to.

He sits there, waiting for the familiar sting of rejection to bite him. He wonders if Eddie would word it anything like the comedy club that dropped him last minute had; We have come to the conclusion that the brand of Laughs-a-Lot does not mesh with the Richie Tozier image. We're sorry for the short notice, and wish you well on your journey. Richie had quit comedy the next week.

“I was talking to the audience,” says Richie, weakly. “I'm a performer. You know that, Eds.”

“When the fuck do you say I love you to your audience? You're not a popstar, Richie, you post videos on the web to thirty viewers.” Thirty is generous. Also, hold on, Eddie watches his videos? “Would it fucking kill you to be honest for once?” Not that he's ever tried it, but Richie’s pretty sure it would. Instantly. Like, head spontaneously exploding into a cloud of blood and brain bits instantly.

“Big talk coming from you,” Richie mumbles. He regrets it as soon as it's out of his mouth -- he doesn't even mean it, not really, but there's a part of him that feels bruised and sore like Eddie's kicked him in the ribs and he just wants to get him back. That's all.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Eddie asks, and his voice has lost its distinctive highs and lows, leaving it flat like a fizzless Coca Cola.

“I didn't..” He should back out here. He really, really should. But he's never known how to hold his tongue. “I just meant that, you're not really honest with yourself, are you? About liking dick. So, maybe you aren't in a position to lecture others about honesty.”

Eddie is already moving, buttoning up his shirt with one hand and sliding his pants on with the other. He's not responding, just moving so fast he becomes a blur. Maybe that's just the tears clouding his eyes. God, Richie’s pathetic. He can't believe Eddie isn’t fucking saying anything.

The silence is the worst. Eddie yelling at him until the lady next door knocks, slapping him across the face until his cheeks burn red, slamming the door with a shout, anything would be better. Anything would be better than this. The silence feels like it's eating away at him, like he's rotting and the maggots Eddie was talking about before are crawling around on him, eating away at his flesh until there's nothing left of Richie Tozier but bones.

Eddie doesn't say anything. Richie knows he has more to say, and that makes it all the more fucking worse — Eddie probably has a rant locked and loaded to whip Richie around the head with, but he won't even bless Richie with the chance to hear his voice again. Does he know that's what Richie loves most? Is it a punishment, or does he just think Richie is so worthless that he doesn't even deserve a word in response? Both would be fair, he supposes.

He pulls his pants up, zips the zipper, buttons the button, doesn't look at Richie once as he slips his jacket on and walks out the door. And then it's really quiet, and Richie can't fucking stand it, so he screams in frustration. It's just a “Fuck!”, emphatic and deep and loud, and then he shuts his mouth with a snap and realizes that there's no way Eddie was far enough down the hall to not have heard that.

Not that it matters. The humiliation of the past twenty minutes is certainly enough fuel for Eddie to never speak to him again.

Richie showers, firstly because he needs the background noise, and secondly because there's dried spunk sticking to his (un)happy trail and pubic hair. Usually he wouldn't care, but it makes him feel sick to think of leaving the evidence of what had happened on his skin. He scrubs himself clean until his skin is raw and red.

The silence of his apartment is particularly harsh tonight when he tries to bury himself in bed under comforters, so he gets up and goes to the couch again. God fucking damnit. He can't stand where he lives, can't stand how he lives, quiet and trapped.

There’s this story that Richie’s mom — good ol’ Magnificent Maggie Tozier — told him once, about himself. She’d said, you were a fussy, fussy baby. Guess I should’ve known how you’d turn out, right? You’re still fussy - but back then you would cry and cry and cry. No one could figure out why, I’d feed you and swaddle you and change your diaper ten times and none of it would soothe you. Even the regular things, like lullabies and bedtime stories, you weren’t having any of it. I’d make it so that the whole house was perfectly dark and quiet, blackout curtains in your nursery, nothing helped. You’d only fall asleep if you tired yourself out crying. But then, there was one night where you wouldn’t stop crying your eyeballs out and your father told me to stop trying to get you to sleep. So I did. I turned on the lights and Went put on one of his records and we sung along at the top of our lungs. You fell asleep not two minutes later. Sometimes, I think you were born just to be difficult.

All this to say — Richie can’t sleep in silence. He needs the noise, whether it’s Eddie’s soft breathing in his ear or the incessant honking of cars on Park Avenue. In his apartment, though, there isn’t a lot of ambient noise. There’s the dripping sound of his upstairs neighbor’s tap leaking, and downstairs there’s someone talking on the phone. Mostly there’s nothing, so Richie tends to sleep with the TV on. It drives his electricity bill practically halfway across the Pacific, but it’s either that or not sleeping at all.

Although, to be fair, Richie does his fair share of that, too.

So he fishes the remote out of somewhere between his couch cushions (there are a lot of things between his couch cushions. Eddie’d have an aneurysm if he found out — credit cards and dry shampoo and a copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray he shoved in there when he realised there weren’t any actual pictures in it) and presses the rubbery red power button, flipping to the first non-news channel he can find.

He stops flipping when those distinctive lingering chords ring through his outdated, grainy TV speakers, followed closely by a mellow voice singing “making your way in the world today takes everything you've got…”

You've got that right, Cheers Theme Song Guy. Richie thinks, I wish I knew your name, but such is the fate of uncredited artists in our cruel world, going constantly unrecognized for the things we create that impact people all around the world… another unsung hero, even though I guess you do sing, doomed to be forgotten to time and history…

Across the TV screen, the final credit fades in over the scrolling images, reading “song by Gary Portnoy”

Oh.

The theme song fades into static and tinned-can laughter, so Richie rolls over, intending to go to sleep. But his mind can't stop tuning in to the one line zingers and tell-tale sound of flirting inching on more.

He remembers when it'd been like that, with Eddie. They'd been good old regular buddies for nearly six years before they became this — though if you asked Richie he'd say they never were quite regular. For those six years, Richie had thought himself a perfect cliché, a fag hopelessly in love with his heterosexual best friend, la di da, tale as old as time, as common as a stray cat in Turkey. But around six years into Richie's ultimate exercise in self-flagellation, Eddie had gotten drunk.

They'd gotten drunk together before. They went to college together, of course Richie'd seen Eddie loopy on shitty beer, passed out on a sheetless mattress on the floor (and Richie knew he must have been drunk when that happened, because a sober Eddie would never, in his life, touch a bare, sticky, college boy's mattress, are you kidding?), all the classics.

The difference had been the wine.

Eddie had ordered wine at some fucking hole in the wall bar they'd ended up at, clinked his glass against Richie's, and got to sipping. Immediately Richie knew that the flush in Eddie's cheeks was different than the flush of a tipsy buzz. Eddie had kept glancing longways at him, in a way that sent a tingle from Richie's spine to his toes. They traveled to the dance floor together, Eddie's hands creeped under Richie's shirt and up to his hairy chest, and the rest was history.

In the morning, Richie’s Google search history had read; does wine make straight men gay. gay wine. homosexual alcohol drink. straight man have sex with man on wine. wine that makes you want dick in ass?

His research had proved inconclusive, which left him with a very curious possibility indeed; that perhaps he hadn't been a fag in love with a straight man this whole time.

Richie turns over on the couch, towards the TV, still wide-awake with memories playing on-repeat in his mind. On his grainy, slightly discolored screen, Sam and Diane are kissing, Sam with his awkward, oversized body and frumpy clothes, contrasting with Diane's soft lines, her head of curls and put-together outfit. Richie wonders if he and Eddie look like that — not exactly, of course, because they're not a man and a woman, they're a man and a man, but he wonders if everyone can tell how deeply opposite to one another they are, when they stand next to each other. Completely mismatched, not suited for romance by any stretch of the imagination.

Richie knows it's dumb to feel heartbroken. Romance was never even in the cards for them. To ever believe otherwise would be a supremely idiotic notion.

Good thing Richie’s never claimed to be anything other than an idiot.

He bears a striking resemblance to Sam, on the basis that he’s the flirter, the tall asshole, the push to Eddie's pull -- but he doesn't feel like that now. Doesn’t feel like the one calling the shots, if he ever was. Not to mention that he's spent two years basically monogamous, tied to Eddie like he's wearing a chastity belt and Eddie has the key — Eddie’d freaked out after the first time they slept together, and their ensuing first and only date had been a trip to get STD tested. Sitcom tropes are one thing, but the truth is that when you're in a testy off-and-on relationship, in real life, it usually means that one of the two is not committed to it, continuously leaves the other in the lurch, and the other is the one who's so fucking head-over-heels that he stays and waits for the former to come back.

In real life, there's no scene where you run through the airport to declare your love and have it requited. But God, Richie wishes there was. He wishes that loving someone was a strong enough force to account for every other area where you fall short.

The thing about Richie Tozier is that — and this will come as a great surprise to anyone familiar with his short stint in stand-up comedy, or even a loyal viewer of his faux-radio broadcast, or even just someone who has had the unfortunate experience of being passingly familiar with his lady-killer persona — he is a diehard romantic.

Don't laugh. It's true. He cried at princess movies when he was a child. That's how serious it is.

So, when Sam and Diane find themselves alone, embracing, and Diane tells him this'll probably be the last time they do -- you'll forgive Richie if he sheds a fuckin’ tear or two. It burns in his eyes and as it slides down his cheeks, leaving his vision blurry even with his glasses on. It sucks that even the sitcom couple, the epitome of ‘and it all worked out in the end’, even here the lovers can't have it all.

(Richie knows how it is in real life. He knows that he'll never get what he wants. He's come to terms with that.)

Sam and Diane dramatically proclaim their goodbyes.

(He just thinks fiction should be different.)

Diane leaves, and Sam doesn't go after her.

Richie understands, because he's a coward, too, but he still wants to kick the guy in the balls through the thick glass screen of the TV. Go after her! You fucking idiot! Don't you know that this is a romance, and you're the man she loves? Don't you know that she has no choice but to love you back, because that's how the story goes? Don't you know you have everything I want and you still fucking squander it anyway?

The credits roll, and so does another unwelcome, burning tear down Richie's cheek.

I hate this ending. I want a happy ending, he thinks, and promptly falls asleep.

Richie wakes up the next morning and sets himself up for a super-special episode of Richie Tozier’s Spectacular Show About Nothing In Particular. He clicks on the webcam, and his eyes look half-hollowed out, his hair sticking up every which way like he's just stuck his finger in a socket, his clothes crumpled from a restless’ night's sleep to which his background noise was Gary Portnoy’s smooth voice singing ‘where everybody knows your name, and they're always glad you came’. Richie had not found it a comforting tune by his third time hearing it. It had taken on an edge of taunting, like Gary was personally rubbing it in his face that in reality, barely anyone knew Richie’s name, and even less people were glad to see him come.

“Good morning sunshine, the earth says hello,” he says, half to his own face in the camera, and half to the auditorium full of people he imagines every time he sees that green webcam light flick on. “Yesterday’s episode was all about love. We'll call this a half episode, eh? February 14 oh-point-five. I was watching TV last night and Cheers was on and it got me a-thinking again about that horrible thing.”

“Ell - Oh - Vee - Ee. Frank Sinatra calls it very, very, extraordinary. Well, I'll tell you what, Francis, if that is your real name, you don't know jack-fucking-shit about love.” Here, he croons joylessly: “There's nothing extra-ordin-ary,” End crooning. “About your synapses firing in a certain pattern and the monkey in your brain who steers your body going ooh-ooh-aah-aah and crashing cymbals together over seeing some Average Jo-- Jane with a pretty face. Pansy Division had it fucking right with Luv Luv Luv, people do talk about love, and it does sound like blah blah blah, and they really just mean sex, sex, sex! People just want to conn-e-ect!” Here, he croons again.

The croon shifts into a groan as he buries his head in his hands, letting his fingers tangle in the curls there and pull painfully through them. He rakes his hands through his hair until it’s nothing but frizz, and thinks of the school picture day of ‘87 where Maggie spent hours trying to comb his hair down and only succeeded in making him look like Weird Al on meth. Well, more than he already does.

“Romance ain’t like no pop song on the radio, I’ll tell you what, pard'ner. No siree,” he says, emerging from his hand-cocoon a new man, complete with a Southern accent. “An’t like they show you on that newfangled telluh-vision. You’d have’ta be real fuckin dumb to buy what they’re selling you, that love feels anything like butterflies in your tummy or catchin’ snowflakes on your tongue. I never could catch a snowflake on my tongue, you know. That’s probably why romance is such a fucking shitshow for me. Having sweet romances is for the perfect people of the world. Those factory-made clones with perfectly coiled hair and nine-to-fives that the government churns outta the clonemaker and twists the key in the backs of to make all the rest of us normal folk feel like Grade-A Freaks. But we’re not! Love sucks balls! I’m not afraid ta fuckin’ say it. Love is like playing slots in Vegas, and baby, I’m going broke out here. The machine’s only pulling goddamn cherries. It’s a carnival game rigged so that the house always wins, and the house is the government and those wind-up toy clones who fall in love because they’ve never had the world hit ‘em over the head and yell LOSER LOSER, CHICKEN SNOOZER!”

“But if you look closely you can spot the cracks in the facade that they’re selling. Take Romeo and Juliet, for example. They’re what you think of when you think of roh-mahnce — roses and balconies and convoluted double entendres for raw-dogging. Whatever love is to you, it’s in that story. And it really is a nice thought, isn’t it? That despite everything that separated Romeo and Juliet, despite how different they were, and with the knowledge that their marriage would certainly ruin both of their lives — the love there was strong enough to override it all. They were willing to risk it all for each other. That is, if you ignore the last half of the play.

Because for as grand as their romance was, it still crashed to the ground with the weight of good ol’ human fallacy. And that’s what love does. That’s Really All, Folks! Shakespeare understood that love was a losing game. Shakespeare would have really jived the fuck out with Luv Luv Luv by Pansy Division.” Richie takes a breath here, finally, staring into the glaring red light of the webcam’s on indicator. “And since Romeo and Juliet, since the beginning of time probably, we’ve all been chasing that grand romance of the ages. But it can’t happen. It can’t. Not without the eventual crash. Now, that’s what Cheers gets right. Cheers knows damn well that romance is too good to be true for regular shmucks like us. Sam and Diane’ll never have their happy ending, and it’s not because they don’t want it enough — it’s because they just can’t save themselves.”

Richie falls quiet. Seconds tick onwards as the words sit and fester, weighing heavily on his mind. If this was a real radio show, like the one he worked on briefly in college for about half a semester — before they quietly let him go for being a bit too much of a loose cannon — the audio would go to one of those emergency tapes that plays to fill dead air — . But it's not a real radio show, so this will all need to be cut out of the final edit.

Richie shakes himself, and looks back at the camera.

“This is Richie ‘Master-Blaster’ Tozier, signing off again. I know this wasn't a regular installment of the show, but give me some love songs to download, eh? Just because I don't believe in the thing doesn't mean I won't still listen to them. That'd be like if when I stopped believing in Santa Claus, I stopped listening to the A Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack. That'd be ridiculous. Not to mention that I never believed in Santa Claus in the first place. I'm Jewish. I thought all my classmates were experiencing mass hallucinations.” Richie feels himself slip back into his broadcasting voice almost unconsciously, adjusting his spine and tilting his chin upwards.

“Alright, alright, I'll let ya go. Bye, bye now. Love ya. No, you hang up first!” He exclaims, moving his mouse to click the off button on the recording as he does.

With that, the silence settles back in, making itself at home in all the empty spaces in Richie's apartment, getting stuck in the corners and cobwebs. The only noise is the whir of his laptop’s fans as he boots up Windows Movie Maker.

Editing is his least favorite part of the show. Richie can't stand the sound of his own voice emitting from the computer’s speakers, grating and screeching like nails on a chalkboard. You'd think he’d love hearing the sound of himself talking, what with just how much he does it, but the way Richie talks is less out of enjoyment and more like a violent expulsion from his body in word form. If he keeps talking, if he keeps making noise, then he can't disappear. You could never forget him in a crowd. Richie’s sure of that.

He snips and cuts at the rough edges of the episode, wincing at the way his voice teeters on the edge of too earnest, too much multiple times throughout. He swears he can see his own eyes get shiny whilst talking about Romeo and Juliet. It's embarrassingly transparent. The whole video reeks of heartbreak. But it's the truth, and honesty is the best policy.

Richie moves his mouse to click upload, and then watches as the loading bar fills slowly to completion.

He can't tear his eyes away from the webpage afterwards. He reloads, and reloads, and reloads. He doesn't know what he's waiting for. Just some acknowledgement. For the little favorites counter to tick up by one, or for a comment calling him a dumb faggot, or for a simple acknowledgement that yes, he's still here, still tangible, not yet disintegrated into dust.

What he does get is this, five minutes after uploading the episode:

CLKGTR76 20 seconds ago

I disagree. Romance and tragedy are two different genres, and R&J was always a tragedy falsely billed as romance. Real life can be either. Depends what you want it to be.

Richie stares at the screen for a beat, then two. The bright image sears itself into his corneas, and he has to blink to clear the residue of it away. Of all things, he was not expecting this. He wasn’t expecting anyone to actually listen to what he was saying. Richie’s learned to expect that most of the time, the bullshit that spews out of his mouth becomes background noise, TV static to most people. No one listens for what the court jester has to say. They just wait to laugh, or boo, or throw tomatoes.

There’s only one person in Richie’s life who’s ever treated him like he has anything worthwhile to say. Eddie might bitch, might groan, might tell him he’s in the running for the dumbest person alive, second only to Michael from work, but he’s always listened regardless, as if Richie’s ever actually saying anything meaningful.

It's strange. This user, CLKGTR76, usually comments with a tone of complete dismissal. Most of the time, Richie can't tell why they watch the videos at all because they've never seemed to enjoy a single one — it's always Are the only jokes u know about dicks? —to which Richie had replied yeah, it's a pretty thick vein of comedy— or Don't rub your eyes like that —to which Richie had responded, you'd rather have me rub one out eh?— or I know you can do better impressions than that voice —which had struck Richie with an odd cord of sadness, so he hadn't responded.

So this genuine response… catches Richie off guard. Why would they give a flying-fried-fish fuck about Richie, or his dumb broken heart, and unsalvageable love life? Maybe through all these videos they've watched out of hatred, CLKGTR76 has developed some kind of a sweet spot for him. Richie imagines them as an elderly woman, maybe, from the scandalized, admonishing tone that the comments tend to take, like Richie’s somehow their personal problem. Maybe it's some widowed old lady who thinks of him as her estranged son, one who doesn't bother to visit on Christmas anymore. And boy, what a cheery thought.

It doesn't seem likely that many elderly women frequent this website, however, because it’s mostly chock-full of video diaries by college idiots.

That’s when the memory creeps in. Eddie had said -- in the throes of their argument last night -- “You're not a popstar, Richie, you post videos on the web to thirty viewers.” Richie’d had more pressing issues at the forefront of his mind then, but it snags on a jagged corner of his mind now. The thing is that… Richie never, ever volunteered that information, which meant… that Eddie had gone out of his way to look for it.

He supposes it’s not hard to find through simply typing and entering richie tozier into the Google search bar, but the thought still sends a cold shiver down his back, because Lord knows Richie’s said a million unsavory things in these videos, protected only by the knowledge that no one who knew him in real life would ever have to hear them. He thinks of the time he said “yeah, the person I love’ll never love me, either, so fuckin what, Radiohead? I’ve got some head you can radio on,” and wants to bury his head under the ground like an emu.

And this video is even worse than most— Jesus, it's five minutes of Richie on the verge of tears, painfully, obviously, a wreck, and trying to mask it with pointless ranting about shit that doesn't matter. What was he thinking? Oh God, Eddie's going to see this, and then they'll really never speak again, because Eddie’ll finally see who he is, a pathetic mirage of a man who’s spent the better part of ten years just trying to get a chance to touch him, and that's it, that's the nail in the coffin, and maybe a part of Richie finds that thought a relief. But most of him feels it tearing through his throat, agonizing like the slow cut of a wedding cake.

It's with these thoughts whirling around his brain, like the tornado that took Dorothy out of Kansas, that Richie finally makes the connection.

Eddie’s voice boils up in his mind, deeply immersed in one of those classic Kaspbrakian onward spirals, chugging forward like he couldn’t stop if he tried; Richie, that’s the Mercedes-benz AMG CLK GTR, it’s the car that brought Mercedes back into racing, it represents resilience, it represents winning, and only around twenty have been made, in the entire fucking world. I’ll probably never see one in my life, and neither will you.

The username is CLKGTR76, as in the AMG CLK GTR, adored by one Eddie Kaspbrak, who was born in 1976.

The realization hits him like a splash of cold toilet water against the ass cheek of his life.

Richie laughs out loud in the dark, echoing cavern of the closet, which suddenly feels miles bigger than it is. Of course. Of course. It makes so much sense — the formal, stilted typing style, the mostly abrasive amount of concern, the odd sort of earnestness that permeates every single word. It's all so textbook Eddie Kaspbrak, and Richie aches just to pinch his cheek again and watch him go maraschino cherry red.

The thought makes something warm and unwelcome bubble up in Richie's chest. It's two p.m. on a Tuesday, and Eddie is probably sitting at his boring corporate job in a high-rise building in the middle of downtown New York, wearing headphones, biting his cheek the way he does when he's on the verge of exploding with everything he wants to say, which is most of the time, and he's thinking about Richie. Who the fuck knows why, but it's undeniable when Richie has the evidence right in front of him, burning and bright on his laptop screen. The proof is in the pudding, and the pudding is the words sitting in perfect computerized lines on top of each other, and the proof is in Richie looking at them.

He rereads the words with fresh eyes, thinking about Eddie’s fingers clicking each letter of the big clunky keys of his unmovable desktop computer, punching out the words, aggressive with every movement.

Depends what you want it to be.

Richie knows ex-fucking-xactly what he wants it to be. He knows exactly what the warm thing burrowing into the space between his lungs is, familiar and undying with its repetitive pulses. It’s hope, goddamnit, and, despite all his attempts to tamp down its flame, it continues on burning, bright and incessant.

Richie responds, and his fingers press into each key purposefully and strongly, like he’s etching the letters into wood instead of pressing buttons;

I really hope youre right about that, perfect stranger

He shuts his laptop, and thinks about it for the rest of the day. There’s still the possibility that it’s not Eddie behind the screen, but what are the chances of that? Of Richie having a dedicated, dwindling audience of about ten viewers, one of whom shares an obsession with the same rare model of racecar as Eddie, one who shares the same tone of voice as him (if you can have a tone of voice over typed text), the same birth year as him, and the same affinity for hitting Richie around the head with his own stupidity like a brick? It seems less likely by the second.

As he scrubs a single plate with repeating circles of soap, Richie can’t help the fact that his mind starts to wander back to romantic-fairytale-land. It’s all Eddie’s fault for unblocking the clogged pipes of his heart and letting hope start to drip dangerously into his lungs. Now he can’t stop it.

Richie tries to trace the pathways of their half-hearted romance, or half-hearted tragedy, whatever, back to the beginning. Tries to imagine a world where that hope would have reason to flow.

That first night they’d fucked, under the hazy lights of some shitty club, when Eddie had gotten drunk on wine and Richie had gotten drunk on Eddie, or on bourbon, Eddie had pulled him by the collar of his shirt and whispered near the shell of his ear, words deceptively slurring to hide the decisiveness behind them; “I don’t want to go home. Not without you, Rich.”

Richie’s always been caught off by Eddie’s bare brazenness, his ability to say plainly what Richie couldn’t fess up even with two fingers down his own throat. At the time, Richie had stared openly at Eddie, searching his face for any sign that this was a joke. Richie had felt suddenly like he was being made fun of. Like a high school bully was mocking him, asking if he had a crush on him, calling him a faggot and a fairy and a freak — The Holy Trinity of F-Words that Describe Richie Tozier — and he had to pretend like he didn’t care about any of it. It rolls right off my back, I’m rubber and you’re glue, sticks and stones. Play it cool, Tozier. Don’t let them see your underbelly.

“Am I being Punk’d? Are you Ashton Kutcher wearing a realistic Eddie Kaspbrak skinsuit? You legally have to disclose if you’re Ashton Kutcher wearing a skinsuit, if you don’t it’s entrapment,” he’d blurted in one long breath.

Eddie had wrinkled his nose, illuminated by the disco ball lights for a moment like they were his spotlight and he was about to sing the grand solo. “Your breath smells so fucking foul, and I still want to kiss you,” he’d said, with an air of disgusted wonderment, like he couldn’t believe the strength of his own wanting. Or just his own desperation, to stoop this low.

“Yeah, well, you smell like… frankincense.” Richie had leaned in deeper, his skin flushing hot and cold, their faces now more next to each other than looking at each other, noses brushing each other’s necks as Richie made himself hunchbacked to wrap himself around Eddie. “And myrrh.”

They were swaying, slowly, in a sort of awkward two-step, so as to not seem terribly out of place on the dance floor, while I'm A Slave 4 U blasted over the speakers.

In the present, Richie hums along to the song as he scrubs a stubborn cheese and egg stain from the outside of a mug (he’d attempted to cook an omelette in the microwave. It had exploded spectacularly in a blaze of glory. Everything Richie had eaten for the past week had tasted yellow.

Baby, don’t you wanna dance up on me? I just wanna dance next to you… Richie’s humming, wistfully. Trust Eddie to make him nostalgic for Britney Spears of all things.

“That’s my cologne.” Eddie had deadpanned, all those years ago, circling his arms around Richie and pulling him against him, hips-to-hips.

“You wore cologne for me?” Richie couldn’t help himself from grinning as he tilted his head down over him, creating a private curtain of hair that shielded the two of them from the outside world. At the time, he’d thought himself an honorary Beatle with his Shagadelic haircut. “All for lil-ol-me? You shouldn’t have!”

“I wear cologne every fucking day. It’s insane that you haven’t noticed it before. Does your nose work?”

Of course Richie’d noticed it before. He notices everything about Eddie, always. He doesn’t know how Eddie hadn’t noticed, how when Richie wasn’t barfing up bullshit, he was staring at Eddie, or trailing after him like a cartoon character after an apple pie on the burnt, woody scent of Eddie’s cologne, or how he hung on to every word like gospel. He’d just never been allowed to say it out loud before. All bets were off now.

Eddie must have known on some level that he had Richie wrapped around his finger. Why else, then, would he have been so bold in asking? He must have known Richie never would have said no. Maybe it’s inane to dissect a drunk person’s words and actions like this, but drunk actions are sober thoughts, aren’t they?

Richie doesn’t know what to make of it as he loads the dishwasher. In the back of his mind, he considers John Cusack holding a boombox over his head to declare his love. Thinks of Love, Actually and Sam running after Joanna in the airport. Thinks of picture perfect fairytales with happy endings and wants so badly for it to be true.

Brrring-brring.

The phone rings. The dangerous hope in Richie's chest springs into flow at the sound, unbidden and warm, pouring over the spaces between his ribs. It’s gotta be Eddie. Who else would be calling him at 3 goddamn PM? Richie reaches for the receiver, and then pauses.

“Hi, Edster. No. ‘Ello, mate! Definitely not,” he mumbles under his breath, to absolutely no one. He flips through tones; “Hey. Hey? Hey! Uh. Richie speaking, you have reached Madam Tozier’s House of Dildos.” (the opening to an abandoned stand-up bit that continued with him listing descriptors of dildos: we’ve got veiny, springy, prickly, sturdy, fluffy, zany, spiffy…) “Fuck no. Okay, um, alright. Hello, who is this? God, no. I sound like a housewife living in a haunted house.” He lowers his voice. “Hey. What’s up?”

The telephone rings its fourth ring. Richie snatches it from the receiver before it stops, holding it to his ear.

“Eddie?” is what comes out of his mouth, high, reedy, and desperate.

“Rich, you’re not gonna believe the meeting I just had.” comes Bill Denbrough’s voice, overlapping over Richie’s moment of weakness, barrelling right past. Richie is first shell-shocked, and then grateful that Bill’s too absorbed in his own shit to have noticed that Richie said anything at all. “The publishing company is telling me they can’t take my manuscript because it’s too long. Can you fuckin’ believe it? I told them it’s a horror novel, not a short story, so what did they expect. I think they know it’s good, they just don’t wanna publish a first-time author with something most of the industry wouldn’t be able to recognize if it was shoved halfway up their asses — talent. It’s bullshit, whole industry’s halfway underwater and they don’t want to take a chance on a promising young writer, like they’re drowning and they just keep scooping buckets of water into the damn boat— I just came up with that metaphor! Right now! I should write that down... Hey, you’re quiet, Richie.”

“Well, sorry, Billy-o, when was I supposed to get a word in? That shebang was about as densely-packed of a run-on sentence as your novel is. Heyo!” (Talking to Bill induces a state in Richie called Billism wherein he must start adding O’s to the ends of words in an attempt to appeal to Bill’s plain heterosexual sensibilities.)

“If you want my advice, I say: scrap it. Start over. Ditch the werewolves and try your hand at writing a feel-good story about a plucky boy wizard who’s got a boner for a big hairy giant. Or something. My sources are telling me fantasy romance is all the rage nowadays. The people don’t want to read about pitiable victims getting eaten, they want to read all about the human condition, which is all about fucking someone — or something — you abso-lutely should not be sticking your dick in, no siree.”

“Sounds a little derivative. I think the boy wizard thing’s been done before.”

“Not like this it hasn't.”

“Alright, man, I’ll jot it down,” says Bill, agreeably, because that’s just how Bill is. He’s the kinda guy that’s friendly on the edge of being severely irritating for it. His face is always plastered with a shiny white smile. It’s offputting, too, because what Bill likes to write is anything but sunshiney. Richie thinks that’s probably why they’re thick as thieves, have been since grade school — they have matching pits of darkness inside of them. Although, sometimes he thinks he might be the only thing keeping Bill from going off the deep end. Richie’s darkness manifests in more of a tortured sadness, like it’s a Biblical punishment for not believing, a damnation or some shit — Jewish, remember? — but Bill’s manifests more like a scary killer clown. He does worry occasionally that Bill might finally snap and kill someone if these publishing companies keep rejecting his manuscript. In the papers, they’d call it “The Publisher’s Worst Nightmare: A Promising Young Horror Writer Who Decided to Create His Most Haunting Story Yet….” and, if nothing else, the publicity would for sure, finally, get people reading Bill’s manuscript.

“How’re you doing, Richie?” Bill asks, after a moment. Richie grits his teeth.

“Just peachy, Billy. Like, really, top-notch. My numbers came in and I’m a lotto winner. I met a sweet babe and we’re getting hitched in Vegas. Sayonara, Denbrough, you’ll never hear from me again!” Richie responds, picking at a pimple with the hand that’s not wrapped around the receiver, “Hey, I just had another idea for a novel. This one’s free-of-charge for you, my friend, but when you hit it big I want a chocolate fountain and an ice sculpture of Jake Gyllenhaal. So imagine this: a classic busy businessman, more like a business boy than a man really, meets an unemployed but dashingly charming comedian. They fall into a- er, sexual relationship, due to the potent sexual tension they share upon making eye contact. One night, in midst of passionate coitus, the dashing love interest confesses his love. The business boy, terrified of his own sexuality, flees the scene… but the love interest chases after him, shows up at his job with a bouquet of roses, and the businessman can’t resist his charms and gives him a second chance, yadda, yadda, yadda, the lovers consummate their love in a supply closet and live happily ever-fucking-after.”

On the other end of the line, Bill clears his throat. “What?”

“You know, like Brokeback Mountain. But set in New York. With a happy ending.”

“So nothing like Brokeback Mountain?”

“I’m tellin’ ya, Denbrough, you’ll regret not writing this story. Fairy-tales are about to be the biggest genre in literature, by which I mean, of course, tales about fairies.”

Bill’s quiet for a second too long, and Richie knows he’s said something a bit too distasteful for his delicate heterosexual sensibilities.

“Richie,” says Bill, stiffly, “Is this, you know… like a cry for help?”

“No, man. Crying for help is fuckin’ gay.” Richie clears his throat, “But it’s a good ending, right? I mean, better than the shit you write. I always hated how you just kill ‘em all off and say The End. Would it be so crazy if they survived for once? Would it be so crazy if they triumphed and cheered with glee?”

“It’s horror, it’s not meant to lift your spirits, man,” Bill responds, “But sure, I guess, for a shitty romcom that’d be a great ending. It’d really show the spirit of human triumph, how people will do anything for love… it’s not realistic, but hey, who needs it to be? It’s for watching and crying with a bucket of ice cream after a breakup because it makes you believe there’s some great romance out there waiting for you.”

“So I should go after him?”

“Huh?”

“Sorry. So, the uh… love interest should go after the business boy?”

“I mean, it wouldn’t make much sense if he didn’t,” Bill says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “You getting into screenwriting or something? Hey, I always said you needed to put that imagination to good use. I’m always here if you need any advice, y’know. The biggest thing you should know is to show, not te—”

“Alrighty-o, Billy Shakespeare.” Richie cross-talks loudly, over the end of Bill’s sentence. “Good talk. Great talk. That idea’s all yours, bud, good luck with the manuscript, love ya bud, not in a gay way, no, I love you more, no you hang up first, alright bye-byegottagocallagain.”

Richie hangs the receiver back on its switchhook with a definitive click. He can hear Bill’s tinny voice trying to interrupt as he does so, but he’s already barrelling to the front door with one prime directive overriding all other orders in his mind: Go After Him. Grovel at his feet, beg for a second chance, charm him with your wits so he can’t even imagine leaving you alone in the quiet again.

It’s nearly four p.m. now and hopefully Richie’ll be able to intercept Eddie at the train station before he goes home at five. Eddie has a car, of course, a Mercedes-Benz he loves like a baby, but he takes the subway to work every day because he prefers it to being stuck in rush hour traffic that makes a fifteen minute drive into a fuckin’ half hour one, Rich, and frankly I don’t have the time and/or patience to deal with these slow ass Enn-Why-Cee drivers who switch lanes like they’re playing Mario Kart and don’t even have the dignity to use their turn signals when they’re doing it.

Richie hurtles himself out the door with his shoes half-tied (he’d gotten about as far as ‘bunny ears jumped into the hole’ before he’d said “Fuck it, I don’t have time for this, the love of my life could be walking out of my life forever and I’m sitting here singing about bunnies. Getcha head in the game, RT”). He shoves past people on the sidewalk, marching a one-man wedding procession all the way to the subway station. He realizes about two blocks too late that he forgot to bring a coat. The brisk February winds are biting at his fingers and nose and tips of his ears and turning them all red. He shoves his hands into the pockets of his jeans and marches on.

Eddie should be easy to spot in the pulsating mass of people, Richie reasons, jogging down the steps. He just needs to look downwards for the top of someone’s head, dark hairs stiff with gel coating every strand to stop its stubborn curl, someone clad in a dark puffer coat, walking swiftly, with big strides that look ridiculous with his little stubby legs. Finding him should be easy. It’s the catching him that’ll be hard.

Eddie Kaspbrak is a slippery guy. Richie feels bad for the unlucky private assassin who'll inevitably be hired to find him when he pisses off the wrong Wall Street guy and is forced into hiding.

Richie pushes into the crowd, and immediately sees the coiffed brown hair, stuck upwards with gel to tame it out of the face, and that puffer coat that dwarfs a small frame, makes Eddie look like a teddy bear. Richie reaches out, one hand on each of his shoulders, and spins him around, already opening his mouth to spew his why-we-should-all-forgive-richie-tozier tight five into his face.

It’s not Eddie. It’s not even a man. It’s a woman with short, gelled hair who blinks at Richie in askance.

“Uh. Sorry. I thought you were someone else,” says Richie, limply.

She looks him up and down, wrinkles her nose, and nods as she turns away. It’s a lot of expressions in a split second. It doesn’t do well for Richie’s confidence, being hit with yet another rejection, this time completely unsolicited.

He can’t really blame her, though. It’s a completely rational reaction to seeing Richie Tozier for the first time— first, shock and consideration as you process it all, the glasses that take up half his face, the grease on his hairline, the rumpled state of his tee-shirt and his awkward proportions he never really grew out of after puberty, and then complete disgust overtakes as the picture comes together, pimply and hairy as it is.

Richie sighs and pushes his glasses up his nose with a clammy hand. Now, in the throes of people, all he can see is moving colors around him. He's facing towards the crowd and they're moving towards him all at once, clad in hats and thick coats that obscure every identifiable feature.

It was a fucking dumb idea. Richie'd known that. It's never the same as it is in the movies.

“Richie?!” comes a baffled exclamation behind him.

Richie considers squeezing his eyes tight and pretending not to be here, but his body is already being spun around by firm hands. “Edster!” he says, in mock-surprise.

Eddie stares up at him, evaluating. Richie can almost hear the echo of his voice, reading out that familiar checklist of brain injury symptoms.

(Are the eyes following the light?

Not really, they're oddly fixated on the pimple on Eddie's nose.

Is one pupil larger than the other?

A little bit, but that's just because Richie has a different prescription in each of his eyes.

Is the patient delirious?

Remains to be seen.)

Satisfied with whatever he finds in this evaluation, Eddie finally asks, “What the fuck are you doing here?”

Richie can't bring himself to say it. He opens his mouth, then closes it, then opens it again, like he's the Pac-Man of inhaling whatever germs are floating around in the grimy subway tunnel air.

“Uh,” he starts, and once he starts he can't stop, “I imagine the same thing you're doing. I'm taking the train, as is my right, and duty, as a tax-paying Enn-Why-Cee citizen. They run this shit with my hard-earned money, you know. I make a point to ride it at least once every month just to make sure I'm getting my money's worth.”

“You're not wearing a coat.” Eddie registers. His hands have not yet left Richie's shoulders, and Richie feels positively bolted to the ground under the weight of them. “You were planning on staying out in the below-freezing weather without a coat?”

“Didn’t know you cared,” says Richie. Foot, meet mouth.

Eddie sighs, pulls his hands off of Richie’s shoulders. Richie considers dropping to his knees and grovelling at Eddie’s feet please don’t leave me please please please I dont know what I’ll do without you. He decides against it.

Eddie glances at the watch sitting prettily on his left wrist, and grimaces at the position of the clock hands. “Okay. Well,” he says, looking at Richie again now. “I’ve got a train to catch.”

“Wait-- waitwaitwaitwaitwait.” Richie pleads at the back of Eddie’s gelled hair as he turns away.

“What?” Eddie asks sharply, turning his head to the side so that Richie can see him in profile, the annoyed twitch of his eyebrow and the stressed lines along his cheek from where his nose is permanently scrunched.

“Can't you fucking, just, slow down?” He pleads. “You never stop moving.”

“That's ironic coming from the ADD poster child of the century.” Eddie snaps, which is fair, but the way that Eddie is restless is very different to the way Richie is. Eddie doesn't fidget, doesn't bounce his leg or snap his fingers incessantly like Richie had as a kid. It's more like Eddie's whole body is vibrating with constant energy, like if you look away one second he'll be gone the next. He's always powering up. For what, Richie couldn't tell you.

Eddie's on the move again, and Richie's biting at his heels. For such a small guy, he's surprisingly swift on his feet, although to Richie, who is intimately familiar with how athletic Eddie can get, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise at all.

Richie reaches out desperately with a hand, looking to grab any part of Eddie that he can, because the crowd is closing in around them now and he'll be damned if he lets Eddie be the one that got away.

His hand closes around the loop on the back of Eddie's coat. He clings to it like a leash keeping him tethered to Eddie's side. That is, at least, until Eddie comes to a stop in front of the train’s closed doors. The kinetic energy left in Richie’s body has nowhere to go except forward, and he keeps moving, chin colliding with a dull thunk on the back of Eddie's head.

“Ow! Fuck!” Eddie exclaims, in synchrony with Richie's “motherfucker!”

Eddie turns back towards him, eyebrows raised incredulously, a burning fire in his eyes. Not the fun kind. “What do you want from me, Rich? I'm just trying to get home,” he says, impatiently, one hand nursing the sore spot on the crown of his head, the same soft one Richie was touching last night.

“I thought I made it pretty clear what I want!” Richie exclaims, then, hands flung open wide, creating a wide berth around them. Subwaygoers skirt around the edges of his freakishly long arms, throwing the two of them annoyed looks. If possible, Eddie shrinks deeper under the bulbous puffs of his coat, like it'll swallow him whole if he tries hard enough.

“It’s been pretty embarrassing for me, actually, how obvious I’ve been about what I want. I’m pretty sure everyone in the tri-fucking-state-area knows what I want. I don’t know how you don’t,” continues Richie, pushing the words out fast and quick, like there’s a ticking bomb strapped to his back that’ll go out if he doesn’t say it soon enough.

The furrow in Eddie’s brow only grows deeper. “Sorry, was I supposed to read your fucking mind? You hate when I ask what you want, it’s always, oh, Eds, whatever you want, and you never want to talk about anything meaningful, you just waffle about fuck-all, and when anything gets too honest, dare I say too committal for Richie Tozier, you back away like a cornered dog. If you really wanted me to know what you want, you would’ve just told me. But you don’t. Ever.”

Richie just stares, hands held palm-up in disbelief, outstretched in front of him.

“Tell me, Rich,” says Eddie, stubbornly, “just say it. If you’re not a fucking coward.”

“Alright. Okay. Fine,” Richie’s hands clench into fists, dropping by his sides. “If you really want to know.”

“I do,” says Eddie, a crude imitation of a wedding vow, which, in turn, inspires Richie to put on his very own crude imitation:

“Oi, govenah, I fink you’re quite fit.” Richie watches Eddie’s face twist between disgust and surprise, and plows on. “I’m prop-ah infatuated with yous, love. I fink you’re just the bee’s knees, alright. I fancy you, even. I’m head-over-heels in love, babes. That’s what you wanted to hear, innit?”

Eddie doesn’t have a chance to respond then, because they’re both near swept off of their feet (shit, that’s another good entendre for being in love. That’s the problem with having to improv your love confession. It never sounds as good as it does in your head.) by the crowd of people flowing in through the train’s open doors. Eddie reaches out and grabs Richie by the collar of his tee-shirt and pulls him inside.

Richie hadn’t been planning on taking a trip today, not really, but that’s the way it goes with Eddie Kaspbrak. He’s a tornado that exists just to blow through your life and leave you winded on your ass.

The subway car is full to the point of bursting, so they stand, hands encircled around the same pole between them.

“Shouldn’t you hate this?” Richie asks before Eddie can say anything. “This is germs galore. The Live Aid of germs. The World Cup of germs.”

Eddie snaps his fingers in front of his face. “Focus, Tozier.”

“Ten hut.” Richie says, dumbly saluting.

“Look, I…” Eddie’s fingers flex around the pole. Richie wonders if they’re growing clammy with sweat like his are. “I’m scared of this. I don’t think I’ll be any good of a partner. You… you know how I am. I don’t know how you can still want… me, not when you know how I am. But… I want you too. I just don’t know if I can say it back. What… what you said.”

Eddie’s words are punctuated with a sort of stilted, choppy formality, the polar opposite to his usual onward-hurtling speech. It’s unnerving.

“Oh,” Richie says, truly taken off guard. “That’s, uh… y’know, okay. I was, uh, pretty prepared for you to spit in my face and call me a fag, so, that’s awesome, actually.”

Eddie looks taken aback. “You thought I’d call you that?”

“No! No,” Richie scratches the back of his neck. “I guess… I was just in my head about it.”

“Well, it's not.. it's not true, you know. I've never been ashamed of you. I'm just… scared. Not scared of you, even, but of… I don't know.” Eddie lets the words drop uselessly from his mouth. For the first time since Richie's known him, he seems sincerely lost for words.

“Yeah.” Richie agrees. “Hey, what stop d’you think I should get off at?”

Eddie looks up at him tiredly. “Come to mine.”

Richie doesn't need to be told twice. “Aye, aye, Captain.”

The funny thing is, Richie’s really never been to Eddie's place stone cold sober.

You'd think, at some point in their eight years of rocky friendship, Richie would have landed at Eddie's place to watch TV, or play cards, or whatever it is well adjusted people in their 20s do with their friends. Mentally, Richie had just categorized it as off-limits, taboo, this nice high-rise apartment with marbled countertops and a fucking central heating system. He can’t blame Eddie for not wanting to bring his pet 30-year-old fuck-up here, at least not under the light of the day. He's only ever seen it stumbling in at one a.m. when Eddie’s dragged him home from whatever hole-in-the-wall they'd stationed themselves at to pretend to watch whatever big game. As soon as the sun rises, he's out the door, racing against the clock, like he's Cinderella and his dress will turn back into rags at eight a.m. sharp, and then Eddie'll know who he really is.

All sober affairs occur at Richie's apartment, where Eddie shows up whenever he wants, knowing that Richie will always be there, because where the fuck else would he be?

Eddie’s apartment even has a real lobby, carpeted in a dark, maroon carpet that makes Richie think of red velvet cake. “They really shouldn't have so much carpet here,” Eddie complains. “It just collects dust and dirt and mold, and that shit festers.”

“Why, Oi nevah seen such ah foine place as this, Mistah Kaspbrahk!” Richie blabbers out, lisping his words like he’s missing significantly more teeth than he actually is. “Oh, golly, oh, gee!”

“God, that little orphan boy Voice is so shitty, Rich, it’s going to make my ears bleed.”

“Excuse me, mistah, me name is Archie Sootyfoot, on account of oi don’t got no parents of me own, and no shoes too, so ever’one just calls me by what my feets look loike after a long day in the fact’ry!”

Eddie rubs his temples with one hand, in an incredibly put-upon manner, pressing the elevator’s up button with the other. “Maybe it was a mistake to invite you here. I’m going to lose my security deposit if my neighbors complain that I’m kidnapping 19th-century cockney children, you know.”

“Huh. I thought my Voices were so shitty they’d make their ears bleed. Unless you really think my voice is good enough to convince ‘em?”

“It can be both shitty and distressing, can’t it? If nothing else, they’ll probably fucking call a wellness check on me.”

The elevator dings open in front of them just as Richie opens his mouth, probably for the best, because he’d been about to launch straight back into a classic Sootyfoot tirade.

Eddie gestures for Richie to enter, a flourish that says you first. Richie feels distinctly like he’s being wined and dined — romanced, even, for the very first time. He flutters his eyelashes and plays coy, shuffling into the elevator. Eddie grimaces.

“What a gentleman you are, Sir Eddington,” he says, with a light princess’ lilt. “Taking me to up to your tower. I'm flattered, really. How nice, the elevator moves so smoothly! And no dog shit outside! What a paradise!”

“You've been here before.” Eddie responds drily, pressing the button on the interior of the elevator that reads 9. He pops open the sanitizer that he always keeps handy in his pocket, squeezing a glob of the liquid into the palm of his hand.

“Not like this,” responds Richie, realising too late that the high princess tone has dropped from his voice, leaving it unsweetened, no added preservatives, pure, honest, Richie Tozier, and no one wants that. That just won't do. He compensates by bursting out into song: “A whole new wooooorld…”

Eddie's groan is drowned out by Richie’s voice, now-sanitized hands glued to his face.

“A dazzling place I never knew…” and Richie doesn't know what possesses him then, but he feels that tug, that gut-punching feeling, the very same one that he's learned to carefully ignore his whole life, the one that tells him to reach out, touch him, bring him closer. He presses past the knee-jerk I can't, because, he thinks, it's not for me, it’s for him. It's for Eddie. He doesn't want Eddie to be scared anymore. That's what he tells himself, so it doesn't feel as selfish as it is, when his hands press onto Eddie's, prying them off of his face. “But when I'm way up here…” There's a shake in his voice, almost imperceptible.

Richie expects to feel Eddie's hands slip out of his, like sand in an hourglass, but they stay clutched in Richie's fingers.

This is fragile, Richie thinks. I can’t lose this. Not again.

He draws Eddie in by his wrists, pulling him in like the tide pulls in the sand. Finding the groove of the song, he starts to shimmy, all the while crooning, “It’s crystal clear that,” he moves Eddie’s arms as he moves his own. It’s like dancing with the dead weight of two sausages, but he’s committed too hard to drop this now. Eddie’s watching him, face carefully blank. “Now I’m in a whole new world with you…”

At last, something twitches in Eddie’s disinterested face. He tugs on Richie’s hands, moves his shoulders in a sort of jilted swaying motion. Richie watches color rise to his face as he does, like he's deeply embarrassed to be entertaining Richie's whims — but he keeps swaying anyways.

“C’mon, it's a duet! Sing with me, Eds!” Richie encourages, feeling that familiar hit of getting Eddie to loosen up. Nothing feels as gratifying as pushing Eddie to step even slightly outside of the 1x1 rigid box he tends to live his life in. Richie wonders how the dipshits (Eddie's words, not his) at his uptight office job would feel, knowing that their most perfect employee of the month gets his kicks hanging with unemployed college-dropout failed comedian turned bartender-in-training Richard “Who-Let-The-Dogs-Out” Tozier. They'd all probably blow a gasket. What does it say about Richie that he's incredibly pleased by that thought? It makes him feel strangely like a corrupting force, but not in the ruining lives way, more in the sexy reveal-your-true-desires way, the bad boy archetype who corrupts the sweet church-going girl under her mother’s nose.

“Absolutely fucking not,” Eddie replies, which is fair. Richie was already pushing his luck.

Richie picks up the song where he'd dropped it, bursting into, “No one tells us no!” His voice cracks on every high note like he's sixteen years of age performing at a talent show. It's awful, but he'll do anything to keep Eddie dancing, swaying in circles in the awkward two-step they've fallen into. “Or where to go…”

With a flourish, Richie drops one of Eddie's hands, raising the other over his head to encourage him into a spin. Eddie flushes something fierce, his dropped hand clutching into a fist as he executes the twirl with the most put-upon frown on his face, spinning jilted under Richie's arm. Richie whistles and whoops the whole time.

The ding of the elevator interrupts their dance. The doors push open on the still image of Richie with his hand, entwined with Eddie’s, both hovering above his head, Eddie in his starch stiff suit turning back around to face him. They look utterly ridiculous.

On the other side of the doorway, a middle-aged woman with a child on her hip peers back at them. She blinks, seemingly as unable to come up with a reaction as the two of them are.

Eddie snatches his hand away like it’s been scorched, third-degree burn, and Richie cracks one of his classic crowd-pleaser grins, toothy with the buckteeth Wentworth had insisted on pressing braces onto for two long years right smack-dab in the middle of high school. The child giggles back at him. Eddie shuffles past the mom, muttering mortified apologies. Richie just waltzes past, unable to let the mild embarrassment of being caught bring him down from the cloud he’s walkin’ on.

The thing about living your whole life as Richie “Whataburger” Tozier is that you get extremely used to public embarrassment. He’s not afraid to be caught with his pants down, not afraid to be seen vomiting in a gas station toilet. In the realm of making a grand fool of himself, Richie’s a goddamn pro, because at least when you’re a dancing clown no one thinks you’re a freak. They just think you’re funny.

He knows it doesn’t feel that way for Eddie, though.

As long as Richie’s known him, Eddie’s top-of-the-list life goal has been Blend Into The Crowd. In college, they’d once had a particularly enlightening conversation about their respective majors, Business Economics versus Music Education — take a wild guess who each belonged to — in which Eddie had uttered the sentence “I’d be mortified to have a major that no one else on God’s green Earth does,” and Richie had responded “Ah, we are not of the same breed, mi amigo,” to which Eddie had replied “Yeah, I’d fuckin’ hope not.”

Richie glances over at Eddie’s face, nervously scanning it for the telltale signs that he’s pissed off — the twitch of the vein in his forehead, the crinkle of skin between the furrow of his brows. Richie stuffs his hands in his pockets to keep from reaching out again -- to keep from ruining the one good thing he’s maybe ever been allowed to have.

It’s usually hard to tell, with Eddie’s perpetual frown, if the other is actually mad or not. Richie’s seen enough eighteen-year-old cashiers cowering under his gaze to know that. But he considers himself somewhat of a Kaspbrak connoisseur, this far into the ten-year research experiment he’s tentatively calling The Eddie K. Observation Project, and the expression on Eddie’s face now isn’t anger. His mouth is pinched, but pressed into a carefully straight line instead of downturned. His eyebrows are high on his face, instead of furrowed deeply, crinkling the skin of his forehead into accordion folds. There’s a crease by the corner of his eye, betraying the smile in them.

He’s holding back a laugh, Richie realises with a start, feeling giddiness start to rise into his chest like helium filling a balloon. He could just float away with it.

Eddie’s silent as they make their way down the hall to his apartment, but this silence isn’t sharp or stinging. It’s bubbling with restrained laughter, boiling to the top of the pot. It threatens to spill over as they reach the door. Richie presses a hand over his own mouth, watching the twitch of Eddie’s eyebrow in response. Eddie’s refusing to spare a glance at him, like looking at Richie’s funny shaped face will send him right over the edge.

Eddie inserts his key into the lock, turns the doorknob, and pushes the door open to step inside.

All it takes is Eddie tilting his head to look over at Richie, beckoning him in — Richie snorts, and then just breaks out into peals of uncontrollable laughter. Eddie’s the one who reaches out this time, pulling Richie by the forearm, dragging him into the apartment. Then he cracks, too, and Richie’s granted the gratifying sight of Eddie’s shoulders shaking in time to Richie’s hiccupping laughs.

“Christ,” Eddie says through short huffs of laughter, “Now my neighbors are really gonna think I’m insane.”

“It’s the truth, ain’t it?” Richie replies, looping his arms around the other man’s shoulders and spinning them around so that Eddie’s back is against the now-shut door.

Eddie looks up at him, peering through his eyelashes, still shaking slightly with laughter, and Richie instinctively glances away, overcome with the warm, comforting weight of the other’s gaze. He thinks of how Eddie couldn’t say I love you back to him — Richie’d almost been relieved, like thank God, Eddie doesn’t love me back. He doesn’t know what he would’ve done if Eddie had said it. Probably drop to his knees and start grovelling, for surely the end times had finally come.

But Eddie’s looking at him softly, affectionately, now, and it’s inspiring the same sort of panic in him. Richie’s feet grow steadily colder, like he’s standing at the altar and being asked to say I do.

“Uh,” he starts, wracking his brain for something to say. When he fails to think of something, he instead leans back down to meet Eddie’s mouth with his, maybe even slip his tongue in, if he could be so lucky, but Eddie stops him with a hand on his chest.

“I just want to hang out. Like we used to, in college,” he pauses here. ”Maybe a bit more making out.”

Richie grins. “Fuck yeah. Shots and clubs, let’s go!”

“We hardly even did that shit in college and you know it, Rich. We spent most of our time cooped up in the dorm playing fucking Street Fighter 2 Turbo on your beat up SNES.”

“The life of kings, really.”

Eddie wriggles his way out of the circle of Richie’s arms, stampeding his way to the bedroom. Richie follows, trying to break the Pavlov’s Dog conditioning he has that makes him think, instinctively, that he’s following Eddie to his bedroom for the purpose of fulfilling his most base, animal desires. Although, he supposes, playing Street Fighter is not that far off from what they usually do. It’s all just two naked men wrestling, if you really think about it.

Eddie goes to change into his pajamas (a matching silk and monogrammed set), because I’m not sitting down on my bed in these fucking gross germy clothes and neither should you. Richie finds an old pair of sweatpants he left here once, and shimmies into those.

Eddie’s PlayStation 2 sits in a corner of his room, mostly untouched. It blends in with his bland, neutral-colored decorations. Richie’d probably think it was an avant-garde art piece if not for the two controllers stacked neatly next to it.

Eddie hooks it up to his TV, presses the on button.

The thing that has Richie feeling leagues more like he’s twenty instead of thirty, is the way they perch on top of Eddie’s bed, controllers in hand. They might as well be sitting in beanbag chairs, eating Doritos and dirtying the controllers with the dust.

They play three games. Eddie beats him at the first two, and then quits when Richie, quite frankly, destroys him the third time.

Eddie lays back on his bed, legs dangling off the end. Changed into his monogrammed silk pajamas, he looks softer than Richie’s used to, rid of all the hard lines of the suit that he always needs to be peeled out of, like some sort of stupid banana.

Richie lays back, too, body tilted towards Eddie’s so that he can watch him. He never wants to miss a moment of the Eddie K. Show.

(It’s his favorite. He tunes in every night. He falls asleep to the theme song.)

Eddie’s head turns towards his, big brown eyes wide open and searching, and suddenly they’re just looking at each other, noses so close they’re almost brushing.

“Hey.” Eddie says.

“Hi.” Richie responds.

Even after some ten-odd years of knowing each other, of Richie cataloging the every flick of his nose or twitch on the hard line of his eyebrow ridge, there are still moments when Eddie is totally and completely unreadable.

For example, right now, Richie can’t quite tell if that look in Eddie’s eyes means they’re about to kiss, or if they’re about to fuck, or if Eddie is going to tear him to shreds because double-jumping is cheating (even though it isn’t). It’s a determined, stubborn look, the kind you’d get on your face if you were planning to jump off a bridge onto a busy freeway, but it’s an expression Eddie wears on constant repeat, like choosing what color tie to wear (the options being ‘maroon’ and ‘scarlet’) is an event of equal severity as, perhaps, shooting yourself in the head.

In any case, the silence stretches on for a beat longer than Richie can handle. His mouth opens on pure instinct, ready to play a rerun of Tozier’s Top Hits (come one, come all, come short, come tall, from boogers to buttcheeks, he can do it all!) when Eddie finally lurches forward, a disjointed, mechanical motion, and seals his mouth wetly over Richie’s.

“Okay, wow,” mumbles Richie, into the kiss, absolutely and totally dumbfounded.

The kiss is sweet, simple, chaste even. It lasts maybe five seconds, but ithits Richie with the intensity of a grenade to the dick.

The thing is — Eddie doesn’t do this. Ever. He’s never the one to make the first move. He always plays black in the proverbial chess game of their sexual relationship, never white. It’s not something Richie has ever been bothered by; he’s happy to have even a piece of Eddie bestowed on him.

(And beggars can’t be choosers, after all.)

Richie holds very, very still. He almost thinks that if he moves then maybe the illusion will shatter beneath his hands. This scene is like something straight out of some dumb daydream that he lets himself entertain for a maximum of five minutes a day, or else he’d drive himself insane, putting himself through the endless torment of what could be.

But right now, it’s not some delusional idea of what could be, it’s what’s actually happening in real life. It’s happening now, and Richie looks like an idiot, just lying here with his mouth gaping wide open, looking for all the world like a dead fish lying in the sand, instead of like someone in love kissing the man he’s in love with.

So, he props himself up on his elbows, puckers his lips, and goes in for another big ol’ smoocher.

Eddie’s hand tangles in the grown out hair at the nape of his neck. Richie’s heart is beating at the confines of his ribs. He thinks to himself, okay, game face on, Tozier, pull up your big boy pants and fuck him like a man. Prove yourself. Prove that you’re worthy of his majesty Edward Frank Kaspbrak coming down from His throne to knight you with a sword on your shoulder. Prove that you’re worthy of seeing him face to face instead of kneeling to kiss his feet. If you play this right, you won’t have to live as a peasant ever again.

Invigorated, Richie plants his arm on the other side of Eddie, and promptly rolls on top of him, legs bracketing his narrow hips.

“Ow, fuck!” Eddie yelps, “Give me a fucking warning before you try to crush my fucking ribs, would you?”

“You’re a tough guy, you can take it,” Richie responds, grinning down at him. It’s not an entirely unfamiliar position. He can recall, even now, dark nights in college dorms, wrestling on the floor in a weak attempt to imitate a Street Fighter throwdown. On their lanky, twenty-year old bodies, it looked more like an octopus with eight pale skin-colored tentacles writhing on the ground than any kind of pro wrestler move. Back then, it was the closest to Eddie that he ever let himself be.

He drops down for another kiss, this one open-mouthed. Eddie had time to brush his teeth, apparently, somewhere in the five minutes he took to change out of his suit, because Richie’s taste buds flood with that familiar minty freshness. It’s good for Richie’s hygiene, kissing Eddie. It’s just practical, really; it’s the most toothpaste he’s had in his mouth all day.

Richie presses down, snakes a hand between their bodies and fumbles at Eddie’s zipper. Eddie mumbles something into his mouth and it sounds like beechee. Richie bites at Eddie’s lip through the mumble, pushy and hungry and fucking insatiable, so he barely gets the word out.

“Richie. Richie,” he’s repeating when Richie draws away. Yeah, baby, say my name, Richie thinks, “Richie.”

Then there’s a hand on Richie’s chest, pushing him away. Richie feels a rubber band of tension snap between them, and then he’s drawing away from Eddie, dazed and confused like he’s been under water.

“Can we not?” Eddie says, his voice now clear instead of muffled, “I mean— I think it would be good. For us. To not have sex for a while?”

Richie blinks.

No sex.

Not having sex. With Eddie. Together. Not having sex together.

Richie and Eddie, sitting in a tree, N-O-T F-U-C-K-I-N-G. Richie and Eddie, sitting across from each other in perfect criss-cross-apple-sauces, hands folded politely in their laps. He would almost laugh out loud at the image, if not for how devastated he is by it.

“Oh. Okay. Yeah,” he pauses, unsure where to go from here, “I can leave, if you want.”

Eddie makes a visceral little noise at that, and it goes through Richie like a gunshot. His hand is still clutching at Richie’s shirt like Richie’ll bolt if he lets him go.

“No, Rich. I don’t. Want that. Unless…unless you want to leave.” Eddie looks suddenly uncertain, his eyes shifting away from Richie’s. “But I meant what I said, you know. I like you. I want you here.”

“But you don’t want to have sex with me.”

“Richie.” Eddie’s voice is soft, understanding. “Of course I want to have sex with you. But that’s not, like, all you are to me. I don’t— I don’t have any other friends, man. This— you’re— important to me.”

Richie hates it, hates that tone. Eddie’s never treated him like a feral animal before. Like he’ll bite if threatened.

That’s not inaccurate to how he feels right now, though; like he’s cornered, in a cage.

For the past two years, all they’ve done is fuck.

It’s an easy enough routine. It’s simple, reliable, like riding a bike, or riding an Eddie. And Richie’s good at it, or at least he likes to think he is. He hasn’t had any complaints yet, with any of his past partners, Richie’s always prided himself on being able to tell exactly what they wanted, and to give them exactly that. Richie can always read a crowd. He always knows what trick to pull out of his hat, what zinger to land, what move to make. And it does it for him, really, being able to be exactly what his partner needs.

But if it’s not sex, then Richie’s got no fucking clue what Eddie wants from him anymore.

The rug has been yanked out from under his feet, and here he is now, standing naked in nothing but his heart-patterned boxers.

“Okay. Then—” he starts, and then exhales in frustration, “then what do you want with me?”

“I—" and Eddie seems almost as lost for words as he is, “I don’t know exactly. Just… to be close to you, I guess?”

Eddie’s flushing deeper than Richie’s ever seen him before, red creeping up his neck steadily.

“Why?” Richie asks, befuddled. “Like, what’s the point. What’s in it for you?”

“Jesus fucking Christ, Rich, I don’t fucking know, I don’t know why the hell I want this,” Eddie inhales, and he shakes Richie by the shirt that he still has clutched in his now-warm fist. “But I do! Okay? And that’s not gonna change, so— so you better get fucking used to it.”

The eerie echo of a wedding vow hits Richie again. There’s a finality in Eddie’s tone. They’re on the precipice of something, but Richie doesn’t know what.

“Okay, okay,” he responds. Now he’s the one placating Eddie. “Whatever you want, Eds.”

At this, Eddie lets out a long, put-upon sigh, and Richie knows he’s said the wrong thing again.

Maybe this whole taking-it-steady thing was a bad idea, because Richie habitually says the wrong thing whenever he opens his mouth, like he’s trying to ruin his own life for the hell of it. He isn’t, but you’d be surprised.

“I don’t want it to be ‘whatever I want’,” Eddie pushes out, finally, with that constipated look on his face. “I want it to be whatever you want, too. What do you want, Rich?”

The expression on Richie’s face flickers. He doesn’t know whether to laugh or burst into tears, and lands smack dab in the center with a toothy grimace. “Uh,” he wants to crack a joke. It’s really a great question. He could think of a million funny things to say — your mom’s pussy being at the tip-top of the list, but the way Eddie’s looking at him makes him falter.

No one’s ever asked Richie that question, save for maybe bitchy baristas and bullies at school who’d spit out “what do you want, Tozier? Huh? Come to beg for a knuckle sandwich?”, so forgive him if it makes him pause a little.

What does Richie want?

Well.

It’s not like he doesn’t know.

Richie wants a lot of shit, but he figures this probably isn’t a genie-bottle situation where Eddie can grant whatever he wishes. Even if it was a genie situation, it’d probably backfire pretty horrendously if he said I want a romance with a happy ending. Knowing his luck, he’d probably end up in a fucking Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind scenario. Jesus.

Richie wants Georgie W. Bush to roll up the FMA and shove it right up his rectum. Richie wants Spongebob-shaped Kraft-branded mac & cheese for dinner tonight. Richie wants two million U.S. dollars in cold, hard cash no change.

Richie wants lots of things. That doesn’t mean he’s gonna get any of them.

Still, Eddie’s looking at him, expectantly. Like he really thinks something worthwhile is going to tumble out of Richie’s mouth.

Richie forces himself to think about it. Think about what he wants that Eddie could give him, even if the thought alone makes Richie feel like some kind of soul-sucking leech.

The first thing that comes to mind is so brain-meltingly mortifying that Richie’s knee-jerk reaction is to punt it out of the window the second it dawns on him.

He'd thought, horrifyingly, immediately: I just want to be held.

He mentally shakes himself like an Etch-a-Sketch to banish the thought as quickly as it came.

But it’s too late. It’s a burning brand on his side, marking him for slaughter. Richie just wants to be held. It has nothing to do with sex and it has barely anything to do with romance. It’s a simple, human want. Cavemen in leopard-print dresses had probably thought to themselves, Grug want hold. Grug crave skin-to-skin contact. Stop now, thank very much, Grug need somebody with a human touch.

It’s so dumb, so uncomplicated, that it feels like saying I want my mommy. It comes from that same deep-gut place, when you’re crying so hard it’s coming out in dry heaves and you just think I want to go home, even if you already are at home. But it’s not really home you want to go back to. You want to go back to a memory, something that’s embedded itself deep under your skin, an ingrown hair that no matter how much you pick at it, it won’t spring free. It’s stuck inside of you, out of reach but constantly dug for.

After that first thought, they just keep comin’ and they don’t stop comin’:

I want to be loved. I want my hand held. I want to fucking spoon. I want body heat. I want skin. I want to sleep together. Like, sleep together, in the same bed, not even fucking.

When the thought of sleep crosses his mind, Richie’s whole body sags with exhaustion. He hadn’t realised it before now, but he’s so… tired.

He groans and knocks his head against Eddie’s chest with a thunk.

“I want to go to bed,” Richie says, and if he was still lucid enough he’d spare some energy to mentally berate himself at how childishly it comes out, on the edge of a whine, but as it stands, he feels like a spring roll that gained sentience. Whatever that means.

“Okay.” Eddie responds, and then, with a heaving throw, rolls Richie’s body off of his. It’s the gentlest, sweetest touch Richie’s ever felt. “Let’s go to bed.”

Richie doesn’t need to be told twice before he’s crawling under the covers. Eddie gets up to flick off the light switch, and Richie can only tell when he gets into bed by the sound of shuffling blankets and fluffing pillows.

For all the sleeping together they do, they really don’t do much actual sleeping together.

When they do end up in bed next to one another, it’s always been strictly facing away. It would just be too much, Richie thinks, to blink awake and be able to see Eddie asleep, looking at once vulnerably young and impossibly old.

But there’s never a routine to it. It’s just a mutual understanding; turn away, conk out, bish, bash, bosh.

So, naturally, operating on pure instinct, Richie turns onto his side, towards the cold edge of the bed that faces the window.

He never feels farther away from Eddie than like this; a foot of space between them, both of their bodies held perfectly taut to keep from crossing the line.

They start speaking at the same time. Richie says— “How do you sleep in this big ass bed alone?” (he has a humble ‘full’ size mattress, paling in comparison to Eddie’s royal ‘queen’ size.) at the same time that Eddie starts, “Why are you—?”

“Oh.” Eddie pauses, “You first.”

“I was just saying, like, how do you sleep in such a big bed, man. You probably get lost just putting the fitted sheet on. It worries me.”

“You make it sound like I’m fucking Thumbelina.” Eddie sighs. “For your information, I usually sleep holding a pillow and with a pillow behind my back. It’s dumb, but I get so paranoid that if I turn my back something’ll get me, you know?”

“The great Eddie K fears the monster under the bed?”

“No, dumbass. I fear burglars.”

“You think a pillow’ll protect you from a burglar?”

“It’s the illusion of safety, alright?” Richie’s grinning dumbly now, grateful for the cover of darkness. “And you know it’s rude to face away from someone you’re talking to, right?”

“Ah.” Richie turns back over, blinking owlishy in the dark.

When his back meets the mattress, Eddie is lying right there, facing towards him, breathing soft in his ear.

“Jesus, Eds.” Richie hisses out, arms suddenly drawn tight over his chest. “Warn a guy next time.”

“Okay. I will. Next time,” and it’s impossible to miss the little pleased note in Eddie’s voice, like the cat that got the canary. Next time. Huh.

So that’s it, then. It’s settled, set in stone. They’re doing this again. They’re going to keep doing this. Whatever this is, these meaningful conversations lit by moonlight. And make-out sessions on the side.

(And Street Fighter.)

It doesn’t sound half bad to Richie. Not bad at all, he reasons. He can trade sex if he gets to have this, still, have Eddie, in whatever way he can have Eddie.

“So...” Richie swallows around a lump in his throat. Tries to think of a way to say I love you without burping it up into Eddie’s mouth again. “D’you feel safer with me here, then? From burglars, I mean. And things that go bump in the night.”

Eddie snorts, a soft sound with his nose buried halfway under the covers. “I think my pillow is still doing more protecting than you.”

“What the hell? I’ll have you know I was voted Most Likely To Get Punched In The Face my senior year of high school. I’m tough stuff, cookie.”

“Sure.” The back of Eddie’s knuckles tap at Richie’s chest, and suddenly he’s overwhelmed with the closeness. He couldn’t tell you what it is, exactly, that possesses his body, but Richie reaches out and grabs Eddie’s hand before it can retreat.

He really has to figure out how to say this. Richie opens his mouth and nothing comes out. He shuts it again.

Eddie’s fingers curl into his, slow and tentative. They’re treading water.

“I wish—” Richie starts, then stops, then starts again. “God. Fuck. I wanted to put this smoothly. I was gonna make a joke about— you needing to feel safe, and needing something to hold, and I was gonna say, well you should probably hold me, then. And we were gonna spoon and it was gonna be a fucking romance for the centuries. But I fucked it up, didn’t I, huh?”

The words sit in the air for a moment. The darkness makes everything seem slower. Richie can almost see the way the closed-captions hover under his face, camera focused on him so the audience can’t see Eddie. Can’t see how he reacts to the confession. Cut to commercial.

“I don’t care what it was gonna be,” Eddie says, and he sounds annoyed. “why does everything need to be so— choreographed? Where’s the Live fucking Studio Audience, Rich? It’s just you and me.”

With that, Richie lets his arms droop again, and shifts onto his side to face Eddie, gripping his hand like a lifeline the whole time.

“Yeah, well, I mean, that’s the problem, isn’t it?” He wishes he could stop himself here, but once Richie gets to talking, there’s nothing to be done about it. “It’s you and me. It’s you. God, Eds, don’t you get it? Even if there was a Live goddamn Studio Audience, I wouldn’t give a shit what they thought. As long as I could put on a good show for you.”

“Richie,” and Eddie’s nosing his way under Richie’s chin, throwing a leg over top of Richie’s. Holding him close, holding him tight. “I love every show you put on. Why else would I stick around this long?”

“I dunno. The benefits? Dental insurance?”

“If you’ve got dental, you’re not using it well.”

“Ow. That’s hurtful. Of course I don’t have dental.” Somehow, Richie’s nose has found its way into Eddie’s hair.

Eddie hums. “Yeah, I thought so,” and then he says something that is an electric shock to Richie’s system, jolts him right awake, “If we could get married, I’d let you get on my insurance.”

Eddie has never so much as uttered a word in the vague direction of marriage. It’s the elephant in the room, of course. They’re hitting their thirties. Eddie has a career and a nice apartment in the heart of New York. Marriage would be the next logical step. Just like it goes in the ancient proverb; first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in a baby carriage.

(Richie has to pretend the idea of Eddie pushing a baby carriage, a little bundle of joy wrapped in frills and lace doesn’t make a brand-new set of caterpillars crack out of the thousands of eggs in Richie’s stomach, and they’re squirming around, forming cocoons in there, and if he doesn’t swallow a gallon or two of gasoline soon, they’re gonna turn to butterflies.)

Personally, Richie’s resigned himself to a life of being a distinguished bachelor. The fun uncle.

(The funcle, if you will, although if you won’t, that’s okay too.)

After enough time, people stop asking when you’re finally going to settle down, and start coming to their own conclusions. And Richie’s good with that, really. He likes seeing his sister’s kids on Hanukkah, likes being able to say “wow, you’ve gotten so big!” every year. He likes when he gets to buy them water guns and loud-ass toy drum kits, and when Suzie gets to tell him you’re a real fuckin’ bad influence, you know that?, and when he gets to answer, taking a drag from the cigarette she offers, that makes two of us.

But if marriage is what Eddie wants, then by the Lord’s mercy, Richie’ll march right up to Washington right this moment and demand, with his gun to every congressman’s head: sign that fucking bill. It’s what Eddie Frank Kaspbrak wants, and what Eddie wants, he’ll get. You got that, punk?

“Edster, for you, I’d make it happen,” he says, with all the grandeur of a prince who could snap his fingers and get it done, the easy confidence of a guy who’s got Bush waiting on the other line.

The laugh that Eddie barks out is slightly muffled by the way he has his face practically pressed between Richie’s tits, but Richie feels it anyway, reverberating through his ribs like he’s nothing but a speaker, made to to amplify Eddie’s every noise. Richie thinks he’d be pretty happy with that life, if Eddie was just pressed up against him like this all the time, speaking into the hollow space between his lungs, making his morning phone calls with the receiver held up to Richie’s spine.

The sound tingles through Richie, and he immediately wants more of it. He continues: “We’ll sign those courthouse papers, and I’ll wear a veil and you’ll wear that godforsaken suit, and we’ll honeymoon in Greece and consummate our marriage just like this. No sex! Just a big, great ol’ hug.”

Eddie huffs out another laugh. “You know I don’t mean no sex forever? Just like— I don’t want it to be the only activity we ever do.”

“Nah, Eds, no takebacksies. I’m celibate now. Like a nun, only I’m spiritually married to you instead of Jesus. I’m divorced from Jesus.”

“Aren’t all Jews kind of divorced from Jesus?”

“Don’t know about the theology on that one. I’ll get back to you.”

“Okay, great. I’ll be waiting.” Then, softer: “I always wanted to get married in a hotel lobby. It was the most extravagant place I could think of.”

“Now that I can do, for sure. I’m great at walking into hotels like I own the place. Hell, the way I dress, I’m always lookin’ like I’m on a vacation.”

“We’ll have our first dance in one of those fancy clear elevators.” Eddie says, definitively.

“Aw, jeez. What have I done? Now you have an elevator fetish.”

“I do not.” Eddie is adamant.

“It’s okay. I got a buddy who can punch out a tune on the grand piano while we dance.”

(The buddy in question being, of course, none other than William James Denbrough, who took a couple piano lessons in high school. Bill wouldn’t mind. Richie knows he’s a romantic at heart, even if he seems ultimately more taken with blood and guts and scary ghosties. Good ol’ Willy J, as Richie likes to call him, would always have his back, and Richie would always have his. That was how they rolled.)

Eddie just hums in response, head now tilted slightly upwards, nose in the divot between Richie’s collarbones, so that the sound vibrates throughout Richie’s larynx like it’s coming from his own vocal cords.

Richie can tell Eddie’s drifting to sleep by the way his breathing slows, and the thought, inexplicably, sends a dash of panic through him.

Usually, Richie can find some way to quiet his brain enough to sleep. Focusing on some white noise off in the distance does the trick well enough. Eddie’s apartment being in the heart of the city helps; there’s noise for miles, honking in every direction, music playing faintly as people drive past.

But tonight, Richie’s mind is running at an average rate of about 100 thoughts per second, and if left alone with them he might just spontaneously combust from the speed he’s running at. He needs Eddie’s rhythmic onward drone, the relentless steam train way he talks when there’s no one to stop him. It’s the only noise that’ll cure Richie’s ills. It’s the antidote to his woes.

“Hey, Eddie. Eddie. Eddie,” he urges, hushed but hurried. Eddie groans at him, which Richie takes as a sign of life. “Would you take my last name?”

Eddie doesn’t respond, for a moment. Richie thinks maybe he’s fallen asleep again, and is about to deploy his second line of attack (giving him a wet willy) when he pipes up again:

“I guess so.” Eddie’s voice is growing more graveled with each word, sleepiness dragging him down. “Or we could hyphenate, but it would be an obnoxiously long name to sign every time. Especially with your middle name, can you imagine? Richard fucking Wentworth Kaspbrak-Tozier?”

“Contrary to popular belief, Fucking is actually not my middle name.”

Eddie breezes past this, already jetting off to his next point. “And you better not smash my face in a damn cake. I hate that shit. And I don’t want a red carpet entrance, I just want to… walk in. And I don’t want to hear my coworkers give awful speeches.”

“God, is that the sound of my heart beating?” Richie thumps his chest with a hand for emphasis. “We must be a match made in heaven. We hate all the same things! Oh, be still, my beating heart.”

It’s only somewhat hyperbole. Truth be told, Richie feels like he’s spent the whole day being spun in circles, and this being the way it ends feels too good to be true. His heart feels dangerously light in his chest, like it’s been pumped full of helium and he’d just float to the ceiling without Eddie’s solid presence at his side, holding him down, holding him close.

Eddie’s thigh is still pressed over both of Richie’s. The guy is as flexible as ever, but Richie scoots a little closer to make it less of a stretch, lets his own legs slot into place with Eddie’s.

It all feels like too much. Too close for comfort. The point of no return, somehow, even though they’ve been far closer than this before. They were closer than this yesterday.

It’s different, though. Letting their bodies relax into each other instead of straining against one another. There’s no pulling away and pulling back in. It’s just this. Just two bodies intertwined.

Richie thinks again about dying here in the night (they’d be found sooner, certainly— Eddie’s never missed a day of work in his life. Mr. Johnson would call an immediate wellness check.), and he’s sure when they found the skeletons, they wouldn’t be able to tell their bones apart. Wouldn’t be able to figure out where one of them ends and the other one starts. Just a fucked-up two-headed unidentifiable beast. Not even human in nature. A cryptid, really. They’d call it The Brooklynite Brute.

It’s just funny, Richie thinks. How simple it all ended up being.

“You know, I can’t sleep alone,” he mumbles into the crown of Eddie’s hair. It smells like fresh moss on the forest floor. “Can’t sleep without the noise.”

“You sleep alone most nights.” Eddie says. He’s kind of bad at whispering.

“Nawh, I sleep with my buddies Sam and Diane.”

“Who?”

“You don’t know Cheers? What the fuck is that TV for?”

“I know Cheers,” Eddie huffs. “I’m just not on first name basis with them.”

“Keep on talking, baby.” Richie flutters his eyes shut with that.

“What the fuck am I, a glorified radio?” Eddie asks, but doesn’t get a response. “Of course you can’t just sleep in silence like a normal person. That’s insane, Rich, I hope you know that.”

His breath is puffing on Richie’s cheek with each word, bright and warm.

“You asleep?” He asks a second later, soft. Richie doesn’t respond. He’s close enough to sleep anyway that he doesn’t want to rouse himself with the nails-on-chalkboard sound of his own voice.

“Well. I hope you know I meant what I said, earlier. Everything, I mean.” Eddie’s saying, now, unbidden, like he can’t help himself. “I’m fucking terrified right now. But I want this to be good, and I want you to— want me to want you, and I don’t want it to feel like some kind of— hostage situation. Or like, I’m your housewife from the 1950’s and I’m withholding sex from you in return for disrespect. I don’t know shit about love. You probably know that by now. This is the closest I’ve gotten, so cut me some fucking slack, okay?”

Eddie’s voice has dropped deep and low. He’s not talking to Richie, not really, not like he actually wants Richie to hear, but Richie can, anyway because Eddie’s lips are practically brushing his ear with every word.

Richie’s wide awake now. How could he not be?

Richie keeps his eyes shut though, and extends a hand to meet Eddie’s. Eddie gasps minutely when he intertwines their fingers. When he finally speaks, Richie’s words are simple and quiet but reverberating through his chest: “Okay.”

The phone rings the next morning, Mr. Johnson on the line, and it seems to Richie that nothing has really changed at all. Not where it matters, anyway.

Eddie slips out of bed like he’s still trying not to wake Richie. It’s a good effort. Richie watches through his own eyelashes as Eddie hurriedly flits around the room. Somewhere in the flurry, he finds the time to jot down a quick note. Leaves it on his nightstand.

Richie jolts up in bed as soon as Eddie leaves, giddy as a kid on Christmas. His very first sticky note from Eddie, oh boy!

It reads; You can stay if you want. There’s milk and cereal. Coffee in the machine. - EK

That’s about as good of a love confession as Richie’s ever gonna get.

Chapter Text

2006.

Mr. Johnson’s gonna kill me, Eddie thinks as soon as he wakes up. It’s not an unfamiliar thought to have at all.

You see, Eddie’s got this thing. An internal clock that’s counting down the seconds, every day, to the end of the world. Like he’s got a Doomsday clock burning a hole in his mind, only the doomsday it’s counting down to is the moment that he has to be at work.

Today especially, because there’s a man in his bed. A sweet and funny man who is allegedly in love with Eddie, who had crawled back into his life last night and held him so gently Eddie hadn’t known what to do with it, but just a man nonetheless, taking up valuable space in his mind. And his bed. He can’t kick him out, but he mentally packs Richie Tozier into a box, folds him up all nice and square.

None of it matters. Because Mr. Johnson’s gonna kill Eddie. Because it’s Wednesday morning and there’s no neatly stacked report on his desk.

Ideally, Eddie would’ve handed it in yesterday, because the report is all typed out, Eddie’s not that much of a slacker, it’s just not printed, but he’d been — preoccupied at the time. It’s a rookie mistake to tell yourself you’ll deal with anything tomorrow, because when tomorrow comes, it’s already too late.

Eddie picks up the phone at the first ring. “Kaspbrak speaking.”

“Good morning, Mr. Kaspbrak.” Mr. Johnson replies. It’s become customary for him to call Eddie every single morning, after a few close calls where Eddie was almost late to work (due to unforeseen Richie-related circumstances). He says Eddie just needs to be reminded, sometimes, which Eddie is grateful for. Not many bosses would go out of their way like that for an employee, but Mr. Johnson is always willing.

“Morning, Mr. Johnson.” Eddie replies, hurriedly, holding the phone pressed to his ear with his shoulder while he pulls a clean pair of socks on. “I know, I meant to get the report to you yesterday, but the work got ahead of me. It’s my fault.”

“Mmh. Don’t let it happen again.”

“No, of course not. This was a one-off, I promise.”

“Okay. I’ll see you.”

“Alright, thanks, Mr. Johnson.” Eddie replies, quick and automatic. And then, just as automatically, he adds: “I love you.”

Huh.

Eddie hangs the phone back on the hook, shellshocked and rigid. His eyes are fixed on the rounded lump of Richie in bed, his eyelashes softly fluttering as the sunlight filters over him in bed.

There’s nothing Eddie wants less than to go into work right now. For the first time ever, he wants to crawl back into bed. Wants to press his face into Richie’s stupidly large, warm chest and let the phone ring and ring and ring.

There’s no fucking way Eddie’ll be able to look his boss in the eye after saying he loves him. But that’s fine, he reasons, he doesn’t usually spend a lot of time looking him in the eye, anyway. Eddie likes it that way.

And besides, Eddie’s never missed a day of work in his life. He’s not about to start now.

He checks his watch; 7:20 A.M. as he mutters shit, shit, shit, fuck, all the way out the door.

When he grabs a seat on the subway car, he tries very hard not to think about invisible viruses crawling over his legs, which leaves him with only one other thing to think about. A couple things, really, but they’re all attached to one big, pulsating thing that he hasn’t been able to look directly at.

I love you.

Everyone says it. It’s not even uncommon to say it to the wrong person — a child in class often mistakenly calls their teacher Mommy, so why is this any different?

If this was an argument, Eddie would say it just is, but if this was a court case, that would not pass as a valid defense. Of course nothing is ever that simple, in the real world. Everything Eddie does is intentional, logical, reasonable. And he never just says something like I love you. Not to just anyone. It’s simply not a phrase that’s in his lexicon.

That hasn’t always been the case, though. There was a time when saying I love you came as naturally to him as rain does during April in Maine, every time he hung up the phone.

It was the only thing she would ever let him end the phone call with. Otherwise, she'd call and call and call, filling Eddie’s voice mailbox.

Eddie feels a strange ache pulse in the center of his chest.

Maybe the I love you had been a sign from his subconscious.

Stepping off the train onto the platform, Eddie Kaspbrak has to ask himself that fatal question.

Do I miss my mother?

He can’t. He never could. He spent eighteen years, and nine months, attached to her by umbilical cord. Longer, even, if you considered that decade wherein she still called him every day, reliably consistent screeching down the line.

It’s only been two years without her. A fraction of the time that he spent with her voice in his ear. He supposes, maybe, it’s natural to miss something that was second nature to you for so long. It’s natural for the lobster to miss the barnacle, maybe, if only because it got used to its weight on its back.

Eddie doesn’t pick up any of her calls anymore, but he still pays all of her medical bills, of which there are many. She still forwards each to him in the mail, and he sends back the checks. She used to leave him voicemails, until his voicemail box was full. He doesn’t delete any of them, because despite not speaking to her, he is not under any misconceptions that she’ll be around forever. One day, she’ll be gone, and he’ll want to hear her voice again. That’s why he keeps the voicemails.

Maybe they wouldn’t be the best testament to her memory, though. The voicemails she’d sent him directly after that fated call had included more foul words, more theories about his sudden turn to homosexuality, and an endless barrage about how he hadn’t returned her I love you. Eddie’d listened to them all that first week, and after each one, fell into bed with Richie again, like it was a method of self-balancing. Like somehow it’d all equal out, between the sex and the voicemails, into a baseline where Eddie was just okay. Not good or bad. Just okay.

You’re my baby, I carried you in my womb. Maybe you forgot, Eddiebear, but I remember, clear as day, how little you were. When you were a toddler, oh, you were just the sweetest thing. Whenever I told you off, you’d just burst into tears and tell me how much you loved me, and how could I do anything but forgive you then? I miss when you would do that. If you told me you loved me, now, maybe I would forgive you, but you won’t. Do you have any idea how much you’re hurting your dear beloved Mommy? How much it hurts to hear the baby you nursed and fed, who sucked the nutrients out of your body, tell you he doesn’t love you? Every baby boy loves his mother. She’s his very first love, the very first breasts he touches, the very first vagina he’s inside. Maybe that’s why you’re a fag. ‘Cause you don’t love your Mommy.

The words echo in Eddie’s brain as he walks into the gray concrete building he works in, scanning his work badge at the door. ‘Cause you don’t love your Mommy. It’s not true. Of course he loves her. He never stopped. He wouldn’t know how.

It would be easier if Eddie didn’t. If he didn’t love her, he would probably be able to answer her calls, and trust himself enough to tell her you’re hurting me, and if you loved me like you say you do I think you would care.

It’s killing me, she’d said, in the last voicemail that Eddie had bothered to listen to. It’s going to kill me faster than the disease, Eddiebear. You’re killing your mother. Matricide. That’s what it is. That’s what you’re doing. It’s matricide.

That’s all behind him now, though. He’s not Eddiebear right now. He’s not even Eds, or any one of the many asinine, horrible nicknames Richie has for him. He’s Mr. Kaspbrak, and he has a report to print out.

“Good morning, Mr. Kaspbrak,” says Daisy who works the front desk, as bright as ever. Eddie smiles back his pressed-lips, tight smile. It’s nothing like the grin he wears when Richie makes him laugh against his will, the way it tears through his face no matter how stiff he wants to hold himself. Eddie doesn’t like to smile with his teeth, most of the time. He uses whitening toothpaste and has never had a cavity, but there’s a pervasive yellowish tint to them anyway. Sonia hadn’t cared about dental health as much as she’d cared about infectious diseases, so for a while Eddie hadn’t known how to floss. It doesn’t matter, though, with Richie. Richie’s teeth are crooked and misaligned and he’s beautiful for it, and it makes Eddie not mind his own so much.

Eddie tries to refocus his thought process, but now he’s in the elevator pressing 4 for his office floor, and this reminds him of Richie, too. Like a parasite he can’t get rid of. Maybe that’s just how it feels to be loved. Maybe it always feels like something you can’t shake. But he’s never wanted to shake Richie.

Then again, he hadn’t wanted to shake Sonia, either. It took him twenty-seven years to get to that conclusion, and if she had never said anything cruel, he would have called her every day for the rest of her life. Or his own, whichever ended first. Was Richie capable of saying anything as cruel as she had? The chances were low, Eddie decided as he opened a spreadsheet full of percentages on the square block of a computer that sat in his cubicle. But it wasn’t a possibility that could be ignored entirely.

After all, just two days earlier, in the midst of their argument, Richie had said some things Eddie couldn’t believe had come out of his mouth. Big talk coming from you. You’re not really honest with yourself, are you? Not the outward cruelty that Sonia spoke with, sure, but with the same secret judgement that dug into that space under his ribs, made him feel distinctly like he was being X-rayed, or laid out on a surgeon’s table. After all, Eddie had always been an easy target. Sensitive. Delicate. He was easy to hurt, and it was even worse with people who loved him.

He’stired of people assuming that they knew him better than he knew himself.

Richie could be forgiven for it, though.

He’d apologized. Sonia never had.

In all those voicemails, that was what Eddie had been waiting to hear.

Searching between all those words that she said, looking desperately for any hint that she regretted saying any of it. Looking for any reason to let her back into his life. Because he loved her. Even now, even still. Why the hell else would he keep paying those goddamn medical bills?

“Kaspbrak,” says Larry at the water cooler when Eddie goes to fill a cup.

“Mr. Jones,” he replies cordially.

“Man, you don’t have to call me that. It’s not like Johnson’s breathing down your neck making sure you’re being professional all the time, you know that, right?” Larry claps a hand on Eddie’s shoulder. Eddie nearly flinches, but he’s spent a lot of time training himself not to react to this exact brand of camaraderie. He was surrounded by it in college, and had known that his career would only be more of it. That’s just how business majors are, he would say, if he hadn’t been one himself.

But in college he’d always had this unshakable feeling that he wasn’t like the rest of them at all. A wolf in sheep’s clothing, or maybe the other way around. Like maybe one day, sitting in the back of his Econ class, he’d get called on to answer a question, and the heads of everyone in front of him would swivel 180 degrees, and their pupils would narrow into slits like lions’ eyes, and they’d be able to smell his weakness. And then they’d just tear him from limb to limb, probably. Eddie always gets that feeling around Larry. Like he’ll sniff it out if Eddie so much as twitches wrong.

Eddie stays perfectly still, prey animal trying not to alert a predator to its presence. “I know,” he says stiffly. “It’s a sign of respect.”

“Sure,” responds Larry, agreeably, letting his hand leave Eddie’s shoulder. Eddie breathes an internal sigh of relief and then power-walks away as fast as his legs can take him.

His next stop is the printer room, where he’s sent over his report analyzing key datasets for the company’s last quarter. The report is about ten pages long, and when he arrives the machine is printing the last page. The pieces of paper sit warm in his palms as he collects them and shuffles them into a straight pile.

Then comes the part of his day he’s been dreading the most. Eddie glances at the clock. It only reads ten A.M., but he considers pacing in circles until his lunch break so he doesn’t have to take the papers to Mr. Johnson’s desk just yet.

He has to talk himself up to it by reminding himself that delaying the inevitable won’t make it any less inevitable. Ultimately, Eddie’s fear of the report being late(r) wins out over his fear of looking his boss in the eyes. Eddie’s good at his job; he’s not going to let that change just because he made an easy slip-up with his words.

Still, the pit of dread sits heavy in the space between his ribs as he makes his daily pilgrimage to Mr. Johnson’s office.

The office has two clear windows on either side of the door. Eddie knocks, then steps to the side so that Mr. Johnson can see him when he raises his head from his desk.

Mr. Johnson nods, waves him inside. Eddie follows the direction dutifully, and places the stack of papers on his desk.

“The report, Mr. Johnson. Sorry again for being late.”

Mr. Johnson looks up at him from where he’s sitting behind his mahogany desk. He’s a stout man of about fifty-five years old. Only a couple years older than Eddie’s mother. He has a daughter Eddie’s age, Eddie knows. His hairline has receded dramatically, and the lines of his forehead are stark and evident as he raises his eyebrows at Eddie. Eddie tries to tame the rush of shame that burns through him.

“Timing is of the utmost importance, Mr. Kaspbrak. You know that. What do I tell higher-ups when the data for last week is being sent this week?”

“I know.” Eddie just says.

“I asked you a question, Mr. Kaspbrak.”

At that, Eddie does flinch. His eyes flicker down to the pages on the desk. He thinks of saying I don’t know, I’m sorry, and letting his lip wobble and eyes fill with crocodile tears. That always used to work. Maybe not so much now when it’s done by a man pushing thirty.

“Tell them it’s my fault,” he says, when he's confident that his voice won’t wobble.

“No, I won’t. It’s my failure, too, as your boss. I shouldn’t have allowed it to happen in the first place. You’ve always needed your reminders to keep you on track. I reminded you once, but apparently, that wasn’t enough.”

“Okay.” Eddie replies, unsure where this conversation is heading but relieved that Mr. Johnson doesn’t seem mad at him. In fact, Mr. Johnson’s lips are pressed into a thin line of clear displeasure, but his eyebrows are furrowed too, something in them that’s almost softly concerned.

Eddie blinks rapidly. He must be imagining it, or misreading the expression (as he is often wont to do). Mr. Johnson doesn’t feel worried for him, Mr. Johnson is his boss, and sure, he cares about all his employees, and maybe he wonders what’s going in their lives, but Eddie doesn’t think he’s personally invested enough in Eddie’s life to think that— something’s wrong just because of a slight change in his daily routine.

“I, as your supervisor, can only assume that the change in behavior can be attributed to the fact that something else is taking precedence over your work.” With this statement, Mr. Johnson breaks eye contact and brings his reading glasses up to sit on his nose from where up until now they have been hanging on a chain around his neck. He looks up at Eddie through the lenses, eyes now slightly enlarged behind them. Eddie feels like he’s being put under a microscope, his life contained in a petri dish. "And, not as your boss or supervisor, but just man to man, I have to ask, Mr. Kaspbrak: is everything alright?”

If Eddie was frozen before, he’s downright petrified by this question.

Of course he’s doing alright. He’s honestly doing better, he thinks. Lately he feels a little more like a real adult, one who goes out on weekends, exploring his city and really living in it, instead of some sort of— background character in a sitcom who only works and goes home.

But there’s something else, nestled in the undertones of the question, that causes Eddie to hesitate before he answers. It’s that thing again. The concern. It’s not quite pity. Eddie knows pity, he knows coddling, and this is not that. Unlike Sonia’s hysteria, this is logical. It’s understandable enough, the way that he came to the conclusion that Eddie may not be alright. The concern isn’t suffocating, doesn’t press down on the fragile place between Eddie’s ribs until they start to cave. It’s a gentle pressure, and Eddie feels something inside of him start to creak open.

Here’s the thing.

Eddie never met his father.

Frank Kaspbrak died when Eddie was two years old, from a cancer of the heart. Eddie knows the story like the back of his hand. He knows everything about the man that anyone could possibly ever learn, from his favorite baseball team (the Orioles, if you can believe it— he went to school in Maryland before he came to Maine, and up until his death still watched them play on the MLB broadcast) all the way down to the oatmeal he ate.

Suffice it to say, Eddie’s done a lot of imagining about the man. Considering what he would be like, a man who loved his mother, and he’s landed on this:

Frank Kaspbrak, unlike Sonia, would have been an astonishingly quiet, level-headed man. He would have smiled when Eddie told him about his Madonna CDs, instead of calling him a sissy. He would have told Eddie, over the phone on that vital phone call, I’m listening, I’m here, I’m glad you told me, son. He would have taught Eddie to play baseball instead of telling him he was too delicate for it. Frank would’ve asked him, every day after he came back from school, how ya doing kid?, and Eddie never would have had to cushion his words for fear of upsetting his father.

Mr. Johnson hesitates at Eddie’s silence, and then speaks up again. “I won’t hold it against you, whatever it is you may be going through. I just ask that it doesn’t get in the way of the things you care about.”

Eddie’s nod is nearly a bow with how deeply he bends his neck. “Of course,” he hurries to agree. “Nothing is more important to me than this job, Mr. Johnson, I hope you know that.”

Mr. Johnson seems to find that response satisfying enough.

He nods, and shuffles around some papers on his desk. “I do know that, and you have always been an excellent employee. To keep you on track, though, I was considering introducing you to someone.”

Eddie’s stomach turns unpleasantly. He’s never truly been one for office socializing or teamwork. He prefers to keep his interaction with his coworkers to cordial e-mails and nods of acknowledgement. It’s worked out for him so far, so why change that now? People are complicated and messy (god, he knows that now more than ever after the whole debacle with Richie) and that is something that he is not interested in bringing anywhere near his job. Still, he swallows it down and stays attentive to Mr. Johnson’s every word.

“My daughter, Myra. She works in HR. I was thinking of setting the two of you up for weekly check-in sessions. That way she’ll be able to help you stay focused on the task at hand, and you won’t ever feel overwhelmed by the work again.” Mr. Johnson’s looking at him and smiling widely as he says it. He clearly thinks it’s a great plan, which makes Eddie want to think so too, but all he can think is Huh.

Eddie knows about Myra, of course he does. Her name floats around the office all the time, and she always seems to be the one delivering bad news. It’s always ‘Myra from HR said we need to keep emails on topic’ and ‘Myra from HR says we need to make a spreadsheet to organize the work trip’, and usually Eddie agrees with Myra’s points from afar. But he struggles to see how she’ll be able to help him with his problem, when his problem is a budding relationship he’s not sure he’s ready for. Eddie’s pretty certain that Myra’s not a therapist. What’ll they even talk about?

He doesn’t voice any of this to Mr. Johnson. He can’t. Instead he just nods, slowly, as Mr. Johnson rips a sticky note from his notepad and begins to write something in dark ink.

“Good, good. Just go see her before the day is over, eh.”

The eh strikes Eddie with a strange sense of familiarity, like an accent he can’t quite place.

He asks something that is very out of character for him, then, because he knows it’ll just keep nagging at him all day if he doesn’t— “Where are you from, Mr. Johnson?”

The older man looks at him with a furrowed brow, but responds, simply: “Maine.”

Eddie feels, oddly, like he knew that answer. Something nags at the back of his mind that he can’t quite parse. He pushes it away, takes the sticky note, and in return gives Mr. Johnson a heartfelt thank you.

When he returns to his cubicle, he sticks the note up on the wall above his computer so he doesn’t forget it, and then sits back down. He puts himself to work, invigorated by his conversation with Mr. Johnson and the looming prospect of weekly meetings with HR that he’s still not entirely convinced he needs. Eddie works well, he works hard, he doesn’t need help with that part. He just faltered. Just this once. Or twice, but what’s the difference?

He remembers to go see Myra Johnson at around 4:00 when the sticky note above his computer loses its stickiness and falls down with a light fluttering sound. Eddie picks it up and follows the directions on it, scribbled in almost-incomprehensible handwriting. It leads him to a hallway he’s rarely been down except to use the bathroom, to a door he’s never gone through, and he knocks on it softly before walking in.

The woman on the other side of the door is the spitting image of her father. Stout and round-faced, with wrinkle lines already etched into her forehead. Eddie has enough of those himself to empathize. All in all, she strikes Eddie as deeply average, in appearance, demeanor, and dress. It occurs to Eddie that a description of her would also be an apt description of Eddie himself, all gendered markers aside: mousy brown hair and big buglike eyes, that permanently downturned mouth and those straight shoulders that betray a childhood spent correcting herself.

“Hi,” Eddie says, when she doesn’t say anything. “Kaspbrak?” he tacks on after a moment, unsure if she’ll recognize him from his face alone.

“Oh!” She explains, voice shriller than Eddie expects. “Eddie! Of course, sorry, where is my mind today?”

“That’s okay,” he responds placidly, crossing the room to sit at the chair across from her desk.

“So, my father tells me you’ve made a bad habit of being late to work.” Myra’s pulling a file out from a cabinet as she says this, presumably one that contains Eddie’s entire record of working at this office. Eddie leans forward subtly, trying to catch a glimpse of what’s inside it.

“I— I’ve been late a couple times now, yes.”

The expression that Myra turns on him then is so familiar that Eddie has to lean away again, back pressed firmly against the chair. Her large eyes are unnervingly expressive, and her head is tilted imploringly at Eddie, bottom lip slightly pouted, and Eddie can only identify this expression as pity.

And then, for no reason Eddie can identify, Myra asks: “What’s wrong?”

“Uh,” Eddie feels distinctly like he’s making all the wrong choices here, like he’s playing a video game and picking the wrong dialogue options every time he opens his mouth. “Nothing?”

“There must be a reason your routine has changed so drastically.” Her lips pull into a tight, straight line as she stares dead-on at Eddie. “Are you doing drugs or gambling?”

“What? No.”

“It’s not uncommon at all for men of your age to turn to vices,” she starts, slowly, placatingly like she expects him to yell, and Eddie would do anything for her to stop speaking like that.

“I only take prescription pills, and I don’t go out anywhere except here.”

The lie slips out so easily that Eddie doesn’t even think of it as a lie. It’s true enough. He doesn’t feel like the same person when he’s out with Richie, as he does here at work. Mr. Kaspbrak is not Eddie is not Eds. He makes sure of that.

Myra nods, slowly, consideringly, like she really doesn’t believe Eddie at all.

Eddie needs to get out of here.

“Okay, well. Whatever the distraction may be, I want you to throw it away, okay? Get rid of everything that you are prioritizing over this job.” Myra speaks like she’s casting a spell upon him, like with just a word she can make it true. Eddie feels deeply unmoved by it. “Secondly, a technique that has been very successful for us in the past has been daily goals. These could give you something to really work towards.”

There’s a dull burst of frustration that begins burning somewhere deep in Eddie’s gut. It’s the part of him that doesn’t really know why he’s here at all — he’s worked well on his own, with no help, for the better part of a decade. He doesn’t need daily goals or a routine. He knows exactly how to do his job. But the frustration is easily tamped down, suffocated like a rag over a candle, by the part of him that wants this to be over. The part of him that lies down and shows its belly and says, “That sounds good. Thanks for the help, Myra.”

Eddie really is a different person around Richie, he thinks, with a sudden wave of shame. Maybe he changes himself for Richie, to be someone Richie would like more, someone bright and colorful who swears a lot and snaps back even more than that. Or maybe that’s who he really is, and he’s a different person at work because he needs to be. But this version of him feels truer. It's who he is for 8 hours a day, afterall, and it’s the version he knows how to play the best. It’s too late for that to change, now.

The trouble is that Eddie can’t tell who exactly he’s lying to. If he’s even lying at all.

“Have a good evening, Mr. Kaspbrak,” calls Daisy, half an hour later as he walks out of the building.

“You, too!” Eddie calls back, for the sake of being polite, but his skin is suddenly crawling.

As soon as he steps out into the cold, pollution-filled New York City air, he thinks: I don’t like hearing that name. Not very much at all.

It makes him itch, the feeling thrumming under his skin. Makes him think of Richie asking, last night in the dark cradle of Eddie’s bed, if Eddie would take his last name if he could. Eddie knows now with a definitive certainty that he would. No hyphens, no mixing and matching, just Edward Frank Tozier. Simple, easy to swallow. Kaspbrak is clunky, sharp in his mouth. Kaspbrak tastes like cough medicine and medical needles.

Eddie can’t stand it, suddenly, which is odd. He could withstand being Mr. Kaspbrak all day today, has withstood it for years even, but the thought of Sonia Kaspbrak in some podunk town back in Maine, telling all her neighborhood friends that her son’s a deadbeat who won’t come visit, won’t return her calls, an ungrateful little shit who cares more about the glamour of New York than his dying old mother, has him wanting to gut out the part of him that’s Kaspbrak at all. He wants to pull the plug, cut off the payments, sever the umbilical cord once and for all.

But he won’t, because she’s his mother. And because two men can’t get married, and one can’t take the other’s last name. Because that was all just some elaborate fantasy he’d constructed with Richie, and it would never be true. In real life, he’s Eddie Kaspbrak, and he will be forever. There’s no changing that.

So Eddie rides the subway home, and expects to find an empty apartment, just he always does.

When he cracks open the door, jostling his keys with a jingling sound that echoes through the hallway, the lights are already on. Richie’s there. Richie Tozier is sitting at his kitchen island, and directly in front of him on the surface are two large pizza boxes.

“What.” Eddie says, flat and unenthused.

“Uh.” Richie adjusts his glasses, and Eddie finds it very hard to not be endeared by him. “You didn’t come home at your regular time, so I figured you were working late. So I got pizza. It’s got all your healthy toppings, even though putting spinach on a pizza doesn’t automatically make it healthy.”

“It’s a balanced meal,” is all Eddie can muster, because he’s dumbfounded. By a lot of things, really. First by the fact that Richie noticed he wasn’t home at his ‘regular time’ (and do they really see each other so often that Richie knows when Eddie gets home by heart?). And, secondly, “Did you pay for this?”

“Don’t worry about that.” Richie responds, waving vaguely in the air like that’ll make the question go away. “You pay for enough shit, Eddie, just let me do this once.”

Eddie has a lot more to say. About how Richie should really be more financially responsible, considering he hasn’t had a reliable stream of income since he quit comedy, and even then he’d mostly relied on tips to keep him afloat. And how Eddie literally has leftover pasta in the fridge, maybe not enough for two people, but it’ll do, and Eddie could’ve made more, and besides, Richie really didn’t need to do any of this at all. It wasn’t like he was starving on the side of the road begging for scraps, so this was just…. unnecessary. It’s too much, Eddie thinks. Too much, and suddenly the words are stuck in his throat and he’s choking on it.

“Besides, I figure you deserve it. Working so hard on those percentages. Showing those numbers who’s boss.”

That knocks Eddie out of his haze well enough. He shakes his head, sets his briefcase down, shrugs off his jacket as he says, “You really don’t know what I do, do you?”

“Not really, no.”

“Wow, Richie. How long have we known each other?”

“Eh. At least a week.” Richie says, with a shit-eating grin. Eddie slides into the barstool next to Richie, and opens one of the pizza boxes. Just as Richie promised, it’s the order he gets every time he’s ever ordered pizza; mushrooms, olives, bell peppers, spinach. Eddie’s stomach turns at the thought of Richie knowing his order so well, but of course he does. Richie knows basically everything about him. Except—

“I’m a risk analyst,” he says, pulling a piece apart from his pizza with a cheesy pull. The pizza’s warm, still, which makes him think it must have just arrived before he did.

“Well, I know that. I’m just fuzzy on the details. I know it’s got to do with numbers. Percentages. But it all goes over my head, y’know?”

“You took math classes for fun in college.”

“But this isn’t math, Edster. It’s a horrible perversion of the art. You take the numbers and string them up for your own sick entertainment.”

“Sounds like you know a lot.”

Richie takes a big chomp of his own pizza slice, loaded with heavy meats, and pulls away with his teeth so that the cheese stretches. He does that dumb move teenagers do, where they slurp it up to their mouth like they’re in the Lady and the goddamn Tramp.

“Jesus, Richie,” exhales Eddie, “you come to my home, order pizza against my will, and then make a fuckin’ mess on my marble countertops? Some guest you are.”

“Hopin’ I’m more than a guest by now,” says Richie.

Huh. So they’re really doing this. Like, for real.

There is a part of Eddie that had been perfectly willing to sweep last night under the rug. Richie’s prone to disappearing, and Eddie had almost expected it this time, that he’d never see him again, and then he’d drift away into Eddie’s memory, some weird, small dream he’d had for only one night. It was easy to see why Richie wouldn’t want to stick around any longer; after all, outside of sex, what did Eddie have to offer to this dynamic? Sure, they’d made promises last night, but it was easy to say shit like that when you didn’t have to see each other’s faces.

But Richie— he meant it. He really did, Eddie can’t doubt that, not now, when Richie waited for him, and spent money on dumb pizza for him, and now they’re just sitting here, eating, and it feels like so fucking much. Eddie feels the weight of it, again. Those three words. God, I love you, dripping from Richie’s lips, smooth, like honey, like he’d said them a million times before. I love you, Eddiebear, bittersweet from Sonia’s mouth. And then, finally, today: I love you. The first time Eddie’s said the words in two years, and he’d said them into his phone’s receiver, to his boss, who hadn’t even noticed.

Eddie could topple over with the wave of shame that comes over him. Richie loves him. Like, really loves him.

And Eddie doesn’t know if he’ll ever love anyone.

He doesn’t say any of this to Richie, though. To Richie, he just responds, with a light, agreeable tone in his voice; “I guess, since you bought me pizza, I’ll let you stay.”

Richie fist-pumps in celebration, mouthing ‘fuck yes’ around a disgusting mouthful of greasy cheese and pepperoni. Eddie doesn’t wanna kiss him any less for it.

They gobble up the rest of their respective pizzas with ease (and Eddie remembers, now, how eating a whole pizza was commonplace for him in college, fresh out of his mother’s grasp and now only needing to grapple with the guilt of lying to her instead of the fear of being found out and punished. He cringes a bit at the memory— he has gained a better understanding of moderation since then).

Richie offers to take the boxes down to the dumpster instead of letting them sit in Eddie’s apartment all night, because he knows how unclean empty food containers grate on Eddie’s nerves. Okay, well, Richie doesn’t say it in all those words, what he does say is “wowzers, looks like it’s dumpster o’clock!” and then he’s stacking the boxes on top of his arms, which are bigger than they have any right to be, and struggling to maneuver the stack out the door for about thirty seconds while Eddie watches, offering no help at all.

Richie steps out of the apartment with a “thanks for the help, Edster, really appreciated” over his shoulder, and then the door shuts.

Eddie is immediately aware of how silent it is. Not that silence is something he minds, but with Richie around, he gets used to the constant talking, or humming, or the sound of his feet shuffling around heavily because he walks like he never learned to lift his feet. At some point in time, Eddie had found all the noise annoying. He couldn’t tell you at what point exactly in the last seven years it had stopped grating on his nerves and became something he sought out instead, but it had.

Eddie cleans up the crumbs on the counter, pushes the barstools to rest against the island. He walks out of the kitchen and his finger hovers at the light switch, but he leaves the light on for Richie to come back inside.

He feels the panic start to swell in his chest then, a familiar ballooning of his lungs like they’re growing too big for his ribcage. Eddie changes out of his work clothes, finally, and detangling his tie from around his neck helps a little bit with that choking feeling. Not enough, but some. He brushes his teeth and tries to soothe himself with the circular motions.

Halfway through this, he hears Richie re-enter the apartment and lock the door. Eddie listens to the noise of him kicking his shoes off, and almost certainly not putting them on the shoe rack, just leaving them right there by the door, all haphazard with the shoelaces untied and splayed out every which way. Eddie’s probably going to trip over them in the morning, but he can’t find it in himself to mind right now. He tunes into the rhythmic noise of Richie padding down the hall.

Richie pops his head into the bathroom with one hand pressed over his eyes, though his fingers are parted for one to peek through. “Oh, no, sorry Eddie, I didn’t know you were naked, I’m so sorry, oh, my bad—”

“‘M nawt naketh.” Eddie says around the head of his toothbrush, flipping Richie off without looking at him.

Richie scurries away, cackling like he’s the greatest comedian on Planet Earth. Eddie waits until his back is turned to smile.

Eddie tucks into bed, later, and Richie opens his arms in offering. Eddie crawls into them, and he thinks, I don’t know what to do with this.

I don’t know what to do with any of this, as he presses his face into Richie’s chest and falls asleep.

He doesn’t have too much time to catastrophize about it, though, because soon enough, Richie’s starting his new job, and then they’re both too busy to have impromptu date nights (is that what they are? Date nights?). Eddie finds this to be somewhat of a relief, that he can truly, once and for all, focus on his work and what he needs to do. Mr. Johnson is happy with the development, and clearly seems to think his new system of keeping Eddie under his watch is what’s responsible for the improvement.

Richie works most evenings, now. The bar he works at is called The Naughty Beaver, which Eddie hates with no small amount of vitriol. He makes this expressly known to Richie, many times a day.

So, they're good, and this… arrangement, if that's what you can call it, is working out pretty well.

There's just one thing, though.

They haven't been kissing.

It's not a conscious decision Eddie makes. Just something he notices, a couple weeks into their new arrangement. They'd talked about making out (a phrase that Eddie absolutely fucking hates, by the way) like they were teenagers, but it's just that…

It's hard, okay? To figure out when to kiss someone. It was so clearly defined before, that the kisses started when the drinking did, and they would always lead to sex. Eddie knows he's the one who proposed the whole no-more-sex deal, but it was, in many ways, easier when he knew what the rules were.

When is Eddie supposed to kiss Richie? In the mornings? When he gets home from work? When they're watching godawful movies and Richie's tearing up at the happy endings?

He can't quite square it. Spends a lot of time staring at Richie and thinking: should I do it now?

That's it, though. That's the only blip in their otherwise clear skies.

They crawl into Eddie’s bed at the end of every night, though sometimes Eddie’s already asleep when Richie gets back. When he isn’t, they trade work stories. Richie has some colorful new coworkers-slash-friends, named Bev and Ben. It’s like some shit straight of a sitcom, Richie says, how obnoxiously perfect they are for each other, like really, it makes me fuckin’ sick when they’re both on shift with me, and they’re both working it as a sidegig for their fucking entrepreneurial businesses, God, I feel uncool around them.

Eddie’s work stories mainly consist of petty revenge against Larry, who has become his latest workplace enemy. Eddie would never tell Richie, but his own life feels pretty uncool when compared to Richie’s. Richie meets the weirdest people in a day, the kindest ones too, the drunk and emotional ones who tip 200% while sobbing you’re just so genuine, man, that’s rare to find in the world. Eddie’s day mainly consists of burning numbers onto the back of his eyelids, and occasionally speed-walking so that he can beat Larry to the fax printer.

Eddie supposes that’s just how it is with jobs. Grass always looks greener on the other side.

That is, he thinks that until Richie really does invite him to come to the bar after work, one day, and he realizes it really is greener. Shades and shades greener.

The Naughty Beaver sits in a row of nightclubs and smoke shops just outside Hell’s Kitchen, and when Eddie gets there around six P.M. it is, he guesses, the only place in the city that isn't swarming with rush hour traffic. The bar is seedy and dark and smells of something Eddie can’t quite place, something rank and lingering. It doesn’t help that all the flooring and furniture is wood, he thinks, because it’s absorbed the smells of a thousand drunk, sticky people stumbling through. Not to mention the rest of the cocktail of drugs people are probably on when they put their hands on this bar countertop and slide into this chair— yeah, Eddie’s not touching shit in here.

Richie isn’t behind the bar when he enters. The bell jingles when he walks in, and someone calls, from… under the bar, “one second!”

The head that pops up from under the bar, as Eddie approaches, is not covered in Richie’s dark bird’s nest of hair, but rather, a shock of red that somehow manages to look spiky in the layers on the woman’s head.

“Hello,” says Eddie, on instinct, though he’s still reeling as he watches as the woman in front of him plucks the cigarette that’s hanging out of her mouth and stubs it on the wood countertop. Eddie is appalled by the dark circle it leaves behind, and he’s sure that the cigarette smoke and the burning wood are both contributing to the cacophony of smells he’s experiencing. He stares at the circle for a moment longer and realizes it is far from the first one there, and that the counter top is in fact dotted with them, all along the bartender’s side.

“Sorry about that,” says the red-haired woman. “Boss won’t let me take smoke breaks, you know how it is.”

Eddie does not know how it is.

“What can I get you?” She asks.

“Uh, Richie Tozier?” Eddie responds, with an inflection like it’s a question, too.

“That’s not on tap.”

“No, I mean—”

“I know what you mean,” she says, and she grins wide and gummily at him before calling back towards the open Employees Only door behind her, “Richard! Your boyfriend’s here!”

Eddie blanches at the title. Boyfriend isn’t exactly how they refer to each other. In fact, they don’t really… refer to each other at all. It’s not that their relationship is a secret, but it’s not known enough that Eddie’s used to hollering it out. At his own workplace, no one has a clue. It’s the kinda thing you can still get fired for. Eddie guesses it must not be as much of an issue here.

Richie comes barrelling out of the back room, his hair wild and untamed, not dissimilar to the way it looks when he and Eddie— well. Eddie doesn’t let his thought process go there, he just furrows his brow. Richie’s panting hard.

“Eds!” he says brightly, an ever-familiar sound as he maneuvers his way from behind the bar, coming around for an embrace. Eddie feels a prickling sensation of self-consciousness around this woman, Richie’s coworker, being… privy to their relationship, but not quite self-conscious enough to ignore the firm weight of Richie’s arms around him, the way the weight calms his nervous system after a whole day of being wound up.

Eddie thinks, sometimes, that he would only feel truly content with Richie’s weight lying sprawled on top of him as a blanket. If only that wouldn’t crush Eddie’s ribs, of course. As it is, Eddie melts into the embrace, curls his arms around Richie’s back and leans into his chest. They pull away after a moment; it’s not nearly enough to dissuade the curling ball of nausea in Eddie’s stomach, but the closeness quiets it, for a moment.

“Didn’t think you were gonna make it,” Richie comments as they pull away from one another.

“Of course I was. I just got caught up at the office. You know how it is.”

“Yeah.” Richie says, understandingly, and rubs along Eddie’s forearm, a soothing motion like something you might do to tame a spooked horse. Then he glances back over to the bar, eyes wide as if he’s just remembered the woman is still there; “Oh! I should introduce you to Bev!”

Eddie turns back to the woman, and Richie does his duty (“Eddie, this is Bev, she’s a fuckin’ riot, and Bev, this is Eddie, he’s an absolute dreamboat, dontcha think?”) of introducing them. Eddie smiles his corporate smile and sticks out a hand for her to shake.

Bev looks utterly baffled by this, eyebrows furrowed as she stares at Eddie’s outstretched hand, and then, hesitantly, raises her own to shake it.

“Sorry. Just haven’t met someone like you in a while,” she says, smiling that same gummy smile.

Someone like you? Eddie wants to ask, not certain if it’s an insult. Someone like you as in gay, effeminate, strange? That can’t be true, Eddie thinks, not with the part of town they’re in. Maybe, then, she means the opposite of that entirely; someone like you, as in someone who shakes hands in greeting and doesn’t have anything interesting to say at all.

“It’s okay,” he replies, blinking at her. “Is Bev short for something?”

“Oh, yeah. It’s Beverly, but no one calls me that. Bev just feels more right, y’know?”

Eddie doesn’t know this woman, but already he thinks, Beverly doesn’t suit her nearly as much as Bev does. Her whole demeanor gives him the impression of a wild animal, a little rabid, with her smudged eyeliner and sharp nails. Eddie finds himself more than a little frightened of her, though she’s shown him nothing but kindness.

“I know,” he affirms. “Mine is Edward, but no one calls me that except my mother.”

Bev’s smile in response to this is less gummy and more wry, lips pressed together like this is bittersweet, to her. “My father gave me the name, refused to call me Bev until the very end. He’s six feet underground now, the poor sucker, God never rest his soul.”

Eddie’s not certain how they got on this topic, and the way Bev seems unperturbed by this mention of her father’s passing gives him a sudden sense of uneasiness. He can’t imagine that he could ever speak of his mother that way, if she, God forbid, lost her battle with heart disease. He tries to imagine saying the words ‘my mother is dead’ but can only feel the sensation of the words getting stuck in his throat, unswallowable.

“Aw, Rich, I scared him,” says Bev after a moment. “Sorry, Eddie, I didn’t mean to do that. I get too comfortable with this fella.” She shrugs at Richie.

“It’s okay,” he says, again. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

Bev’s smile doesn’t reach her eyes this time around. It’s more of a grimace than anything, a twitch upwards of the balls of her cheeks. “Thanks.”

Richie’s hand comes down heavily to clasp Eddie’s shoulder, and suddenly he’s being spun towards another person. Eddie hadn’t noticed the man come out of the back room, but he must just be quiet, because there he is, standing at the counter beside Bev. He’s tall, taller than Eddie at least, but he holds himself sort of scrunched over sheepishly, his curtain of light brown hair falling into his eyes. He has half a beard growing sparsely on his chin and he is very handsome.

“Benny boy!” barks out Richie. “Meet Eddie! He’s my very best buddy, my— uh, partner in crime, you’ve heard of him.”

The handsome man smiles with recognition. “No way! You’re that Eddie?”

Eddie doesn’t know which Eddie he’s talking about. “Eddie Kaspbrak,” he responds, with a hand held out to shake.

“Ben Hanscom,” the other man says in turn. Ben Hanscom shakes firmly, confidently, warmly, in a way that makes you never want to let go. “Richie never shuts up about you, man, you should hear it, it’s all Eddie this and Eddie that and oh, Eddie forgot his coffee this morning and ah, Eddie hates this song—”

“Alright, alright.” Richie says loudly from Eddie’s side. “That’s quite enough of that, Benjamin.”

Ben just smiles at Eddie, then, like they’re in on some private secret. Eddie just can’t believe that Richie talks to his cool, unapproachable coworkers about him. The thought sends a rush of white hot shame through him, like these people know all about how boring he is, and they’re just entertaining him long enough to be polite, but when he leaves they’ll both exhale and say ‘God, he was a real piece of work, wasn’t he?’

“What?” Asks Bev, directed to Richie. Then, singsongingly: “Don’t want him to know you liiiike him?”

“I know that already,” deadpans Eddie, and that cracks Bev and Ben right up, like it’s the funniest thing that’s ever been said.

“Yeah, that tracks, he’s about as unsubtle as a car crash,” Bev remarks, idly tapping her nails on the countertop.

Richie points an accusatory finger in Bev’s face, then, that Bev promptly snaps her teeth at, pretending to chomp it down. “Hey! I don’t wanna hear a word out of you, Miss Marsh, or I’ll spill your big secret, huh, how wouldja like that?”

Looking between them now, Eddie’s pretty sure he knows what the big secret is. Richie’s talked his ear off about Bev and Ben dancing around each other, and all about their lingering glances and gentle touches (accompanied, of course, by Richie’s colorful mime-gagging), and Eddie had sort of built an image in his mind of some grand romance they were engaged in. Now, though, he watches as Ben’s eyes flit over to Bev when she isn’t looking, and then quickly away, and Eddie just feels a vague sense of secondhand embarrassment.

Eddie glances at Richie then, and wonders if that was how he and Richie were, or had been, at least. It can’t be, because once they’d started fucking they’d made a point of not letting anyone see them, not giving any onlookers a chance to detect anything off, strange, or queer. It wasn’t a conversation they’d ever consciously had, they had just both understood it as something that needed to be done. Even in college, maybe they had been a bit close, but the fiction of being heterosexual men was something they’d both been too entrenched in to even slightly stray from. That’s what Eddie thinks, anyway, though his skin crawls at the idea that maybe when you like someone that much, you can never truly hide it.

“Can I get you a drink or something, Eddie?” Ben asks pleasantly, while Bev and Richie prattle on without them.

“Oh, uh… yeah, sure. Can I get a Dirty Shirley?”

Look, Eddie doesn’t need to drive home. He’ll be forgiven for indulging himself a little.

“Not wine?” Ben asks with an eyebrow raised. Behind him, Bev has Richie trapped in a headlock that he’s struggling to writhe out of.

“I’m trying something new,” responds Eddie, sliding to sit on one of the barstools, grimacing as he tries very hard not to think of the cocktail of germs swimming around down there.

“Hey, there’s no shame in that!” Ben smiles at him encouragingly. Eddie watches as his hands move through the practiced motions of an experienced bartender; he pours the drink without even looking, eyes still focused on Eddie. “I’m trying new things, too, lately. Stopped drinking a couple weeks ago.”

At that, Eddie’s gaze shoots back up to Ben’s face. “Really? How’s that work, a sober bartender?”

Ben shrugs, easy and cool as he places a maraschino cherry on Eddie’s drink. “I dunno. It’s not like I need to taste the drinks to serve ‘em, right? And you’d be surprised, how great of a deterrent from drinking it is to see the shit people do while drunk every night.”

“Fair enough.” Eddie agrees, taking the glass as Ben offers it to him. The conflict between Richie and Beverly seems to hit a high point then.

“Go freeze to death in the ice machine, Tozier!” Bev hollers at Richie, who is now retreating back through the Employees Only door.

“I will!” Richie calls back, throwing a middle finger at her over his shoulder.

Eddie stays until the end of Richie’s shift, watching as drunken idiots try to sing karaoke in the meantime. Richie is surprisingly productive at work, in his element, charming bargoers with a big grin slapped on his face. He only seems slightly distracted by Eddie, though that’s not to say he doesn’t make his fair share of pit stops at Eddie’s seat between drinks, or linger near him even when they aren’t talking, or throw winks at him over his shoulder when he flirts with a woman fifteen years his senior. But Beverly runs a tight ship and snaps her fingers at him more than once, calling through the chaos, “focus, RT!”

‘‘She’s a dictator, Eds, I tell ya,” Richie laments during one of their brief meetings. He’s balancing five full cups on a tray, supported with only one palm. Eddie eyes the tray warily as it wobbles. “She’s the Lord Capulet to our Romeo and Juliet, O Romeo, Romeo, let down your hair…”

Richie trails off dramatically while pulling away, reaching out with the arm that’s not balancing the drinks, fingers outstretched towards Eddie like he’s being torn away.

“That is not the quote,” replies Eddie, but he reaches out an arm towards Richie in response anyways.

Maybe it’s just the Dirty Shirley, but something about this place makes a curling warmth start to spread through Eddie’s limbs, unbidden and golden. It’s lovely. Everyone seems so happy here. Ben and Bev giggle in the back room while customers cheers and clink their glasses together. And, at the center of it all, there’s Richie, cracking jokes and doing bartender tricks he can barely pull off.

The karaoke, despite how bad it is, adds a nice ambiance, too. Like, right now, on the stage, someone is up there singing I Wanna Dance With Somebody and not hitting a single note. And yet, where Eddie would usually find himself deeply irritated with the screeching noises of the microphone and the too-loud laugh of the girl two seats over, he finds an odd comfort in the cacophony.

Eddie feels the shame he wears as a second skin start to melt off of him, encouraged by being surrounded by so many people who are so flagrantly debauched, so un-embarrassed. It’s not a gay bar, but it is the kind of place where people are free.

He loosens up and orders a second drink. After all, he’s not driving tonight; Richie’s taking him home.

Before long, Richie’s shrugging on his ratty leather jacket over his t-shirt, nodding to Eddie that it’s time to leave.

“Look, the manager won’t like me doing this, but,” Richie leans over the bar counter conspiratorially. “I’ll show you through the back exit. And that’s not even an innuendo or anything.”

Eddie snorts and comes around the side of the bar as Richie waves him through. Ben’s taken over at the counter, now, and he just smiles kindly when he sees Eddie follow Richie through the Employees Only door, lifting one hand to wave goodbye while effortlessly performing one of those bartender pouring maneuvers with his other. Eddie smiles and waves back.

The back exit that Richie shows him to, leads into an alleyway that smells somehow worse than the bar had. It’s downright putrid, like vomit and shit had a baby.

“Jesus, Rich, why’d we have to go this way?” Eddie asks, pinching his nose in such a way that his voice comes out nasally.

“I’m the talent, I can’t be seen leaving through the main exit.” Richie glances back at him. “Oh, yeah, sorry, a raccoon died back there last week and it’s been rotting for a while. Just the circle of life, y’know?”

Eddie wants to reach out and rip Richie’s spine straight out of his annoyingly broad back. Richie’s leading him further into the alley, towards the opposite end that Eddie had come through. It opens up to the back of the building, where two cars are parked, but Richie walks past the cars, one hand on Eddie’s shoulder, steering him like he’s a child.

“Richie, this is probably the worst attempt at a murder I’ve ever seen.” Eddie deadpans as Richie leads him further. He would think Richie would execute this premeditated homicide a little more smoothly, especially considering all the hours of Dateline NBC he’s watched, so he’s honestly disappointed by this— behind Richie’s workplace, with multiple witnesses having seen them leaving together? Rookie mistakes to make, really.

Richie looks taken aback, mouth parted in shock. “Really, Eds? You think that low of me?” Yes, Eddie is about to say, but Richie continues: “If I was gonna murder you, it would be way more thought out than this.”

Eddie supposes he has to acquiesce to that. They keep walking until they’re on the sidewalk next to the street. Eddie glances around at the unassuming brick buildings around them with a frown.

“No, I, uh… I just wanted to show you something,” says Richie, suddenly, uncharacteristically timid. “Just a place I like to go.”

The apprehension holding Eddie’s shoulders tight starts to fade away, then, because he can never really stay annoyed with Richie for long. Especially not when Richie gets that look on his face, the one like he’s an orphaned, kicked puppy whimpering in a box on the side of the road. This poor, sweet man, Eddie thinks, pressing a palm to his face at his own susceptibility.

“Okay. Fine, take me there, Rich.”

Richie flashes him a little grin, and then, by the edge of the road, puts a hand in the air to hail a cab. After a moment of standing there, illuminated by the glow of the street lamp, a yellow taxi pulls over to them. The driver in the front seat has a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

When Richie opens the door for Eddie with a grand “after you, dear sir”, a cloud of cigarette smoke puffs out from the car into the cool evening air. Eddie wrinkles his nose as he slides into the far seat.

Richie slides in after him and shuts the door.

“Where to?” The driver asks in a gruff voice.

“I’ll direct you,” Richie replies, and Eddie doesn’t miss the way Richie’s eyes flick over to him, almost nervous. Eddie can’t possibly imagine what he’d have to be nervous about. He squints at Richie, but Richie doesn’t look at him again, too focused on the road.

A couple minutes into the ride, Eddie stifles a cough and asks, “Could we open the windows?”

Eddie watches through the rearview mirror as the driver grits his teeth, bending the cigarette that’s still sticking out of his mouth, and begrudgingly rolls down the windows.

Normally, in this situation, Eddie would be brimming with anxiety at the uncertainty of it all, at not knowing where they’re going, at the smoke and the overwhelming feeling of not being in control. But the cool winds start to rush past Eddie’s ears, and he finds he can’t really be bothered to care about where they’re going. Maybe the whiskey is getting to him.

He vaguely registers Richie directing the cab driver down 116th street at some point, and then he raises his head and realizes exactly where they’re headed. They’ve gone all the way to the Upper West Side, and they’re heading for the waterfront. The sun has almost set, leaving a thin strip of glowing light in the direction they’re going, like they’re driving straight for the light.

It’s a far cry from any place they usually frequent. It’s nothing like Eddie’s office and apartment down in Manhattan, or the busy, college-kid infested area around NYU where they’d gone to school, or even The Naughty Beaver and Richie’s shitty apartment in Midtown (which, Eddie thinks, privately, Richie shouldn’t even still be paying rent for, considering he comes back to Eddie’s every night he can). Now, this would be a good place for Richie to murder him.

“Yeah, you can just drop us off here,” Richie says a couple minutes later. The car skids to a violent stop then, like the driver can’t let the car move for even a second longer than they pay for. Richie hands the driver a wad of cash, which the driver quickly flips through before unlocking the doors.

They get out of the car at the nearest sidewalk, and behind them is a bursting garden of flowers and bushes, and then an endless grassy knoll, that gives way to the glittering Hudson behind it.

“Why are we here?” Eddie asks, furrowing his brow at the river in the distance like it has the answer.

“Uh,” and Richie sounds nervous again, “You ever seen You’ve Got Mail?”

“No,” Eddie responds, flatly.

“Okay, well, you should. Great fuckin’ movie, it’s got Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, what else do you need, like really, a modern classic. Anyway, it’s about these two bookshop owners and they hate each other’s guts” — Eddie narrows his eyes at him — “not to say that’s us, but then they have this real steamy online romance thing goin’ on, and it’s great, and it reminded me of our little online romance, huh?”

“We didn’t have an online romance,” Eddie has to interject. His stomach twists at the thought that they had a romance at all. He’s still getting used to the idea.

“I would beg to differ,” says Richie, and Eddie can’t even begin to decode what he means by that. “Anyway, then they meet up for the first time, and they meet— here.”

Richie gestures openly at the garden. It’s still too early in the year to be fully in bloom, but it’s nice regardless, Eddie thinks.

“So, let me get this straight,” Eddie starts carefully. “You brought me… here… because you saw it in a movie?”

“Well, when you put it like that…” Richie scratches at the back of his neck, looking sufficiently sheepish.. “But, like, it’s not just that. I also wanted to… take you on a date. I wanna do this right, y’know? We’re taking it steady, aren’t we?”

Eddie promptly feels his stomach drop out of his asshole.

Is this a date? Why the fuck wouldn’t Richie warn him, if it was a date?

Eddie hasn’t been on a date since he was fifteen, with Rebecca Lawson from church. Rebecca Lawson had worn a blue floral dress, and Eddie had worn his nicest button-up, freshly ironed by his mother and smelling strongly of steam. Rebecca Lawson had asked if he wanted kids, over their meal of pancakes at one P.M. —the most luxurious meal a fifteen-year-old Eddie could think of. Eddie had said, “Well, I’m only fifteen, so I’m not sure if I will.”

Rebecca had responded, in that soft-spoken way she always talked where you had to strain to hear, “You have to date to marry, Eddie.”

Eddie had felt too awkward to disagree. Rebecca apparently didn’t find his behavior offputting enough, because she still asked him to walk her home. Eddie had to decline (with an internal sigh of relief), on strict orders from his mother to come directly home. Then, Rebecca had insisted on walking him home, and hovered with him in the doorway, prolonging the goodbye and leaning meaningfully towards him. Out of the corner of his eye, Eddie could see that there was someone watching through the peephole. He inclined his head politely at her and waved goodbye. She nodded dejectedly, and went to walk home.

Later, Eddie told his mother about what Rebecca had said about wanting to have kids. Sonia had told him, “Of course you’ll want kids, Eddie. You shouldn’t say things like that. But I don’t want you seeing her again, she seemed… eager. Girls can get very eager, Eddiebear, you need to know that, and you must not let it tempt you.”

“I won’t.” Eddie had promised, and he had kept true to it.

In the present, Eddie turns his horrified expression onto Richie, and says, “I’m still in my work clothes.”

Richie’s eyes flick down his body quickly, and when he looks back at Eddie’s face it’s with a squint. “I don’t see anything wrong. I’m wearing my sweat-soaked Sublime shirt, I mean, come on.”

"It’s our first date,” insists Eddie, and as he says this, it seems to dawn on Richie, too, rendering him speechless. “I didn’t want it to be like this.”

Eddie thinks, then, about Bev calling him Richie’s boyfriend. It had struck him as such a juvenile term, something schoolkids on playgrounds threw around, but at the same time, it was more official than any title they’d given each other before. Friend from college was Eddie’s go-to, when nosy coworkers asked what he was doing after work, and it seemed partner in crime was how Richie had taken to describing him. But boyfriend is an admission of intent, the same way going on a date is. There’s no comfortable middle ground of plausible deniability. They’ll be all in. There’s no coming back from this.

It feels like the solid ground has just about vanished under him. It’s all fun and games to entertain this fantasy under the cover of blankets or in the warm, hazy lights of Eddie’s kitchen. It’s quite another to be out in public, to say it’s their first date, like there’ll be more to come. You have to date to marry, Eddie, Rebecca Lawson had said, and Eddie’s known it his whole life. But being with Richie means they can’t date to marry, and they may never, unless there’s a miracle or a severe political shift in this country. Eddie’s not holding out for either. They can play pretend all they want, but that doesn’t mean this will really lead anywhere. Eddie knows how things go for men like them.

Right now, though, in the fading orange glow of the sunset as it glitters across the Hudson, Eddie thinks this is exactly how he’d want a first date to be, even if it’s not— how it should be. Even if they never marry. Even if Richie never makes an honest man of him. He looks down at his crumpled suit again, and his shoulders sag, and he thinks… it’s okay, probably, if it’s not a perfect date. Nothing about them is perfect.

When he looks back up, Richie’s wearing that familiar kicked-puppy expression, like he’s waiting for Eddie to just up and leave him in the middle of the nearly-empty park.

“But…,” he starts, reluctantly. “We came all this way. And don’t think I didn’t see you spend all that fuckin’ money, too, so I’m not gonna let it go to waste.”

“Oh, don’t worry your pretty little head, Edster. I’m employed now, I’m practically swimming in cash.” Richie drawls as they start walking again, towards the garden and the benches nestled inside it.

“Don’t tell me you used your first paycheck on this, Rich.” Richie doesn’t respond to that, so Eddie repeats, stern: “Rich.”

“You said not to tell you,” Richie replies with a shrug.

Eddie brings a hand to his forehead to rub at the already-deep worry lines there. “I’m paying for the ride home,” he says, and leaves no room for negotiation.

This is a common topic of conversation for them, a thread that Eddie can’t seem to stop picking at— Richie’s absolutely horrible financial decisions. For a guy who’s been “between jobs” for about three years, he always seems to still have enough money for splurging on nonsense shit like Pokemon cards and joke books. Eddie can’t quite wrap his mind around it, having grown up in a tiny, cluttered house with a single mother who didn’t work, and relied on checks from family members who felt bad for them to keep her afloat— Eddie had learned pretty early on about the importance of budgeting. In fact, it was probably where his interest in numbers and percentages had begun, pouring out his piggy bank and carefully counting coins to make sure he had enough for lunch.

And Richie’s childhood… well. Suffice it to say it had been wildly different than Eddie’s. Eddie had met Richie’s parents a couple of times in college, when they’d dutifully come at the start of each year to help Richie settle into his dorm room. Maggie and Went were eccentric and kind people. They were extremely difficult to hate, and yet Eddie had found himself feeling bitter towards them anyway. It was evident they would do anything for Richie, and while they didn’t overly hold his hand, they never let him fall under, never let him drown. Whenever Richie asked for money, they were there to provide without fail. Eddie couldn’t even imagine that level of support.

It pains Eddie, a little, to watch Richie exhaust resources he doesn’t have. Eddie’s been lucky with money, because he always knew he had to be. There was no fallback plan. It was succeed, or die. He’d never had the option of failing.

They sit down on a bench in the center of the garden, one that faces the Hudson, and they watch the sun creep down under the horizon. The flowers and plants around them turn blue in the fading light.

“In the movie,” starts Richie, because he can’t stay quiet for longer than thirty seconds at a time. “Meg Ryan is all like, I wanted it to be you. I wanted it to be you so badly. And then they stick their tongues down each other’s throats, and it’s all framed by the flowers.”

Eddie throws him an unimpressed look. “I don’t suppose that’s what you want to do now?”

“Jesus, no!” Coughs out Richie. “I’m not that fucking insane, Eds. I just— I was thinking about, how when I read that comment you left on my video, I really did want it to be you. I always thought she was really over-acting in that scene, until I felt it too, and then it made perfect sense.”

Eddie doesn’t know what to say to that. He doesn’t exactly have Richie’s propensity for words, and he hadn’t exactly had time to prepare a speech. He traces the slats in the bench with his fingers.

“Oh,” he says. “I didn’t know you’d figured out that was me.”

Richie laughs, even though Eddie doesn’t know what he said that was funny.

“Shit, yeah, guess I forgot to tell you that part,” he replies, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “It’s dumb. It was the username, it’s that damn car you like, isn’t it? And your birth year. Didn’t take too much to put two and two together, especially after you let it slip that you’d seen my videos and… you type the same way you talk. Didja know that? Like, it’s uncanny. I could hear your voice in every comment.”

Eddie’s stomach turns unpleasantly. He hates the idea that he's so easily… detectable. It's the uncomfortable feeling of being naked in front of your classmates in a dream, covering yourself with two hands that can't cover nearly enough. Soon, Eddie's teeth are gonna start falling out.

“I didn't know any of that,” he replies, stiffly keeping his gaze fixed on a point in the horizon where the dusky blue of the sky blends into the shimmery blue of the harbor.

“Yeah, well. I just think about you a lot, I guess.”

Eddie abruptly stands from the bench.

“Eddie?” Richie asks faintly.

“Uh. I just need to… take a walk.”

“C’mon, then.” Richie stands up. “I know a route.”

Eddie can't quite figure out to say that he needs to, suddenly, inexplicably, be as far away as possible from Richie Tozier.

But it'd be rude to leave Richie here, standing in a spring garden with his already-dirty laces dragging on the ground. He looks sweet, and pitiable, and Eddie still knows his manners enough to not push him away just because he can barely stand the way Richie looks at him, sometimes, like Eddie’s some sort of crystal ball that’ll show him his future if he looks hard enough.

“Fine. Tie your shoelaces first, Dick,” he grumbles.

“Jeez, alright, mother dearest.” Richie replies with two raised hands, a perfect alright-you-got-me pose. He kneels to tie his shoelaces, and the image of Richie down on one knee isn't doing much to help Eddie’s ongoing distress.

Richie’s humming something under his breath. Eddie strains his ears to hear, doesn't know really what he wants to hear, but what he hears is “bunny ears jumped into the hole…”

Eddie sighs and wipes the thoughts of marriage out of his mind.

Even if he could marry a man… He's sure Richie Tozier wouldn't be the kind of man he's supposed to marry.

Richie stands and makes a flamboyant gesture for Eddie to follow him. Eddie falls into step.

“This way's the prime bird feeding spot, trust me, I know this stuff.” Richie gabs as they walk.

“I don't have any seeds.”

“Oh, yeah, but some geezer always leaves a bag o’ birdseed behind. Forgetful bunch, the elderly.”

“That's what they're known for, yeah.” Eddie agrees, begrudgingly feeling the corner of his mouth tug up.

“There's that sweet smile!” Richie crows, and a hand comes up to pinch at the balls of Eddie's cheeks. “Where'd you go, huh?”

“Nowhere.” Eddie replies, batting his hand away.

“Good, good. Wouldn't be the same withoutcha.” Richie’s hand is still struggling against Eddie's, pushing back against his palm with his knuckles. Eddie pushes him away, but Richie's arm extends to rest around his shoulders, pulling him back in.

“You're insufferable.” Eddie mutters, tucked firmly against Richie’s side. He doesn't pull away. Figures, what use will it be.

They're by an open stretch of harbor, now. There's another bench, but instead of sitting, Richie ducks his head under it, looking for all the world like an emu with its head buried under sand.

“A-ha! Eureka!” Richie chirps from underneath the bench, and his hand pops up with a little brown bag clutched in it. He moves to stand, doesn't quite maneuver his head, and promptly hits himself on the wire metal bench.

It's very hard to not be endeared by him, Eddie finds. Begrudgingly, he reaches down and grabs Richie by the arm that's stuck in the air, and lifts him to stand.

He realizes his mistake too late, when Richie's hand curls around his.

Eddie stares at their hands clasped together for a moment, unblinking.

“There's no one else here,” Richie says, tentative and shaky. He glances around like there really might be someone around, even though by now everything is covered in a sheet of blue darkness. “If you wanted, we could… pretend we're a normal couple and hold hands on our romantic walk by the harbor.”

The laugh that accompanies that statement is dry and a little bitter, and Richie’s hand twitches in Eddie's with it.

It's a bleak idea. Holding hands under the cover of night, because that's the only way they really can. Like everything they do together is just some crude imitation of romance, and the grimy feeling of falseness coats all of their dreams with a thin slimy film — and yet, within the embrace of that dream, it all feels so real.

Eddie thinks back to that very first night. Richie had been an escape from the real world. Richie had made him feel like he didn't have to be who he was.

It's more complicated, now, but then again, maybe it's not at all. Maybe Eddie can have both this and his normal life too, a game of balancing the things he wants on spinning silver plates.

Eddie lets his hand relax into the hold then, submits to the familiarity of Richie's body next to his, shoulders brushing with every step. He lets himself think it'll be okay, for now.

They walk along, taking turns to sprinkle birdseed and watch the birds peck at their feet. Richie’s hand is a little clammy and twitchy, thrumming with restless energy as always. Eddie thinks it must be exhausting to be in his body. It reminds Eddie of the way Richie moves during sex, too, hands constantly roaming like they need to find something to sink into, like he just needs to anchor himself — and Eddie's face flushes because he shouldn't be thinking about things like that anymore.

They wander for a while until they find it, or rather, until Richie leads Eddie to it. ‘It’, of course being an old photo booth that sits in some far-off corner of the path. Richie breaks their hold to emphatically gesture at it and Eddie thinks, oh fuck oh shit please god no.

It's no exaggeration to say that Eddie fucking despises photos of himself. All the ones that exist, reside in an old photo album tucked away somewhere in his mother's house in smalltown Maine, never to see the light of day. Eddie lives perfectly fine, not having to see his own face except for in the mirror.

But Richie’s hand drops back down between them, this time to tug at Eddie's wrist and pull him towards the booth, and, like with most Richie-related situations, Eddie's helpless to do anything but follow.

They tumble into the photo booth because Richie practically sprints at it and then, when his body hits the far wall of the booth and rocks the whole structure, proceeds to groan that his twenty-nine-year-old bones are too old for this shit. Eddie uses his hands to stabilize the sides of the booth, and then everything stills, and there's about three inches between their bodies. Richie’s halfway curled over to even fit inside.

They've been closer than this before, of course, but Eddie finds himself shrinking away from the warmth of Richie's body anyway. It's a fruitless effort. Their knees still knock together.

Richie doesn't seem nearly as bothered by the situation; he leans over Eddie to click the button on the wall that's helpfully labeled CLICK FOR PHOTO. Then, his arm comes down heavily around Eddie's shoulders, and he squeezes Eddie against his side as the flash blinds them.

“You were definitely not smiling in that,” Richie says, while Eddie's still squeezing his eyes shut to clear the bright afterimage from the back of his eyelids.

“Well, gee, sorry Rich, I had about two seconds to make myself presentable before you clicked the goddamn button.”

“Aw, don't be like that, Eds. You always look cute, even when you're scowling.”

“I was not scowling. You're one to talk, anyway, you're probably barely even in the fucking frame.”

“Fine,” and then Richie's bending at the knees, bringing himself down to the eyeline of the camera. It's a tight fit in the tiny space, and Eddie's knees are pushed into the corner.

“Fuck! How do you take up so much goddamn space all the time?”

Richie doesn't respond to that one, simply reaches a hand over to Eddie's closest leg, curls his fingers around his shin, and lifts it to splay over his own. “Say cheese!”

Eddie's face burns fiercely at the touch, and he's staring helplessly at the side of Richie’s face, an expression of total disbelief on his own, when the flash goes off for the second time.

“What?” Richie says, looking over at him a moment later.

And Eddie looks at Richie’s sweet face, which has this expression like he really, truly doesn't know what he's doing, and he can't fucking take it anymore. He crashes forward, both hands on either side of Richie’s face, pulling him into a bruising kiss. The flash goes off for a third time in the background, but they don't pull away from each other for a long moment.

The kissing is — it's weird. Save for that one night last week, all the times Eddie can remember kissing Richie, it was under that drunk haze they so often inhabited together that just made everything go down a bit smoother. Now, he's viscerally aware of the dry skin on Richie's lips, of the feeling of mouth-to-mouth. It's gross, to put it simply. Eddie's always found kissing gross. That doesn't stop him from wanting to do it again.

“I guess kissing's back on the table, then?” Richie asks, smiling widely. There's a hopeful lilt to his voice, and if Eddie still had any hesitation about it, it would surely have been washed away by the bone-deep certainty that Richie wants this, too.

Eddie hums, affirmatively, and Richie keeps on grinning with his crooked teeth on full display.

Eddie kisses that dumb smile off his face.

He wants it to last longer than it does. It never lasts long enough, the warmth he feels around Richie.

It keeps him warm for the night, at least.

Eddie has work the next morning, and of course he wakes up late again. He doesn’t know what it is about Richie that makes him feel so tired, but every time they spend an extended amount of time together — time that’s not just existing in the same space, but rather looking at each other and experiencing something together — Eddie just wants to crawl into bed and stay there forever.

When Eddie wakes up on a normal day, he’s always single-mindedly focused on one thing: getting to work. On these rare… off days, it’s like his bed is a little warmer and the sun’s a little too bright and he wants to stay in bed just a little longer. He’s suddenly aware of how soft his sheets are, how plush his pillow is, of the undying warmth of the man in bed next to him.

He shakes off the comforter even when it tries to cling to him, and goes to work.

Eddie goes to see Myra Johnson first thing every morning now, where she smiles warmly at him and asks him if he completed his daily goals. His daily goals are essentially an elementary school worksheet he takes home with him every day, and puts on his fridge with a magnet. They’re easy enough to follow; things like getting up an hour before work, having a healthy breakfast to promote energy and combat fatigue, breathing exercises to regulate oneself before going to the office. They’re all tasks Eddie would be doing anyway, but the worksheets do… kind of… help him remember. Not that Eddie needs help to function, by any means, when he’s done it just fine on his own for all these years.

It’s just nice, is all. He’s always liked routine and structure. There’s nothing wrong with that.

“You’re doing really well with these goals, Eddie. At this rate you could be my father’s favorite over me.” Myra jokes Eddie hasn’t really clicked with Myra in any meaningful sense, although he sometimes gets the feeling she might be vying for friendship — and it must be lonely, sitting in this room all day, so he doesn’t blame her much. But when Myra mentions her father, Eddie’s always interested. He just looks up to the man, okay? Forgive him for feeling a wash of pride, at Myra’s words.

“I’m sure that’s not true,” he says diplomatically, even though he desperately wants it to be. “He must be proud of you working here. If he’s happy with my progress then he has you to thank for it.”

Myra does something odd, then, with her face. She kind of squints and dips her head downwards so that Eddie can’t quite see the rest of her expression, but he can tell that her cheeks are coloring with a pink hue. “You really think so?” She asks, her high voice bordering on a squeak.

“Of course,” he answers, truthfully. For once in his life, it seems like he’s chosen the right answer.

He leaves Myra’s office with a newfound pep in his step. He even gives a pressed smile to Larry in the hall when he walks past him, and Larry’s returning expression is as if Eddie’s decided to do something as out of character as wearing neon green and polka dots. Then, he sits himself down at his little cubicle desk and puts himself to work.

About two hours into rigorous data analysis, the landline phone that sits on the other end of his desk rings.

Eddie stares at the ringing phone like it’s about to detonate. It might as well, because no one in Eddie’s eight years of working in this building has ever called that phone.

But it keeps ringing, and so he picks it up.

It’s Daisy from the front desk. “Hi, Mr. Kaspbrak, I have a call for you. A Mr. Tozier, he says?”

Eddie breathes out through his teeth. Why would he have ever expected anyone else?

“Thanks, Daisy,” he says, trying not to let his irritation seep through. “Patch him through.”

The line crackles, and then, after a moment: “Tozier’s Wild and Wacky Emporium of Farts here! Whaddya looking for, something, anything, we’ve got classic farts, silent but deadlies, wet ones, explosive, stale, rich, that one’s for those customers with an expensive palate, noxious, oh ho ho now that one’s fancy, thunderous, that one’ll blow your socks clean off, and of course we’ve got stinky farts, this ain’t no scam, folks, this is the real damn deal—”

“How the,” Eddie lowers his voice and leans in close to his desk so that none of his coworkers have a chance of overhearing him. “actual fuck did you get this number?”

Richie halts in his tracks. “It’s a free country, EeKay. I just looked up data risk analyst offices in New Yawk, and boom, there it was.”

Okay. Fine. That checks out, Eddie supposes. He still feels odd about it. Richie is something that shouldn’t mix with his work life. Richie is part of his other life, and crossing this line feels dangerous, somehow.

“Whatever,” he brushes off. “Why are you calling?”

“Can’t a guy just want to talk to his best buddy?”

“No.”

“Jeez. Not what you were saying last night. But I get it, you gotta be hot and cold, gotta keep me hooked so I keep coming back again, huh?”

“I don’t gotta do anything to keep you hooked.” Eddie mumbles, and then feels immediately bad about it. He doesn’t want to use Richie’s feelings against him, but it’s just— well. The guy kinda wears them on his sleeve nowadays.

“Yowch! You know what, that’s fair. Can’t even say you’re wrong.”

“Sorry, Rich, I didn’t actually mean that.”

A beat. “It’s okay.” Richie’s voice is uncharacteristically somber as he says it, but when he speaks again it has that regular cheerful tone again: “Just a-wondering if you’re still gonna make it to movie night this weekend?”

Richie had invited him, along with Beverly and Ben from the bar, over to his apartment for a ‘movie night’, and is very, very determined to make it happen. Eddie is less enthused by the prospect, not to mention not entirely convinced that Bev and Ben actually want to hang out with their co-worker’s weird, uptight, uncool boyfriend (Eddie knows how he looks to other people, alright, he’s not going to change himself for it, but he knows). Besides, who willingly spends time with their co-workers outside of work? Eddie can’t imagine it, but he’s not about to discourage Richie from making friends, because Richie has this weird habit of locking himself in a closet and talking to a camera instead of talking to a real person. So, whatever works, really. And it’s not like Eddie has many adult friends either, so maybe it could be a real change of pace for him, too.

Not that he thinks he needs friends. But it’s a pleasant thought, is all.

“This is what you needed to call me to ask? In the middle of the work day? You know I can get fired for taking out-of-work calls, right?”

“You? Fired? Pshaw.. If they haven’t been scared off by your winning personality already, then they’re never getting rid of you.”

It’s something that might’ve been true once, before Eddie’s recent bout of chronic tardiness. He’d been a truly picture perfect employee. Employee of the Month, March 2001, August 2002, and June 2004, thank you very much. But he’s pretty sure he’s on thin ice now, and while no one’s said the words you’re at risk of termination, Eddie can read between the lines.

Eddie doesn’t know what he’d do if he got fired. This job has been his life— and he means, his whole fucking adult life, besides college, nothing else has consumed his time like this job does— for the past seven years. And he’s always liked it that way; the routine, the area. Maybe not so much the people, but he likes Mr. Johnson well enough. And there’s a nice café downstairs run by a mother and daughter who both know Eddie’s name and sandwich order. There’s a courtyard out back with a stone fountain, not that Eddie sees it often, but he likes knowing it’s there. It’s deeply comforting, the familiarity, and without it, Eddie— Eddie wouldn’t know what to do with himself.

He never even spent that much time looking for a job, right out of college: this place had been his first choice, after his graduation when Sonia had told him: “I saw this office on the way in! You should apply there, Eddie, they’ll love you!” He’d approached the office with his resume, and the rest was history.

It won’t be half as easy if he gets fired. He’ll have to tell every new job that he applies to that he got fired ‘cause his college buddy wouldn’t stop calling his work phone, and that makes him sound severely unhireable.

“Yeah, I hope so,” he responds, after silence stretches over the line for a moment too long. “Of course I’ll be there, Rich.”

“Cool, cool. Just wanted to check. Catch ya on the flipside, Edsmobile.”

The call ends with a click and then static in Eddie’s ear. He pulls the phone away from his ear and puts it down, feeling disoriented, but ever so slightly lighter, in the way that Richie always seems to make him feel. Like he’s not here in the office at all.

Eddie closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and goes through the motions. For the rest of the day, everything feels very distant, and it’s easier that way. It means he doesn’t have to be in control of every muscle twitch and minute expression.

He only snaps out of his vaguely sleepy haze around Saturday evening, when Richie’s invited him over.

Eddie takes his Mercedes to Richie’s apartment this time, pleased to have an excuse to put her wheels to pavement again. She moves like butter, glides across potholed streets like they’re made of glass. Driving his car puts him in such a good mood he almost doesn’t even get pissed at the traffic on the way there. Almost.

It’s when he pulls into a parking spot and everything slows to a stop, when the rushing colors and lights outside of his windows consolidate back into the angular shapes of buildings, that the panic starts to set in. The apartment building is all brick and mortar, short and stout, and if Eddie’s remembering right, where he’s parked is a spot that you can see out of the singular tiny window in Richie’s apartment. Eddie wonders if they already know he’s here, if they saw him pull in and are waiting on him now, talking about how odd it is that he hasn’t gotten out of his car yet— or, worse, if they haven’t noticed him at all; that he’ll go upstairs and knock on the door and walk in a room of people who were already having a great time without him. Eddie sighs and looks up at the ceiling of his car.

This is exactly why he doesn’t go out. It’s always like this. He’d be lying if he said there wasn’t a tiny little hopeful part of him that’s thinking, this is it. This is when it finally comes together, when I finally enter a room I’m not alone in, when I walk in and everyone there is happy to see me — but that part of him is offset heavily by the part of him that knows, with a deep and true certainty, that Eddie Kaspbrak simply doesn’t just connect with people like that. He’s met plenty of nice people in his life, sure, plenty of people he could love and be close to if he wanted to, but he’s just never— gotten that far. He’s never gotten over the awkward hump of the how are yous and the oh yeah the game was crazys. Except for with Richie, and that’s only because Richie had brute-forced his way past that awkward phase anyway, the way he does with everyone.

Safe to say that Eddie’s just not feeling confident about this. It’s multiplied by how badly he does want Beverly and Ben to like him — and even more so by how sure he is that they won’t. Eddie isn’t the kind of guy people like, as a general rule. He’s never tried to be. He’s okay with not being likable, mostly. It’s not a requirement for his job or life on a daily basis. He’s a New Yorker, not by birth but by creation, and he’s found that if no one else does, he at least likes himself that way.

Eddie takes a deep breath and counts to twenty. He opens the car door and steps out, letting it click softly shut behind him. He makes sure the car is locked, because he’ll be damned if it gets stolen. Then he begins the walk of doom, taking the stairs up to Richie’s apartment, every heavy step feeling like he’s walking towards his own execution.

He hovers in front of Richie’s apartment door for a moment longer than he should, staring into the peephole like it owes him money.

“Oh, hey, Eddie,” comes a smooth, confident voice behind Eddie, so starkly contrasted with his mile-a-minute thoughts that it causes him to flinch. “Woah. Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.”

Eddie runs a hand across his sweaty forehead, pushing his hair back as he stares wide-eyed at Beverly Marsh. “It’s okay,” he says, stiffly. “Just thought I’d be the last person here. I got off work late.”

Beverly Marsh laughs in his face. “Oh, no way, you’ll never be the last person when I’m comin’, I’m fashionably late to every-fuckin-thing. I was a month late to my own birth.”

Eddie laughs, too, a nervous sound. “My ma always said I arrived just on time, ‘cause I was born at midnight on the dot.”

“Punctual.” Bev says, smiling so widely that her eyes are almost pinched closed. Eddie feels a little less strangled for it.

The apartment door opens, then, without anyone knocking on it. Eddie doesn’t jump this time, but it’s a near thing with how Richie is nearly hollering at them: “Eds! Bev! What is this, some sort of button-up-shirt-wearing convention!?”

Eddie and Bev are, in fact, both wearing button-ups; his buttoned with a tie, hers unbuttoned over a tee-shirt.

“You’d fuckin’ love a button-up shirt convention, wouldn’t you, Tozier?” Bev retorts, and it’s exactly the kind of thing Eddie would’ve said, had he not been too busy being shell-shocked. He decides then that he likes her a lot. She throws her arms around Richie, suffocating him in a bear-hug.

Eddie steps up after her. He means to push past and make his way inside, but Richie catches him by the arm before he can.

“Hey.” Richie says, tone of voice much softer than the one he was using a moment earlier. He draws Eddie in and hugs him, squeezing him firmly in greeting.

“Hey, Rich.” Eddie squeaks out, trying for normal and ending up somewhere around high-strung and freaked-out instead. Like he always does.

Richie kisses him on the cheek, quick and chaste. Eddie tamps down his initial burst of panic when he remembers that Bev and Ben already know about them.

“Ben!” Bev’s calling out somewhere, deeper in the apartment. “Of course you’re already making drinks, I bet you’d explode if you had to sit down and not be helping out every goddamn second—”

Bev’s words are laced with a tone of melting affection as she makes her way into the kitchen. Richie and Eddie exchange meaningful glances.

“I live to please,” answers Ben’s chirping voice. Bev laughs melodically and Ben follows a second layer. They sound good together. They sound like they go together.

Richie heads in that direction, as if he's drawn in by the very sound of laughter — which, knowing Richie, is probably not that far off. Eddie follows after him because he doesn't want to be left behind (after slipping off his loafers, of course).

“You know we're not at work, right, Hanscom?” Richie's saying as he approaches the kitchen counter. “I'm not paying you for any of this.”

“That's alright.” Ben responds brightly. “Consider it my thanks for inviting me over.”

“Awh jeez, Benny, don't make it sound like I'm doing charity.”

Ben chuckles and shrugs. “No, I just— I appreciate you guys.”

Though he could never say it as plainly as Ben does, Eddie gets where he's coming from. It feels a bit surreal, being invited over just to ‘spend time’ or ‘hang out’, with no ulterior motive whatsoever. He understands the urge to just start profusely thanking the others for even allowing him to be there. In Eddie, that urge usually manifests itself not vocally, but instead in obsessively cleaning up when he’s at someone else’s house. His hands twitch subconsciously now, anxious for something to do.

“Hey, Eddie!” Ben greets when Eddie comes up behind Richie. “I remembered that you like Dirty Shirleys, hope you don’t mind that I went ahead and made it before you ordered this time.”

Ben holds a glass out to Eddie, the glass all frosted and cold, filled with that familiarly unnatural red liquid, ice swimming and clinking against the rim. Eddie stares at it, wordless, and for a moment, entirely forgets himself. He hadn’t expected, for whatever reason, Ben to give a shit about what he liked at all. Usually, Eddie just takes whatever he’s served on a silver platter at work events. He was always taught to be grateful, after all. Furthermore, his propensity for candied cherries is deeply unhealthy and something he tries to only indulge in every once in a while. He really shouldn’t be drinking this. He takes it anyway.

“Thanks, Ben,” he says, unable to keep the tone of absolute wonder out of his voice. It’s then that Eddie notices that Bev and Richie have their own drinks, too, each fancy-looking and clearly custom-made.

“Don’t mention it.” Ben says, pleasantly, which seems to be the only way that Ben can say anything. “Between you and me, I like myself a Shirley, too. Just a clean one.”

Ben picks up the last glass sitting on the counter, equally red and icy — almost indistinguishable from Eddie’s.

“You have good taste.” Eddie acknowledges with a small smile, and brings his glass to clink against Ben’s with a “Cheers” and a smile to boot, feeling much more relaxed with the drink in his hand.

The four of them make their way to Richie’s tiny ass couch (and Eddie’s face flushes to think about the last time he was here, how the couch had barely fit just the two of them with Richie’s lanky body filling in every empty space). Richie and Ben take the floor while Bev and Eddie are given the privilege of the rickety old couch that Richie probably picked off the side of the road.

They’re watching a foreign film called Amelie, that Eddie has no interest in beyond thinking the main character has a pretty cool haircut. It’s similar to his own, now that he thinks of it, except not parted or slicked back the way he usually wears it. Maybe he should start wearing it the way she does.

Ben, Bev, and Richie, all seem pretty invested in the movie, though, so Eddie gets a show of his own, listening to their lively conversation.. Ben’s enamored by the French backdrops and architecture, Richie with the filmography and wittiness, Bev with the coloration and style. They all agree that the movie is stunning in all aspects. Eddie stares at the screen intermittently and tries desperately to see what they see.

It's only after the movie, that he starts to get it.

“Wow.” Ben breathes, leaning his head back against the arm of the couch as the credits roll. Eddie glances over at him; his shoulder is brushing against Bev’s knee. The expression on his face is wrought, and his eyes are wet. “That was great. That was… beautiful.”

The moment barely lasts before one of Richie's grabby hands is pushing into Ben’s space to pinch at his cheek. “Awww, Ben, you big softy. You Greek fucking God of a man with a golden heart.”

Bev swats half-heartedly at Richie for that. “Don’t even try, Rich. We all know you were tearing the fuck up at that eyelid kiss.”

Richie puts his hands up, as if caught at gunpoint. “Hey! You can't prove that, you don't know that!”

“Eddie, wasn't he tearing up at the eyelid kiss?” Bev turns to him now. Eddie very much doesn't flinch, but it's a near thing, like if the actors in a play just walked off stage and started talking to you — he feels just outside of their conversations, usually, on the edge looking inwards.

Eddie, who was watching all their faces, illuminated by the dim TV light, did in fact see the gleam in Richie's eye at that scene, and the sniffle he tried to conceal as a cough.

“Oh. Yeah,” he confirms, “Bawling like a baby.”

Bev’s eyebrows raise halfway up her face, in an expression that so clearly reads ‘see?’ without her having to say a word.

“Eds! You baby-faced traitor!” Richie exclaims in mock-offense.

“Pretty sure you mean bald-faced,” Ben corrects.

“Trust me, I meant what I said.”

Bev rolls her eyes self-righteously, this time sharing a glance with Eddie that he thinks means these guys, huh. Like they’re on the same team, them versus their guys, which is a funny sentiment because their relationships with their respective guys could not be more different from each other.

Eddie opens his mouth then and what comes tumbling out is, “But you were crying, too, Bev.”

It’s true. Eddie had glanced over at some point during the movie, some light, bright part, and had to do a double take at the wetness painting Bev’s cheeks. It was mainly so surprising because Bev didn’t give any other physical indications that she was crying; no shaking shoulders, no hiccups, no quivering lip. The only reason Eddie could tell was because the light of the screen reflected off of her face, glowing with tears.

Eddie’s never met anyone who cries the same way he does. But maybe that’s just because he hasn’t been close enough to anyone to see them cry for a long time.

It hits Eddie a moment too late that maybe it’s a bad idea, bad manners, to point out that someone you barely know was crying — especially when they clearly didn’t want it to be seen. But then again, isn’t it fair game when she was the one who brought up Richie crying in the first place?

Bev, thankfully, doesn’t leave him in the dark with that thought for too long. She barks out a laugh, right in his face, and her breath carries a harsh bite of tequila with it.

“I sure was, wasn’t I?” She says, with her smiling eyes. “You’ve figured out my secret, I guess. Bev Marsh’s got a soft spot too. Who woulda thunk it?”

Eddie wants, suddenly, to also have cried. But he doesn’t think any movie’s ever made him cry, much less this one, with its degrees of separation from him, what with it being in French, and artsy, and esoteric; all things Eddie Kaspbrak patently is not.

“Why?” He asks, curiously. Just wanting to know. “Why’d you cry?”

Bev takes a considering sip of her drink, mulling it over. “I don’t know. I guess it was the intimacy, the breaking point of it all. After she spent so long lonely, so long running away… I guess it was just that she gave in. Don’t you want that, sometimes? To just give in.”

Oh boy, does Eddie want that. Not sometimes, but always.

“Yeah. I get that,” is all he says, looking down at the bottom of his glass.

“Are you Amelie?” Richie asks, reaching across the couch towards Bev again. “You wearing a beret and going around saying oui oui?”

“Nah.” Bev says, taking Richie’s hand in hers and swinging it. “I think Ben’s Amelie. I’m his Nino.”

Eddie’s gaze turns to Ben at that, and he’s gone so beet red he’s almost purpling. Bev laughs melodically, tipsy enough to tilt her head back as she does it, and all Ben does is stare at her, stone-cold sober, taking in every molecule of the sight.

“I don’t think I’m really either of them,” Eddie mumbles, tapping a finger to the rim of his glass idly. “Don’t think movies like this are made for people like me.”

He doesn’t really know what he means by that. Mostly that he’s too bland of a person for his life to ever be that colorful, but also that he’s too queer of a person to have a romance that sweet. Both too normal and not normal enough, all at once. The Eddie Kaspbrak Conundrum, scientists may call it.

“There will be other movies.” Ben says kindly, his attention now fixed on Eddie. “If this one didn’t resonate, another one will.”

That’s not the point, Eddie wants to say. I wanted this one to resonate. I wanted to be in this moment with the three of you, experience it just the way you did, look into that TV and see whatever it was that you did, but I just can’t, because I’ve got a chronic case of the Eddies. And I can’t say any of this either, because this is not something Eddie Kaspbrak would say.

“Yeah,” he agrees, instead. “I hope I get to share them with you guys.”

At that, Ben smiles. He reaches across the couch, and now they’re a tangled web of limbs, the four of them. His hand rests comfortingly on Eddie’s knee. “Me too. It’s been a long time since I’ve had friends like you guys.”

“I don’t think I ever have,” says Eddie.

“Me, neither.” Bev pipes up.

Richie shakes his head wordlessly. He’s slumping down with exhaustion against the couch.

“Well. I’m glad I have you guys.” Ben says. Somehow that’s enough for all of them, and the understanding pours heavy like syrup over them without needing to say anything more.

Bev leans over Ben, swinging a leg over each of his shoulders and attempting to press a kiss to his eyelid. He giggles, a lilting noise. Eddie watches them in simultaneous envy and happiness. Happy for them, while painfully cognizant that it’s something he can never have; that care-free love, that sweetness. He’s past thinking of it as unfair, by now. It’s just how it is. Men like him weren’t made to be loved like that.

Richie’s hand circles around his ankle, ever-familiar in its heaviness.

Men like him were made to be happy with what they can get. So Eddie’s happy, or his closest approximation to the feeling. The four of them fall into a tangled mess before too long, and Eddie will only spend some of that time feeling like he’s trying to break out of his body into the real world, feeling like pounding fists at his chest like he needs to crack it open to feel free.

Ben’s head rests against his leg. Richie’s hands hold on wherever they can. Bev’s lips press against to his shoulder. All together like this, they reek of alcohol and sweat. All together like this, they smell of the closest thing to home that Eddie’s smelt in a very long time.

Two days later, he goes back to work.

He puts on his suit and tie, his second skin for as many years as he’s been a man. He shaves his face, watches the prickly hairs go down the drain. He picks up his briefcase, and feels like a boy in a costume, this time.

He says hello to the secretary. Frowns at the man he’s supposed to hate, Larry, just because he’s supposed to. Today he can’t recall the reason why.

He sits down at his desk and types and types and types.

Before long, he’s going to Myra’s office for his appointment.

“Right on time today, Mr. Kaspbrak.”

Eddie nods a second late, because at first he doesn’t recognize it as his name, thinks, seriously, Mr. Kaspbrak? That’s my father.

“That’s good! I think we’re really making strides.” Myra smiles. Her teeth are shiny, perfect, and white. “Don’t you think so?”

“Of course,” he nods again. “You’ve been my teacher, after all.”

Myra doesn’t stop smiling. “We might not need these meetings, soon enough.”

Eddie looks at her blankly, and feels like he’s just a speaker playing pre-recorded lines when he says: “Oh, I’ll miss them.”

“Of course, not needing them doesn’t mean we can’t keep having them.”

Eddie blinks. He’s not sure what she means. “I’d prefer to— well, work as much as I can during work hours, if that’s okay.”

“Oh, right, yes, of course! I’d never tell you not to work, that’d defeat the whole purpose of my job, right? I just mean, outside of work, we could meet up.”

“Oh.”

”I’ve just enjoyed talking to you so much, and I’d love to see you again.” Myra continues, and something sinks inside of Eddie, the weight of a peach pit in his gut, just heavy enough to feel. She sounds so sweet, so earnest, but truth be told, Eddie hasn’t enjoyed the sessions nearly as much as she seems to. It’s not her fault, really, it’s just that Eddie can’t take his socializing brain into work; he splits himself from it every morning and leaves it behind. But then he thinks of his friends, and the way they made space for him, invited him in, and he looks around the empty room — no windows, just a plant with browning on the tips of its leaves, only a desk and a chair for company — and pities her. He hadn’t been too different from her, not too long ago.

“Well,” Eddie says carefully, considering what to say that won’t sound like a complete lie. “I have a busy schedule, but I think some arrangement could be made.”

“That would be so wonderful.” Myra gushes, and one of her arms reaches across the desk between them, which suddenly feels much smaller than ever before, and a hand squeezes around his forearm. Eddie feels suffocated by it.

“Yes.” he agrees. “Just choose a restaurant and— I’m there.”

“Oh, really?” Myra blinks repeatedly at him. Her hand is still on his arm, now rubbing circles there. “You’ll take me out to a restaurant? What a gentleman!”

Eddie’s holding himself perfectly straight and still, rigid in his seat like she’s a predator who can sense movement, weakness, blood in the water. “Sure,” he says with a pressed smile.

“Men of this age aren’t like you, Mr. Kaspbrak. They can’t be bothered to wear real suits or groom themselves or treat a lady right. But you’re different.” Myra’s hand is petting down his arm, now, a slow crawl down to meet his hand. Eddie doesn’t have the heart to tell her exactly why he’s so different from all those other men. “It’s refreshing. I’m looking forward to our date.”

To punctuate that sentence, as if it doesn’t already hit Eddie hard enough, she squeezes his hand. Just lightly, softly. Her hands are well-moisturized and small and Eddie just about feels bile creep up his esophagus because he can’t say the no that’s burning there — because a refusal would beg the question why. Because she’s the goddamn CEO’s daughter, and no man in his right mind would turn that down, and if Eddie does, and it gets out to the rest of the office, it’ll creep into everything. Not to mention Mr. Johnson himself, who would only look on in knowing disappointment, like, you couldn’t swallow it down? You couldn’t put on your big boy pants? You couldn’t be a fucking man, just this once, Eddie Kaspbrak?

Eddie shoots up from his chair the moment that Myra’s hand leaves his. He smooths down his suit jacket and tie, slightly crumpled by how long he’s been sitting. “Me, too,” is all he can say before he’s powerwalking straight out of her office, feet barely touching the ground with how strongly he wants to make a break for it, to just run down the hall and keep running, run up all those flights of stairs until he’s up on the roof of a building so tall it touches the clouds. He wants to lean up against the railing of the roof and loosen his tie as the winds whip around his face. For the first time ever since he began working here, he wants to leave.

He doesn’t leave.

Instead, Eddie walks, blankly, back to his desk. He doesn’t even spare Larry a glance this time, angry or otherwise. He just breathes and focuses on the lights on the ceiling that are somehow too bright but also too fuzzy, and their subtle flicker. The familiar carpet that he wishes he could clean. The gray walls of his cubicle, his favorite place on Earth because it’s the only place that feels like his.

The world tilts and rights itself again. Numbers swim into focus in front of him, and his gaze locks on them, unshakable. He taps away at the large keys of the desktop computer, inputting zeros and ones like his life depends on it.

The rest of the work week after that is just the same. All Eddie can see is numbers, overlaid fuzzily on top of each other, etched on the back of his eyelids. He’s avoiding Myra, sure, of course, but he’s also avoiding everyone else, and no one’ll notice if the already standoffish and antisocial guy in the office is just a little more antisocial than usual.

The one person Eddie does speak to is the one who calls his desk phone. The ringing breaks him out of the fugue state he’s settled into, a bright sound in the grayness that he’s become so used to. He reaches for it and knows who it is before he picks it up, tells the secretary, before she can even get out her ‘Mr. Kasp—’, “Patch him through, please.”

There’s some crackling noise over the line, and then it clears.

“Hey, Rich.” Eddie breathes out, and feels like he’s breathing easy for the first time today. Richie’s been calling his office phone a lot lately, mostly to his chagrin, but now that it’s so consistent, he’s started to accept it into his routine. That’s the way everything seems to go, with Richie: Richie pushes, Eddie pushes back, Richie pushes harder, Eddie accepts it because he can’t be bothered to fight it anymore. And maybe because he likes it.

“Eddie?” Richie asks.

“Yes, it's Eddie, who the fuck else would it be.”

“There you are.” Richie says, relieved. “For a second there you almost sounded pleasant, and I was worried it was some sort of skinwalker situation where your lifeless body was being puppeted around by a brain parasite.”

Eddie squeezes his eyes shut and fights against the smile that's trying to creep its way up his face. “You have to stop reading those weird fucking manuscripts.”

“I can't! Bill needs me! Plus, he pays me. And just between you and me, I don't think he's made many friends in Portland, so it's the least I can do for the poor fella, honestly. I'm probably the only thing keeping him from finally snapping. It's chilling the way he talks about publishing offices sometimes. You'd think he’s planning on flying a plane into HarperCollins LLC if they send him back to edits again.”

“Richie.”

“What, too soon?”

“No. What? I don't give a shit. Just, why were you calling?”

“Oh, uhhh…” It's only now that Eddie becomes aware of the background noise on Richie's end; there's frantic whispering, crowd noise, clinking glasses, and most damningly, the distinct sound of someone singing on a shitty karaoke machine.

“Are you calling me from work?” Eddie asks in complete bewilderment. He wracks his mind for reasons why Richie would be calling him from work— “Did you get fired?”

“No! No, I didn't get fired, they can't afford to lose me, are you kidding?” Eddie rolls his eyes at that, but Richie continues: “I just wanted to know, you know, if maybe, on Friday or something, you'd want to come to the bar and— ow, shit, Bev, what?!”

Eddie hears the muffled sound of Bev telling Richie off, and then it's Bev's voice on the receiver, loud and clear: “Hiya, Eddie, we were just thinking it'd be nice to see you and celebrate the end of the week with a round of drinks. How does that sound?”

Eddie hesitates, brow furrowed. He's pretty sure he knows Richie and Bev well enough by now to know they aren't trying to pull the wool over his eyes, that this isn't some sort of high school prank where they're inviting him out just to stand him up when he gets there — that'd be a dumb prank, anyway, considering they're inviting him to their workplace. But they're acting really fucking weird.

“…Sure, I can be there,” he ends up saying, all thoughts overridden with the realization that he'll get to see his friends, no matter what dumb shit it is they have planned.

“Great! Thanks, Eddie. Love you, seeya then!” Bev responds sing-songingly. He can hear the smile in her voice, and it makes him want to be there with her now. The call ends with a soft, definitive click.

“You too,” he says, after the bustling noise of the call has already disappeared. He pulls the phone away from his ear and it's like he's in a completely different place, like for a moment he really had been there, in the bustling bar with its constant moving chaos. Then he's back in the office, and it's still and silent except for the sound of keys clacking on computers. The air here is stale, and it's almost worse than the ever-present stickiness that's in the air at the Naughty Beaver.

Eddie breathes in, and out, and feels as though his lungs are shrivelling in his chest. All the air in the office is air he's already breathed. Every single weekday for eight years. It's a hell of a long time.

That's the thought that's percolating in Eddie's mind for the rest of the week. Until Friday comes around, that is.

Eddie grows complacent. He stops checking the caller ID when he picks up his desk phone, because it'll be Richie. Richie calls him at any time of day, regardless of whether it's in the middle of both of their shifts. He puts no thought to whether Eddie might not be there to pick up. Doesn't take it personally if Eddie doesn't, just calls a couple hours later with some inane question like "Are fish with wings just birds that fell from the sky and evolved?" to which Eddie would get to reply "Why the fuck would I know that?" And repeat on and on, ad infinitum.

So when he gets a call while he's sitting in his gray cubicle, he thinks nothing of it. He shrugs, picks up his phone, and puts it up his ear.

"Richie?" He asks, expecting a hearty "the one and only!" in response.

"Eddie," says Sonia, and Eddie's breath is knocked right out of his chest. "Who's Richie?”

Eddie blinks a few times in quick succession. He should've waited for Daisy at the front desk to tell him who was calling, but he hasn't been doing that lately, because there's only one person who ever calls this number anyway.

“Ma?” Is the only word he can say, the only thing that he can push out of his mouth without it coming out bitter with bile. His voice is an octave higher than usual.

“My baby,” she coos. “Oh, Eddie, you can't imagine how much I missed your sweet voice. How could you rob me of hearing it? That's cruel, Eddie. That's not nice at all.”

Eddie's stomach is turning. He slouches over in his seat like he just might vomit right here in his cubicle. “Why— why are you calling, Ma?” He asks, instead of how did you get this number.

She goes quiet, which has always been the worst sound to hear from Sonia. When she speaks again, her voice is shaking. “It's your birthday, Eddiebear. Did you think I'd forget?”

Fuck.

Here's the thing.

Eddie knows exactly what day it is. He always does. He has a calendar on his wall at home where he crosses off each day with religious repetition.

And he knows what day his birthday is, the way any adult does. It's on his driver's license, his birth certificate, all his legal documents. It's a number he could tap out on a keypad with his eyes closed.

So, then, he must've known, on some level, that it was his birthday today. But he just hadn’t thought about it, the way you don’t think about blinking or breathing, but you still know you’re doing it. He’s had more pressing things to think about, like the commute to work and how much he hates it every single day, the grime that makes the soles of his nicest loafers stick to the subway tiles, the leftover sweat and germs teeming everywhere he puts his hands. How he really likes driving better than any of this, but if he drove then he’d have to park. If he drove then he’d have to feel that broiling-over joy that driving with his windows down always brings to the brink of him, and then he’d have to go to work afterwards anyways.

“No, I—” he starts, but doesn’t want Sonia to know that he forgot his own birthday. He’d never hear the end of it. “Just wasn’t expecting this. That’s all.”

She sniffs into the receiver. “Alright, well, I wanted to tell you happy birthday. Thirty is a big one.”

Thirty. Jesus, that’s right. He’s turning thirty.

“Thanks, Ma,” he says, sounding faint to his own ears.

“Of course, baby,” and the line is silent again for a moment. Then: “Who’s Richie?”

She’s not going to let that go. Sonia’s never let anything go, always had a nose for whatever specific secret Eddie was trying to hide.

“Uh,” Eddie rubs at his forehead with a hand, trying to dissuade the headache brewing there. “No one, Ma. Just someone I work with.”

She hums at that, like it makes sense, letting it drop to go in for another kill. “You know there’s nothing wrong with being focused on your career, Eddiebear, but I can’t help but wonder…” she trails off here.

“What?” He asks, though he’s pretty sure he can guess.

She sniffles again. “I’m dying, Eddie,” she says, declares, with a voice crack. The pit in Eddie’s stomach feels like it’s going to consume him. “You pay the medical bills. You know, they don’t think I have very long, and you’re already thirty now. All I ever wanted was to see my baby happy. Now you won’t even let me see you at all, and you know, Eddie, you know my dream was always to see you married. Before I die, at least give me that. If nothing else. That would be the least you could do, Eddie, it’s all I ask.”

There’s a pleading tone in her voice that borders on a whine, almost painful to listen to, like the squealing of a car’s brake pads that desperately need to be replaced.

“Ma,” Eddie tries. His right hand is white-knuckling the phone while his left one taps incessantly on his desk. “I don’t even know any women in New York I could marry.”

“What about that nice girl?”

Eddie’s tapping finger stills.

“Who?”

“Oh, you know. Mr. Johnson’s daughter. He’d be a lovely father-in-law, don’t you think?”

The nausea is simmering again, coming to a boil.

“Myra? Ma, how do you know Myra?”

It’s silent for a beat too long. “Eddie, I know everyone you work with. That’s how I know there’s no Richie, and if there was, you’d be calling him Richard.”

Eddie can’t help the way his breaths are coming short, heaving into the receiver like he’s about to hurl. He might be. “What. Why? How?”

That’s the thing he’d forgotten to ask. How did you get this number?

“I got you this job, Eddiebear.” The walls of his cubicle feel closer than they ever have, like his shoulders can reach from one end to the other. His back is bending, shoulders hunching as she keeps talking: “I’ve done everything for you. Everything. I begged and pleaded for your sake, so that you’d have a leg to stand on. Mr. Johnson watches over you for me, he’s an old friend from Derry, and that’s why whoever this Richie person is, he can’t be in your life.”

“It’s my life, Ma. Not yours.” Eddie almost doesn’t believe it as he’s saying it, but he squeezes his eyes shut and knows that he has to. “He doesn’t have to be in your life, but he’s in mine.”

“You don’t think I can take it away?”

Eddie’s heart drops.

“You don’t think I can tell Mr. Johnson he has a fag working for him? That a man he respects takes it up the ass? How do you think he’ll react to that?”

“Ma,” he pleads, voice small and high.

“Eddiebear, this is for your own good. You’ve always needed me, whether you knew it or not.” For her part, Sonia sounds convincingly pitying. Eddie can feel the ghost of her hand over his cheek. “And for the love of God, baby, come home for Christmas this year to see your dying mother. That’s all I ask, really.”

“Okay,” he says, shakily, an agreement that feels like he’s begging. “Okay, Ma, I will.”

“Good. I love you, Eddie.”

“I love you, too.”

The phone call ends with a quiet click as he hangs it back on the hook.

It’s 5:02 P.M. He has to clock out.

It’s that time of year when the days are finally long enough for the sun to still be out by the time Eddie gets out of work. He stands with his briefcase in hand, considers going home to grab his car, before he remembers that he's probably going to get shit-faced like he does every time he's with Bev and Richie. And Ben, especially Ben, even though he's sober, ‘cause he's the #1 drink provider of the group, happy to facilitate everyone else's drunkenness but his own.

Eddie hails a cab, deciding, at least this once, to spare himself the agony of the subway. He’s earned that much.

Only, in the cab, there are even less distractions than there would be on the train. This doesn’t exactly help with the scattering of Eddie’s mind. Here in the cab, he’s entirely out of control. All he can do is watch the driver’s hands on the wheel and pretend they’re his own, but that doesn’t even work much when his body lurches with each press of the gas and the brake. It irritates his stomach, sets it rolling along to the rhythm of the car, jumping with every pothole the cab driver hits.

If he thinks about it, this is what his life has been all along. All false control in his hands, one of those dumb fucking health hazard toy steering wheels that people give kids in cars.

It makes sense, really. A part of him must have known that it was too easy to break free, that for someone who’d put her whole life into molding a son to be dependent on her and her alone, she’d let go too easy. But he’d been so eager for it that he hadn’t stopped to consider. Eddie was suspicious of everything as a general rule, paranoid of everyone, but somehow never nearly enough to see it coming.

Maybe she’s right. Maybe he does need her. Because a real adult would’ve done a substantial amount of digging, would have picked at the scab to see the thing underneath, but Eddie had always been too terrified. Always less of a man and more of a little boy.

His chest feels drawn tight, his ribs corseted with string around his desperately pulsing lungs as they try to inhale, and inhale, and inhale.

Eddie stumbles out of the cab at the Naughty Beaver; the cab driver barks at him to close the door but he’s bracing himself against the brick wall and he can’t hear over the incessant buzzing in his ears.

He’s there heaving heavy breaths for minutes before things swim back into focus, and by then, the cab is gone. The door of the bar opens, and the bells jingle. Eddie tries to straighten himself into a presentable, standing position.

“Woah, Eds, hey, hey.” Richie sounds like he’s enticing a stray cat with goddamn rabies, and Eddie wants to laugh at that. Richie’s big hand lands on the back of his neck. Eddie’s suddenly very aware of how clammy he is, and how dry Richie is. “You alright?”

“Yeah, yeah, I,” he knows he’s not being very convincing right now. “Just got a call and it’s. It wasn’t good.”

“Oh. What’s wrong?”

“It’s my mom. She’s, um, she’s sick.”

“Shit, Eds. That fucking sucks.”

“Yeah. Yeah, it does.” A regular reason to have a breakdown. A man with a sick mother who he loves and cares for, brought to his knees at the thought of her sickness. That’s who Eddie is.

“I think. I’m going home for Christmas,” he says, and fully expects Richie to know what that means. Eddie doesn't think he hides it very well, anyway. He assumes most people he interacts with can see it plastered on his forehead, between the early-formed worry wrinkles and gray hairs, a glaring red sign that reads MOMMY ISSUES.

“Oh shit, Christmas with the Kaspbraks. I bet that's a real rager.” Richie says with that sideways grin he gets when he's about to say something that will be extremely funny to him and only him. “I bet you all wear full suits and ties. I'll bet you were born with it fused to your skin.”

“I don't want to go.” Eddie says, stiffly. More stiff than usual, that is. Richie can probably detect the grave seriousness of his voice, because his smile droops ever so slightly. Eddie hates that -- hates whenever Richie absorbs his misery like he's a six foot two inch tall dish sponge.: “I won’t reach my quota for the year. Mr. Johnson’ll be disappointed,” he lies, wanting to see Richie’s smile return.

The thing is, Eddie's good at lying. He wishes he wasn't. It's trained into his limbs the way babies instinctively know how to swim as soon as they leave the mother's womb; it's all they've ever known how to do.

He wishes, sometimes, that he was as easy to read as Richie is. He’s the world's most entertaining puppet show, the way he smiles wide and frowns deep. Most of the time, Eddie's own mouth is pressed into a flat line, and he has to press a big red button in his mind that says SMILE, always a second too late to fool anyone into thinking it's natural.

“Fuck that, Eddie.” Richie’s laughing, disbelievingly. “You know how I feel about Mr. Fucking Johnson, the guy can go fuck himself ‘till he’s inside out. Your mom’s sick. You should go home, be with her.”

“You’re right.” Eddie agrees, softly.

That’s the thing with being good at lying. If you’ve been doing it long enough, you really start to believe it. He can feel the panic seeping out of his body already.

Richie’s hand pets comfortingly between his shoulder blades, long fingers splayed there. “Yeah. You’re gonna go home, and, and, everything’s gonna be alright, okay, Eds. Cross my heart and hope to die. Tonight, though, we’re gonna get drunk and get your mind off of all that shit.”

It’s the first good thing Eddie’s heard all day. He nods, frantically, affirmatively, and Richie laughs.

“Alright, Ernest Hemmingway, let’s get you a drink.” Richie guides him, steering him with the hand on his back. He leads Eddie to the door and holds it open, pushes him through. “Oh, and, happy birthday.”

Eddie barely has a moment to process the scene in front of him — the bar completely deserted and dark — before there scene erupts with cheers and whoops, two people screaming at the very tops of their lungs: “SURPRISE!”

“What the fuck,” he says, to Bev and Ben, who have popped up behind the counter like a pair of jack in the box clowns.

“Happy birthday, Eddie!” Ben exclaims, big bright smile on his handsome face.

“Hanscom, please get the birthday boy — no, sorry, the birthday man — a drink.”

“Sir, yes, sir.” Ben mock-salutes at Richie.

Bev practically catapults herself over the counter to wave for Eddie to come closer.

“How is no one else here?” He asks.

“Oh, we made sure of it,” is Bev’s only response to that, which leaves Eddie with far more questions, but she’s already moving on. “Look, we couldn’t quite afford a full cake, but we’ve got you a couple grocery store bakery slices!”

She unveils them like they’re the top dish at a Michelin star restaurant; two matching slices of red velvet cake. There’s a candle on each, a number 3 and a number 0.

“You sure love red food, don’t you, Eddie?” Ben asks, and Eddie laughs, because he hadn’t realized it, but he does.

Bev pushes the slices towards him while Ben places his drink next to the plate, and Richie— Richie’s getting on stage, because of fucking course he is.

“This one goes out to a very special guy in the audience tonight,” Richie’s saying into the karaoke microphone. “Everyone’s very favorite porcelain doll turned real boy, weasel standing on two legs, shaken soda pop can about to explode at any moment, Eddie Kaspbrak!”

There’s something swelling in his chest at all this, clawing up his throat. Please don’t cry, he thinks inwardly, as Bev lights the candles with a fucking cigarette lighter.

Then Richie starts singing, over the karaoke machine, in the worst goddamn singing voice Eddie’s ever heard— Happy birthday to you, happy birthday tooo youuuu. Somehow he’s not hitting a single note, and Eddie laughs wetly. Bev and Ben are chiming in, in the background, but Richie’s amplified voice overpowers both of theirs.

Richie’s smiling so widely, blue eyes squinted, head tilted, and he’s singing to Eddie. Only looking at Eddie. He reaches out a hand — happy birthday dear Edsterrrrrr — and Eddie reaches back, halfheartedly. Eddie’s chest still aches, dully. Richie’s reaching out to him, and Bev and Ben are warm by his sides. They’re all so warm and Eddie can feel it, the way they burn with the things they feel, with love for each other. Eddie doesn’t feel any of that, at least not naturally. He can only feel it on his skin, he can’t feel it inside, can’t produce it himself. All the warmth in this room is coming from them. He’s cold. He’s fucking freezing.

“Make a wish, Eddie.” Bev says, sweetly, as he stares into the flickering light of the birthday candles.

Eddie closes his eyes and thinks very hard.

I wish I was someone else.

I wish I was whoever you think I am.

I wish I could be someone you really love.

Eddie inhales and blows the candles out. He doesn’t know who he’s wishing to.

Richie doesn’t leave them in that quiet moment for long. He never does. Eddie really appreciates that about him, because left alone to his own devices, Eddie would be happy to trap himself in silent thought-spirals, drowning deeper inside himself until he can’t be pulled out anymore. Until Richie can’t save him anymore.

“For my next song, I’ll be serenading the birthday boy…” Richie’s messing with the karaoke machine, scrolling through the list of songs. Three heads swivel towards him.

“Seriously, Rich? The guy just turned thirty and you want to punish him with more strangled-chicken singing?” Bev heckles. She seems to think knocking Richie down a peg is the job she’s being paid for, instead of actually working at this bar.

“People pay their life’s savings to hear this angelic voice, Ms. Marsh.” Richie barks back. “But because I’m so nice, Eds, you can request something.”

“Gee, what an offer. Is this my present?” Eddie asks, dryly.

“Yeah, this is pretty much all I can afford to get you, so, choose wisely.” Knowing Richie, that could very well be the honest truth.

Eddie hums and considers this. He doesn’t listen to much music at all, not the way Richie does where he scours the Web for obscure tracks with genre-labels like shoegaze and math rock. Most of the music Eddie likes is stuff he hears on the radio. He’s been known to bob his head to some Celine Dion or Britney, there’s no shame in that, but he’s liked other tracks, too, hit songs by artists he doesn’t know by name.

“There’s this song I like, I hear it all the time on 92.3—” He snaps his fingers as he tries to remember. “Somewhere Only We Know?”

Richie whistles lowly, at that. “What a pull from good ol’ Sharp Cheddie over there, some alt-rock realness. Alright, alright, I can do that for ya,” and it strikes Eddie then that he’s speaking with his radio-presenter Voice, the one he uses in his online videos. Being on a stage comes so naturally to Richie, he just starts performing the second a microphone is in his hand. Not for the first time, Eddie wonders why he ever quit stand-up.

Richie loads the song up on the machine, opens his mouth, and, in total sincerity, starts singing.

Eddie hadn’t been expecting that. It catches him off guard, because Richie had truly sounded awful singing Happy Birthday, like a dying cat mixed with a train horn. But there must be some truth to that old saying, that to be good at something you have to know how to be bad at it, because Richie’s really fucking hitting these notes. Eddie knows with absolute certainty then Richie can never know that he’s actually decent at singing, even as, with dawning horror, he realizes that Richie might already know. God help the world if Richie Tozier ever pursues a music career— his ego would probably swell to never-before-seen capacities.

“Hey,” Ben’s murmuring somewhere to Eddie’s side. Eddie can’t tear his eyes away from Richie on stage. “Wanna dance?”

Bev is quieter than Eddie’s ever heard her, but he still catches what she says; “I don’t think so. I don’t think.. I don’t think I can do this, Ben.”

“What, dance?”

“No, it’s… this whole thing. I don’t think I can… do feelings. All this lovey-dovey shit, it’s, it kinda makes me freak the fuck out. I’m sorry, Ben.”

“Oh. Okay. That’s.. that’s okay, Bev, I get it.” But there’s a note in Ben’s voice like he’s really not okay at all. “I’m gonna get some air.”

Eddie processes it absently, because he’s so focused on Richie’s singing voice, which is lower than his regular voice. It’s silky, which is an odd word to use to describe a man’s voice, but it’s the best one Eddie can think of. Worse than that, Richie enunciates every syllable, and Eddie can feel every word, washing over him; I’m getting old and I need something to rely on. The panic that had been sitting dormant at the bottom of his stomach is starting to build again, pulling him down like a brick tied to his foot.

Eddie likes the song, sure, but it’s never hit him like this, never made him feel wobbly and weak. Never made him feel so fucking out of control, and God if that isn’t the theme of this whole fucking day— he’s thirty years old and he feels about as in control of his life as he did at thirteen.

Warm yellow stage lights illuminate Richie; they must be warm ‘cause he’s glistening with sweat as he sings. This could be the end of everything, so why don’t we gooo… and Richie sings it with such passion, such fervor, so much of that pure liveliness that Eddie can never quite seem to conjure up himself. He doesn’t get it. He doesn’t understand Richie at all. Eddie feels constantly as though every movement with his body, his hands, every sound he makes, is carefully, meticulously chosen. He’s never been able to quite replicate the natural, genuine way Richie moves, with his whole self.

Richie’s knuckles are turning white as he grips the microphone. His eyes are squeezed shut. Richie’s alive, and breathing, and real.

I love you, Eddie thinks, and reels back in surprise at himself. I love you too.

He’s standing before he can stop himself, bee-lining for the employee’s exit. He doesn’t stop even when he hears Bev calling after him, mostly because he can’t, because he feels like if he stops he might genuinely just explode with all of it. All the shit that’s been brewing deep inside of him, ugly and unbidden.

And maybe he does fucking love Richie Tozier. Or as close an imitation of love as Eddie can get to, anyway. That doesn’t mean it’s good. Doesn’t mean it’s anything Richie will want. Richie probably thinks he wants Eddie, but it’s not like he really knows anything of substance about him, after all. Richie doesn’t even know his mother’s name. And that’s Eddie’s fault. He doesn’t want Richie to know about his mom, or his childhood, but how can he claim to love a man he’s never been honest with? How can Eddie claim to love anyone?

The thing is— Richie doesn't know the half of it.

If he thinks this is a love story, then he's got the genre all wrong.

Eddie's whole life has felt more like a horror movie, a one-eye-open waking nightmare where he could only ever run as fast as the camera could follow.

He goes through the back door, into the alley behind the bar. The fresh air (well, as fresh as New York air can ever be) rushes into his lungs, replacing the smoke of the birthday candles that had settled there. He inhales, deeply, with his eyes shut, and then yelps when he opens them.

Ben is standing to the side of the door, leaned up against the exposed brick wall. He has an open bottle of Crown Royal in one hand, and his eyes are watery and big when he looks over at Eddie.

“Oh, shit,” he says, “Happy birthday, Eddie. Hope I’m not ruining it.”

“You’re not. It was already ruined,” Eddie says plainly, trying a smile.

Ben nods, looking down at his feet. “I’m sorry about that. I hope you feel better.”

“Yeah. You too.”

Eddie has the vague inclination that he should probably ask Ben something like what’s wrong? What happened?, but he doesn’t feel much like a good friend right now, and the silence is comfortable. Ben takes a swig from his bottle of whiskey.

“You’re drinking,” says Eddie, finally registering it.

Ben looks at the bottle in his own hand like he doesn’t know how it got there. “Uh. Yeah, I am. I know I shouldn’t but— Jesus.” He tilts his head back against the wall, and it lands with a thunk. “I got my hopes up again.”

Eddie doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but at the same time, he does.

“I know the feeling,” he agrees.

“I just wish— that things could be like they are in stories, man. Wish things could turn out right for once.”

“Yeah. It’s like—” and Eddie’s not good at talking about his feelings but Ben’s looking at him now, all wide-eyed and hopeless, so he tries: “It’s like the world only lets you have good things to be cruel. Like, just for the sake of tearing it away from you.”

Ben blinks, and then sniffles. “Wow, yeah, you’re right. I just… it feels like there’s nothing left for me here, you know?”

Eddie looks back at him, concerned. “You’re not gonna kill yourself, are you?”

“No! No, Eddie, sorry if it sounded that way.” Ben apologizes a lot while crying, Eddie notes. “I mean— I don’t know if I belong in New York. I’ve been thinking a lot about California. I think... I think that I just might fare better somewhere with warmer weather.”

Eddie feels a jolt of panic, which in turn makes him feel supremely selfish. It’s just the prospect of something in his carefully cultivated routine going astray, and… he likes Ben. He’d miss him if he went away.

Eddie pushes that feeling down. It’s not his call to make. If Ben thinks he would be happier elsewhere, then he deserves to be.

“You should go, Ben.”

Ben looks surprised, eyes wide and wet. “Really?”

“Yeah.” Eddie responds, and finds that he really means it. “I mean, nothing lasts forever. I loved being your friend here for as long as I got to know you. But everyone has to leave eventually.”

Ben’s nodding, and Eddie notes with mild horror that he’s growing misty-eyed. “You’re a really good friend, Eddie. I hope you know that.”

Eddie stares at Ben for a moment. Ben is the most manly guy he knows that isn’t also a complete and total asshole. Ben is a real man. Ben is a real person. Ben knows what it means to be in love and probably has always known he was capable of it. Eddie wants to be like him, and like Bev and Richie too, even though they’re all such different people. He desperately wants that vital thing that they all have but that Eddie can’t quite seem to access, that realness about them.

“I don’t know if that’s true,” he answers, honestly. “But I really want to be.”

Ben gives him a sad little smile at that, not pitying, but understanding.

Eddie can’t shake the feeling, though, that this tenuous grasp on his life he’s been keeping is slipping out of his hands. He would love to say he has no idea why, but he knows exactly who and what it is. It’s the thing that can’t be shaken, the itch that can’t be scratched, like a scab on your knee that never truly heals over.

He’s going home.

God help him, Eddie Kaspbrak is going home.