bizaar

[bizaar]

Endless Summer ✧

Part 5: Love Lies Bleeding

Cruel Summer Masterlist

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pairing: eddie munson x afab!reader

warnings: sexual content (18+ minors dni), kissing, slight heavy petting, fluff, horny-loser!Eddie and reader both, mentions of parental abuse, mentions of drug use, swearing

word count: 19k

a/n: back from the dead after... what, like a year? I really wanted to get this out, because it was almost finished and literally just sitting in my drafts (I don't have a gif for this one, sorry chat!)

Bad things come in threes, or at least that’s what people always tend to say. 

You certainly find that to be true in the days following the party as your life comes screeching to a full stop in perfectly sectioned thirds. 

First (and most obviously) was the party itself. While ultimately and surprisingly not so terrible as a whole, it turns out that when the cops show up to break up a house party in a nice little suburban neighborhood, it’s not as simple as it looks on television.

On TV and in the movies, the worst thing that happens is they send everyone home, in real life, somebody has to answer for the perceived crime. Since the ruckus occurred in your home – and since you sent Eddie out your bedroom window – the duty of scapegoat fell upon your shoulders.

You can at least take some comfort in the fact that Carol had not been fast enough to scurry off into the night with the rest of the vermin, so when the Hawkins PD sat you down on your mysteriously wet and sticky sofa, she was right there next to you, with her arms crossed and face pulled into a raging sulk.   

She even wailed when her parents arrived to pick her up. Actually wailed, like a little kid throwing a tantrum. 

“It wasn’t my fault!” She howled, “I didn’t do anything wrong!” and you were immensely pleased to find that no one believed a word of that garbled bullshit. 

Your parents were tragically (thankfully) not there to take the brunt of Chief Hopper’s ire, so it was thankfully (tragically) up to Claudia Henderson to step in and take responsibility for you. 

Considering this was your first offense, you got off with a strict warning coupled with an angry finger thrust into your face and a heaping helping of oddly misplaced paternal disdain from Hopper. 

Afterward, it was Mrs. Henderson’s turn to tear you a new asshole. Which is to say, she stood on your front porch and dabbed her eyes and nose with a crumpled tissue as she blubbered through a spiel about “not knowing if she can trust you to make the right decisions,” and “having to think about where to go from here,” all while you went blue in the face swearing up and down that you had nothing to do with the party.

You were ambushed and held hostage in your own home, and unlike Carol, you truly didn’t do anything wrong. (Being caught with the town pariah in your bedroom, milliseconds away from tumbling headfirst down an untoward rabbit hole notwithstanding.)

The problem with telling the truth — and the second bad in this nasty little trifecta — was how you effectively threw Carol under the bus to do so. 

According to you, it was all her idea, because it was all her idea, and she is not going to forget that betrayal any time soon. Compounded with what she witnessed occur just outside your bedroom window and how it effectively put the nail in your coffin of social pariahdom, you’re only counting the seconds until the bill comes due and she beats the ever-loving shit out of you in front of God and all your classmates.

Thankfully, the party preceded a long weekend, one in which you did not leave your house for the duration, except to clear out Melvald’s for cleaning supplies.

Because of this, you have not heard from Carol (or anyone else for that matter) and thus have not yet had to face that wretched music. But you know it’s coming. There is a spell of mighty suffering waiting for you somewhere down the line, and you are not looking forward to meeting it.

The third and final toll of the knockout bell came when your parents made their spectacular return from the land of extended business trips after receiving phone call after many, many phone calls informing them of the caliber of their daughter’s crimes.

They came home, they saw what you did (or rather, what you’d allowed to happen), and they grounded you within an inch of your life. 

In three little steps, your world has become inordinately small; strictly and summarily boiled down to three locations: school, home, and the Henderson’s, though only when your parents are feeling generous enough to extend your leash.

Everywhere else is strictly forbidden under penalty of death (you can only assume).

Prison would be kinder. Banishment even. Eternity in some black and oozing oubliette, destined never to see the light of day again.

At least then, you could rest easy in the knowledge that there would be nothing you could do about it — about Eddie – and the unshakable feeling that everything is different now.

No matter what happens to you at the end of this punishment, nothing will ever go back to the way things were, because he kissed you.

He kissed you. You get heart palpitations just thinking about it.

Sure, you may have been the one who asked him to do it, and you’re not entirely sure it even counts as anything more than a temporary lapse in judgement, but you swear you felt the Earth shift beneath your feet when he pushed up to meet you in the window like that. 

And with everything you said to each other preceding that perfectly imperfect moment? All that intimate back and forth about being friends and all?

Despite all that talk, it feels more important than that. Somehow you can’t shake the feeling that you’ve blown right past the threshold of friends and barreled headlong into something else.

More than friends, whatever that entails.

Then again, you can’t be sure you aren’t just feeling that way because it was your first kiss, haphazard as it may have been, or simply because you still have Eddie’s jacket, allowing you to keep the moment alive every night as you lie awake. 

In the rush to get him out your window and into the clear, he left it lying forgotten at the end of your bed.

What a boon it had been to discover such a tantalizing souvenir, what a blessing.

You’re only slightly embarrassed to admit that, upon discovering it, you hugged it tight and buried your face in its material, breathing deep and trying to drown yourself in the smell of him.

Cigarette smoke and Oldspice and the faintest hint of whatever cologne he’d been wearing that morning, all mixing together with the musky undertone of something earthier, like the natural scent of his flesh. 

You held it close and said his name aloud, just because you wanted it there on your tongue, and because there is power in a name, his especially.

That’s something you’ve known since you were just a kid, and standing there with his jacket in your arms, you used his name like a magic word, in the mindless hope that the act of speaking it would summon him back to the close confines of your bedroom. 

Back to you.

It didn’t work, obviously, but it hasn’t stopped you from keeping the jacket in a treasured hiding spot beneath your bed, like some kind of sordid little relic of power. It’s one of the few things left in your life that is wholly yours, your little secret, but your prison warden has a watchful eye, and you have to keep that treasure very carefully hidden away. Because your mother has taken to conducting almost daily cabin checks to make sure you haven’t quietly fallen into a bad habit.  

Oh, if only she knew what exactly you were falling into, she’d wish it was something as easily dealt with as a recreational drug habit.

On top of all that (and to make matters for you infinitely worse) Will Byers never came home that same Friday you had your “temporary lapse in judgment”.

Apparently, while you were busy tearing down the walls of your home, brick by brick (and the walls of your heart, if you’re being entirely honest) Will slipped quietly away into the dark, somewhere between his home and the dense copse of wood surrounding the Hawkins Lab – the one he and his friends all so lovingly referred to as Mirkwood. 

The only thing left of him was his bike, and from what you understand, it was in pretty bad shape when they found it, and somehow everyone has decided that is your fault.

That was bad enough, but when Barbara Holland didn’t show up for school that following Tuesday, your life went into complete and total lockdown.

Suddenly, every adult you know has been whipped into a frenzied panic, and you’ve been placed under a microscope – no more cloak of invisibility and no more secret rendezvous with Eddie Munson. 

Just you, the watchful eye of half a dozen sets of parents, and the enduring question no one has bucked up the courage to ask you yet – why weren’t you there?

Of course, there is nothing in place to suggest that you ought to have been looking after the boys that night and you’d hardly ever said two words in passing to Barb, but when kids start disappearing in a small town, everyone looks to the local babysitter for answers.

Jonathan only asked you the one question when he called the following morning, but after you hung up, you could feel the others falling quickly into place. 

Where were you when it happened? What was more important than making sure they got home safe? Why weren’t you there? 

You’ve been asking yourself that all week, and the shame you feel over the responsibility you’ve been shouldered with is an unwieldy and cumbersome thing. 

Suddenly, nobody seems to care that you even had a party, which makes it all that much worse. They only care that you’re a babysitter, and a kid in your sphere is missing, and you’re sick with the guilt of that. 

Because while you were having a party and making bashful moves on a boy you’re sweet on, playing the role of the average American teenager to the letter, Will Byers was off getting himself lost or kidnapped or worse, and now you’re just going to have to live with that. 

You wake up with that knowledge, go to school, and go straight to the Hendersons after, because executive decisions are the law of the land and it’s been decided that it’s safer if you and Dustin stay together while the search parties are underway.

You’re the babysitter, so you babysit.

You do all this, and you don’t see Eddie, and you hate how that is starting to become a trend between you.

One deeply meaningful exchange followed by an extended period of absence.

It’s not fair, it’s not fair, it’s not fair, it’s not fair.

It’s another Friday morning and you’re carpooling again, though your passenger is decidedly less exciting than last time. Dustin doesn’t give a shit about your cassettes or Judas Priest, or anything else that had held you so enraptured this time last week.

He didn’t even want the ride to school this morning. He wanted to ride his bike to the point of urgency – even insisted upon it – but his mother went into near apoplectic shock at the mere suggestion that he go anywhere without supervision.

She threatened to break his neck if he didn’t get in your car, and because neither of you had ever heard her threaten anyone, he did exactly as he was told. 

The atmosphere of the cabin is stifling.

You drive the distance down Cornwallis in silence, with Dustin curled over toward the passenger door, muttering conspiratorially into his walkie-talkie, and you gripping the steering wheel, trying desperately not to fixate on comparing this ride to the last one you shared.

It does not even come close.

“You can put a tape on if you want–” You offer, but Dustin brushes you off with a clipped gesture and lifts the walkie to his ear. 

You don’t talk, you don’t laugh, and you’ve never missed Eddie more than you do now. 

When you pull into the lot, you park on the far end like always, so that you’re equidistant to Hawkins Middle and Hawkins High. This time, there is a little more behind it than just the fairness of distance, but you don’t get the opportunity to linger on it.

You don’t even get the chance to look for the big-bodied silhouette of Eddie’s van. Dustin is out of the car and slamming the door behind him before you’ve even managed to finish pulling the hand brake.

“Hey –!” you shout, cranking your window down to call after him where he is scurrying up the grade toward his campus, “Meet me back here at 3:15!” 

“I’m meeting Mike and Lucas—” he begins to protest, but you cut him off before he can even get going.

“Your mom is going to kill me if I come home without you!” you stress, “3:15 or else!”

Dustin dismisses you with a dramatic eye roll and the muffled utterance of something that sounds a tad too much like “yeah, whatever” for your liking and turns to disappear into the throng of kids. 

You’re left staring at the spot he had occupied only moments before, and you find yourself hoping that he isn’t still mad at you for the hasty back and forth you’d traded the Friday before. 

It’s highly plausible. You did call him a little shit, and you haven’t gotten around to apologizing for that yet. You might have even chased him down and done it right then and there if it weren’t for the sharks in the water. 

So far, you’ve successfully managed to avoid Carol following your so-called betrayal, but the danger of an encounter is ever-present, especially in interim times like these.

You’ve found the safest way to steer clear is to lie low, stick to your hiding spots, and stay in your car until the late bell has started to ring, which, according to your watch, is less than ten minutes away. 

Ten blessed minutes of silence and then one mad dash to campus with your head on a swivel, and you’ll be home free.

Before you can settle in to bask in the comfort of that plan, the vacuum seal of your sanctuary is suddenly and unceremoniously broken as your passenger door pops open, and the cool morning air comes rushing in. 

“Hey!” A voice says, and you gasp on instinct.

You recoil as the body belonging to said voice falls into the seat beside you and brace for impact (because you’re not fully confident that Carol isn’t angry enough to haul off and punch you in the face) and in your momentary blinding terror, it takes you far too long to realize that it’s only Eddie sliding into the seat beside you. 

“Sorry,” he says, grinning, “Did I scare you?”

“Jesus Christ!” you yelp, and the swear is punctuated by the door clicking shut. 

He gives you a wry look when he turns to face you.

“Nope, just me,” Eddie says, resting his elbow over the center console and leaning over so that he is tilted toward you. 

Your heart immediately begins to flutter against your ribs like a bird. Instantly it is like no time has passed since you last saw him and that you’ve been meeting like this every day since you rode to school together last Friday. 

It fills you with a suffocating glee, one you are quick to stifle in the lingering effects of your adrenaline surge. It takes everything in your power not to throw your arms around his neck and gush about how much you’ve missed seeing him. That would not be very cool or mysterious of you.

“Where’ve you been? I’ve been looking all over for you.” he asks, and it reminds you instantly of his bashful greeting, standing pressed against your bedroom door with a party raging on behind him, “What, are you avoiding me or something?” 

The question is heartbreakingly boyish and you’re quick to dismiss the notion with a shake of your head.

“No, of course not.” You insist. 

“Oh, of course not.” He hums, “And you’re just oh-so-casually changing your class schedule around, too?” 

You bite the inside of your cheek – and then there’s that. 

“You heard about that?” 

He scoffs. 

“Heard about it? Gaw-lee, it’s all Gareth���s been talking about — you’d think you broke the poor kid’s heart the way he’s going on about his new lab partner – it’s Adam, by the way, and he’s devastated.” 

You feel the faintest urge to giggle at the news, but you get caught on the gnawing hurdle of your guilt and only manage to pull a pained look of remorse.

“That was an act of self-preservation.” you insist, hating how much it feels like a lame excuse and elaborating when Eddie gives you a dubious look, “I had three classes with Carol, and she pretty much wants my head on a pike, so…” 

The sentiment fills the cabin with a weighted silence, broken only by the muted ticking of your watch and the steady beat Eddie is drumming out with his fingers.

“Are you in a lot of trouble?” he asks tentatively, and you sigh.

“I’m on house arrest.” You say, “They only let me out for school, where you may have noticed I’m officially being shunned.”

He scoffs and shifts in his seat, not far enough to put any real distance between you, but enough that you have to resist putting a hand on his arm to keep him from going any further. 

“And why would I notice that?” Eddie asks, almost bashfully. 

The feeling leeches out of him and into you like the sun, melting the frost of an early spring morning. It lodges in your throat, and you happily swallow it down to feel it bloom deep in the pit of your stomach.  

You’re suddenly bombarded with echoes of the last time you sat together in your car like this, swaddled in the intimacy of each other’s company, feeling his energy move through you and co-mingle with yours until you were a singular entity, and you cannot stop yourself from teasing him a little.

“Because you’re obsessed with me,” you venture, the corners of your mouth curling mischievously.

“Yeah, okay — whatever,” he says, and your heart leaps into spectacular acrobatics as you realize he didn’t deny it, “Anyway, now that I have you, I have a very important question to ask you,” 

Inwardly, you begin to scream – a question? What kind of question? And what could possibly be so important that he had to wait to get you in person to ask.

You have the faintest suggestion of a thought. A mere notion, really, and it causes your insides to do a cartoon flip-flop.

Oh boy. Here comes everything you’ve ever wanted, all your hopes and dreams hurtling toward you at the speed of light. 

“Do you wanna come out to Bloomington with me?”

Oh.

Your face instantly flushes with the hot embarrassment of assuming he would ask you anything else as Eddie goes on.

“There’s a record store out there I’ve been meaning to hit up and I think it’s time we spiced up that little collection of yours,” he says.

You have to swallow hard to keep your voice from shaking as you speak.

“I mean…yeah, I’d love to,” you say, “But I can’t. I’m grounded.”

His shoulders jump beneath the patchy denim of this new jacket of his that, by the looks of it, you think must actually be very old. It makes him look strangely soft, wrapped in the well-worn, faded blue material, and you can’t help but wonder if it’s a hand-me-down of Wayne’s.

It’s a painfully endearing thought, and still, you’re struck with a sudden pang of guilt over how selfishly you’ve been hoarding its leather counterpart.

Part of you is suddenly very sorry you didn’t think to bring it with you on the off chance you would run into him.

Though only the part of you that is totally cool and rational and not violently obsessed with him, of course. That other part has been hoping that you would never have to return the jacket and that it will by virtue of the lost and found become yours forever until the end of time, the end.

Of course, sitting beside him so close that your shoulders are nearly touching and watching him blink back at you is much better than swaddling yourself in some measly old jacket.

Eddie tilts a little further into your space, and you can’t help but mirror the motion. 

“… but they let you out for school.” he posits, tapping out the beat of the sentence against your knee and waiting patiently for you to rise to the challenge.  

You’re so busy trying not to get lost in his eyes — the deep and shining pools of umber calling you home and threatening to suck you down beneath the undertow — that it takes a very long moment for your brain to finish processing the information he’s just offered. Even once you’ve untangled the garbled string of foreign text, it takes you even longer to realize exactly what it is Eddie is suggesting.

When it finally hits, you actually recoil from the impact.

He wants you to skip school.

“… you mean go right now?” You splutter.

Eddie grins, as if the naivety of your reaction is equally hilarious as it is endearing.

“Sure, why not? You got somewhere better to be?”

As if waiting in the wings for its cue, the morning bell begins to ring, startling you enough to send you leaping in your seat. You’d momentarily forgotten where you were and what you were meant to be doing – biding your time and waiting for the brief window of opportunity to slip into class unnoticed.

You watch the mass exodus of the parking lot, hundreds of bodies falling in sync to file dutifully into the squat building in the distance — you’re running out of time to slip in unnoticed, and yet Eddie’s question is still hanging between you like the electric feedback of something that has just been plugged in.

Where are you supposed to be right now?

“Homeroom?” you try, and Eddie makes a harsh sound in the back of his throat.

“Homeroom is boring,” he says, rolling his eyes, “And I’m fun, so skip it and come hang out with me.”

It takes another one of those too-long moments to realize that, despite the teasing levity of his tone, he is totally and completely serious. 

“You can’t just cut class because it's boring, Eddie.” you deadpan, and he gives you a very pointed, very droll look.

“Yeah, Sweetheart, you can.” He insists, “Look, it’s not like you’re gonna miss anything, all anyone has been talking about all week is stranger danger and Barbara Holland.”

And don’t you know it. 

Word on the street is that she disappeared from the Harrington’s backyard, despite the official bullshit about her getting on a bus and skipping town for greener pastures.

Even you know that Barb is a goody-two-shoes who would never dream of doing something so adventurous, and was only at that get-together because you’re steadily being replaced in the pecking order by Nancy Wheeler. But Nancy won’t go anywhere without Barb, so now Barb is gone.

Your stomach heaves with the guilt of it and the knowledge that it’s just one more terrible thing that has somehow become all your fault.

If you hadn’t been so busy getting tangled up with Eddie, it would have been you fifth wheeling at that gathering at Steve’s house, and it might have been your face plastered all over those missing person posters and milk cartons.

Everyone would say you skipped down for greener pastures, and everyone would know better.  

The thought is chilling enough to raise goosebumps on your arms, though they are banished with the simple act of Eddie laying his hand atop yours.

“It’ll be fine,” he says, almost as if anticipating the thought, and it is startling to hear your thoughts spoken aloud. “I promise nobody’s gonna know you’re even gone.”

If the reaction makes its way up to your face, Eddie doesn’t seem to notice as you stare back at him with wide, blinking eyes. 

You narrow them to try and wipe away the shocked look you know you are bound to have plastered across your face. 

“Nobody but all my teachers,” you press, and Eddie makes a flippant gesture.

“Minor details, easily overlooked.” He says, “Listen, there’s a cheeseburger in Bloomington with your name on it and I’m buying, so let’s go.” 

You hesitate, watching the last of your classmates disappear into the gaping maw of the double doors, standing open, and for a brief yet terrifying moment, you’re almost sure you can see Carol standing there, tapping her foot and waiting for you to come slinking in. 

“You’re not gonna make me beg, are you?” Eddie asks distantly, “I’ll do it, but it’s not gonna be pretty–”

Your mouth is moving before any rational thought about where you’re meant to be can spoil the giddy excitement building in your midsection.

“… okay, fine–” you say softly, staring past Eddie and watching through your window as a staff member appears to pull the doors shut on you.

No turning back now.

“Awesome–” Eddie starts, but you stop him short, curling your fingers to grip the hand he’s still got resting atop yours.

You squeeze.

“–but you have to promise we’ll be back before school gets out.” 

Eddie nods fervently and places his free hand over his chest in a solemn vow.

“I swear on my life,”

“And we can’t take my car,” you don’t get the time to explain why exactly that is before Eddie shows you his key ring and jingles it at you in a way you imagine is meant to be tantalizing. 

“No problemo,” 

Good. So, you can just slip away unnoticed and be back in time before anyone realizes you’ve been missing. Right? Because it’s just that easy.

For someone like you, it might actually be, despite the scrutiny and the microscope. Who is really going to care if you’re gone? Who will even notice? And most importantly, what’s the worst that can happen?

“… okay,” you say, pulling the handle of your door and popping it open, “Let’s go,” 

It takes a little over an hour in traffic to get to Bloomington, the duration of which you spend catching each other up on everything you’ve missed in the agony of your weeklong absence.

You almost don’t notice the time passing, because it feels devastatingly right to be sitting in Eddie’s passenger seat like this, like something you never knew you were missing out on.

Whereas you’d been hyper-aware of your every movement and the hawk-like way he’d watched as you drove, with Eddie behind the wheel you finally feel like you can relax (despite all the jerky movements and the fact that he goes everywhere a cool twenty miles over the speed limit). 

Eddie talks the whole way, because if there is one thing he can do, it’s fill a silence, and you’re starting to love listening to him go on about all the things that randomly cross his mind. 

You sit and watch with your knees pulled up and your seatbelt hugging you tight against the worn fabric seat, and you listen as he jumps seamlessly from one subject to another. There are no natural segues to the things he decides to talk about, and yet it still makes perfect sense, one thought to the next.

True to his word (and because he still owes you that midnight snack he’d promised you weeks ago at the Hideout) Eddie buys you a modest lunch with a fistful of crumpled dollars and all the change you can nickel and dime from the carpeted floor of the van and the bottom of your bag. 

Then, you walk down the street together, safe in the knowledge that no one knows that you have no business standing shoulder to shoulder like that. If someone happened to be watching and witnessed your fingers brush, the odd flex of a hand, or a shared lingering look, they would have no reason to be scandalized, because, in Bloomington, nobody cares about who you are or what people think you've done.

You’re just two kids from nowhere special, quietly falling for each other on a gloomy November afternoon. 

You’re safe in your anonymity. 

You spend the better part of the afternoon drifting in and out of used bookstores and secondhand shops, RadioShack, and Family Video, and partake in all manner of window shopping until you finally find yourself a record store. 

It all feels very happenstance. A lot less like it’s a store he’s been “meaning to check out” and much more spur of the moment than Eddie really let on, especially with how unimpressed he seems to be with the store’s selection. 

Still, you follow him dutifully around the stands as he flips through tapes and records with a bored look on his face, each section more disappointing than the last, and with every passing minute, you do your best to fluff up the warm, happy feeling middling in your stomach beneath the weight of your ever-present cloud of guilt.

You smile and nod at the right moments, speak when spoken to, laugh at each flippant little comment, and in spite of all the fun you’re having, following Eddie around a store like a puppy on a leash, you feel guilty about it. 

You feel so guilty about everything all the time these days, it’s starting to leave a thick and murky tang on the back of your tongue, one you’re half convinced you’d be able to see growing on your tonsils if you went to the mirror and stuck your tongue all the way out. 

You’re so happy to be here. You wouldn’t change this day for the world, and yet you cannot stop thinking about how it is the last place you’re meant to be, even under normal circumstances.

But these are deeply un-normal circumstances, and as the day wears on and the sky grows darker, your subconscious grows less and less shy about reminding you of that every thirty seconds.

You’re not supposed to be here. You’re supposed to be grounded. You’re supposed to be walking around, solemn as the grave, quietly atoning for all your perceived crimes, and yet here you are again, off making eyes at the same boy who had so summarily distracted you the night everyone imagines you ruined everything.

It’s not fair, it’s spoiling your good time – worse, you’re terrified it’s leeching out of you to color the afternoon and spoil Eddie’s good time, and that’s just one more thing you have to feel guilty about. 

He doesn’t end up buying anything, even the Megadeath tape he’d returned to on three separate occasions (because you’re fairly certain he spent all his cash on two cheeseburgers and the coke you ended up sharing).

Furthermore, he stridently refuses to let you buy it for him, even as you wander up to the cash register with it in hand and repeated assurances that you’re happy to do it.

When you finally emerge from the record store, the sky has turned the color of a fresh bruise. Angry storm clouds churn overhead with the threat of an oncoming deluge, and you make the walk back to the van in a strangely charged silence. 

“So,” Eddie starts after a long, pensive moment, “Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t help feeling like the mood here has taken a nosedive…” 

Yeah, that’s what you were afraid of. You cannot take one more burden on your trembling shoulders without crumbling into a pile of dust, and yet, you’re quick to take responsibility for it.

“I’m sorry,” you say quickly, “That’s on me – it’s been a rough week.” 

He smirks.

“Rough beyond the regularly scheduled programming?”

Your shoulders jump in a way that your reflection in a passing window reads as deeply melancholy, and with the way you catch Eddie watching you, you know immediately that he clocked the motion. 

You stop short beneath the awning of the nondescript business and heave a weighted sigh, distantly confident that, if the rain should happen to choose that moment to start, you would be shielded. 

“D’you wanna talk about it?” Eddie asks, doubling back to meet you when he realizes you are no longer at his side.  

You really don’t, and yet you’ve started to get the feeling that if you don’t it get out of you, it’s going to rot you from the inside. Because you can’t stop thinking about it.

About how you’d snatched up the phone on its second ring that previous Saturday and were hardly able to contain your outward presenting disappointment not to hear that familiar sleazy drawl oozing over the telephone line from the far end of town. Instead came a clipped and to-the-point greeting from the other social pariah in your social circle.

It wasn’t Eddie calling you that morning, it was Jonathan Byers.

You remember wanting so badly for it to be Eddie on the other end of the line, all the while forcing yourself to make polite and idle chatter with Jonathan. You’d even convinced yourself that the worst thing on your immediate horizon was having to break the news about the Oingo Boingo tape someone had so brazenly stolen from the party. Then, he posed that terrible question and asked if you’d seen his brother.  

When Eddie says your name, it’s almost startling, and you realize too late that he’s been waiting for you to speak.

“What’s going on?” he asks.

“…Jonathan called me on Saturday,” you admit, and he rolls his eyes, shaking his head and muttering about Jonathan Jonathan Jonathan under his breath. 

It might have almost been funny, under other circumstances. If you were feeling up to it, you might have teased Eddie about how blatantly jealous he is over nothing, but you can’t muster that kind of gaiety, considering it’s just one more thing you’d end up having to feel guilty about after. 

“Let me guess,” he starts, “He wants to take you to the movies or a fancy dinner and buy you flowers and serenade you with all the latest new wave bullshit?” 

Oh, how you wish it were only so simple as that. 

“Actually… he was calling to ask about his brother.”

It stops the conversation — and Eddie — in its tracks. 

You watch the light of wretched understanding flash across his features as he remembers exactly why that would be relevant in your life and feel the corner of your mouth twitch in a failed attempt at smiling. 

“I had to tell him no,”

Eddie’s brows come down to shadow his eyes and suddenly you can’t tell whether he feels bad for you or sorry for you.

“Okay,” he says, drawing the word out in a blatant expression of his confusion, “That sucks, but what’s it got to do with you?” 

Your shoulders jump.

“He disappeared the night of the party.” you say, “And everybody and their mother has decided it’s my fault that he’s missing—” 

Eddie hardly lets you finish before a strange and sudden indignance flashes across his face.

“Somebody actually said that to you?” he demands, and the urgency of his tone would have been startling if it wasn’t ever so slightly flattering.

“Well, no,” you confess, “Nobody’s outright said it, but I feel it… the guilt.”

It’s a guarded thing, the look he has got on his face. Something deeply personal and kindly extended to you in your moment of inner turmoil. You’d worried that no one would understand the complexity of your guilt, and while that may continue to remain true with Eddie, you should have known that he would at least commiserate with the unfairness of it.

If there was anyone in this stupid, backwater town with an iota of understanding for what you were going through, it was Eddie Munson.

You feel foolish for not having realized that earlier and heave a weighted sigh.

“… I just can’t stop going around in my head wondering if there is something I’m missing and wondering why I wasn’t there to make sure he got home.” You say.

Eddie nods, but the motion is contradicted by the flat stretch of his mouth as he pulls a face.

“Why would you have been there?” he asks.

“Because I’m a babysitter.” 

He watches you expectantly, waiting for you to finish the thought, but there is nothing else to say.

He looks at you, and you look right back at him. All around you, the world keeps on keeping on and amidst the distant traffic and conversations, the silence that has fallen over you is unbearably loud.

“And?” Eddie finally asks, and you hardly know what to say, “Were you supposed to be babysitting him that night or something?”

You shake your head, and Eddie throws up his hands like he cannot fathom what the issue is.

“Okay, great. So how is it your fault? Kids get lost all the time,” 

Of course, that’s not the point.

“But if he was kidnapped—?” you begin, but he doesn’t let you finish.

“What could you have possibly done to stop that?” Eddie asks, though he’s not interested in whatever answer your guilty conscience has to drum up, “What would you do except get yourself kidnapped too?”

“I don’t know, maybe I could have called somebody, offered up some kind of lead people could follow.” You posit, ticking through the endless scenarios your subconscious has drummed up in the long hours you’ve spent thinking about it, “…maybe I could’ve chased the guy down and got him back myself—”

Eddie grabs you by the shoulders and shuts you up quick.

“Sweetheart, no, that’s insane,” he says, giving you a gentle shake for good measure, “There’s nothing anyone could have done. Okay? This isn’t your fault. I don’t care what anyone says, they can’t just force the blame on you because they don’t know where else to put it.” 

“I know… but when you’re in my position, adults kind of just end up blaming you for the shit that happens to their kids.” 

Eddie’s eyes turn dark as that guarded look comes back down to shadow his features, this time backed by something indiscernible.

He drops his hands from your shoulders and crams them into the front pockets of his jeans. You watch the muscles in his jaw flex and his throat bob as he swallows.

“That’s fucked up,” he says unevenly, and you instantly understand that he is speaking on his own behalf as much as yours.

Getting saddled with blame people are desperate to shift – getting condemned because people are scared of the things they don’t understand.  

“That’s Hawkins,” you mumble, shoulders jumping, “I just need to do something to take my mind off of it. I thought coming out here was going to help. And don't get me wrong, I’m having a great time … but it’s still there, you know?… I just wanna forget about it and everything else for a while,” 

He nods.

“I get it,” Eddie says. “So, how do we fix it?” 

Beyond happening upon Will Byers and exonerating yourself from any and all blame by delivering him safely home? You glance up at him through your lashes and feel your tongue go fat and fibrous as the question burning your lips turns you shy. 

“I dunno…” you start, pulling your shoulders up, “I thought – I mean… maybe we could… smoke? A little?”

He recoils like you’d reached out with the suggestion and slapped him across the face. It’s a highly dramatic response to something that didn’t seem all that outlandish in your head, but then again, you’re starting to realize that Eddie is just like that.

“You wanna smoke?” he chokes, “Really? You’re sure?”

It’s the last part that gets you all twisted up inside because you know what he’s thinking: last time you did this, it didn’t go so well for you. While that’s nothing but humiliatingly true, you’re as desperate to redeem yourself in his eyes as you are to put your mind at ease.

Anyway, you’ve had the time to put in a little practice with your former friends, and you’re more than a little eager to show that off, not that you would ever admit that.

“It’ll go better this time,” you assure him, “Because I’m with you.” 

Eddie wrinkles his nose in the most endearing sort of way.

“What’s that got to do with anything?” 

You shrug.

“…they say if you’re gonna do it, do it with someone you trust, right?”

The double entendre threatens to flood your face with color, and if he notices it, it is completely lost in the way his features soften with unmistakable fondness.

You feel your insides go squirmy. 

“You trust me?” Eddie asks. 

“Of course I do,” you say gently, “You’re my best friend.” 

The goofy look it puts on his face is perhaps the most endearing thing you’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing. 

It’s all the encouragement he needs to throw an arm over your shoulder and pull you tight. 

“Say no more, Bestie – come on, step into my office.” 

His “office” is the back of the van with the back doors flung open for ventilation – you don’t know what else you expected. By the time you crawl in and get settled, the skies have opened up to try and drown the pair of you and the world has emptied into a pastoral of streaky grays and blues. 

Eddie produces a joint from the bottom of his beat-up metal lunchbox, and you catch yourself thinking that it’s seen better days – both the joint and the box.

You’re not surprised that it’s where he would keep something like that. Everyone knows (or at least everyone thinks they know) what Eddie totes around in that everyday staple of his belongings, and it isn’t pretzels and peanut butter.

He lights the roll of papers and herb with a flick of his Zippo, expertly takes the first few puffs to get it going, and then passes it to you with what feels like great reverence. You take it and try not to get caught on the ceremony of it all. You tell yourself you don’t have to impress anyone here (despite how badly you want to do just that), you’re just a couple of friends passing a blunt.

No big deal. This time when you inhale, and you manage to hold it briefly in your lungs without coughing, it feels like an incredible victory. It burns just enough to make you forget about anything else but the way it feels. Then you pass it back.

“Look at you. You’ve been practicing.” Eddie says, and because you can’t think of anything cool or witty to say, you keep your mouth firmly shut and let the cycle go back and forth a few more times.

You get a little high, watch the weather, and feel yourself become enveloped in the warm and fuzzy blanket of the back cab. You don’t think about any of the shit stuffed up in your mind, you just think about Eddie and how glad you are he dragged you out here today.

After a while, the pitter-patter of the rain becomes a dull roar, and it begins to grate on you. You don’t know when Eddie flipped on the radio, but suddenly it is compounded with the heavy split-splatting of droplets exploding on the pavement and you clench your teeth until your ears begin to ring.

It’s so loud you’re half convinced that it’s the prelude to some terrible cataclysm that you cannot see. The world ending with a bang, just outside the walls of the van—

“How’re we doin’ over there?” Eddie asks, and the cacophony dies with a whimper. “You good?”

You inhale sharply, feel the gentle whine of your lungs burning, and sigh, pulling your knees up to your chest and feeling the bony cap dig into your cheekbone as you tilt forward and hum out your breath on the bed of a meditative, thoughtful sound.

“I like your voice,” you say dreamily, without really understanding what you just admitted to.

Beside you, you feel Eddie breathe out an airy chuckle more than you hear it. The sound of it skips over the air like a stone across a still pond.

“Oh-ho, you do, do you?” he drawls, and you can’t even manage to get embarrassed about it.  

Your eyes slide shut as you nod a slow up and down and get a little lost in the motion.

“Say something else.”

“What d’you want me to say?” he asks.

The fabric of your jeans is scratchy in an oddly soothing way as you grind your cheekbone into your knee and breathe in – hold it – and breathe out.

“Anything…” everything, “Tell me something I don’t know about you.”

He sits with the request long enough for whatever song had been playing to end, and after a beat of measured silence, the next track begins to play with an uncharacteristically gentle guitar chord for something you would expect to hear from Eddie.

“Uh… hmmm. Well…” he says slowly, “Okay, something you might not know… is that I had a cast on my arm in Freshman year, before all that Iron Maiden, Satan shit.”

It’s perhaps the least interesting thing anyone has ever admitted to you, and yet you’re enthralled by the information all the same.

“You did?” you ask, blinking back at him with your eyes wide enough that you suddenly become paranoid that they’re going to fall out of your head and roll across the cabin floor.

Eddie nods.

“I had a cast… and nobody would sign it—” he says, “I mean, nobody … all I wanted was to make friends in a new school, to start over somewhere and fit in, so I asked people to sign it because that’s what you do when you have a cast, right? You ask people to sign it, and they’re supposed to sign it, like a yearbook. I asked everyone — even my goddamn teachers — and the only one who would sign it besides Jeff was my uncle Wayne,”

 He’s laughing as he finishes the anecdote, but it’s not funny. It’s pathetically sad, and suddenly your heart is in your throat.  

“I would have signed it.” You say immediately, desperate to somehow belatedly make it right, “You wouldn't have even had to ask me, I would have scribbled all over it.”

Eddie casts a sidelong look your way and you hold his gaze, feeling the thick prelude to emotion pressing at the back of your eyes. You hate that you never knew him before now, and you hate more that there is nothing you can do to fix that.

You should have been there for him, and you hope beyond hope that he doesn’t hold it against you.

“Yeah, I bet you would’ve, you saucy Minx,” he says with a grin, tossing the smoldering butt of the joint out into the deluge.

You watch it disappear behind the murky grey curtain and feel your lids drag across your eyes as you blink. Your lashes embrace like estranged lovers and become entangled, and it takes a concerted effort to pull them apart again, all the while your lips begin to move without your consent.

“What happened?”

“Nothing. I got it off a few weeks later—”

“No, I mean, how’d you break it?” you ask, “Did you fall off your bike?”

Eddie snorts out a burst of sardonic laughter at the suggestion, one that he keeps quietly to himself and shakes his head.

“Nope,” he says somewhere to your immediate left and very far away, “My, uh, my dad slammed it in a car door,”

The sentence is sobering in the worst way, and you feel your eyes threatening to take a dive out of your sockets once again.

You wait for him to assure you it was an accident. He doesn’t, and you’re suddenly and unceremoniously reminded of who his father is… Al Munson, more monster than man

“Why?” you gasp.

It takes him a moment to answer and a moment longer for you to turn to look at him. The air has grown suddenly and impossibly thick, and turning your head is suddenly like trying to run in a dream.

“…He was leavin’, and I didn’t want him to go…” Eddie confesses quietly, “Normally I didn’t care, he was always coming and going, but somehow, I knew this time was gonna be different. I knew he wasn’t coming back … after everything he put me through, I still didn’t want to lose him,”

You have to resist the urge to reach out and touch him, wondering when he got so far away from you when just a moment ago you were nearly hip to hip, but you can’t manage to make thoughts travel fast enough to send messages down to your limbs, and they remain firmly tucked in against your body.

Eddie clears his throat.

“Anyway,” he says, banishing whatever the memory of it had been attempted to muster in him with a quick shake of his head, “I put my arm in the door to stop him and he pulled it shut. End of story.” 

Sad end to a sad, sad story you wish you’d never asked for in the first place.

Great job.

“…I’m sorry,” you say softly, and Eddie’s shoulders jump.

“Hey, it’s not your fault my old man’s a motherfucker.”

No, but it’s just one more blow you wish you could have been there to soften. The atmosphere has grown unbearably heavy, which was not your intention when you asked him to tell you something about himself.

Selfishly, you’d wanted a tasty little morsel you could save for later, and there you go ruining everything again.

Distantly, you know you ought to do your best to lift it, though that is easier said than done with the cotton-candy-like consistency your brain has suddenly taken on.

“My turn?”

Eddie nods.

“That’s the game.” 

“Okay…” you say and begin the Herculean task of divulging something that feels as deeply weighted as what Eddie just told you, “…I, uh… kind of… sort of used to have a big crush on you.”

Eddie pulls a face, and your insides do a cartoon flip-flop, second guessing the confession too late as something indiscernible flashes across his features.

Annoyance? Disbelief? You can’t tell, your eyes feel too hot and cloudy to make out any sort of distinguishable emotion.

Eddie turns to gaze out across the near-empty parking lot. The horizon is muddled with the faintest suggestion of a storm roiling in the east.

“Used to?” He echoes. 

He doesn’t look at you when he says it, and that makes you nervous.  

You do your best to swallow down the cobwebs blooming in your throat to no avail.

“Uh-huh,” you say, touching your face and feeling it go hot beneath your fingers. “Big one,” 

Some recessed, sober part of your brain is screaming at you from behind a locked door, banging it down and begging you to shut your goddamn mouth, but the words flow unfettered like the spitting rush of a broken faucet.

“Funny,” he says, “I had a cast, and you had a crush.”

You nod, not quite sure what’s funny about it, but now that you’ve started, you can’t stop yourself. 

“My folks told me I wasn’t supposed to talk to you,” you continue, “So, obviously that’s all I wanted to do … talk to you.” when he doesn’t answer, you just keep going, “I wanted to know everything about you. Everything you liked, disliked, what you did when you weren’t at school, I wanted all your secrets to be my secrets … I was actually pretty obsessed with you for a while there,”

Beside you and a hundred miles away, Eddie makes a strange sound. 

“Man, childhood hyper-fixations are a trip,” He hums, “Some people get obsessed with the Titanic or the Donner Party … and you get stuck with me.” 

You nod again, getting stuck on the drunken up and down of the motion and the feeling of a cool breeze kissing your face. It’s a gently sobering relief, you hadn’t realized you were sweating until now.  

It takes you what feels like far too long to turn when Eddie shifts back to look at you again, and when you do, he’s giving you the strangest look. 

Brows furrowed over narrowed eyes, lips quirked ever so slightly. 

“So, what made me so special?” He asks, “I mean, besides the fact that your Daddy told you I was no good…”  

You blink sluggishly back at him and wonder with no small amount of alarm how he could possibly know that. You think of all the hundreds of times your father said those exact words and wonder just how many other parents in Hawkins have said the same thing about Eddie, your sweet friend — probably your only friend, now — the only person who looks at you and really sees you sitting there. The notion makes your heart swell.

You love love love… and you shrug. 

“You’re the only guy who ever treated me so nice,” 

The sentiment seems to hit him like a fist to the gut, and the corners of his mouth twitch where his sly smile begins to fail. 

Eddie drops his gaze, immediately bashful, and takes a moment just to breathe, to sit with the notion and try it on for size. You like to think you know him well enough by now to understand that he has trouble with niceties, compliments are hard to take for sincerity. Y

ou hope someday he’ll get over that, that someday you can be as sweet to him as he is to you, as sweet as he deserves, and not immediately watch him wilt under the weight of it. 

It takes a long time for him to recover, and when he does, he clears his throat and scratches bashfully at the back of his neck.

“Well,” Eddie begins, voice wavering ever so slightly. “Not that it’s any of my business, but if that’s your basis for attraction, then you gotta get better boyfriends, Honey,”

You clamp your teeth shut to try to stop the truth from jumping out of you and just miss it. 

“Never had one.” 

Those three words hang heavily on the air between you and your guts seize with a terror that immediately sobers you up. 

Oh no.

“Never had one what?” Eddie asks.

“…boyfriend.” You force the word out from the edge of your mouth. 

Eddie’s head whips around to gawp at you—

“You mean…?”

— and you brace yourself for impact as you watch him piece it all together. 

“So, when you asked me to kiss you…?” he trails off, “Shit. That wasn’t your first kiss, was it?”

Your shoulders jump in a lopsided shrug, and your lack of an answer says everything he needs to hear.

Suddenly Eddie has got his face in his hands.  

“Oh, God — if I’d known, I would’ve… I wouldn’t have— Jesus — that was such a bad kiss,”  

“It was fine,” you tell him, though it’s not like you have any basis for such a statement.

You know how it made you feel, and that’s pretty much it.

Eddie shakes his head. 

“No way, we need a do-over.” He says immediately, “Like, right now — ask me again,”

Your brows pinch and feel yourself growing hot all over.

“Don’t tease me—” you start to say, but Eddie just shakes his head.

“I’m not —hand to God, Sweetness, I would never—” 

“You would.”

“Hey, I’ll kiss you right goddamn now if that’s what you want me to do. With tongue. I’ll get all kinds of sloppy with you.”

“Eddie, don’t tease me…” 

“Okay, you’re right. I’m sorry … All I’m saying is the other boys don’t know what they’re missing,” 

It’s sweet, the way he says it, made even more so as you realize he’d made the very pointed decision not to ask the question you know has got to be burning his tongue like a hot coal. 

Of course, on top of all of that – the sordid little subject which you would most like to avoid with Eddie (for now at least) – you’re keenly aware that it’s your turn to ask a question, and while you have every intention of drumming up something cute and flirty, you suddenly can’t stop thinking about something that Eddie said back in your bedroom.

In the tenuous haze of all that heightened emotion, you’d almost forgotten it, and yet now that it’s reared its ugly head, you can’t help but get the sense that it has been there all week, lurking like a fog bank at the back of your mind.

It causes your insides to twist with a strange and misplaced anxiety that you didn’t know you’d been feeling ever since he said it, and now that you’re thinking about it, you can’t stop yourself from asking. 

“…did you mean what you said before?” You say, and when Eddie gives you a curious look, you flatten your mouth into a thin line. “That you feel sorry for me?”

You watch the muscle in Eddie’s jaw flex when he clenches his teeth, and the corner of his mouth twitches upward in what you can only imagine is a weak attempt at smiling.

“…I don’t know how to answer that without sounding mean,” he says, tilting ever so slightly forward. 

It does nothing to banish the mounting anxiety blooming in your guts, so you rephrase the question for clarity’s sake. 

“Did you kiss me because you feel sorry for me or because you wanted to?” You ask, much more directly than is perhaps kind.

The question seems to stick him to the spot, and for a long moment, it is all Eddie can do but stare back at you.

When he finally opens his mouth to answer, you cut him off. 

“Be honest,” you press, and watch his jaw clap shut. 

It’s another long moment of pensive silence before he tries again, though not before taking a deep, measured breath, like he needs the extra beat of time to ready himself for some great confession he is about to make.  

“…I kissed you…” Eddie begins slowly, cautiously, faltering ever so slightly on the word in a way that makes your face burn, “…because I wanted to thank you… for what you did.”

It’s an exceedingly vague thing to say, and you know you must be making a face, though only because of the way you feel the muscles in your brow relax when he moves to elaborate. 

“Sneaking me out the back when the cops showed up.” he says, “That was… well, nobody does things like that for me, so I knew right away that I was gonna owe you big time…”

“…By kissing me?” you splutter.

Eddie pulls his mouth into a flat, horizontal slit. A cheap attempt at smiling.

“…seemed like the right way to pay you back at the time…”

Despite the blatant honesty of it, the notion is ever so slightly sickening. It hits you like a bolt to the chest and between your sudden abject humiliation for being so hung up on a kiss that was hardly anything to write home about and the intention to puke your guts out, you lose track of your filter.

Any attempt at being cute and flirty goes right out the back of the van to face plant on the wet pavement, and your face is burning as the words come tumbling out in a garbled rush. 

“That’s all it was to you?” you gasp, and the whiny drone of how you say it is oddly enough to break any damning tension attempting to gain purchase between you. “Payback?” 

“No, it was more than that.” Eddie says, shaking his head, “I did it ‘cause you asked me to,” 

“That’s worse!” 

“And because I wanted to!” Eddie tries, but you’re hardly listening to him anymore. 

You feel like such a loser you have half a mind to abandon ship. Go running off into the deluge and disappear from sight. Who cares how you get home? Let the rain wash you down the gutter where you can wallow in the pathetic primordial muck that makes up your insides. 

You’re so caught up in feeling sorry for yourself, that you almost don’t catch Eddie’s attempt to explain himself.

“Hey, come on, don’t get it twisted, Sweetheart, the way things were heating up back there, I probably woulda kissed you even if you hadn’t asked me to.”  

“You’re just trying to make me feel better,” you moan, slumping forward to bury your face in your hands.

You feel him shrug more than you see him do it.

“Yeah, probably.” he says defiantly, and when you dare to steal a peek at him through your fingers, he tilts over to nudge your shoulder with his, “Listen… I don’t know if you know this, but the way things are between you and me? Shit, I’d do just about anything for you.”

You can feel a budding suspicion attempting to make purchase in you, and yet along the cliff-face of your affection for Eddie, it can find no purchase. You narrow your eyes at him and do your best to stifle the shy smile threatening to curl your lips. 

“What do you mean the way things are between us?” you ask, straightening your spine and looking him dead in the eye. “What’s going on between us?” 

He meets the sudden challenge of your gaze, and for a moment, neither of you is willing to back down.

“Not a goddamn thing.” he lies.

You couldn’t stop yourself from smiling at him if someone was holding a gun to your head.

“…what, are you sweet on me or something, Munson?”

He makes a soft, pensive noise that you think was meant to be somewhere halfway flippant but dropped off along the way. It’s entirely too endearing.

“Who told you that?” Eddie mumbles, reaching up to tug at a springy lock of his hair.

“Gareth,” you stress, feeling your insides begin to bloom with the fuzzy glow of nostalgia for that afternoon back in chemistry when the freshman dipped his curly mop of blonde hair and muttered the conspiratorial confession that would go on to change your life.

You watch as Eddie pulls a derisive face, one he immediately fails to commit to.

“Gareth has got a big mouth,” he says, then trails off, and you can’t help but hope that he’s as thankful for that fact as you are. Where would either of you be without Gareth and his big mouth? Certainly not here, huddled together watching the rain boil down from on high while you trade bashful affections.  

“Thanks for not asking, by the way,” you say softly. 

“‘Bout what?” 

“About… I mean… when I said I’ve never had a boyfriend…” 

It would have been the most natural thing in the world for him to ask if you were a virgin, and no matter what happens after this, Eddie Munson will go down in history as the only guy who ever resisted asking that question.

He’ll be forever perfect to you for that.

“I am nothing if not a gentleman.” he assures you, “…plus, I kinda sorta already knew that about you.” 

Then again…

Your face goes bright red.

“Oh, my God—” 

“Listen, Sweetness, it’s not a big deal—” Eddie starts, but no amount of gentlemanly padding is going to make this right. He knows. 

“It is!” you yelp, fisting your hands in your hair.

“—anyway, it’s not exactly a state secret…” 

“Who told you?” you ask, and he just clamps his mouth shut and smiles back at you.

It’s all the answer you need.  

Tina Burton, of course. She made sure you knew all about their sordid little tryst out in the woods, but it never once occurred to you that she would turn right around and make sure Eddie knew all about you. 

“Your secret’s safe with me.” Eddie promises, showing you his palms, “Even if everybody at school already knows.” 

You grind out a harsh sound of indignation and brace your hands on your knees, feeling the muscles between your shoulder blades begin to burn from the stretch and breathing hard through your nose.

“I could kill her.” You say through your teeth.

“Yeah. Welcome to the club,” Eddie hums, “Anyway, since we’re talking about what everyone knows…” he says, “And since it’s already come up, you should probably know the real reason I wanted you to come out with me today is because… well, you’ve been lying low so you probably haven’t heard what people are saying…”

Oh, no.

You hadn’t been aware that there was a real reason behind this outing. You would have been content to go on assuming this was a spur-of-the-moment thing for the rest of your lives, but doesn’t it just make perfect sense that there would be an agenda behind today?

“About what?” You ask tentatively and when he doesn’t answer you feel a cold, sickening dread begin to roil in the pit of your stomach – you don’t need him to say it, you already know what everyone is talking about. “About me?”

He nods. 

Oh, shit. 

“What are they saying?”

He sighs and reaches up to pull at his neck – something you are quickly coming to recognize as one of his many nervous habits.

“I guess I just wanted to try and protect you from it … be all chivalrous or whatever, but I’m starting to think that it was a bad move, and this is just gonna make things worse,”

This being convincing you to skip school in a way which, with the way your luck is going these days, you are quite sure everyone and their mother is already talking about. 

“What are they saying?” You tug the fraying cuff of his jacket, and when he fails to be immediately forthwith with the information, you tug harder, “Tell me, Eddie.” 

He heaves out a weighty sigh. 

“Basically, what’s going around is a lot of talk about what happened at your party,” he says, and you hate to hear him call it that — it wasn’t yours, despite the location and the way it has since gone on to summarily ruin your life.

“Nothing happened.” you press.

Eddie squeezes his eyes shut and scrubs his face with his hands.

“Yeah, it did.” he forces himself to say, and you know immediately what he means.

You sent him out the window when the Hawkins PD showed up, you were alone with him in your bedroom. He kissed you, and worst of all, you had a witness to it.

Nothing happened, and yet a titanic shift has effectively taken place in the social hierarchy of Hawkins High.  

You can only imagine what everyone is saying, and yet you can’t stop yourself from playing dumb about it.

“…because we were together?” you ask, twisting your index finger to the point of pain.

“At a party. Behind a closed door–” Eddie says matter of factly, and your ears are ringing so loud that you don’t hear whatever it is he says to finish that sentence. You don’t have to. You get the picture, and your insides burn with the unfairness of it all. 

The virgin and the freak walk into a room at a party, and when they come out again, everyone assumes she’s not a virgin anymore because the only one who actually saw what happened (what didn’t happen) was Carol Perkins. 

What was it she’d said? He brings the weed, and you get laid, and everybody goes home happy? Everybody but Carol, who in fact went home from that party red-faced and squalling and has been on the warpath ever since.     

“… oh…” is all you manage to vocalize in a tiny, failing voice, thankfully swallowing the follow-up “great” before it can escape.

It’s not fair. It’s not fair it’s not fair it’s not–

“It’s not fair,” Eddie sighs, “But that’s sort’ve just the way things go with me, and anyone associated with me…you know, I mean it. The way things are going – even if this is as far as they go – I’d still do just about anything for you… but I’d be a shitty friend if I didn’t warn you that it’s not easy, going forward like this… with me. People in my orbit tend to get spattered in all that shit… Gareth, the guys, even my Uncle…” his shoulders jump in a devastatingly halfhearted way.

When he speaks again, he sounds unbearably tired, like he cannot bear the weight of what this town has put on him for another moment.

“It comes with the territory,” 

“…oh, Eddie–”

He raises his hands in a show of defeat.

“It’s okay if you’re not up for it. I get it. It’s not easy being on the outside in this town, especially when you’ve got bad friends trying to make things exponentially worse.”

You would correct him and let him know that you’ve got no friends now, nobody but him, but you’re too caught up on something he’d just said.

He’d tried to bury it in the rest of everything else, but it hit you word by word like rosy little shards of glass and embedded themselves in you. 

Even if it doesn’t go any further than this, he’d said, and you realize with a start that this is a pivotal moment. He’s been thinking about you – your relationship, whatever that may currently look like – and imagining it deepening, growing, going further. Suddenly, everything is possible, because you’ve begun to realize that Eddie wants you as much as you want him.

It’s the oldest running joke in the Hawkins High book— Eddie Munson asks you to the prom, what do you do? 

You’re already grounded and being shunned for the taint of something that never happened. Your reputation is in tatters with literally every person you know, so what else could possibly happen?

What’s the harm in leaning into it, and who would possibly notice if you did? 

“I’m having fun with you today.” You say slowly. “I always have fun with you.”

“Yeah, I have fun with you too,” 

“…and I wanna keep having fun with you. You’re cool.”

Eddie snorts out a snide laughter.

“Nobody’s ever accused me of that,” 

You furrow your brow.

“Well, you are — super cool. I like you, Eds.”

It sounds silly and juvenile, especially with the way it causes him to roll his eyes – yeah, sure you like him, but do you like like him? You wish you had the capacity to express yourself more sincerely, but after the barrage of revelations you’ve just been beaten within an inch of your life with, your head feels fat and stuffed up with cotton.

You can hardly make yourself form a semi-coherent thought, let alone organize them enough to spin some kind of poetic yarn, but you can't imagine that after everything that's happened over these last few weeks, he still doesn't know how you feel. 

You have half a mind to remind him how you’d only gone and spilled your guts about the great big crush you supposedly used to have on him, but somehow that feels insincere, and you can’t presently stomach anything of that ilk. 

You wanna be sweet to him the way he’s sweet to you. You wanna treat him the way he deserves. 

“I said I like you, Eddie.” You say again, louder for the people in the back, and reach across to lay your hand on his forearm, “I like you, and I don’t care what Carol or Tina or anyone else says. Fuck them.”

His mouth twitches with a humorless smile. 

“You kiss your mother with that mouth?” he mumbles.

“No,” you stress, “Just my super cool friends when I ask them to…”

The air between you fills with a sharp sound as he sucks his teeth and shakes his head, clearly intending to tease you about that. The intention goes out of him immediately, giving over to something that looks almost halfway sad as he casts that inky dark gaze of his down to his fidgeting hands. 

“Promises, promises…” 

And how you love to prove him wrong.

You can’t help but surge forward and steal a kiss – it’s only a chaste peck to the cheek, but it stuns the both of you into silence all the same.  

“Sorry,” You mumble, turning your gaze back to your sneakers crossed over one another as you settle back against the wall of the van, tucking your hands neatly in your lap as if you suddenly can’t be trusted to keep them to yourself, “That went better in my head,” 

“S’okay,” Eddie hums, swallowing thickly, “You can keep it.”

A sticky, charged silence blooms heavily in the van and suddenly the very air seems to press down on you. You’ve finally sobered up enough to catch the reedy tones of Pink Floyd gently serenading you over the stereo, and the clouds begin to let up.

Thick sheets of rain give way to a smattering of fat, lazy drops, and the sky begins to shift in color again.

How I wish, how I wish you were here, 

we’re just two lost souls swimmin’ in a fish bowl, 

year after year, 

runnin’ over the same ol’ ground, 

and have we found the same old fears? 

Wish you were here…

“I like this song,” You hum without really meaning to, and you watch Eddie nod from the corner of your vision.

“‘Course you do.” he says immediately, like stating a fact. “This is our song.” Then, as if he’d only just realized what it was he’d just said, he immediately grows bashful and begins to backpedal, “I mean, if two people were gonna have a song … if… if we had a song? I feel like this would be it.”

You almost hate to hear him take it back, despite how you understand the intention. You’re just friends after all. Just two lost souls swimmin’ in a fish bowl…

Overhead, the soft rattle of distant thunder groans as the storm begins to move on, and you try to picture Eddie listening to this song and thinking about you, commiserating with the lyrics, wishing you were here. You consider what it means that he would assign something like this to you, to be both of you.

I don’t know if you know this … the way things are going between you and me – even if this is as far as it goes… 

Suddenly, your heart is throbbing against your battered ribs, and you understand too late just what Eddie has been trying to tell you all afternoon. 

When you rest a gentle hand on his knee, his eyes snap open from where they’d fallen shut, and he gets caught staring at the point of contact.  

“Hey…” you hum, drawing his owlish blinking attention back up to your face, “For what it’s worth, it wasn’t a bad first kiss, you know?”

It takes him a moment to answer, and when he does, his face splits up in a slow, wide grin. 

“Yeah, it was okay, huh? Haven’t really been able to think about anything else all week…” he says, 

“Me neither,” you hum, “But if you really want to, we could… I dunno… try it again?”  

“You want to?”

You pull your shoulders up toward your ears and tilt your head ever so slightly over to the side.

“Guess I just wanna know what I’m missing…”

He stares back at you for what feels like a very long moment before moving. 

“Yeah, but…” Eddie shifts onto his hands and knees and reaches out to take hold of the doors, swinging them shut with a hard clunk, first one, then the other, and suddenly you’re plunged into semi-darkness. It takes a moment for your eyes to adjust, one just long enough for Eddie to position himself so that he’s perched in front of you, back to the now-closed doors, shielding you from the prying eyes of the world, “Do you want me to kiss you?”  

You don’t even have to think about it. You nod, a tentative, jerky up-and-down movement that you aren’t entirely sure he can see you make now that the doors are shut, and you clear your throat to cover the gasp that comes wrenching out of you to feel his hand come up to shadow the line of your jaw.

He follows the movement of your nodding, and as your vision finally becomes accustomed to the lack of light, you can see the faintest silhouette of him mirroring the movement.

“Will you say it for me?” He asks, “Out loud?”

You swallow hard in a futile attempt to keep your voice from quavering and feel it slide out of your throat with all the consistency of frozen molasses.

“I want you to…” you hum, “to, uh… to kiss me.”

“Are you nervous?”

You shake your head and feel the hold he has on your chin tighten ever so slightly.

“Then why don’t you ask me nicely?” he says in a gentle singsong.

You breathe a sigh out through your nose and roll your eyes, because he’s so annoying, and yet, you’re craziest for him when he’s teasing you like this.

“Eddie,” you sigh, “Will you please kiss me?” 

You’d meant for the question to sound pressed and exasperated, playing along with his stupid little game, and yet the weighted, breathy measure of your voice as it forced itself out of the cloying confines of your throat was perhaps the sultriest, most desperately wanton thing you’ve ever heard anyone say.

It was near pornographic and you can hardly believe that it came out of you.

The soft sound that Eddie makes in response speaks volumes.

His grip widens to cradle your jaw, and before you’ve even registered him moving, you can feel the faintest brush of his lips against yours as he speaks. 

“Good girl.” he grinds out with a timbre you feel all the way down in your panties, and tilts forward. 

Before he can kiss you, however, a bolt of anxiety lances through your midsection – this is happening for real now, once you cross that threshold there will be no turning back.

You draw in a sharp, tentative breath and jerk back ever so slightly without really meaning to. The movement stops him short and cuts the atmosphere like a knife. 

“What’s wrong?” Eddie asks, and you can see his eyes winking back at you in the semi-dark, shining with concern and the faintest tinge of rejection.

You shake your head, desperate to dissuade any fears he may have but suddenly too nervous to voice anything but your own anxiety.  

“It’s just…” You start, choking on the wildly intrusive thought, unhelpfully bubbling up from somewhere inside of you, “You said – are you really gonna use your tongue?”

Eddie makes a harsh sound (one tinged ever so slightly with relief, you can’t help but notice) and even though you can’t really see him do it, you imagine him rolling his eyes.

“Seriously?”  he deadpans.

“This is new for me, okay?” You stress indignantly, quickly to justify the hesitation, “I just wanna be prepared for whatever happens.”

“I’ll keep you posted.” He promises, brushing your hair back from your face, and before you can say anything else, he makes a seal over your lips with his, and he kisses you.

For real this time. Not just a chaste peck stolen from the corner of your mouth or a glancing blow off the highest point of his cheekbone. It’s a real, honest-to-God, lip-locking kiss, and for half a heartbeat, you forget how to breathe. 

It is a moment that is somehow simultaneously impossibly long and devastatingly short, vacuum sealed together like that with your nose crushed into the side of his. Your fingers flex in the dirty carpet lining the floor of the van, and your arms strain under the threat of hyperextension as you lock your elbows to support your weight.

You aren't aware of when you leaned forward to meet Eddie in the kiss, and when you part, your lips click wetly in a sound that rings lewdly through the cavity of the van.  

Even after, you can’t seem to open your eyes as you pass your tongue over your lips. You can taste the faintest tinge of the gum Eddie had been chewing earlier, and you pull your lower lip in past your teeth, trying to chase the lingering flavor of spearmint and nicotine. You realize with a start that your lips feel cold without the press of his to keep them warm, and you wonder how you never noticed that before.

The thought is gone the moment it arrives, and while you can’t seem to make any sort of coherent thought stick long enough to really process it, you are suddenly and keenly aware of the way you have begun to instantly grieve your separation from Eddie, for as brief as it lasts.

He's still very close to you, you can tell without opening your eyes, as your senses seem to have heightened exponentially here in the velvet dark of the van on this rainy day. You can feel the gentle puff of his breath on your face when he speaks, the intimate proximity of him, still so near.

“Good—” is all Eddie manages to say before you push forward again, curling your hands into the front of his jacket and seeking the sweet honey of his lips. You don’t need to see him to find him, you don’t even need to know if you were any good at all.

All other perceived needs have been superseded by the overwhelming and intense urge to kiss him again. 

Eddie makes a startled sound, something tinged with the faintest hint of a laugh, and tilts back under your weight as you throw yourself at him.

You feel his hands curl around your biceps with a gentle, but firm hold and for half a terrifying moment, you expect him to push back and separate himself from you.

He did what you asked, after all. He kissed you, his end of the bargain has been fulfilled, no matter how devastating you might find it to have the moment end – but he doesn’t. 

He grips you tighter and holds you firmly to the spot.  

“Open your mouth,” he tells you, and you’re powerless to do anything but obey, lips parting ever so slightly this time when he dips back down. 

You meet him halfway and make a soft sound when he slots your lower lip between his and begin to tenderly suck on the bruising flesh.  

You breathe out a harsh, shaky sigh and fist your hands in the soft denim of his jacket and when you find the texture to be lacking, you grip the collar of his t-shirt. You try not to tug on it, distantly wary of pulling it out of shape, or worse, tearing it, but it’s all you can do just to try and keep yourself grounded as the world tilts on its axis and Eddie Munson kisses you. 

Your lips interlock like links in a chain, breaking and coming together again in a slow rhythm that, once you start to get the hang of, you can feasibly see yourself getting lost in for hours — days even. 

The rest of your life? No, that’s too much. One of you is going to have to come up for air eventually, and as far as you’re concerned, it’s going to have to be Eddie, because kissing him is the high you never knew you were addicted to chasing.

Still, the way he’s started pawing at you, pressing down until his nose is crushed into the side of yours, trying to pull you closer like if he could only just swallow you down he’d finally be satisfied, with all the little breathless sounds you can feel him trying not to make, you’re not sure you can trust him to be the practical one here. 

You’re lightheaded and steadily going boneless, and you’re not certain when you began to tilt down, but suddenly you’re below Eddie, practically laying in his lap, and it’s almost peaceful, until the sudden adventurous probing of his tongue flicks into your mouth. 

Your eyes finally snap open – you’re not sure how long ago they slipped shut – and you make a high startled sound, breaking the seal of your lips with a vulgar wet smack.

“Eddie!” you gasp, fingers coming up absently to press against your lips where they suddenly feel fuzzy and swollen. “You said you were gonna warn me!”

“I know.” he admits, gazing back at you with a sickly-sweet look on his face that has any and all righteous indignation you might have felt fizzling out before it can even catch. “I lied.” 

You gaze up at him and feel some of that saccharine fondness dripping back into you and reach up to cage his face in your hands. 

“Do it again,” 

And how could you have forgotten how he’d just got finished telling you he’d do anything for you? 

Strange how after a lifetime of longing, everything you ever wanted can fall so unceremoniously into your lap. And all it took was losing everything else you’d spent your life so carefully cultivating.

You’re surprised to find as the last vestiges of that old life you’d been clinging to so dearly slips away with every thrum of your heart beating in time with his, you don’t grieve the loss. You don’t care about the ruin of everything you know, not when you’re with Eddie, and you’re more than okay with that.

This is everything you’ve ever wanted, after all. Your wildest dreams coming true on a random Friday in November.

Life is so unbearably weird and wonderful. 

Eventually, as is only the natural progression of things, as the kiss deepens and breath is traded back and forth with no signs of stopping, hands begin to wander as well. Before you know it, the whole thing has very quickly devolved into one of those full-blown make-out sessions you’ve spent your adolescence and teenage years hearing about – fantasizing about.

It’s all teeth and tongue and reverent, groping hands made that much more intense by the lingering haze of the fuzzy high you share. And you’re surprised to find that mostly it’s your hands scrambling for purchase wherever you can get it, over his shoulders, his back down the planes of his chest, the jut of his narrow hips, and even around to take an immodest palmful of his ass.

You didn’t know you had it in you. 

Eddie has no complaints about your groping, as far as you can tell. He lays you down and props himself above you, and you, with all your newfound courage, cannot stand the distance it puts between you. You pull your knees up and grip him around the waist between your thighs, and it’s all the prompting he needs to drop and press his body flush to yours.

The feeling of him tucked so tightly against you sends a bloom of heat burning through your body and a soft mewling sound slipping from between your lips.

Like it were an electric shock, it sends a tangible shiver rocking through Eddie’s body.

“You like that, Sweet Girl?” he asks, voice having gone unbearably husky in ways you’ve only ever dreamed about, “You like me kissing you?”

You nod, despite the fact that he’s not actually kissing you anymore.

“Words, Baby. Wanna hear that sweet voice of yours.” 

“I like you kissing me,” you gasp.

He makes a low, throaty sound of approval, and suddenly you can feel his teeth on the tender columns of your throat.

“What do you want?” he asks, and you wonder how in the world you’re supposed to answer him when your brain has so begun such a thorough metamorphic transition from solid matter to mush.

“More.” you hum, gasping as he sucks a sharp bruise into the side of your neck.

It makes a lewd, wet pop when he releases you and it shocks you through with chills.

“More what?”

“More.”

You feel his breath fanning the damp circle he has left on your neck as he laughs, turning to spot cold.

“Sweet girl, needy girl — you want me to touch you?”

You can’t imagine how to answer such a question, because as far as you are concerned, he’s already touching you, and yet you’re the one asking him for more, so obviously Eddie knows there are more ways he can be touching you, right?

You know that too, but you can’t imagine that things are about to take that turn. Certainly not.

And then he gently tugs your lower lip between his teeth in a way that makes you grow weak, and you can’t help but chase him – you need more more more as is evidenced by the way your hips involuntarily jump up in search of something, some kind of friction to ease the ache between your legs.

Right.

Eddie, always the gentleman, responds in kind, aggressively grinding you down into the worn blanket beneath you with a firm roll of his hips that has you gasping. Suddenly, you know exactly what it is you were just asking for, as you can feel so much more of him than you were ever expecting.

As it just so happens, things could very easily take that raunchy little turn, and there’s nothing stopping you from getting there but a few layers of fabric.

The thought makes you giddy, on the verge of panic, even and you can suddenly feel yourself coming apart at the seams as your body cries out, once again, for more more more… needy bitch, Goddamn. 

But are you ready for that?  

Are you ready to strip down to your skin and offer yourself up? Cosmopolitan Magazine says you aren’t wearing the right underwear for that. 

Kissing him turned out to not be enough, but what about rutting up against each other like bunnies? What are you gonna do when your body decides heavy petting isn’t enough?

Are you gonna let him undress you? Spread you open? Split you open?

Are you really gonna go all the way in the back of his van in some empty parking lot an hour outside of town? It’s both terrifying and exhilarating, and you’re steadily leaning toward a yes when Eddie snakes his hand up under your sweater and takes a cheeky handful of your breast — you arch into his touch, and then his free hand scrabbles down to fumble with the button of your jeans.

It pops open, followed quickly by your zipper without much coaxing, and the next thing you know, you can feel his fingers pressing down over the thin, damp layer of cotton.

For some reason, this is when your body decides to hit the emergency stop, and you panic. 

The answer is a resounding no, you’re not ready for this.

“Wait–wait a minute…” You say breathlessly, grabbing him by the wrist. “Eddie– wait,”

He immediately backs off, practically leaping away from you to press himself against the wall of the van like you’d spontaneously combusted under his touch.

“Shit, sorry – I’m sorry, that was too much… was it too much?” 

You push up on your elbows and into a seated position, insides burning with the intense combination of fiery want and hot wanton shame. 

“I’m just… I don’t know if I’m ready for that… not just yet.” you tell him, pulling your knees up and hugging them to your chest, “Sorry,”

“Oh, God, no, don’t be sorry! That’s – that’s totally fine.” He says, shaking his head, “I mean– of course it’s fine, it’s more than fine. This should be going at your speed, and I should have – I mean, I shouldn’t have – I’m sorry, I should’ve asked … sorry.” 

“It’s okay,” you try to tell him, but he’s not listening to you anymore.

He’s too busy trying to patch things over, smooth over the imaginary wrinkles in the woven tapestry of whatever it is going on between you.

“I just,” Eddie says in a garbled rush, “I didn’t mean to… to make you uncomfortable or anything, and I would never want you to feel pressured to do something–”

You shake your head.”

“I don’t feel pressured,”

“–e-especially if you’re not ready, because you’re…” he stops just short of saying it, but he doesn’t have to say it for you know catch his drift – a virgin, “… and-and I’m…” not, “... it’s totally cool if you aren’t ready. I went too far, that’s on me–”

“Eddie – calm down.” You press, taking firm hold of his hands and forcing him to look at you, “Take a breath, we’re okay,”  

He nods a fervent up and down that feels just a tad too close to manic.

“Okay…” he says, “Okay… sorry,” 

“You don’t have to be sorry,” you insist, but he’s already shaking his head.

“I know, but I am.”

And you realize with a start that there’s going to be no arguing this one. He’s sorry, and you’re just going to have to let him be that way. If that’s what it takes to move past this hiccup, then you’re fine with it. He can be sorry, and it can still be okay.

“Okay,” you say gently, “I accept your apology … are you okay?”

It takes him a long, quiet moment to gather himself enough to answer.

“I’m okay.” Eddie says, and because you don’t expressly believe him, you squeeze his hands in yours.

“Good, so everybody’s okay.” 

 Only the moment has passed, and once again everything feels different. This time, as the looming sense of unshakable change settles over you, you can’t help but get the feeling that it’s not going to be the way you want things.

Eddie’s watch beeps twice, and he takes his hands back to tilt his wrist up. You watch him closely as he does it, watching his guard settle into place and feeling yourself crumple a little to realize that you have been shut out.

You drag your gaze down to your hands for the sake of self-preservation and mask the dejected air of the movement by checking your own watch.

It’s 4pm. School has been out for two hours, and you’re still half as far out of town. Double that if you take into account the rush hour traffic you’re bound to hit.

Whoops.  

“We should probably head back…” The words are tumbling out of your mouth before you even realize you had the intention to speak. “It’s late.” 

In your peripheral, Eddie’s head snaps up and when you force yourself to look at him, you catch the tail end of a devastated look vacating his features.

You offer a lopsided, melancholy shrug that feels so much more like an apology than you’d meant it to, and the pair of you slowly move to pull yourselves back into shape and climb over the console into your seats.

The drive back to Hawkins is long and all but silent, if not for the cassette playing gently in the background. You try to keep the conversation flowing because you’re nervous and embarrassed, but the mood is soured, and things are awkward now.

You lie to yourself that no, in fact, you did not just ruin whatever it was you had going with Eddie because you didn’t open your legs to him and everything is going to be fine.

You really, really hope that this time, you’ll be right for once. 

It's well after dark by the time Eddie drops you at your car — you’re going to be in deep shit, of that you have no doubt, and yet you can’t manage to make yourself care. 

Awkwardness and sexual rejection notwithstanding, you had a good day. Yards better than anything you could have expected from the rank and file of Hawkins High, at least. 

You hop down from the van and shut the door behind you with a creaky whine and thump and turn to greet your little Toyota.

As you go fishing for your keys, you can only hope beyond hope that Dustin was too caught up in whatever reason he was so adamant about taking his bike today to remember to come and meet you for a pickup. 

Eddie stops you before you can circle around to your driver’s side,

“Hey,” he says, reaching down to snag your hand, “Listen, I know we already covered this, but I really am sorry about earlier.”

“Eddie,” you sigh, “You didn’t do anything wrong.” 

“Yeah, I did. I ruined a perfectly good afternoon,” he says, smiling weakly, and suddenly you know exactly what he’s thinking.

You’re just going to have to agree to disagree. Boy, you wish he would stop throwing himself under the bus for you all the time. You don’t want this sad, self-deprecating, pancaked version of Eddie, especially when he’s going through all this torture over something that is arguably your fault. 

“You didn’t ruin anything,” you start, “If anything, I’m the one—”

“You? No sir, not you. You’re perfect.” Eddie tells you and you feel the sentiment stick you sharply in the gut.

The fondness you feel for him bleeds into your bloodstream, fizzing like pop rocks and lighting you up from head to toe. You’re so high on the feeling that you hardly hear what he is saying next.

“Anyway … I hope you won’t let me spoil a bright future of first kisses,” he makes a show of tapping your chin with the ridge of his knuckles, and the gentle touch brings you crashing back to Earth, “You got potential, Kid. Someday you’re gonna knock some lucky fella’s socks off,”

You flex your hand in his, so perfectly cradled there like you were made special to fit together, and feel a shock of warmth bloom across your midsection at the thought.

You don’t want to have potential, at least not for anyone else whose socks may be waiting to be knocked off, and you are utterly dismayed that the pair of you could have emerged from the shenanigans of the earlier afternoon and have Eddie not know that. 

You put your free hand on his shoulder and push up on your toes, pressing something a little too long to be just a chaste peck to the center of his lips. 

Your lips click when you drop back down, and you move your hand over to pat his chest fondly. 

“I think I’m set on first kisses for a while. I might stick with this one and see where it goes,” you say.

His eyes widen in a way that is so boyishly hopeful, it causes your heart to throb almost painfully for how deeply your affection for him has grown over the course of one afternoon. 

“Really?” Eddie asks, and you take his face in one hand. 

Oh, what a sweet, sweet, unbearably dense boy, he is sometimes. 

“This one suits me just fine,” 

You push up on your toes to kiss him again, just because you want to, and just because you can. This time he snags you around the waist and hauls you up to hold crushed against him.  

It feels an awful lot like going steady, like becoming officially official with someone (not that you would know anything about what that feels like), and yet the way Eddie’s arms feel around you knocks the word “boyfriend” around in your skull until it finds a snug little spot to stick into your brain.  

You stand together just existing like that for what feels like a very long time, and when he finally releases you to touch back down to Earth again, he holds tightly to your hands. You’re glowing, of that you can be certain, if only because you can see if reflected right back in him, and suddenly everything is almost perfect.

Almost.

The sirens hit you before the first of the red and blue flashers peek their way through the haze of darkened trees. The cop car comes screaming out of the night and goes sailing down the road past you, followed by another, and another, and what you must imagine is the entirety of the Hawkins Police Department, hauling ass down Cornwallis, headed somewhere at the speed of light.

It’s startling at best, and distressing at worst considering the conspicuous absences suddenly cropping up in your community.

You can’t help but turn to watch them go, wondering idly if one of the panicked adults in your life noticed you weren't in school today and assumed you'd become the next of the missing kids.

“Whoa, shit, where’s the fire?” Eddie mutters, gaze fixed on the line of squad cars as they go howling down the road to disappear around the bend.

The black and whites disappear into a haze of taillights, leaving the pair of you standing dumbfounded. It’s not every day you see something like that in a boring little town like Hawkins. 

“I hope nobody’s hurt,” you say absently, because it feels like the right thing to say, despite your indignance at being so rudely interrupted.

How dare someone exist in a state of emergency when you’re busy falling head over heels.

It takes Eddie a moment to respond, and when he does, he scoffs and shrugs in a way that is perhaps a tad too flippant for the obvious severity of what you’d just witnessed. 

“Nah.” he says, “I’ll bet it’s nothing. Hey, they probably just found that Byers kid holed up somewhere,” he nudges you, “So you can stop worrying, Sweetness,”     

You have half a mind to make a flippant comment about what you’d just witnessed being a whole lot of commotion for “probably nothing”, but the thought goes out of your mind when you catch Eddie giving you that sickly sweet look again. 

You smile, casting your gaze bashfully down to your shoes and taking your hands back. You cross your arms over your chest and wrestle with the knowledge that you’ve been standing here far too long. The sirens were signal enough that it is time to go home, but like always, you just can’t seem to leave Eddie.

“You gotta go.” he says suddenly, drawing your attention back up to him.

It hadn’t been a question, but he’s still looking at you expectantly, like somehow it will leave things open enough for you to contradict the statement. You don’t have to get going. You can stay together like this forever.

Only forever is an awfully long time for someone who is grounded within an inch of their life and strictly forbidden from spending such an amount of time with the person sharing their space.

You pull your face into another one of those apologetic smiles and tilt your head over to press your ear to your shoulder.

“I gotta go,” you echo, and you give him your hand.

Eddie takes it without a moment’s hesitation, and nods. There is something ever so slightly sad about the gesture, despite the pleasant curl of his lips.

“Yeah… okay.” He says, “Get home safe, Babylove,”

You rock a step back, one Eddie mimics, followed by another, and a third, and you hold tight to your singular point of connection until distance demands you part. Even then, you don’t take your eyes off of each other, even as you open your respective doors and he steps up to the driver’s side of the van.

“Call me when you get there,” he says, and you nod so emphatically that the world briefly tilts on its axis.

“I will.”

Eddie’s face splits into that big, toothy grin.

“I’m gonna hold you to that,” he says, “If I have to call you first, you’re gonna be in trouble.”

You’re grinning so widely that your face has started to hurt – funny how he has that effect on you – and it occurs to you almost too late that you’re going to have a very hard time doing just that.

You shake your head as Eddie slides in behind the wheel and shuts his door. He’s cranking down the window before you can even think to take a step toward him. 

“Oh, wait – I don’t have your number!” you call.

His grin turns wicked and wolfish, and even from this distance you can see his eyes go bright. 

“You don’t?” he says, stretching the word lyrically, “Well, shoot, Honey, why didn’t you say so? It’s in the yellow pages … under Casanova–” he’s so annoying, “Sorry, Lothario–” and you’re so goddamn crazy about him you could scream. “No, wait a minute, that would be Adonis–”

“Goodnight, Loverboy.” 

You can still hear him laughing at his own dumb joke when you slide into your driver’s side and shut the door. It’s hardly half a minute before the seal is broken once more and Eddie leans down into your open doorway to tilt your head up and kiss you again. 

“Eddie–” you start, though any protest you may have at being kept longer in that parking lot is crushed between your lips and his

“I’m so serious,” he says, rocking forward to grind his forehead against yours, “You better call me when you get home.” 

You brace your hand on his shoulder and curl your fingers into the soft denim of a jacket that, by all rights, he should not be wearing. You’d meant to make a show of pushing him away with no real conviction but you’d managed to get lost along the way and ended up hanging on to him instead.

Funny how that tends to happen to you when he’s around.

“I will,”

“You won’t.” He pouts, tilting down to kiss you again, muffling the sound of your laughter.

“I will!” you insist when you manage to pry yourself away from him.

Eddie gives you a long, tender look, and you can feel your heart beating in your throat. He reaches down and takes hold of your wrist, turning it over so that your palm is facing upward, and when he tears his gaze away from yours to look down, you feel instantly lesser for it.  

You feel the sharp tickle of a cheap Bic pen pressing into your flesh as he jots his phone number into the meat of your palm.

“You promise?” he asks, and you nod dutifully.

Anything, you would tell him if you could, I’ll do anything you ask.

“I promise,”  

Even after he shuts your door and you start the car, he remains standing in the parking lot, hamming it up and making joke after endless joke. 

It takes ten minutes for you to drive the length of Cornwallis, and you spend every second of that time fighting the urge to turn right back around just to see if Eddie is still waiting for you in the school parking lot.

When you finally pull into your driveway, all the lights in your house are off and your parents are gone, because that’s just par for the course.

You fully expect to enter your living room to find a note indicating their departure and the state of leftovers in the fridge for you to sustain yourself, and you’re too giddy to even really care about the enduring state of your slow burn abandonment. You suppose that you ought to just count it as lucky because otherwise, you’d be planning your funeral. 

You’re sliding out of your car, slamming the door, and fumbling with the lock, all while trying to keep from smudging the precariously scribbled numbers on your inner palm when Claudia Henderson comes trotting across the street.

Of course, you’re too stuffed up in your head to hear the first two times she calls your name.

You don’t hear her at first, because you’re on another plane of existence. You don’t have the mental capacity to realize what is about to happen, because all you can manage to think is how, while neither of you expressly said it, you’re fairly certain that Eddie Munson is your boyfriend now.

You can’t wait to scribble that blessed update all over the sordid little pages of your diary. By the time you come back down to earth, Mrs. Henderson is standing right in front of you like a red-faced, blubbering jump scare, blotting her nose with a well-used Kleenex and wailing your name for the third or fourth time.

“Holy shit—” The words come tumbling out of you before you can catch them, but thankfully they are steamrolled by your afterschool employer’s whiny, warbling voice.

“Where on Earth have you been?” she mewls.

Your heart leaps up into your throat, and all the giddy levity goes out of you. 

Busted. 

You brace for impact, remembering all too late how she’d threatened her only child’s life that very morning for the mere suggestion that he should exist for a singular moment outside of your supervision, and how you’d failed to drive him home from school that afternoon.

You can already imagine the tales of how Dustin waited and waited and waited for hours before finally being forced to walk all the way home, all the while you were acquainting yourself with the feel and texture of your boyfriend’s back teeth. 

–Boyfriend boyfriend boyfriend–

How could you do such a thing? She would ask, How could you leave him stranded like that? How is she ever meant to trust you again? 

“Mrs. Henderson,” you start with your hands raised in diplomatic defense, “I can explain,” 

What it is you’re about to try and explain away, you’ve got no idea. What are you supposed to tell her? That you were in the next town over watching all your wildest dreams come to fruition? Rubbing up against the town pariah, asking him for more more more…?

Obviously, you can’t tell her that, but what then? You suppose you could lie, nobody expressly needs to know that you weren’t in school that day, but you have no idea how you would even begin to broach the subject of where you’ve been, why you’re three hours late coming home, and how you happen to have no idea where her son is. 

You hope to God she doesn’t ask you that, and you find yourself frantically trying to look around her, to catch a glimpse of a little body pressed in against the front window across the street. 

You watch as any attempt at outrage goes instantly out of her and her face crumples under the duress of a new wave of fresh emotion.

“Oh, honey–” she snivels, “You don’t have to explain anything… we already know.” 

It is a deeply ominous statement to make, and for some reason it raises the hair on the back of your neck. You find yourself having to swallow hard just to keep your voice from quavering as you speak.

“Know what?” you ask slowly,

“They found him, Sweetheart,” she tells you, and you fail to suppress a flinch. 

You hate to hear her – or anyone else for that matter – call you that. As far as you’re concerned, that name belongs on one pair of lips, and they do not belong to your across the street employer, staring at you with her face flushed and a steady stream of mucus running down from her nose. 

Still, her words ring loudly in your ears, drowning out all the cotton candy that has been stuffing up your skull for the last few hours. They found him – him who? 

Your stomach cramps under the duress of your inner turmoil. You hate to ask, but you can’t just stand there staring at Mrs. Henderson, no matter how badly you want this moment to end. It’s not fair. You have to call Eddie. You promised to call him as soon as you got home… and yet? Suddenly you can’t stop thinking about the rush of sirens that whipped past you on the road, and what he said after. 

“Who did they find?” you force reluctantly through your teeth. 

You don’t want the answer, and yet you already have a very clear sense of what she is going to say, and contrary to what Eddie previously assured you, it’s not going to be good.

[bizaar]

hello! i hope you dont mind me asking, but i read an old post of yours that said you were preparing to publish a horror novel. i'd love to hear more about it, if you're willing to share, as i adore your writing. you're unbelievably talented!!!!

hi nonny! tragically, that specific situation fell through, but I haven't abandoned that story or any of the others that have followed! I may have fallen off of the fanfic wagon when I ejected myself from social media, but I certainly didn't stop writing! but oh my gosh how nice of you to say! thank you 💙💙💙💙💙

[bizaar]

Hello! i absolutely adore your writing style. i was curious if you write for any other fandoms, or post your writing elsewhere. i would read anything that you write! have a great day <3

hi Nonny - great question. The short answer is no, I don't really write for any other fandoms, at least nowhere that I've readily posted.

I used to dabble writing Red Dead Redemption fics, and before that, I was neck deep in Dragon Age Inquisition fanfic, but neither of those were reader inserts and I was never brave enough to post them, but that's really sweet of you to say! Now I wish I had more of something to send your way!!

[bizaar]

hi all! it's been a while (i know) - I just wanted to pop in and let you all know I'm alive

in case you're wondering what happened and why I dropped off the face of the earth, I had a serious mental health crisis back in August/September and as a result, had to quit all social media. I'm doing much better, but I'm still very much chronically offline.

I saw some people asking about Endless Summer, and while I've basically all but abandoned it since I last updated, I have several chapters that are basically written that I might be able to muster the gumption to polish and post, just 'cause I love ya <3 (maybe, I don't wanna make any firm promises in case I go and lose my mind again)

like I said, I just wanted to let you know I'm alive, I'm okay, and I still think about this little community all the time

[bizaar]

Dude I swear, I check your profile weekly to see if Endless Summer has been updated. IMO, your portrayal of Eddie in all 3 fics are the most accurate I’ve read so far and it’s just so GOOD 😭

Aww bless you, Babe 🥺 I’m working on it, I promise — it’s taking a little longer between a bunch of other stuff, but I’m always happy to give a preview of what’s to come! 💙

[bizaar]

dead man's party was sooo good! def my favorite chapter <333

Thank you Nonny! I would agree with you (because this chapter holds a very special place in my heart) but my favorite chapter is still incoming and I’m so excited to share it

[bizaar]

Endless Summer ✧

Part 4: Dead Man's Party

Cruel Summer Masterlist

Prev - Next

pairing: eddie munson x afab!reader

warnings: sexual content (18+ minors dni), fluff, horny-loser!Eddie, brief descriptions of sexual fantasies, bullying, mentions of parental abuse, mentions of drug and alcohol use, boys being gross, swearing, and so, so SO much pining

word count: 23k

a/n: once again, if anyone knows the original creator of the gif below, please let me know so I can tag them, I’ve had these on my laptop for over a year and I’ve lost all my credits!!

Dreams are weird. 

Here he stands in the vacuum of a white and foggy nothing, with absolutely no context as to how he ended up there or what he is even supposed to be doing, and yet Eddie is oblivious to the fact that there is anything amiss. 

This is normal, and more to the point this is where he is meant to be, standing out in the middle of this nothing which is slowly revealing itself to be the side of the road, despite a complete and total lack of distinguishing features to establish it as such.

He gets the faintest suggestion of a feeling that he is waiting for something, but before he can stop to ask himself what for, a voice fills the air. 

“Eddie!”

Of course, he knows instantly who is calling – there are only a handful of people who so casually address him by his first name (the vast majority of his peers electing to stick to his last name or some mean-spirited nickname).

Fewer still of that small grouping happen to be of the fairer sex, but even if he didn’t immediately know, who else’s voice would he be hearing out here in the misty mire of his dreams?

 It is music to his ears, and when he turns to look, there you are, already rolling down the window of a sleek car that is most certainly not your dented, soup green Toyota Corolla. 

That’s normal. 

“Hiya Sweetness…” he says, grinning and, even in a dream, hyper conscious of trying not to sound too thrilled that you just so happened to happen upon him in this void of nothing by the side of the so-called-road – what are the odds? 

“Where are you headed?” You ask, leaning seductively over the car door and giving him full vantage of the tiny red bikini you’re wearing – somehow, you’re suddenly also in a pool. You’re in a car, but you’re in a pool. 

And that’s still completely normal too. 

“Home,” Eddie says, gesturing down the long stretch of nary a thing with a long sweep of his arm, “That-a-way.” 

You smile, pink tongue poking through the lines of your teeth, and you lick your lips long and slow. Vaguely, he can’t help but get the sense that Moving in Stereo is playing somewhere in the distance. 

“You want a ride?” You purr, pushing your tits up and looking not so much like yourself as you do an amalgamation of half a hundred different pinups and playmates who have kept Eddie’s company over the years.

“Sure,”

The answer pleases you immensely and the atmosphere grows thick with the heady weight of your approval. 

Your teeth shine in pearly lines behind ruby red lips as you jerk your chin up and bat your eyes all pretty. 

“Hop in and I’ll suck your cock,” —

THUMP THUMP THUMP. 

The banging on Eddie’s bedroom door rattles it in its frame, lancing through his bleary subconscious and startling him into waking. 

The bubble of his dream pops with a fizzle, and just like that, you and the unknowable side of the road are replaced with the socked in atmosphere of a filthy bedroom and a gruff middle aged voice speaking at him through layers of warped hollow core. 

And just when things were starting to get good — ain’t that just the way. 

Lying face down in the rumpled sheets of his unmade bed, Eddie opens his eyes to the real world, and any lingering essence of the dream immediately begins to fade, replaced instead by the voice of his uncle and a sharp rattling door handle. 

“Get up, Ed!” Wayne calls. 

Eddie imagines it is meant to be the warning of an impending entrance, a gentlemanly way of telling him to make himself decent before anyone has to witness (or be witnessed in) any untoward morning actions.

It wouldn’t be the first time he’s been caught jerking off when he’s supposed to be getting ready for school. 

“No fuckoff,” Eddie moans, burying his face into the pillow and squeezing his eyes shut until he sees stars, willing them to take the shape of nondescript pool-cars and bodies in tiny bikinis — it’s not working, and now the door is creaking open.

“You better get your ass up if you wanna have time to shower,”  

He pulls the pillow over his head and whines out a moody complaint. 

“Five more minutes,” Eddie huffs, not caring about showers or school or whatever other bullshit reason Wayne has decided it’s so important he get up right this very moment. 

The man couldn’t be more urgent if the goddamn house was on fire.

“I’m not gonna tell you again,” Wayne says without any real tooth behind the threat.  

If his eyes were open, Eddie would have rolled them. 

In the bad old days, his father wouldn’t have bothered with such a luxury. Al Munson would have told his son once, and if he failed to heed that warning, a very rude awakening was sure to follow, one which varied in levels of violence depending on the old man’s mood and whether or not he’d started drinking yet. 

Eddie is no stranger to waking under a flipped mattress or splash of cold water (or warm beer). Sometimes, he can even still feel the burning of the cigarette his father stubbed out on the bottom of his foot when he failed to get out of bed on the first morning of the eighth grade, but these days he can rest easy knowing his uncle hasn’t got the same penchant for that kind of insanity.

He just likes to stand in doorways and offer cryptic prophecies like he thinks he’s the old man on the mountain or something.   

“She’s gonna be here any minute,” Wayne stresses.

And Eddie has got no earthly idea what kind of bizarre empty threat that is supposed to be — until he remembers the G rated source material behind his dream. 

The reason he was standing on that very real stretch of side road as your little green car came rolling up at precisely the right moment. More importantly, he remembers the plans you made after. The van is dead and he’s catching a ride with you to school today. 

“Oh, shit!”  

He is only vaguely aware of the sound of his uncle retreating and muttering to himself, something to the tune of “oh, sure, now it’s oh shit.” 

When he reaches for his Kmart Special digital alarm clock, which isn’t worth its weight in batteries, Eddie puts a fist into its winking face and punches it clear off his nightstand. Then, he upends himself over the side of the mattress and goes spilling out onto the floor as he leans over to reach for it. 

Lying upside down in a jumbled heap of pillows and blankets, he smashes buttons until the device creaks in his hand and winks off.

“Come on you — fucker!” 

It’s only when he gives it a hot-tempered shake that it comes back on and reveals the terrible truth.

It’s 7:22, and the returning memory of the previous afternoon’s coordination sends him into a blind panic.

You very clearly told him that you would be back at 7:30, leaning out your car window (and most certainly not offering to suck his cock) after you’d dropped him off. 

“How’s that sound?” you asked.

And because he’s the most insufferable human being on the planet, he gave you a sleazy, shit-eating grin and said, “Like a hot date.” 

The van is temperamental on a good day, but it had been acting up from the moment he turned the keys over that morning. Every couple of weeks it gets the notion in its head that it’s going to flirt with going to that great big used car lot in the sky, and every couple of weeks Eddie forces it to limp home where it can sit for a few days and think about what it’s done, but it’s more or less reliable. 

So it’s no wonder he went about the rest of his day with nary a thought in that head so stuffed up with yearning and dirty dishes and Shakespearean bullshit that it would leave him stranded on the side of the road. 

Now, he has eight minutes to pull his shit together before he’s expected to resume his sudden tenancy to your passenger seat. You’re on your way – ETA any minute, so says his uncle – and it sends him into a flurry of movement.

When he checks the clock again hoping maybe he read it wrong the first time, he is alarmed to find that it’s already been a full minute since he last looked. 

“Oh, shit! — shitshitshit!”

Why, oh why, today of all days, did he have to sleep in?

After a moment of aimless scrambling and trying to remember how to function, so recently removed from dreamland, he hears the familiar thumping cadence of his uncle’s gait coming back down the hall and Eddie feels the phantom throbbing of cigarette burns, bringing with them the consequences of a call unheeded. 

He can almost hear his father slurring “I’m only gonna tell you once,” and Eddie’s heart rockets up into his throat as he thrashes to free himself of the tangle of blankets. 

Wayne is still coming down the hall, and Eddie tries to read the man’s mood just by the familiar thump thump thumping – can footsteps sound angry? A traumatic childhood tells him, yes, they most certainly can.  

“I’m up!” Eddie shouts, standing up with enough velocity to very briefly strike him with the bends, dizziness sending dark spots exploding across his vision, “I’m up, I’m getting dressed!”

He whirls in useless circles and teeters hard to the left as his head swells and swims, hoping the suggestion of frantic movement will deter his uncle from rushing him any more than he already is.

“Fantastic,” Wayne deadpans from the doorway where he stands watching the frenetic display, “Alright with you if I take a piss?”

Oh. He’s about to tell the man to do whatever he wants, then he makes a move for the adjacent room and Eddie remembers all the things he still has to do. 

“No! Waitwait no don’t I gotta get in there! I gotta–” he shouts in a garbled rush as he flies past his uncle and slips in to the bathroom, shutting the door in the man’s face and flipping on the light.  

He’s got his toothbrush in one hand and a stick of deodorant in the other before Wayne can even protest the shortstop.

“Well, what the hell am I supposed to do?” he demands, voice cutting through the wooden barrier like a crash of thunder.

“I’ll be right out!” Eddie promises around his toothbrush, with a cloud of minty drool oozing down over his chin to drip into the sink.

On the other side of warped hollow core, he hears his uncle retreat back down the hall, grumbling, but he’s already sunk into a haze of brushing and reciting force of habit lines of poetry.

Some kids learn to say the alphabet while they brush, others do it to the tune of Happy Birthday. When Eddie was a kid, his mother had him brushing to the tones of Edgar Allen Poe, and even after all this time, he still can’t shake the habit.

Once upon a midnight dreary,  while I pondered weak and weary, over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore… 

But Poe is nothing if not just another long-winded Eddie, one with no remorse for this one who happens to be pressed for time, so he elects to go for the abridged version. The ghosts are just going to have to forgive him for that.

He brushes and spits, and rinses, all with those gloomy stanzas running endlessly through his head.  

While I nodded nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, as of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door… 

Thump thump thump.

…quoth the raven – 

“Can you get the door?” Eddie calls, and hears the vaguest hint of a disgruntled rumbling as his uncle heaves himself up from the Laz-E boy. 

Half a second later, there comes the telltale sound of the front door creaking open, followed very quickly by your voice, and Eddie’s stomach does a cartoon flip-flop and screams an incoherent exclamation – you’re here! 

And it’s only then that he notices how he can see all his tattoos and his nipples and his belly button staring back at him in the mirror. 

You’re here and he’s not dressed. 

“Oh, my God!” 

He’s still standing there in his goddamn undies, separated from you by only the shortest distance imaginable, and now he’s spinning in those useless circles again, half-naked and desperately looking for something to cover his shame.

Eddie’s never spent a moment of his life wishing for something as frivolous as a bathrobe, and yet, as he attempts to decide if it’s more scandalous to wrap a towel around his waist or simply live his boxershort truth, he’d give his right nut to be that fancy.

The cold comes rushing in as he eases the door half an inch open and attempts to evaluate the situation, crouching low and listening intently (as if making himself smaller is somehow going to make him less naked). 

Eddie hears you greet his uncle from two rooms over. 

“Good morning, Mr. Munson,” you say, and he winces.

Because he knows Wayne does not abide being called anything but his name, and he prays to any higher power that may be watching that the man is suddenly and miraculously cured of his hideous tendency toward being an insufferable twat. 

“Wayne,” his uncle says gruffly – Thank you, God – followed quickly by the muffled sounds of further conversation and the heavy thunk of the door being shut. 

“Yer that friend of Ed’s, right?” Wayne’s voice comes floating down the hall. “The one from the bar?” 

Of course he had to say it like that. 

Never mind everything else Eddie told him about you after he got home that night last week — no, you’re just his friend from the bar. 

“Yep, that’s me,” you say with no small amount of humor tinging your voice. 

“Heard you had to rescue him from the side of the road—” Wayne starts.

“That’s not what happened,” Eddie shouts, instantly forgetting that he is meant to be listening in secret.  

The last thing he needs is to draw attention to himself in his undressed state, but he can’t just sit there and let his uncle embarrass him like that, not in front of you. 

Of course, there’s nothing overtly embarrassing about the notion that you rescued him, only the way Wayne insists on saying it. 

The van died, Eddie started to walk, you came along and offered him a ride. Nothing more, nothing less. Of course, he failed to be anywhere even remotely that casual about it when he had to explain the lack of his van to Wayne later that evening, and therein lies the problem.

Wayne knows Eddie likes you, even if neither of them have overtly broached the subject.

And of course, now that he’s been discovered lurking, Eddie knows he can’t linger, so he moves as quick as he can. He is a pale flash of skin in the dark, scrambling the distance between the hall bath and his bedroom, a few steps made frighteningly unnavigable by his stunning lack of clothing. 

Eddie briefly glimpses you as he goes, standing politely in the living room with your hands laced behind your back as you turn and take in the ramshackle decor of Casa Munson.

He wishes he’d had time to clean, but since he already used what little time he had lying in, chasing his sickly-sweet dreams, he’s just going to have to live with the state of things as they currently are… and hope that there is nothing too seriously embarrassing lying out, waiting to scandalize you.

He doesn’t need a rerun of what happened with the pinup in his locker. 

“Hiya Sweetheart!” he calls, daring one second more before he slips into the velvet dark of his room.

“Oh — hi! Good morning!” Eddie hears you say distantly, and the acknowledgment causes his insides to flutter and bloom with sunshine lollipops and rainbows.

Having a crush is so fucking embarrassing, and Wayne is more than happy to exploit that.

“Oh, goddammit — you still ain’t got pants on?” He calls. 

You giggle distantly, and Eddie slams his bedroom door. 

The clothes scattered to every odd corner of his room are what he would refer to as “more or less clean” … which is to say, not. Normally, that would be fine, but fine is simply not good enough if it means sharing the sealed proximity of your compact little car, especially when he didn’t have time to shower. 

Suddenly, Eddie is wildly paranoid that he’s radiating a particularly heinous funk that is going to send you running for the hills. That’s never been something he’s been particularly concerned about, and it’s wildly disconcerting.

After all, what is a group of guys if not a raucous cloud of sweat and body odor and farts? That’s just one of those things – a gen-u-ine fact of life. Guys don’t give a shit about that kind of stuff, they barely even notice it if not to laugh, but girls? 

Girls care. 

Some of the far more precious members of the sex tend toward offense by that kind of stuff, and while Eddie has no clue as to your disposition, no amount of sniff testing garners any answer about whether or not he stinks. 

All Eddie can smell is his room, and his room smells like it always does – like weed and dirty clothes and the underlying guff of something harsher. It does nothing to instill confidence in him as he begins the hectic process of dressing.

He zips his jeans and reaches over to punch the strip vent at the top of his window in the hope that a little fresh air might shine some light on the emergency at hand. He is tragically disappointed to find no change, save for the November cold ekeing in and flash-freezing him with goosebumps. 

Eddie doesn’t know what to do. 

He can’t go out to ask Wayne for his opinion on the matter, not with you standing there and not with his pack-a-day sense of smell (or lack thereof). Then again, even if he dared to pose such a vulnerable question as “do I stink?” while standing in the presence of the object of his undying affections (regardless of what Wayne knows about that) the only answer he would be sure to receive is a resounding “to high heaven”, regardless of the truth. 

So, Eddie resorts to a seldom-used plan B: cologne, and lots of it.

If he can’t smell good naturally, he’ll douse himself in the stuff and hope for some kind of miraculous happy medium.

“Hurry it up, Ed,” Wayne calls from down the hall, and it presses him into action. 

Don’t rush me! He wants to howl, but he’s worried that doing so will make him sound far too much like some whiny little freak who slept in past his carpool date (ding ding ding, you are correct sir), so he swallows the intention and leaps across his mattress to ease the door open.

“I’ll be out in two minutes, I swear,” he calls down the hall, doing his best to tear his room apart as quietly as possible as he begins searching for the half-empty bottle of cologne he’d received as a Christmas present a few years back. 

In the other room, Wayne makes a harsh sound, something like a grunt twisted out of shape by the first rattling of a smoker’s cough.

“Where’ve I heard that one before,” he mumbles, undoubtedly to you. 

Eddie doesn’t have time to worry about whatever conversation is sure to follow such an aside, or whether Wayne has already gone and whipped out the baby pictures. 

The thought is terrifying – and here’s one where Ed took off all his clothes to run in the neighbor’s sprinklers, just look at the rash he’s got on his little butt – NO NO NO NO NO NO NO! 

He needs to get out there, he needs to get you out of here, and he needs to find that bottle yesterday, but he has no idea where to start looking.  

He hasn’t seen it in months – years even – and he barely even remembers if it was something halfway decent or just run-of-the-mill bargain bin trash. 

Then again, Eddie distinctly remembers one instance at the Hideout of a sloppy-drunk middle-aged woman leaning over the bar and pulling him forward by the front of his shirt while he was wearing it. She batted her eyelashes and told him he smelled nice, and sure, she was just trying to get laid, but a compliment’s a compliment, and those are hard to come by for a guy like him in a town like this.

Naturally, even with his dresser drawers upended onto his bedroom floor, Eddie can’t find the bottle of dollar store cologne, and he’s well beyond out of time.

So, he reverts to Plan C, which is to tear an insert for a fragrance called Sex Bomb out from between the sticky pages of a well-loved Hustler magazine (the original home of his since discarded locker playmate). 

He gives himself half a dozen paper cuts rubbing it across the length of his chest and under both arms before throwing on the closest shirt within reach, which just so happens to be an old Hellfire Club t-shirt with a greasy pizza stain on the front. 

He barely has half a moment to try and look at himself in the mirror around Sweetheart before Wayne is shouting down the hall again.

“You’re gonna be late!” he calls, with long emphasis on the “late”, because what he really means is he’s going to make you late, and you’re just too polite to say anything about it.

No time to change, he’s just going to have to live with the stain. Eddie doesn’t even bother tying his shoes before he shrugs into his jacket and heads for the door. 

Then, at the very last second, he stops short as he remembers your tattered copy of Dune sitting on his bedside table. He contemplates returning it and the precious contents scrawled across its pages, then spies the dusty paperback sitting on his floor, wedged beneath the stumpy, broken leg of his desk. It’s an easy choice to make 

Eddie drops to his knees and relieves it of its terrestrial duty, then watches blankly as the bench lists and sends everything piled high on its flattop crashing to the floor.

Whoops. 

“…Everything okay in there?” Your voice comes filtering down the hall. 

“Yep,”

He makes a mental note to clean it up later (never) as he tucks the book into the back pocket of his jeans and whips his door open. 

Wayne is back in the Laz-E boy when Eddie finally emerges, and you’re perched on the edge of the couch with your hands tucked neatly into your lap. 

He’s relieved to see that, despite the morning grump, Wayne at least had the decency to offer you a seat. More importantly, Eddie is relieved to find the conspicuous lack of the family photo album spread out between you. 

Which means no baby pictures – Thank fucking Christ. 

“Hi,” you chirp when he arrives, jumping to your feet and crossing in front of Wayne and the television with an apologetic smile.

Before Eddie can reciprocate the greeting, your eyes flit down and your brows jump.

“Uh-oh,” you say, and drop into a graceful crouch to take his laces in hand and – his heart throbs in his chest and he flashes a panicked look at Wayne – you take the time to carefully tie his shoes. First one, and then the other. 

And has anyone ever been treated with such purposeful care? Such reverence? 

Oh my God oh my God oh my GOD.

He’s so not normal about anything happening here – this flagrant act of decency, perpetuated so easily and without a single prompting instance. You, fixing something simply because you noticed it was out of place. 

Something far too big for so small a gesture begins to swell and throb in the space behind his lungs and Eddie feels an unbearable heat blooming across his face as the television vomits a muted stream of morning show prattle to back your benevolent care. 

His heart is beating itself into concussion against the prison bars of his ribs by the time you come back up to meet him. 

“There,” you say with a shy, satisfied smile, “Now you’re perfect.”

It hits him like a fist to the gut and leaves him genuinely winded. In the grand scheme of things, those three little words do more to wreck Eddie than your dreamland doppelganger’s proposition ever could. 

Whatever happens, however the chips may fall and whether you ever make it past this moment – this beautiful, perfect, bizarre fucking moment – this tiny little nothing (it’s everything, you’re everything) will be enough to sustain Eddie for the rest of his life.   

A thousand miles away and to his immediate right, he hears his uncle release a slow breath as salt and pepper brows climb toward his receding hairline.

“Whoa,” Wayne mutters as he bears accidental witness to something that feels unbearably important, and Eddie hopes to God that you don’t notice the way he’s turned feverish, suddenly sweating underneath all his layers.

“Ready to go?” you ask.

He nods a stupid rubber up and down and lurches to the left to whip the door open and hold it for you. 

“Let’s hit it,” he says.

Your car keys jingle as you duck down under his arm and slip back out into the world, the invisible ticking clock of arrival bearing down on you, though not so much that you forget your manners.  

“Oh — bye, Wayne,” you call over your shoulder as you start down the steps, “Nice seeing you again!”

Before he commits to following you out, Eddie whips around to give his uncle one last giddy look - did you see? Did you hear what she said? Can you believe any of the magic you just witnessed?! – grinning so widely he can feel the muscles in his cheeks creaking as they pull nearly past their limit. His face could tear off at the seams, and he wouldn’t give one hot shit about it, because now he’s perfect. 

You said that – you actually said that — so it must be true.

Wayne just shakes his head, already flipping through the pages of the latest issue of American Gardener Magazine.   

“Have him home before dark,” he calls, and even that kernel of irreverence is not enough to put a damper on Eddie’s euphoria, despite the way it twists a chord of bewildering embarrassment in his midsection.

He shuts the door with a slam, clears the steps in one mighty leap, and feels the vicious stab of pins and needles exploding in his knees when he lands and breaks into a short jog to keep pace with you.

Thank God the van is such a clunky piece of shit – imagine the scenario where he didn’t get to receive this gift of a morning, where you didn’t pull over to the side of the road to rescue him from his relatively short walk home and kindly offer to drive him to school. Just imagine.

He can’t, he won’t, he refuses – he really hurt himself jumping off the steps like that.  

“How’d you sleep?” Eddie asks, trying not to limp under the duress of his knees demanding to know why he is the way he is, and feeling his heart palpitate when you stop at the driver’s side door to look back at him.

Despite the chaos of the previous two minutes, it feels so incredibly correct seeing you like this. You’re familiar as childhood, fresh-faced and bright-eyed, first thing in the morning like you’ve carpooled every day of your lives since you were kids – imagine that. 

“Good,” you tell him, smiling secretly as he meets your gaze over the top of your little green car – you open the driver’s side door with a pop, and you tease him, “Wayne says you slept in,”

Eddie scoffs, and mirrors your action, sliding easily into your passenger seat – falling into, more like – and knocking his head on the door frame as he does. Ouch. 

He’s not used to riding in vehicles he doesn’t have to climb up into. 

“Wayne says a lot of things,” Eddie winces, thankful as his blundering goes unnoticed.   

You pull your door shut with a hard thunk and when Eddie does the same, it seals you in together. For a moment, he’s overwhelmed to be so completely blanketed in the aura of you. 

Your space, your car, your perfume – he’s losing his mind and he hopes beyond hope that it all lingers in his clothes and hair for days to come, just so he can revisit this moment in the cold blue hours of the impending mornings he is doomed to spend without you.  

Before he can settle too far into the despair of that future, Eddie lifts up to fish the book out from where it’s been sandwiched between the seat and his back pocket and angles it toward you.

“Candygram.” 

“Oh!” You say, taking it and looking it over, “Oh…what’s this?” 

“A book,”

You scoff, and somehow you manage to make the sound lighthearted and kindly. 

“Thank you, Captain Obvious, I can see it’s a book…” 

Eddie pulls his shoulders up defensively.

“I just thought it might be up your alley.” He stays facing forward as he says it — casual, calm, cool — but can’t help but steal a sidelong glance in your direction to try and gauge your reaction, “Y’know, since you seem to like sci-fi and all…” when his explanation goes without a response, he reaches over to tap the cover, “Heinlein’s a good place to start. He’s pretty much king of the genre,”

You turn the book over in your hands and hold it up so you can see the worn, lined cover to The Moon is a Harsh Mistress – no title has ever sounded so unbearably trashy until this very moment.

Much to Eddie’s patent glee, you bite your lower lip in an attempt to stifle a smile when you open the cover and see his fourth-grade chicken scratch etched into the title page – Properetey of Eddie Munson.

A relic from the days before the word “property” had come across his vocab sheet, and back when Eddie Munson was still just a little boy with a ninth-grade reading level who couldn’t spell and lived in a three-bedroom house with two whole parents. 

Go figure.  

He’s not even embarrassed to share that with you – mostly because he’s glad you like his little gift, but also because it buys him a little more time with your private annotations. If sharing a peek into the murky lens of days bygone is the price for such a private intimacy, he’ll happily pay it.

A mind’s eye for a mind’s eye.  

Satisfied, you lay the mass-market paperback on the dashboard for later and twist your key in the ignition. 

The engine turns over with a gentle rumble — a strident contrast to the phlegmy, hacking roar he gets from the van — and suddenly, butterflies are replaced with gut-wrenching nausea as the radio kicks on and Eddie is forced to endure hearing a miserable three seconds of Crazy Little Thing Called Love. 

He yelps – actually yelps – and slaps the dial over to the next station, which delivers nothing but blessed static.

It fills the car and sets his hair standing on end, and he tries not to look too conspicuously guilty of anything as he begins to feel the heat of your startled gaze on the side of his face.

“Everything okay?” 

“Yeah… about that…” he begins lamely, trying with everything in his power not to think about that scorching, tumultuous summer or how goddamn strong Stacey Keats’s thighs were, squeezing around his neck and shoulders while she attempted to suffocate him. “... I got nothing, sorry.” 

You blink back at him, wide-eyed but ultimately forgiving of such an act of sudden spastic violence.

You regard him with a cautious smile, “…No Freddie for Eddie, huh?”

“Uh… hah, no. I mean … just not that song.”  

“Fair enough,”

It’s already in his head though, and Eddie is just about ready to spend the rest of his day buffeted with trauma flashbacks of losing his virginity when you pull the gear shift into reverse, and put your hand on the back of his headrest as you twist around to back out.

Thrust into such intimate proximity – this close, he swears he can see the individual hairs of your lashes, curled up so perfectly to kiss your shadowed lids – he forgets there ever was such a person with stunningly muscular thighs named Stacey Keats. 

It’s just you and him and this cloyingly sweet atmosphere, seeping into every fiber of his being. Eddie tries not to stare at you too intently and knows he is failing miserably when he watches you flatten your lips against what he imagines can only be a smile.  

“You smell good,” You say softly, and he barely hears you over the roaring of his blood thundering through his veins.

He thinks he manages to force out a choked “thanks” but he can’t be sure with how quickly his senses are abandoning him. 

It occurs too late that he ought to return the compliment. Your perfume is in his sinuses now, with the faintest undertone of shampoo and something sweeter, which he can only imagine must be the natural smell of your flesh. It comes together in a stupefying combination that turns his tongue fat and fills his mouth with saliva as it envelopes him in a sickly sweet embrace.

Eddie has to grit his teeth just to keep his head above water. He knows if he isn’t careful, and if he lets it overwhelm him, he’s in danger of doing something insane like telling you he loves you.   

Being a person is a particular sort of agony, he is coming to learn.  

You aren’t even touching him, and still he feels the ache of your hand’s absence when you take it back from the headrest to take hold of the steering wheel — he can’t really be that starved for touch, can he? He’s not actually that pathetic… 

“You can put something else on if you want,” you say, gesturing to the well in the passenger’s side as you complete your three-point turn and begin the long, bumpy trek back up the drive to catch the turn off to Kerley Avenue.  

Yes please, anything to distract from the way his heart is beating itself senseless against his ribs. 

Eddie surges forward to fish a rectangular box out from where it’s been stashed beneath his seat and flips up the hard vinyl lid, revealing a collection of cassette tapes – your music. 

“Ah ha!” he cries, unable to separate the total and abject weirdness bubbling up alongside his mounting excitement, “Avast ye, me hearties! Ex marks the spot – buried tray-sure!”

In the apparent inability to function normally, Eddie’s subconscious inexplicably turns pirate, which is utterly mortifying and something that – to his knowledge – has never happened before.

Maybe he’ll get lucky and it will be nothing more than the first signs of an inoperable brain tumor and not just his painful inability to be normal, but beside him, you do your best to swallow an undainty snort of laughter and fail miserably. Thankfully it is not a mean sound, then again Eddie is not entirely sure you’re capable of such a thing.

It helps to alleviate some of the humiliation of the previous moment as with hungry, waggling fingers, he peels back the curtain to take one more coveted peek into your secret world. 

For a long few moments, neither of you speak, but he can feel you trying to split your attention between him and the road as he takes steady, focused inventory of your taste in music. 

It’s all more or less what he would have expected – a lot of 70s rock, some pop, some disco. There are a few surprises in there, like the Alan Parsons Project and Supertramp, but Eddie sits pleased with the run-of-the-mill presence of Fleetwood Mac, Bowie, and Kate Bush.

For as much as you continue to surprise him every time you spend any amount of time together, there is a strange comfort in knowing that you’re not actually all that hard to pin down. You like exactly what he expects you to like, and somehow that makes it feel easier to know you. 

When he sits in silent regard of your tapes for too long, you start to fidget, and when the silence persists even after that, he can sense a tangible nervousness leaching out of you, clouding the atmosphere like blood in water.

“Just… try not to judge me too hard, okay?” you finally say, “I’ve been told my taste is…hmm… eclectic?”

It comes tumbling out of your mouth like a dirty word you’re shy about using and Eddie bites the inside of his lip to try and temper the wicked little smile forming there. 

“That’s not always a compliment,” he hums, imagining the fights you must have with your shitty friends over what to play and, more than likely, losing out over their preferences — it’s Belinda Carlisle over Pink Floyd, every day of the week, and how you must suffer for it. 

“Believe me, I know.” You say, “I mean, try explaining to your PTA treasurer mother why you’re listening to a band called Judas Priest –”

“Judas Priest!” he shouts, a little too loud for such an enclosed space. 

He didn’t mean to say it like that, but how else is he supposed to react when you hit him with such a ridiculous concept?

The reaction makes you jump, and suddenly you’re staring back at him in owlish surprise — he almost feels bad about that, even as he begins to laugh.  

“What?” you ask.

“Please. Now you’re just trying to impress me,”

Your brows furrow over your pretty eyes, making a crease between them, and Eddie has to resist the urge to smooth it out with his thumb. 

“No, I’m not,” you say. 

He calls your bluff. 

“You do not listen to Judas Priest,”

“Yes I do,”

“No, Sweetheart, you don’t, and that’s totally cool! But let’s just be honest with each other here.”

“How dare you.” You gasp, feigning complete and abject offense, “You don’t think I can rock out?”

Eddie snorts, because no, actually, he doesn’t. You, all sweetness and sugar (with a mother in the PTA – because that absolutely tracks, he bets you were a girl scout too) headbanging and growling out the chorus to Exciter like you think you’re Joan Jett or something? 

Absolutely not, and your mouth falls open as you come to realize this fact. 

“You don’t!” You gasp, “Well excuse me, Mr. Rockstar, but I thought I was supposed to be Corroded Coffin’s biggest fan! What happened to that, huh?” 

“Listen,” Eddie starts with a diplomatic hand, “I’m sure you think you’re hard, listening to all that bubblegum shit they play on the radio — Twisted Sister and Def Leppard, am I right?”

You set your jaw and your face flushes with the faintest hint of pretty, indignant color. 

“So what?” You press, 

“So, I’m just saying, there’s metal and then there’s metal.” He continues, “Maybe you’ve got a little Zeppelin on your rotation, and I’ll even buy the occasional foray into AC/DC, but Judas Priest? Come on, Babe — don’t kid a kidder.”

He’s testing the waters with that sneaky little term of endearment, that’s for sure, and with the way you’re sitting there gawping at him, Eddie is almost sorry he tried it. 

Maybe he’s read the room wrong and getting a little too familiar too fast, but maybe you’re trying a little too hard to convince him of something that is so blatantly untrue it’s laughable.   

Your face twists into a mask of genuine annoyance then, and Eddie can’t help but fixate on how much attention you’re putting into glaring at him and not watching the road – it makes his insides squirm with repressed nerves and latent images of cars in ditches. 

How he ever managed to let you start this car when neither of you is wearing your seatbelt is beyond him – he guesses he’s just that sick with the fever of you – and he’s suddenly kicking himself for so blatantly antagonizing you. It’s all fun and games until you’re upside down on the side of the road.

“Next…” Eddie starts, casually reaching over your head to snag the belt, pull it across your lap, and buckle it into place. “...you’re gonna tell me you listen to Iron Maiden,” 

“I do listen to Iron Maiden!” You cry, head snapping back to the front and swatting his hand away. 

Eddie snorts out a scoff.

“You’re such a liar,” 

“And you, Eddie Munson,” you begin. “Are an unbelievable snob.”

It forces a startled bark of laughter out of him, once again too loud for the enclosed space – that’s a first. He’s been accused of a lot of things, but never of snobbery.

“Prove me wrong,” he says, grinning wickedly and leaning dangerously far into your space.

Your seatbelt doesn’t let you get far, but you rise to his challenge anyway, and suddenly you’re nose to nose.

“I will!” you insist, “Keep looking, Smart Guy, since you’re so damn sure – go on. All the way to the back.” 

Ever eager to please, Eddie resumes his inventory with renewed interest, rapidly flipping through the likes of Elton John, the BeeGees, ABBA, John Denver, and half a dozen other bands, none of which are even remotely within the vicinity of what you so calumnously claim to listen to. 

On and on, he is greeted with the top forty of this decade and the last: Tears for Fears, Loggins and Messina, Queen, The Clash, Dusty Springfield, The Go-Go’s, Jefferson Starship, Paul Simon, Duran Duran, ELO, KC and the Sunshine Band – the list is neverending. 

The further he goes, the surer he gets, shaking his head and chuckling smugly to himself. 

He’s so right, and you’re so busted. 

“There’s no way you listen to–” and then, like happening on a unicorn, he finds it. 

Stuck in at the far back between Mötley Crüe and (lo and behold) Iron Maiden, is the Screaming for Vengence album, on glorious cassette tape. 

Buried treasure.

All further taunting immediately dies on his tongue as he suddenly gets a very good taste of his own foot. 

“HA!” you shout, and it rings loudly in his ears, “I told you!” 

You snatch the tape from his hand when he holds it up and immediately feed it into the player. After a moment of mechanical whirring, the car fills with the introductory riff of You Got Another Thing Coming, and Eddie is stunned – truly stunned. 

Judas fucking Priest. 

“Oh, my God,” he says, “How is this possible? How did I not know you were cool?”

“Because you’re a snob!” You punch him in the shoulder and it’s not half as startling as the way you bloom before his eyes, “And I’m a stunningly mysterious creature with many secrets to behold!” 

While both of those facts are inarguably true, Eddie has never seen you so excited. Who knew riling you up was the key to opening the door to your life? It stirs a dangerously mischievous urge in him as he tucks that revelation into his back pocket for later. 

Still, he’s never wanted to know more about someone than he does right now. Eddie is ravenous to know everything there is to know about you, and he’s trying so desperately to be cool about it.  

“I’m serious — how’d you get into Judas Priest? Girls like you don’t listen to music like this.” 

You grin.

“A snob and a chauvinist. You’re oh-for-two there, Buddy-Boy — but if you must know…?”

“I must,” 

You cast a sultry sidelong glance at him and Eddie is instantly shot full of holes. 

“I was exposed at a very young and impressionable age,”

Which means someone sat you down and picked out a song special for you, knowing you’d love them before you even knew you had the proclivity for metal in you. Eddie is suddenly so incredibly jealous, that he feels like he could burst. What a devastatingly intimate thing to have missed out on – how he wishes that could have been him, young and dumb and unlocking something so important in you as an entire genre of music. 

It’s not fair that he’s had to wait this long to get to know you, and that he’s missed out on years of having a friend like you. He suddenly can’t believe he went so long not knowing what he was missing.

“Who did this to you? Tell me everything,” Eddie pleads, “The suspense is literally killing me.”

You bite back a grin and turn your attention to the road as you explain. 

“You went to Hawkins Middle, right?” You ask, and he nods, electing to say nothing about what a hellish experience it was, smack dab in the middle of the single parent, Alan Munson days, “Remember how they used to do a talent show and everyone had to participate for good sportsmanship or whatever?” 

And then, something begins to tickle the back of Eddie’s brain, something far too good to be true.

“Sure do.” He says, trying not to sound too excited about what he suddenly thinks he knows.

He tells himself he doesn’t know exactly what you’re about to say, (because he doesn’t want to get his hopes up) but suddenly he’s leaning into your space again, hanging on your every word, and despite his better judgment warning him to temper his expectations, he knows exactly what you’re about to say.

And it is too good to be true.

“So, most people would just pull some bogus thing together and call it talent, because they had to, right? But then, there was this group of kids who just woke up and decided they were gonna put together a fully functioning metal band for the show…”

Holy shit holy shit holy shit–

“...and they weren’t good, but it was crazy, because of all the things they could possibly play, they get up there and whip out Exciter like that’s a totally normal thing to happen at a middle school talent show–”

Eddie’s mouth falls open as he is bombarded with memories of the earliest days of Corroded Coffin, those first practices in the Hawkins Middle music room, back when the band was him, Jeff, Doug Teague, and Ronnie Ecker. 

Talk about a blast from the past – what a fucking trip.

“You’re kidding,”

“I’m totally serious. Bunch of twelve year olds playing in a Judas Priest cover band,” you say, like it’s the funniest thing anyone has ever heard.  

Eddie bites back the urge to correct you (Corroded Coffin is not a cover band, they are a band that happens to do covers) and he keeps waiting for the punchline, for the other shoe to drop, but you’re still just going on and on like you’re blissfully ignorant of what exactly you’re confessing to him, here on this random Friday at 7:40 in the morning. 

You continue with a casual wave of your hands, daring to release the steering wheel just long enough to get your point across.

“Anyway, it’s like I said – young and impressionable. But it sort’ve blew my mind, and I’ve been listening to them ever since– in secret, of course, because, girls like me don’t listen to music like that,” You say, making a point to drop your voice in abject mockery of him. 

For half a moment Eddie can’t tell if you’re joking, telling him all this as if he doesn’t know exactly what you’re talking about, and as if he wasn’t the one getting pulled off stage for playing Exciter at his middle school talent show. 

And then it hits him. You don’t know. 

Oh, my God. He can’t believe this. He cannot believe you don’t know. How can you not know?

“Dude… that was me.” he says, unable to keep it to himself for another second, “That was me!”

You give him a dubious, sidelong glance as you reach the intersection and roll to a stop.

For a moment, you don’t speak, you just stare, eyes narrowed, brows furrowed, jaw set in a quizzical press. 

“...shut up,” you say slowly, and yet you don’t outright reject the notion, the way he had earlier with you. 

Eddie doubles down, and he knows he’s talking too fast, too loud, but his blood is pounding with the revelation that you’ve been in each other’s orbit – affected each other – for much longer than twelve measly months. 

“That was my band! That was Corroded Coffin! We got together and learned to play Exciter in like, two weeks, and we were awful and nobody clapped!”

Your eyes go wide as realization hits you like a brick, and then you gasp.

“Oh, my God, I remember that!” you shout, “Nobody clapped! Eddie! That was you!?”

There he goes grinning his face off again. 

“That was me!” He shouts, “I made you cool!” 

And then you scream. It is a loud, giddy thing that fills Eddie’s chest cavity with a bright, uproarious, infectious joy that wells so big so suddenly, his ribs crack open and it floods the car in a matter of moments.

For a second, you’re both insane with it, shouting and laughing and talking over one another as you slap and pull at each other’s jackets, capering and cajoling like you’re the oldest, closest, best of friends that ever were and ever will be.

It’s disgusting and it’s wonderful.

While you’re too busy playing to notice, the light changes, and two sharp beeps from the impatient driver idling behind your giddy shenanigans alerts you to the green. You don’t stop talking, even as you flip your indicator and take the turn that will begin the final stretch to school.

You’re still laughing and breathless when you pull into the parking lot, which is already flooded with cars and bodies and the everyday flurry of pre-bell action, none of which you notice because you’re both too busy battering each other in questions – do you remember this, did you see that, were you there when so and so did this that and the other.

Come to find out, you haven’t just been in orbit of one another. You’ve been right fucking there. All your lives, you’ve been each other’s unknowing shadow, and Eddie can’t stand knowing that you were so close and he was too stupid to notice you there until you were staring him in the face.

He’s completely out of his mind with the giddy atmosphere in this car – if he were thinking rationally, he might crack the window just so he can try to breathe, but you’ve got him full force now, completely unfiltered and unfettered.

It occurs to him distantly that most people never get to experience this much of him, he doesn’t often get the chance to be so unabashedly himself, and he might want to dial it back a bit, just to save a little face. But it’s intoxicating to be so completely seen and to have his energy matched, and now that he’s started, he can’t stop. 

“Did you see us play at the winter show in ‘81?” He asks, pulling his knee up and twisting in his seat to face you as you shift your car into park and pull the break. 

“No,” you say, almost apologetically. “I was tragically still sequestered to Hawkins Middle…”

And Eddie was a bright and shiny Freshman at Hawkins High, steeped in that happy little limbo between escaping his father and having his heart curb stomped into the pavement.

“...why, what happened in ‘81?” 

“Aww, man!” He starts, “You missed out, it was awesome. We got pulled off stage and everyone got put on academic probation for Satanic Ideations,”

Finger quotes don’t even begin to cover all the drama that went along with that and the untoward allegations he has long since stopped trying to beat. 

Your eyes go wide. 

“Is that how all that Satan stuff started?” You wonder aloud, “I remember when people started saying that, but I never knew why. I always thought it was just too much Dateline or something,” 

“Yeah, that coupled with all my Dad’s shit and a heavy dose of Iron Maiden in the ninth grade, and here you find me. Eddie Munson: Satanic Freak.” 

He drops his voice to a theatrical cadence and gestures widely as he says it, fully intending to give himself a fix of your laughter, but your response is surprisingly muted. 

Your brows pinch briefly before smoothing over again, and you hum thoughtfully, dropping your gaze to stare pensively into space as you settle back into your seat.

For a moment, the silence is unbearable, and when you finally speak, Eddie has to try and breathe out as quietly as he can so as not to be caught holding his breath. 

“…well,” you begin, “For what it’s worth – I never bought in to all that,”

It might have been startling were he capable of being startled by anything you have to say about him anymore. After this morning’s onslaught, what’s one more little kindness to come tumbling from your lips?

“No?” Eddie asks, crossing his arms over his knee and dropping his chin down to rest there, “You’re not subscribed to the Hawkins Christian Coalition?”

You pull a face. 

“You’re not scary enough to be a Satanist, even with all those tattoos and chains and everything you do to try and look tough.” Your gaze flits back to him, “You don’t scare me,”

Eddie’s heart crawls up into his throat and begins to throb there, threatening to strangle him with every solid beat. He’s been hoping you feel that way, but it’s been a long time since he learned not to hope for things.   

“Not even a little?” He asks, voice dropping to a muted timber as the atmosphere suddenly becomes unbearably charged with intimacy. 

You shake your head. 

“How come?”

Then, you stick him to the spot with a shy quirk of your lips. 

“Because I’ve seen you in your underwear,” you say innocently, and his guts seize.

What was that he was saying about not being shocked? 

Eddie’s mind goes blank and his mouth falls open – and here he thought he was being so stealthy. You erupt into a fit of infectious laughter, and what is he if not powerless but to laugh right along with you? 

It’s bizarre, sitting here like this, with his head buzzing and the muscles in his face and abdomen aching from laughing so hard. He can’t stop, every time he thinks he’s coming down, you break into another fit of giggles and pull him right back over that cliff again. 

He’s never felt higher than he does right now, and it takes a long, long time to touch back down again.  

“Man — where the hell did you come from?” Eddie asks when he finally manages to catch a breath, “How come I don’t remember you from back in middle school?”

“I don’t know,” you tease reaching out to tug at the frayed strings lining the hole in the knee of his jeans – he has to resist the urge to take your hand, “Maybe you were already too cool and famous to notice little ol’ me,"

Eddie can’t tell if you’re making fun of him, and with what you say next, he finds that he doesn't expressly care.

“I feel like we would’ve been friends if we knew each other back then,” you say, “Back in middle school? It could’ve just been this — you ‘n me — all the time, and none of that other bullshit. Us against the world… I think that would’ve been better…”

And have truer ever been spoken? You're right. It would have been better to live in that far-off universe where this was his reality and his days were filled with mornings like this one, laughing and shouting and loving instead of bracing for impact and dreaming for something better.

Eddie tries to imagine how your friendship would have softened a hundred different blows from a hundred different hurts, how different so many things would have been, and his heart throbs for what he didn’t realize he was missing.

Of course, then again, if you’d been his friend back in those days, it would have put you in the path of his father, and if only for that reason, Eddie is so incredibly glad he never knew you until now. 

Wayne has got that wild penchant for embarrassing him, sure, but he’s harmless. The same can not be said for Al, who was always more of the “search and destroy” type than the “you wanna see some baby pictures?” kind of Dad. 

He wouldn’t have been able to sit by and just let Eddie have you. He would have ruined it, and by extension, ruined you, and Eddie can’t even think about that. He won’t, so he focuses on you here and now, sitting so pretty with your face curled into that soft, wistful smile, saying all the right things to break his heart in the best possible way. 

He has to clear his throat to keep his voice steady. 

“Yeah,” he says unevenly, and if you notice the change, you don’t show it. “Me too… I've been thinking about that a lot actually…”

“You have?”

Eddie pulls his shoulders up in his best approximation of a casual shrug, even though nothing about this feels at all casual.

"Why? Is that weird or something?"

"No, it's not weird," you tell him, "...you're kind of a big softie, you know that? Under all that armor?"

You reach out to tug at the collar of his jacket and Eddie huffs out a breath, averting his gaze so that you won't see his eyes sparkle with the wonder of being seen.

"Yeah, but don't tell anybody," he says, "I've got a reputation to manage,"

You hum out a gentle laugh and shake your head, looking almost secretive, sitting there and smiling for no reason save the atmosphere and such a fond, shared sentiment. 

Suddenly all Eddie wants to do is squish your face between his hands and tell you how much you matter to him, how important this all is, and how it’s gonna last forever in his heart of hearts. 

In a hundred years, no one will remember that either of you existed, but he’ll always remember the way you dropped down to tie his shoe, and the ease with which you spoke when you offered a kindness you could not have possibly known would break him into a hundred thousand pieces. He imagines those pieces radiating out in a shockwave through time and space, embedding themselves in the fabric of the universe where they’ll live on indefinitely. 

Fueled by that thought alone, Eddie can’t help himself. He’s starting to learn that he is greedy for your innermost thoughts, and he desperately wants to be let in.  

He knocks your knee with his, and it feels so devastatingly intimate it threatens to make him blush.  

“What’re you thinkin’ about?” He asks – the school bell will be ringing any minute now, but he’s going to use every second of that time, if it’s the last thing he does. 

Your shoulders jump.

“All the fun I missed out on,” You hum, and it hits him like a fist to the gut, “...I mean, just imagine all the time I could’ve spent hanging out with Uncle Wayne,”

Eddie rolls his eyes, but even that is not enough to dampen his affection for you, not entirely. 

“He’s a shithead, but he’s not so bad when you get to know him,” he says. 

“I like him,” you say, “I think he’s nice.”

It’s another little kindness you have no idea he needs so badly. They're still a family, Eddie and Wayne, as odd a couple as they may be, and it is such a relief to hear that you like his little broken family.

Eddie blooms under the approval he didn't realize he was looking for.

"Oh," he says, "You do?"

“Yeah," You say, smiling sweetly, "He said he was gonna show me your baby pictures next time I come over,”

Eddie frowns.

You have a funny little way of undercutting sincerity like that – maybe because you’re scared to be too vulnerable for too long – and he can’t stand how endearing it is. 

Maybe it’s because he feels the exact same way, and maybe it’s because of how his affection for you is growing faster than he can manage it.

Even just in the time it has taken to get from his driveway to this parking spot, his fondness for you has swelled exponentially. He'd offer you his heart if you asked for it, and the thought is terrifying, because of how easily (and how badly) you could hurt him if you chose to.

He doesn't think you will, because he likes to hope that you feel the same about him (you like his family, why would you want to hurt him after that?) Still, you will not be seeing those pictures, under pain of torture and death.

He’ll burn his house down before that happens.    

“Congratulations,” Eddie says, grinning, “You’re officially banned from the house,”  

You laugh out loud, and for half a second he thinks all that madness is about to kick up again, but then, your smile drops and all the levity goes out of you as your gaze shifts to the right, just over his shoulder.

The shift in mood is jarring enough to draw his attention, and when he turns to follow, he sees it too – Carol Perkins, making a beeline for the little green Toyota.

“Well, shit.” He says, insides squirming with anticipation of the sudden and violent death of this moment. His moment.  

You sigh, and Eddie watches with no small amount of despair as you begin fumbling with your keys and your seatbelt and anything else you can get your hands on. 

Show’s over, everybody out of the pool. 

“… I guess she’s still pissed…” you say. 

Still, because Carol had been your original passenger the previous afternoon before you deigned to swoop in and replace her with Eddie. She’d sat with her arms crossed and her lips curling as you traded greetings and the initial back and forth that led to the events of this morning, and she made no effort to hide how against the ride-giving she was.  

Before Eddie could pull the handle (or try and navigate getting into your two-door car with Carol sitting so summarily opposed to such an action) she slapped the doorlock into position, like someone’s snotty brat kid throwing a public tantrum.

“I’m so fucking serious.” She hissed, “If you let him into this car, I will get out and walk.”

You leveled her with a dangerous look then, the likes of which Eddie had not yet seen grace your features, and it made his insides squirm. 

“Then get out and walk.” You said through your teeth, and the silence that followed was unbearably weighted.   

Presented with two options – get out or make room – Carol lost her shit (as seems to be her standard operating procedure.)

“— you fucking psycho! You’re gonna feel so bad for me when I get fucking murdered on some backroad—” she snarled, and then, like fate, the Harrington wagon whipped past, and in half a second, Tommy Hagan and Steve Harrington were there to bear witness to the first step to something Eddie can only hope for – that you would once again choose to swap your shitty friends for someone like him (not just someone like him, but him exactly).

He supposes you’re both going to hear all about it as soon as you break the vacuum seal of this car. 

He is hit then with the sudden and desperate urge to beg you not to do it – maybe you don’t have to go to school today. Maybe you can just drive somewhere and keep talking and laughing and never let this moment end and forget the law of the land and which sides you both stand on.

Maybe you can just stay together like this forever.

Awful lot of maybes for a ten minute drive to school. 

The rush of cold morning air is sobering in the worst way when Eddie pops his door handle and steps up out of your car and the perfect little biosphere of your aura. 

You appear on the other side a moment later and shield your eyes against the sun. 

“You want me to distract her so you can make a run for it?” he asks.  

The corner of your mouth twitches in a humorless smile. 

“Funny, I was about to ask you the same thing,” 

He can already hear the beginning rattle of Carol’s tirade like poison daggers hurled at his back – undoubtedly meant for you. He might have done something to try and shield you from that, but he’s still loopy from the giddiness of everything that just happened in the car, so he snorts out a burst of laughter. 

He’s still smiling stupidly when Carol arrives. 

“What, is this just gonna be a thing now?” she says, “You’re suddenly a packaged deal?” 

“Nice to see you too, Carol—” Eddie tries, mustering as much sleazy charm as he can manage.

“Shut up.” she snaps like a slap to the face, coming to a short stop at his side, “Are you coming tonight or what?”

Of all the questions someone like Carol has ever posed to someone like him, this one leaves him a little more than dumbfounded. 

“ Come again?” 

Carol’s features pinch with the prelude of a rage she quickly swallows.

“To the party, Dipshit.” She drawls.

Eddie looks to you, for assistance as much as in expectation of the same kind of droll, sarcastic response you’ve been giving all morning, and is almost shocked to watch when the color drains from your face instead. 

He wants to laugh about it, he wants you to put him at ease by doing just such a thing, but with the low autumn sun reflecting the faded color of your car into your face, you suddenly look like you’re going to be sick, and Eddie can only respond in kind.  

“What party?” He asks slowly, feeling the corners of his mouth begin to tremble with the prelude to some terrible revelation like he is about to realize this has all been some hideously mean joke.

“Nothing,” you say quickly, “Don’t worry about it,” 

But he is. He’s violently worried about whatever it is he’s missing out on here, and it’s twisting him up bad enough to move him toward panic. 

Eddie hates that Carol is the one to voice those exact concerns. 

“What do you mean don’t worry about it?” She snarls, “We talked about this—”

“Carol—” you warn, slipping back into that dark and dangerous look you’d adopted the afternoon before, “Shut the fuck up.”

Her eyes go wide and she recoils – actually recoils – like you’d reached out with the words and slapped her across the face. Eddie wonders when you last spoke to her so directly, if ever, and the air begins to bubble with the impending row.

He has half a mind to excuse himself because in the wake of the ongoing conversation, he suddenly doesn’t feel so steady on his feet, but Eddie can’t resist the sense of duty he is saddled with to stick close by, in case you need him to pull you out of the fire. 

“Did you even ask him?” Carol demands.

You set your jaw and breathe out hard through your nose, gaze flitting briefly over from where you are busy boring holes into your so-called best friend to regard Eddie with a strange, guilty look.

“Can we talk about this later?” You ask, and he doesn’t know why, but it hits him like a fist to the gut. 

The first inkling of wretched rejection lays prickly fingers at the nape of his neck, and despite the roots he puts down, that sick sense of vertigo intensifies. 

“You didn’t, did you?” Carol says. 

When you remain silent she rolls her eyes and grinds out an aggravated snarl. 

“Jesus Christ, I have to do everything around here.” She says, then turns over to regard him with a droll, uninterested look, and Eddie’s mouth goes dry, “She's having a party tonight, and she was supposed to invite you, but I guess she chickened out — anyway, you should be there,”

Hurt feelings are blood in the water to someone like Carol Perkins, and Eddie does his best to swallow them down as he struggles to pull his armor into place. He tells himself doesn’t care. He doesn’t care that you’re having a party and didn’t invite him, and he doesn’t care what that suggests. 

“...Why should I be there?” He asks, trying his best to mimic Carol’s apathetic tone and feeling his voice quaver. 

He doesn’t care. Really he doesn’t, so why does it hurt so bad to think you don’t want him around with all your other friends?

Overlooking the obvious reasons – your friends are terrible, he has no interest in socializing with them, they have no interest in socializing with him – he suddenly can’t stop his head from spinning with a hundred different ugly little suggestions.  

“God, you’re really that stupid, aren’t you? You’ve been trying to get into her pants, right? That’s what this whole thing is about? So bring your stash tonight and see what happens,” Carol shrugs, “Who knows, maybe you’ll get lucky.” 

The silence that follows is shockingly loud and Eddie feels it screaming in his ears, telling him that this is the other shoe dropping, this is what it’s been all about – all of it.

You’ve just been using him to pass the time while your friends are away, the minute they come back you’ll drop him – Stacey’s friends are back and their mean, cackling laughter is so loud, it draws everyone’s attention. Everyone is turning to stare, everyone is watching the Freak get his heart broken.   

“We’re just friends…” he says flatly, trying not to look at you as he does and cringing under how hideously false it sounds. 

It’s easier to lean on the lie and make it feel like truth in moments so vulnerable as this. He wishes you would say something, and yet he’s not sure he could stand to hear whatever it is you might have to say, because what if you agree?

After everything you’ve been through in the last few weeks, over the last half hour? He’s not sure he could endure that, it might break him. 

Carol just rolls her eyes. 

“So, what? You’ve never heard of friends with benefits?” She says, “And if you’re her friend, then you’re my friend too, and if we’re all gonna be friends now, I don’t see why we all shouldn’t benefit,” 

She’s said the word too many times and it’s been whittled down to a blade that stabs Eddie in the chest with every violent utterance. 

“What is your problem?” You demand a thousand miles away and to Eddie’s immediate left.

He doesn’t know when you came around to his side of the car, but suddenly you’re standing next to him, and he is busy grappling with the powerful urge to step away from you if only to try and protect himself.

Carol ignores you and holds him trapped in her gaze like a snake hypnotizing its prey.  

“You come to the party and bring weed,” She says, “She’ll open those little legs for you, and at the end of the night, everybody will be happy. What’s the problem here?” 

“Carol!” You cry, but with such a hideous truth hanging between you, it’s too little too late. 

He’s never swung so hard from euphoria into unhappiness – it’s a violent startling sensation that leaves Eddie feeling like he’s swaying. 

This is why he doesn’t let himself get his hopes up. This is why he stays in his own goddamn lane and minds his own goddamn business.

Eddie feels like he’s going to be sick. 

I thought you said you loved me… 

In the distance, the bell begins to ring and the parking lot steadily begins to empty. Carol gives you one last parting look before turning those viciously saccharine-sweet eyes on him, and Eddie feels something inside of him crumble. 

“Bye Eddie, see you tonight,” She calls in a malicious sing-song, skipping away. 

You linger where she leaves you, watching her disappear into the steadily thinning crowd.

For a long time, neither of you speak. The air feels very thin, and suddenly Eddie can’t catch his breath. Something deeply recessed in him urges him to run. Something small and vulnerable, familiar as childhood and in desperate need of protection, something he’s suddenly so sorry he ever considered offering to you. 

“...Eddie, I’m so sorry.” You begin, “That was… I don’t know what that was–”

“You talked about it, huh?” 

“No! No, not like that …” You insist, and then you pull a guilty face and drop your eyes to your sneakers, “I mean, technically we did. She brought it up, but it wasn’t like that, I swear. I don’t even want to have this stupid party.”

He’s heard enough. Never mind that his feelings are hurt you didn’t invite him in the first place, but to find out everything has been hurtling toward the inevitable way it always plays out? A sleazy hand on his thigh, bashful batting eyelashes, and a loaded confession of “...I don’t have any cash on me,”

Eddie Munson is easy. Eddie Munson trades weed for head. 

No need to stand on ceremony and take the whole beating if he doesn’t have to. Eddie turns on stiff legs and starts back across the parking lot, headed for the safety of the trees and leaving you standing there as the late bell brings to chime. 

“Eddie, don’t go–” You call, and he flexes his fingers against the buzzing static suddenly burning in his palms – his vision blurs and his chest fills with something black and angry,  “I’m sorry!”

He doesn’t care, and he spends the rest of the morning in misery.

For lack of anywhere else to go – and because he refuses to slink home with tears on his lashes and his tail between his legs after the way he left, just to have Wayne utter the dreaded curse of “told you so,” – Eddie hoofs it out to where he left the van parked on the shoulder the afternoon before.

He shuts himself up in the back and lays curled on his side in the dark, counting down from a thousand and doing everything in his power not to think about how perfectly wonderful the morning had been until it wasn’t, and how perfectly wretched everything is now. It hurts so badly he can barely breathe, and he hates hates hates just so he doesn’t have to feel that hurt. 

Eddie hates how tightly around your finger he’d let himself get coiled, he hates how vulnerable that’s left him feeling, and he hates how stupid he was – what was he thinking giving his heart over like that?

He should know better, but this time was supposed to be different. 

That’s how it always works, though, isn’t it? The world lulls him into a false sense of security, and just when he’s let his walls drop, just when he deludes himself into thinking he’s finally getting something made special for him, it pulls the rug out and he cracks his head open on the pavement. He doesn’t know why he’s still so surprised every time it happens, except that you were supposed to be different.

Everyone told him you were different.   

You weren’t supposed to hurt him like that, and yet he knew you had the capacity for it. He knew he needed to proceed with caution (isn’t that exactly what Wayne told him that night after he got home from the Hideout, brimming with butterflies and positively glowing in the aftermath of you?) – and still he let you do it anyway. 

Eddie thumps his head against the floor of the van hard enough to send a burst of dull muted color flashing across his eyes, and when it still doesn’t banish the image of you from his mind, he does it again, and again, and again.

Stupid stupid stupid stupid…

He allows himself to wallow in that patent despair until the steadily rising sun makes it too hot to remain closed up any longer. And even then, all he does is shrug out of his jacket and resume his miserable solitude with his head in his hands. 

Back to his regularly scheduled programming, whatever that means. He’s not going to that party, that’s for sure, and the next few weeks are going to be miserable because of it. 

He’s going to have to avoid you and all your shitty little friends, and he’s also going to have to endure all the whispering and staring and snickering behind his back, ramped up to eleven because he dared to rise above his station and court somebody so hopelessly out of his league. 

Worse of all is how he’s going to have to avoid his friends, who are all going to want to know with wide-eyed horror how this could have happened? How could it not? And why is everyone acting so surprised that it did?

It’s not like that, I swear, your voice pipes up from somewhere in the back of his mind, somewhere he’s going to have a very hard time extracting you from, I’m sorry! You call, I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry– 

And despite his best efforts, Eddie believes you. Everything that happened this morning, the week before at the Hideout, and the week earlier at the picnic table not so far from here – all of that matters. He can’t discount that, no matter how hard he tries to shield himself from the hurt it makes him feel now. 

People don’t just look at each other the way you look at him when it doesn’t matter, they don’t say each other’s names the way you say his or perform act upon endless act of necessary kindness as a means to justify a sticky little end. He has to believe it matters, and after everything you’ve done for him, he has to at least give you the benefit of the doubt, even if at the end of the day he’s reading the room wrong, and you only want to be his friend. 

Somehow, the notion hurts worse than the idea that you’ve only been paying attention to him to hook your friends up with free weed, which he tells himself you’re not. That would be too outlandishly cruel, and even despite that nagging little call, begging him to defend himself from such a hideous possibility, Eddie has to believe you want to be his friend.   

“Fuck!” he grinds out, scrubbing his hands over his face until his skin begins to burn, “God dammit,” 

He doesn’t want to be your friend. He wants so badly to matter more to you than that, but Eddie never gets the things he wants, so he decides that he can swallow his pride and be your friend, even if it makes him miserable. 

He’ll put himself on the back burner if that’s what it takes to be near you, and he’ll go to your stupid party tonight, even if he’s not actually invited.   

——————————————————————————————————

When you told him his place was on your way to school, he didn’t expressly believe you, but Eddie never imagined you’d be coming all the way down from the top of Cornwallis and doubling back again just to pick him up. Awful long way to commute for just a hookup. 

He’s busy trying to calculate how much gas money he owes you as he hops down from the van – back in action, two hundred dollars and a full afternoon spent under the hood later – and slams the door, stuffing a plastic bag of substance into his back pocket. 

It’s a meager haul, he didn’t have time to hit up Rick on top of everything else he had to do just to work himself up to coming here tonight, but Eddie figures it’s not going to kill these assholes to share. 

Anyway, he’s not here for them. He’s here, because he’s taking a chance that it’s worth trusting you, and trusting himself that it will in fact be worth his while to step out of his comfort zone.

Only this is very far out of that little green zone. 

Eddie hates parties.    

Your house is what would typically be an unassuming home built in the tract style of the 60s and 70s, similar enough to the one across the street to be from the same catalog, if not nearly identical. Tonight, however, it is a beacon of activity you can sense a mile away. 

Eddie imagines it must look worlds different when it isn’t teeming with wildlife and thrumming with the base and drumline of the overloud music playing within.

As he crosses your front lawn, he tries not to get caught imagining the alternate universe where he’s coming to your house for the first time under entirely different circumstances — dinner with your parents.

He brings flowers and wears nice clothes and does all the right things to make that good impression which has always eluded him. In spite of the odds stacked against him, at the end of the night your father shakes his hand and your mother tells him he simply must come back for Christmas, and you walk him out to the van, wrapped in a conspiratorial huddle as you tell him how well he did, how your father doesn’t approve of anyone, and how he just got finished telling you what a fine young man he is.

It’s an outlandish flight of fancy, sure, but it’s all he’s got to bolster him as two meatheads come spilling out of your front door and down your steps, entangled in the throes of testosterone and budding alcoholism. 

Eddie steps over them and pays no mind to the couple busy playing tonsil hockey on your front porch as he slips through the front door and into the house. Your house. Not the way he wants to be seeing it for the first time, but beggars can’t be choosers. 

He’s barely over the threshold and already his skin has begun to buzz – this better be worth it, because he’s missing Hellfire Club for this, and Keith already tore him a new asshole for daring to bow out of the session. Eddie knows he can’t kick him out of the club for missing one game, but the consequences will be dire. 

He’ll probably kill his character off in some deeply insignificant way and make him spectate through the rest of the campaign, and Eddie will sit there and take that disrespect because there are more important things happening tonight than fighting the Thessalhydra.

D&D will still be there for him next week, but if he doesn’t play his cards right tonight, you may not be, and that’s not a chance he’s willing to take.    

Eddie makes his way through the party, through the violent, seething throng of co-eds actively making bad decisions, and tries to take in the place through the haze of teenage mayhem.

He wants to say your house is nice, but who could honestly tell through all the mess? He wonders idly who among this group of maniacs is going to have the presence of mind to stay after and help you clean this up, but the thought is quickly forced out of his head by wave after overstimulating wave of noise. 

He can hardly think for how loud it is.

In an attempt to get his bearings, Eddie makes his way to the kitchen, which he learned very early on during nights and weekends like this, is always a good place to center oneself amid such chaos.

The kitchen is typically the center of a home and a safe space at a house party because it’s where the losers tend to congregate – the people who don’t know how they got invited and have no idea what they’re doing here. For some odd reason, Eddie hopes it's where you'll be too.

If he's lucky, maybe he can coax you out into a quieter space to try and smooth things over before he has to have any of your terrible friends inflicted upon him.

Color him wildly disappointed then to find Tina and Carol, standing over an electric red bowl of something into which they’re upending bottles of vodka and gin.

Jesus Christ, Eddie manages to make himself think with no small amount of effort (because the kitchen has provided no respite to the noise) They’re gonna kill somebody. 

He is halfway through making a mental note to warn you to steer clear of the witch's brew of instant inebriation, wherever you may be, when your friends finally notice him. 

“Omigod hi!” Carol screeches, too loud and over-friendly to be sober, it puts him immediately on edge, “I didn’t think you were coming after that stunning little tantrum you threw earlier.”

“Well, what did you expect?” Tina starts, leering at him and sending a shock of chills crawling up Eddie’s spine, “When stray dogs get a whiff of good pussy, they come running,”

It’s not the most intricately crafted insult he’s ever heard, though Eddie imagines that has something to do with the booze. 

Still, his insides heave when the pair erupt into a fit of mean, tittering laughter. He breathes a deeply agitated sigh and waits for them to stop. He’s not going to leave, no matter how badly he wants to, because he’s here to make things right. 

That’s all that matters to him. 

When he doesn’t react, the humor very quickly goes out of them, and Carol sticks him to the spot with daggers in her eyes. 

“Well? Did you bring your shit or what?” she slurs. 

Or what is a good question, but Eddie’s long since learned that it’s better if he keeps his mouth shut in situations like this. Wordlessly, he reaches into his back pocket and produces the bag of contraband, and both girls react with immediate disappointment.

“That’s it?” Carol says, snatching the bag from his hand. 

“It’s not like you gave me a lot of notice,” Eddie presses. “You’re lucky I even had that,”

Carol makes a phlegmy sound of disgust in the hollow of her throat and rolls her eyes. Then, Tina produces a crisp twenty-dollar bill and snaps it at him, like he should be wildly impressed by such an amount.

Never mind that what he just handed over is easily worth double that, he’s not going to argue — he can always count on getting robbed blind at these functions — now, he just wants to see you.  

Eddie swallows any dirty feelings attempting to rise in him over what the transaction suggests – he brings weed and you get laid – and crumples the bill in his fist, focusing on the way it folds as he dares to ask where you are. 

“Whatever – she’s probably in her room sulking,” Carol says with a dismissive gesture, saying something under her breath that sounds a little too close to “fucking loser” as she turns her attention back to the electric red caldron bubbling over with poison and the promise of bad decisions.

He can't tell if she's talking about him or you.

“Which one is her room?” Eddie asks, and Tina’s eyes flash with malignant glee.

“And wouldn’t you just love to know?” she says, grinning, and he doesn’t know why it feels like being lied to.

It’s not as if either of them were ever going to take him by the hand and lead him to you. In their eyes, he is only here for one reason, and now that the transaction is complete, he’s on his own. 

He doesn’t know why he expected anything less. 

As Eddie turns back toward the party and readies himself for what is promising to be an exhaustive search – the house is not that big, but good God if it isn’t filled beyond capacity – he gets stuck on the suggestion of faded lines etched into the door jamb.

Beside each tick in the wood, there are clearly written heights and age definitions by year. He can’t help but reach out and run a fond, reverent hand over the gentle care taken to keep track of your life and wishes someone would have thought to do the same for him.

“Why are you just standing there?” Tina snaps, “She’s waiting for you.”

Eddie fails to suppress a flinch as he takes his hand back. He gives her one last parting look, one which is met with sneering, smirking disdain, then steps down into the living room.

“Be gentle with her,” she calls as he starts back into the house, “It’s her first time!”

They erupt into more of that mean laughter, and Eddie has to bite the inside of his cheek until he tastes blood just to endure it.

Of course he’s heard that rumor, and talk of your inexperience has ramped up increasingly as people have begun to notice the pair of you dancing around each other, but he can’t help but think of how you would be mortified to know they’d just offered the secret to him. It was not theirs to tell.   

Still, he takes hold of the knife of that last parting gift and carefully removes it from his back, tucking it away where it will remain safe with him, forever if need be.  

It’s a lot of trial and error to finally happen upon the right door, and Eddie has the misfortune of walking in on not one, but two pairs of writhing bodies in various states of undress, going at each other like the world is ending – one in what he imagines is your parent's bedroom, and the other in the hall bath. 

Sure, maybe he ought to have started with the door covered in plastic butterfly decals, but isn’t there a saying about judging books by their covers?

Anyway, how is he supposed to know which room is yours? He’s never been to your house before now, and the music is inordinately loud, too loud to think straight.

Usually, that’s not something that bothers him, usually he likes that, but Eddie doesn’t usually spend his Friday nights socked into a singular space with everybody who hates his guts, and it’s all come together to knock him woefully off kilter. 

Then, as if the punctuate the thought, someone shouts something unintelligible and the room erupts into laughter – something about nerds or freaks or any of the other infinite hurled insults that batter Eddie daily, and he is reminded, once again, that he is missing Hellfire for this.

He knocks and presses his ear to the door to try and scan for any kind of life within, beneath the thrumming of the music – if somebody doesn’t turn the noise down, they’re going to blow the speakers. 

“Go away!” Your voice comes shouting through layers of distance and solid core. 

Bingo. 

Normally, he might have done you the courtesy of heeding such a warning, but tonight he doesn’t dare.

All the things Eddie has to say to you are best not done through a wooden barrier, especially surrounded by so many intently listening ears, so he takes a chance – and a breath. He twists the knob and lets himself in. 

The atmosphere in your room is instantly better than the rest of the house, and it is thankfully much quieter in here.

Like finally closing the lid on something, Eddie is relieved to find that he can finally hear himself think again as he shuts the door and braces his back against it.  

You respond to the intrusion on your sanctuary by pushing up from where you’ve been lying on the bed with a pillow over your head and hurling it across the room

“This room is off —oh, Eddie!” you yelp, curling your lips inward and instantly losing steam the moment you clap your eyes on him. 

The pillow strikes the wall beside him with middling force, and he watches it slide flaccidly to the floor.

“Hiya Sweetheart,” Eddie offers, forcing himself to try and sound casual as he says it, “Sorry I’m late,”

You don't respond, you just sit there staring back at him with wide-eyed wonder, and he is struck with a sudden bolt of unbearable shame for having ever doubted you.

He wants to tell you he missed you, but he swallows that intention because it's only been twelve hours, and he's not trying to look that pathetic in front of you, even if he still feels a little sore about the way you left things that morning.  

Eddie clears his throat and reaches up to pull at his neck, making a show of looking around your room and trying to hide the rush of nerves he is suddenly feeling.   

“So, this is where you’ve been hiding, huh?” He’s in your bedroom — oh, my God — he’s actually in your bedroom. 

He is a visitor from Mars, taking his first look at the scenery of a brand-new world, and he’s not too shy to admit that it is thrilling.

It’s just as bad as it was back in your car, only dialed up to eleven, because this is the hub, the mothership, your den of secrets, and Eddie is desperate to take in as much of it as he can as quickly as possible, in case you really mean it and are about to kick him out.

Posters, pictures, books, stuffed animals, bed sheets, pillows, trinkets, clothes – you you you yOU YOU.

He has to make himself stop and breathe because if he keeps going like this, he’s in danger of keeling over right there on your bedroom floor. And wouldn’t that be the most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened to him?

In the distance, the party rages on, separated by layers of wood and plaster and paint, and Danny Elfman begins to wail “Oh I think you like it, like it, being told what to do…”

He can’t help but wonder who among that crowd would be so bold as to put on Oingo Boingo, and he almost says something about it, but when he notices how small and fragile you look, sitting there, tucked in among your pillows, the notion goes out of him.

He doesn’t want to tease you, but under the circumstances and the lingering miasma of his hurt feelings, he doesn’t know how else to interact with you.

“You know, I’ve been looking all over for you,” he starts slowly, venturing a step forward into your domain and watching you with careful, unblinking eyes as if you were a venomous snake, poised to bite. 

“You have?” you gulp.

Eddie nods, moving closer. 

“Yeah, weird move to invite someone to a party then disappear,” he says, then shrugs, “But what do I know? Maybe that’s what all the cool kids are doing these days.”

The attempt to stir something from you goes over like a lead balloon, and you remain where you are, watching him with wide, unblinking eyes. 

“I can’t believe you’re here,” you say, and unlike Carol, you sound genuinely stunned about that.

Still, it puts the gentle fear of rejection in him and Eddie has to put down roots to keep himself from retreating a step.  

“...should I not be?” He asks, and you surge forward.

“No! No, I’m so happy you’re here–” You start, scrambling toward the end of the bed as if you’re suddenly desperate to be near him before second-guessing the act. It sends another flurry of mixed feelings tearing through his body. 

“ …I looked for you …” You say, dropping your eyes bashfully, “After school.” 

Eddie makes a thoughtful sound and tries not to picture you sitting in the parking lot, long after it has emptied out, waiting for him to show up. Of course you would want to drive him home, even after the fight you’d had (if you could even call it that) because you’re just that nice.

He hates to have disappointed you like that, and it makes him feel all the worse about the way he reacted and all the nasty little thoughts he spent the day wallowing in.

Before he can even think to verbalize any of that, you explode. 

“Eddie, I’m so sorry! All those things Carol said? I promise you, that’s not what I want out of this,”

“...out of what?” he asks after a moment of silence, because his feelings are still hurt and he can’t help but poke that bruise just a little.  

“Out of this,” You stress, gesturing between you, “You and me. I wanna be your friend. I promise I’m not trying to use you for anything. I just want to be your friend,”

He feels the corner of his mouth twitch and contemplates how best to navigate the new waters of your relationship/friendship/whatever this thing is between you, especially now that he knows you’re a virgin. Frustratingly, it paints every one of your previous interactions in a new light, despite how he's been telling himself that it doesn't matter.  

Eddie wishes that information could have made its way to him through you, just so that he could have been a little more cautious with his actions – his flirting – but he never gets the things he wants, he just rolls with the punches. 

And the only way he knows how to roll with this situation is to poke fun at it. 

“So, you mean you haven’t been waiting in here all night, consumed with lust and just dying to see if I’ll show up?” 

Another swing and a miss. 

It was supposed to make you laugh – a throwback to the good part of the morning – but all you do is sink forward to rest your head miserably in your hands. You make a terribly melancholy sound and your shoulders heave, and after a moment, Eddie realizes with a bright burst of panic that you are quietly trying not to cry.  

Oh, shit.

It’s paralyzing in the worst way, and he feels instantly awful. He came here to make things right, and what does he do? Open his mouth and spit poison all over the room – that Munson Magic, funneled through his warped lens. 

Eddie has to remind himself for the hundredth time since he decided to come tonight that he isn’t mad at you. He’s taking a chance that you were just as stunned by Carol’s behavior that morning as he was, and he’s sinking down on the end of your bed, exercising the utmost caution with every one of his glacial movements. 

Your shoulders tremble with the effort of holding something in as you take a deep, watery breath and force it out through your fingers, and Eddie’s fingers twitch with the urge to put his hand on your back. He doesn’t dare, because with the lingering effects of the venom he hadn’t realized was still coursing through his veins, he’s afraid he doesn’t know how to be gentle with you. 

A long and sticky silence blooms between you as you both wait for the other to speak – someone in the next room screams, the house erupts with muted laughter, and Oingo Boingo continues to push your speakers to their limit.

“… I’m sorry about the way I acted this morning,” Eddie finally says, taking yet another chance at being unflinchingly honest and quietly marveling at how brave he suddenly is, “I guess I got my hopes up for something, and got my feelings hurt, and instead of facing it I walked away. I do that… when the going gets tough, I get going … but I want you to know that I wish I’d stuck around…”

When he looks, you’ve sat up, and you’re blinking back at him with a look of utter horror. 

“You’re sorry?” You yelp, eyes flooded with tears, “No, I’m the one who should be sorry! If I thought for one second something like that was going to happen…? I would’ve… I wouldn’t have… I don’t know. I would have done things differently.”

He pulls his shoulders up and can’t make himself tell you that the feeling is mutual. It would have been nice to have you stand up for him, but he understands what it’s like to be paralyzed by a moment, so he forgives you for that, even if he isn’t ready to verbalize it.  

“I know,” he mutters, tracing a loose spiral into the rumpled fabric of your quilt. 

“I’m so sorry, truly and deeply, from the depths of my soul. I’m sorry and I’m mortified, and I totally understand if you never want to see me again,”

Eddie sighs.

“Sweetheart, I wouldn’t be here if I felt that way,” he says, “I don’t make a habit of showing up for people I don’t want to see – I’ve usually got more self-respect than that…” Of course, that brings to mind all the times he’s done exactly that, and he feels himself pulling a face at the blatant contradiction, “…usually…”  

Another one of those silences settles over you, and you sit together listening to the thrumming static of a sound system being pushed to its impending doom.   

“Why are you being so nice to me?” You ask, looking miserable as you shift to pull your knees up and hug them to your chest.

He can hardly stand how small and sad you look – nothing like that should ever grace your features, and Eddie moves before he can stop himself, reaching out to pinch your cheek between his forefinger and thumb.

“’Cause you’re a freaky little weirdo with bad friends and I feel sorry for you,”

Funny how that’s the joke that finally lands.

You laugh, a soft, watery thing, which comes burbling out of you on a burst of breath as you jerk out of his touch. He is instantly lesser without the searing press of your flesh – even so innocently as that – but finally, Eddie feels some of the weight of the earlier day lift from his heart.

Even with the party raging on behind you, the atmosphere feels almost as good as it did that morning, with the pair of you socked into your car and losing your minds together.

Somehow, it makes everything that happened between then and now simultaneously worse and a little less significant, and Eddie is tired of thinking about it, so he puts the matter to bed.    

“Look,” He starts, “Carol is a gaping asshole, alright? Everybody knows that, so let’s stop pretending this isn’t old news and move on with our goddamn lives. Let’s go back to the good part.” He’s moving again before he can stop himself and grips you by the shoulder, “We’re friends now, aren’t we?”

You nod, and he gives you a gentle shake for good measure – your secrets are safe with him. You’re important to him. You matter to him, and he hopes beyond desperate screaming hope that you feel the same.  

“So, let’s just be friends,” Eddie says, and you surprise him by surging forward to throw your arms around his neck.

“Thank you,” you say into his jacket, hugging him tight, and he is woefully unprepared to accept such a sudden burst of affection.  

He cannot be this starved for touch. He refuses to be that pathetic, and yet he’s fighting every screaming instinct he has to constrict you in his arms and bury his face in your hair, because Eddie doesn’t remember the last time someone hugged him. 

He’d forgotten how good it feels to be held, to be wanted, and part of him isn’t sure he’s ever really known the feeling. It’s a frighteningly somber thought to have at a house party on a Friday night, and yet as you continue to hold him, his heart is suddenly in his throat and that insane urge to confess his feelings is sitting on his tongue like a hot burning coal. 

The idea of opening his ribcage and giving you his heart is suddenly so tantalizing that Eddie can feel his resolve slipping – he doesn’t want to be your friend, he wants to matter to you, he wants it so bad sitting there on your bed wrapped up in your embrace, that he feels insane with it.

Thankfully before he goes doing anything too foolish, he can hear his uncle’s voice of reason warning him to “proceed with caution and leave room for Jesus” (the second part less serious than the first), so Eddie clears his throat and gives you a neighborly pat on the back, like something Wayne would have done.

It makes him feel stupid, he knows he should have just hugged you, but despite his best efforts, when you release him, he watches you rock back on your knees and feels you take his heart with you.

Just like this morning after you’d deigned to so charitably tie his shoelaces, Eddie is suddenly unbearably warm under all his denim and leather.

You scrub your hands across your face to try and banish any lingering wetness on your cheeks and offer him a weak smile, happily changing the subject as something immeasurably charged threatens to pass between you, and he shrugs out of his jacket as quickly and casually as he can, desperately hoping that you don’t notice if he’s blushing. 

“How bad is it out there?” you ask, scrunching your features as if you’re afraid to ask.

Eddie sucks a breath in through his teeth and contemplates lying to you, just to spare you the hard truth – it’s a disaster, the house is a lost cause, there’s no hope in ever getting it clean again, you’re going to have to move.

“You’re gonna want to burn your parent’s sheets,” he says diplomatically, “Seriously.”

It takes you a moment to pick up what he’s putting down, but when you do, your eyes go wide and your shoulders drop. 

Somebody is having sex in your parent’s bed (and in your hall bath, but that’s neither here nor there).   

“Oh, my God—” you moan, “Who?”

He feels his face screw up as his subconscious unhelpfully drums up the image of the frenzied bunnyfucking he’d walked in on in your parents' bedroom, and he sucks his teeth. 

“You know, I never quite mastered the art of identifying people by their bare asses…”

You scoff, but you’re clearly too pressed to see the humor in it – maybe in a few days, when the heat has died down. Then again, maybe in a few years when no one remembers they ever even went to a party up at your place.

Eddie will remember, if only because this moment and the press of your arms around his neck has been seared into the back of his mind, but nobody cares what the town Freak remembers, and there is a quiet comfort in that. 

“You should also know that your speakers are this close to going the way of the dodo,” he says, jerking his thumb over his shoulder, “I mean, listen, I know you’re eclectic and all, but I’m guessing those are probably your Dad’s and if he’s anything like mine – which, for your sake, I hope to God he’s not – you’re gonna catch a whole lotta hell for killing a nice sound system like that with Oingo Boingo.” 

Your lips quirk shyly.

“I can’t take credit for that,” you say, “It’s Jonathan Byers’s tape – he let me borrow it,” 

Eddie can feel himself pulling a face, try as he might to remain neutral about the idea of you trading music with somebody else – with Jonathan Byers. And after that beautiful moment you had this morning? 

Maybe he is reading the room wrong, and he’s just the next name on your roster as you make your charitable rounds with all the social misfits of Hawkins.

It’s a terrible feeling, one that wells up so suddenly that Eddie has to jump up from the end of your bed, just to try and get away from it and the image of you picking up Jonathan Byers for school and tying Jonathan Byers’s sneakers and laughing and playing and—

“Jonathan, huh…” he huffs, jealousy driving him three steps forward to knock haplessly into your dresser, where he immediately begins aimlessly picking up and putting down all the little trinkets he disturbed with such a frantic movement, “What’s that about?”

In the attached mirror, Eddie sees your shoulders jump innocently.

“Nothing. Sometimes we hang out,”

He plays at making a little porcelain horse canter across your dresser and tries not to feel the twinge of nausea those four words spike through his midsection.

Sometimes you hang out.

Boy Howdy, he sure hates hearing that, and he hopes to God he never comes up so casually in Jonathan’s presence.

“…and he just… gives you tapes?” he forces himself to say, not actually wanting to know what he’s really asking you.

This time, the subtext is not so murky that you don’t pick up on it. 

“Yeah.” You say slowly, lips twitching, “So, what?”

Eddie pulls his shoulders up.

“So nothing, it’s just … if I’d known you were in the market for trade-sies, I woulda brought you something good to listen to… not this bizarro new wave shit.” He says, gesturing to the bowels of the house where Grey Matter is still inexplicably playing.  

You narrow your eyes at him when he turns to face you.

“…Is that you being a vicious snob again, or are you seriously getting jealous right now?”

It’s a ridiculous notion, one which Eddie is offended to have thrust upon him.

“Me? Jealous? Not a chance,” He lies, like a lying liar, “Also, how dare you? I don’t get jealous,”

You bite your lip in a failed attempt to stifle the slow smile creeping up across your face, and for reasons he cannot explain, it makes him feel suddenly and painfully shy.  

Okay, he’s jealous, so what? He’s jealous that you’re out here trading cassettes with someone else. Big deal. It’s not like he went out on a limb giving you that book or anything or that he imagined you were having a special moment when he was looking through all your music earlier.

It’s not like he’s so desperate for your approval and your attention that he came all the way out to this stupid party, even though he’s been suffering what felt very much like the prelude to heartbreak all afternoon.

It’s not like he’s missing Hellfire Club or that he spent the better part of an hour trying to get Garreth on the phone just so he could get your home address, and it’s not like he ransacked the emergency fund Wayne keeps to get the van working so he could be here, standing in your bedroom with you looking right through all his bullshit.   

It’s not like he’s in love with you, or anything so mortifying as that. No, nothing like that at all.

“Quit lookin’ at me like that,” Eddie says, dropping his gaze in a desperate attempt at self-preservation – he immediately clocks the faintest suggestion of a teddy bear hidden beneath your bed, and his bloodstream fizzes with unbridled affection.

“Like what?” you ask softly and the sensation intensifies. 

“Like you’re so smart and can read my thoughts.” Eddie hums, feeling hideously vulnerable as he snags a kinky lock of his hair and drags it across his face – hiding, “Anyway, what do I care about who you’re dating? Not my business – not my circus, not my monkeys,”

The next three seconds of silence are the longest anyone has ever experienced in the history of life on Earth, of that he is certain.

“…I’m not dating Jonathan Byers.”

When he finally musters the courage to drag his eyes up from the stuffed animal peering up at him from beneath your bed skirt, Eddie gives you a long, hard look and tries like hell to decide if he thinks there is a “but” coming swiftly down the line.

He waits and he looks at you, and you just keep looking right back at him until the standoff starts to feel something similar to “home free”.   

“You’re not?” He finally asks.

The corners of your mouth begin to curl, and you continue to hold his gaze.

“No,” you say,  

“Okay, good.” 

“Why’s that good?” 

“Don’t worry about that,” he says, flopping back down onto your bed with enough purposeful force to jostle you, “You lied to me, by the way.”

“When?” You ask.

“Yesterday, when you said my place was on your way to school.”

Your brows jump up toward your hairline and you adopt the guilty look of someone caught red-handed. You had said that, before you promised to come back and get him that morning – you said “it’s no trouble, I can swing by and get you – it’s on my way, any way,”, so who’s the lying liar now?

You take a deep breath in through your teeth, hold it, and force the words out on your exhale. 

“Okay, so maybe it’s not exactly on the way…”

Eddie levels you with an unimpressed look.

“Sweetheart…”  

It’s way out of the way – driving past and doubling back, adding fifteen minutes to your commute on top of how late he was already running out of the way. 

Far enough out of the way that you can’t even pretend it isn’t.

Your lips curl sheepishly as you pull your shoulders up to your ears. 

“I mean… can you blame mel?” 

It makes him feel unbearably smug and paints the rose-tinted memories of that morning in a brand-new cherry-flavored haze.

Eddie’s heart thumps against his ribs and he hums thoughtfully, trying to play cool, despite feeling the exact opposite about how hard you campaigned just to come and get him this morning. 

“So… I guess that means you kinda like me, huh?” He tries – you flush and quickly pull a pillow into your lap, averting your gaze.

“Who says?” you ask.

He could keep pushing it, if he were feeling mean. And he is, because he wants to see a little more of that pretty color bleed into your face, but doing that would mean putting himself further on the line than he already is, because what if you turn the question back on him? 

No, he’s not that brave.  

“You sure ask a lot of questions for a girl hiding out at her own party,” Eddie says, plucking at a string hanging from a seam in your comforter and trying with everything in his limited power not to get too hung up on the fact that he’s lying across your bed.

How many times has he imagined doing this in how many different ways? Even so platonically as this?

It’s just another one of those things that is oh-so-casual, suddenly second nature, like he’s been doing it every day of your lives.  

First, he’s riding in your car and flipping through your cassettes, and now he’s in your room, lying on your bed, with his head propped up on one hand, and there you are, sitting close enough that he could reach out and touch you if he so dared – does he dare?

No, probably not. You’re not there yet, despite the hug and all the previous touching.

Somewhere to his left, he’s vaguely aware of hearing you groan in disgust.

“Please don’t call it that.” You say, heaving out an aggravated sigh and burying your face in your hands, “This is not my party,”

Eddie reaches down to snag the fluffy ear of your stuffed bear from where he can see it peeking out from under the bed.

He brings it back up for air and props it between you, half out of decency because he’s just realized that you’re wearing a skirt and he can see the faintest suggestion of your pink panties peeking back at him from where you’re sitting cross-legged.

“Go on, Sweetheart,” He says thickly, “Tell it to the bear.”

Self control, he tells himself, averting his eyes. Self preservation. Self destruction, as his eyes flit down to steal another peek, and when he gets home? Self care.  

You shift forward to snatch the teddy up, unfolding your legs to stretch out demurely in front of you, and placing it reverently beside you in the pillows. Eddie is struck blind with a powerful sense of relief mixed with disappointment, and the faintest pang of jealousy, because that’s where he wants to be.

“It’s just not fair.”

Tell me about it. He thinks, trying not to frown at the bear from where it sits leaning against your hip and grinning back at him.

Bastard.

“They all decided they were allowed to come and hold me hostage in my own home just because my parents are out of town, and they can’t imagine not throwing one of these shitty house parties every week.” You say, “I don’t even know most of the people out there, and the ones I do don’t even like me. Nobody likes me, Eddie…”

He’s listening, he swears he is, but he’s also looking at your legs, stretched out and crossed so daintily alongside him. He traces a line in the comforter beside them because he’s not bold enough to do so along the expanse of your skin. 

“Aww c’mon,” He says, “Somebody here likes you…”

The comment goes largely unnoticed, and the bear keeps grinning at his failed attempt at flirting with you.

Loser, it taunts.

You’re thankfully too distracted by the fires of your indignation to notice when Eddie drags it down by its foot and whips it back under the bed.

Stay down there, Fucker. He thinks as you continue, practically frothing at the mouth as you go, oblivious to all that is happening around you. 

The genie is out of the bottle, and she is – evidently – fucking pissed.  

“I don’t know why I even bothered. I told them I didn’t want them coming here, but nobody cares about what I want. This whole thing was some great big ploy to get Steve Harrington to come down from his throne but he’s not even here because he’s off playing pretend that he’s this nice guy so he can get into Nancy Wheeler’s pants and somehow that’s my fault, because everything is my fault, right? It’s my fault Steve didn’t come to this stupid party and it’s my fault that they’re all cannibalizing each other trying to get his attention. It’s so fucking pathetic.”

Of course it is, but the last thing Eddie expected from tonight was to receive such a titanic info dump on the current state of affairs of the inner circle, and it’s all he can do just to try and keep up.

“Hold on… who are we talking about – Carol or Tina?” Eddie asks, “Or Tommy?”

He needs to make sure he gets all the details right for when he tells the guys about this later – Adam is gonna love this, goddamn gossip hound that he is.  

“Does it matter?” You deadpan, “They’re all the same – all they do is sit around fighting over whose turn it is to gargle Steve’s balls,”

Eddie’s brain lights up in a hundred different places with a hundred different images, most of which involve exactly what you just described (which he is trying not to picture). The rest involve you and himself recast in those leading roles and he feels his temperature steadily begin to increase. 

“Wow.” he chokes and clears his throat in a futile attempt at banishing the image as he is unceremoniously reminded of the dream that had been so tragically cut short. Hop in and I’ll suck your cock– he has to shift to try and conceal the way all that thinking has started to affect him, “…You–uh– you really just said that.”

As the fires of your anger begin to dwindle and fade, the air of your tirade settles, and Eddie watches as you begin to realize everything you just said.  

“...sorry, that was a lot.” You mumble, “I guess I’m upset,”

“You’re my goddamn hero is what you are — hey, you wanna do me a favor and go repeat all of that to the room? I’d love to see Carol’s head spin around.” Another swing and a miss, “So, all of that being said… let me ask you this – if you’re so miserable, why do you stay friends with them?”

“I mean… how would I even begin to make new friends? Who’s gonna wanna hang out with me after Carol’s finished with me.” 

Eddie drums a muffled beat out over your comforter and after a moment of contemplative silence, volunteers himself for the task with a tantalizing wag of his fingers. 

You huff out a watery sigh of laughter and shake your head, reaching out to crush his hand in your fist.

“You don’t count.” You say, and Eddie might have taken genuine offense to such a notion if he wasn’t so fixated on your sudden point of contact.

“Babygirl, I’m the only one who counts.” He presses, flexing his fingers to steeple them with yours.

Much to his patent dismay, you take your hand back, and he pushes up, folding his legs and sitting upright because what he has to say next has to be done with his chest. 

“Hear me out, okay? Because this might sound a little crazy…” He starts, “What if you just … stopped hanging out with them?”

You glare back at him, but Eddie doesn’t really think your ire is meant for him.

“As if Carol’s gonna let me go quietly like that–”

“Fuck Carol–” He spits, he’s so sick of hearing about Carol fucking Perkins he could break something – he won’t, but he could, “You’re really gonna spend time sitting around thinking about her after all the shit she’s pulled? Just the shit she’s pulled today? Grow a little spine there, Sweetness, it’ll do you some good.” 

“It’s not that easy—” You whine, and Eddie doubles down, rising up on his knees and snatching your desperate, flailing hands out of the air.

“Yes, it is,” He says, holding your wrists together, “It actually is.”

You heave a world-weary sigh that has no business coming off of you.

“Eddie–”

“What are you so scared of? She’s bad for you, Sweetheart – I know you know that. Cut her out before she kills you.”

You grind out a desperate sound and just like that, your head is in your hands again – you double over, leaning far into his space, and this time he’s powerless to stop from resting a hand on your back because he knows.

He knows life is hard enough with bad friends but with no friends…? He’s been there, and it’s a miserable existence he wouldn’t wish on anyone, especially not you, but he cannot stand by and watch you suffering at the hands of the worst people he knows. Not when there’s something that can be done about it. 

Eddie might suggest that he’s got a whole group of friends who would be happy to have you (maybe) but things are starting to get a little too heavy for his liking.

The atmosphere is filling up and getting hard to breathe, so Eddie pivots and pulls your hands away from your face – because since you’re touching now, apparently he’s just going for it, every chance he gets.

Cool.   

“Come on. Look at me.” He says gently, and slowly, you unfold yourself to meet his gaze, “How long have you been friends… ten years?”

You nod.

“And d’you really wanna waste another ten years feeling like that just because starting over is … is what? Scary?” Eddie doesn’t wait for you to answer, “Of course you don’t. Carol had her chance to be nice and fun, and she blew it, okay? She decided she’d rather be the wicked bitch of the mid-west, and now she can fuck off back to Oz, ‘cause — hey, look at me — I’m your best friend now, okay? I’m your best friend… and I’m gonna warn you now, Sweetheart, I’m not good at sharing.”  

You give him a look, one that says ha-ha very funny, and Eddie almost takes genuine offense to it.

“It’s so funny how you think I’m kidding. Just wait, you’re gonna wake up tomorrow and it’s gonna say Property of Eddie Munson tattooed across your forehead,”

“Just make sure you spell it right this time,” you say, and this time, Eddie does not think that kind of irreverent undercutting is very funny. 

“Gee, thanks,” he huffs, watching you settle back into your pillows, “I’m only tryin’ to save your life here.” 

You giggle, but he can tell you’re not convinced, and it’s driving him a little crazier than he expected something like this might. Maybe that’s because it feels a little too much like he just asked you to choose him over Carol and you’re leaning steadily toward no. 

 “This is nuts,” Eddie says, shifting up to settle over you – he leans with one hand braced on the mattress over your hip and stares down at you, laying there nestled in among your pillows, “You’re really gonna make me beg?” 

“I’m thinking about it,” you hum, and he feels that unpleasant skittery feeling threatening to return, so Eddie shifts away, preparing to vacate the spot on your bed, but you snag him before he can get very far.

 “Alright, I’m just kidding… don’t go.” You say, taking a fist full of his shirt and holding him to the spot, “I’m done with Carol.”

He twists back to look at you, and when you don’t show any immediate signs of teasing, he shifts around to lean over you again, caging you in with both hands this time. 

“For good?” he asks.

You nod. 

“For good.”

“And you’re gonna come hang out with me instead, right?” Eddie stresses, “You’re gonna sit with me at lunch and trade tapes and books with me and not Jonathan Byers,”

“I knew it!” You gasp, pushing up into his chest and shoving him away – before he can protest, you slip off the side of your bed and plant yourself on the floor, “You are so goddamn jealous.”

“I’m just trying to make sure we’re on the same page here, Sweetheart.”

“No, you’re just trying to boss me around,” you huff, crossing your arms and sitting with your back to the mattress, tucked in between your bed and dresser with your knees pulled up. 

And Eddie, unable to stomach such a separation, slides down to follow you.

He settles in beside you, hip to hip, and watches you with no small amount of amusement as you try to play mad at him.

“I told you I don’t like sharing.” Eddie says, nudging you with his shoulder, “Not with Carol, and not with Jonathan.”

You roll your eyes. 

“...If you must know…?” you start, gaze sliding sideways as you wait for him to give you the expected follow-up.

“I must,”

“Those interactions begin and end with me babysitting his brother. Nothing more, nothing less.” 

And isn’t that the tastiest little morsel of forbidden knowledge he’s ever had the pleasure of learning? Eddie knows he’s grinning at you, and he’s trying not to leer, but holy wow.

“You’re a babysitter?” He gasps, trying not to make it sound too sleazy as he stretches the word and holds it in his teeth. “Cool. Tell me everything.”

It makes sense in a wet-dream fantasy sort of way, like the version of you leaning out of the car and licking your lips on the other side of his raunchy little REM cycle.

You give him another one of those looks, and it opens up a path of clairvoyance between you. Eddie’s not blind to what other guys would say – what kind of fantasies that knowledge would set minds belonging to the likes of Tommy Hagan and his cadre of meatheads to spinning.

And he knows what you’re going to say – you’re getting ready to head him off at the pass. To assure him that it’s not nearly as sexy and glamorous as what trashy teenage slashers would lead him to believe, and Eddie would remind you that he’s not, and never has been, like the other guys – the seven seconds in heaven he just spent looking up your skirt not-withstanding.

“There’s nothing to tell,”  you say. “It pays the bills,”

Eddie scoffs, trying and failing not to stack up the world of difference between your home and his. He bets your place is nice, when it’s not full of screaming hormonal assholes, a lot nicer than a rusty doublewide on the wrong side of town.

“What bills have you got living in a nice place like this, huh?”

You’re not rich, by any stretch of the word – Eddie can tell that just based on the car you drive and your Crate & Barrel catalogue of a living room – but you’re not struggling either. He doesn’t imagine your parents spending much time deciding whether it’s better to shop for groceries or pay that month's power bill, and you seem to know that as you twist over and give him a strange, pensive look.

“See that box over there?”

You turn his direction to a circular blue tin sitting on the far end of your dresser, tucked in between a music box and – Eddie is immensely pleased to see – his tattered copy of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

Even from here, he can see that there is already a bookmark tucked into its pages, and it makes him feel unbearably smug to have been right about that – he knows what you like.     

Eddie lifts up and uses the motion as an excuse to put a cheeky hand on your knee, reaching over to fetch it for you and watching keenly as he settles back in against you.

Visions of loose sewing supplies dance in his head as you pop the lid, and you reveal a treasure of rolled, stacked, and waded-up bills, crammed into every nook and cranny of the Royal Danish cookie tin.

Money. A whole lotta money.

“Ho’mama!” He says, immediately reaching over to take his very own fistful of dollars, “— what’d you do, rob a bank?”

Eddie opens his hand and lets all the presidents rain back into their little tin hideaway, and you make a harsh sound in the back of your throat.

“More like stash every dollar I’ve made since I was thirteen.” you say matter of factly, “This is my George Bailey fund,”

It's startling to hear that name come tumbling out of your mouth, like the clanging of a bell. It sends him catapulting back into a sepia-toned memory, standing on a chair to peer into the top drawer of his mother’s dresser, and hearing her tell him the same thing about her own meager stash of bills, much smaller than yours.

“Someday,” she’d said, pulling him close – distantly, Eddie can still feel the vibrations of her gentle Tenessee drawl, moving through his body as she spoke the same words then that come slipping through your lips now.

“… I’m gettin’ out of this crummy town and I’m gonna see the world,” you say, affecting your best transatlantic accent, putting in all the right inflections at the right places and blowing Eddie’s brains clear out of his skull.

They’re plastered all over your bed and the back wall, that ooey-gooey grey matter, of that he is certain because you’re shrinking further and further into yourself with every moment of silence that passes between you.

What are the odds that you would have the same thought, the same intention – he is only vaguely aware of the look he must be giving you, if only because of how you grow suddenly sheepish under it.

“…Jimmy Stewart?” You try, “It’s a Wonderful Life?”

Eddie blinks hard to try and disperse the haze of his two lives colliding with such a violent cacophony, and when it lingers, he shakes his head – he knows. Of course he knows, how many times has he watched that movie with and without his mother? Enough to know that he’d throw a lasso around the moon for you if you asked.

He’d pull it down so you could swallow it, and the moonbeams would shoot out of your fingers and toes, and the ends of your hair. Even if not that,  he’s seen it certainly enough times not to have to have the concept of George Bailey and Bedford Falls explained to him.   

“No,” He says too late, “I mean – yes. Yeah, I’ve seen the movie, I’ve just…” he doesn’t know what to say, he’s literally speechless, so he takes a page out of your book and cuts that vulnerability off at the knees before it can settle, “…I’ve never seen such a terrible impression,”

You snort, and the money disappears as you slap the cover of the tin back into place.

“That’s mean.” You say, setting your life savings on the floor beside you.  

Eddie crosses his arms over his knees and after a breath of sullen silence, shifts over to lean against you.

“You started it,”

For a long moment, neither of you speaks as the atmosphere grows once again heavy and super-charged with that high Eddie’s been chasing since the morning.

You reach out to trace the burnished ridges of his rings, and before he realizes what’s happening, you tentatively lace your fingers with his.  

He holds his breath and lets you take his hand, still sitting so close to you, and a pensive silence falls over the room. You sit side by side, holding hands, and Eddie wonders if he could have even imagined something like this happening this morning when he slid into your passenger seat, so blissfully happy that you’d deigned to stoop so low to even tie his shoes.

And now you’re holding his hand.

The music is still playing in the other room loud enough to rattle the walls of your bedroom with each thrum of the bass, but neither of you seems to notice anymore.

It might as well have been your own individual heartbeats for all you know.

“Eddie…?” you say thickly.

“Hmm,”

“…Can I ask you something?”

He can feel you looking at him, and when he turns, your eyes flit down to his lips. 

Oh boy. 

Behind his teeth, his tongue grows restless, and he can’t stop it from darting out to swipe across his lower lip. He watches the faintest tinge of a blush spread across your cheeks as he does it and sees just how hard you have to work to drag your eyes back up. 

You like him. He doesn’t know why he keeps convincing himself that you don’t when you’re sitting here like this staring at him like that. 

Eddie nods, and you get caught on a shallow, stuttering breath as you try to inhale.  

“Promise you won’t laugh?” you ask.

“I won’t.”

Your brows come together over your eyes, and you suddenly look so sincere, he can’t help but feel a pang of violent remorse for every time he’s ever even thought about teasing you.

“You have to promise.”  

“I promise.” Eddie makes the sign of an x across the left side of his chest. “Hope to die.” 

You breathe out, long and slow, and flex your jaw as you hold him in your gaze.

“I don’t want you to die, I just wanted to know if…” you trail off, take a deep breath, “Would you kiss me?” 

It hits him like a brick to the face and for half a second, Eddie forgets how to breathe. He swallows hard against the way his throat has gone so suddenly dry and feels his life flashing before his eyes rather than really seeing it. He’s too blind to see it – his vision has gone spotty with a headrush, and it takes every single ounce of his self-control not to sway under the force of it.  

“You want…” he starts, and finds that when his voice fails him, he has to start again, “You want me to kiss you?”  

You nod.

Oh.

That’s what he was hoping you’d say, but Eddie spends a lot of time hoping for a lot of things that never end up happening, so it’s not what he expected you to say. And despite all the time he’s spent sitting around fantasizing about this exact moment – about the way you’d bat your lashes and lick your lips before giving him a soft, slow smile –  he doesn’t know what to say.

His functionality for speech has abandoned him entirely, so he just hums out this weird, pensive noise that is caught halfway between a giddy laugh and a desperately wanting whine.

For half a blinding second, he’s afraid it’s going to scare you off – because what the fuck was that?! – but your brows come down, and your lips twist up, and the next thing he knows, you’re laughing.

He’s laughing too. Because you want him to kiss you.   

You haven’t even been Amigos Oficial for twelve hours and here you are blowing past those barriers at the speed of light.

Life is so wonderful and weird sometimes.  

You want him to kiss you. You, want him. Genuinely and truly.  

Eddie’s mind is clawing at the planes of his skull, screaming desperately for release, and his heart…? Well, that fucker’s stopped beating all together. It’s dead on arrival.

You’re suddenly so close, closer than you’ve been all day, closer enough that he’s suffocating in the sweet, cloying scent of your perfume and your shampoo and your skin.

You smell so good that it kickstarts his salivary glands, and he has to swallow down the sudden excess of spit in his mouth.

“Eddie…?”

“Okay.” he says unevenly, “I mean — yes. I’ll… I’ll kiss you … uh…” he clears his throat, “When?”

You suck in a sharp breath and hold it and pull your shoulders up to your ears as you scrunch your features in that specific little way Eddie so desperately loves.

“I’m free now?” you offer, and – CLEAR – Eddie’s heart leaps back to life, bruising itself on his ribs and punching a breath out of him.

It’s violent, and it hurts a little in all the best ways, and it takes him a moment to learn how to work his brain again.    

“Oh – right – um … o-okay.” He says.

And then, he watches something indiscernible flash across your eyes in the wake of such a hesitation and you immediately begin to backpedal.

“I’m sorry, you don’t have to,” You say quickly, and isn’t that the worst thing anyone has ever said? “If that was totally off base…? If you don’t want to–”

“No! No, I do – I want to.”

“Do you?” you ask, so painfully hopeful it makes his insides throb with an unabashed wanting he is powerless to ignore. 

“Yeah… actually… I really do.” He says, growing shy again and swallowing it for his own sake, “…been thinkin about it for a while now.” 

“Oh – you have, have you?” You giggle, grinning as you tilt your head sideways to press your shoulder to your ear. “...okay, good.”

Eddie shifts further into your space and braces a hand on the floor at your hip.

“Great.”

Your gaze flits down, and you bite your lower lip to try and get control of the smile that is steadily growing wider and threatening to split your face in half. Like always, you fail miserably, and nose to nose, you can’t stop yourself from looking. Eyes up, then down again.  

“Excellent.” You purr. 

Eddie takes your face in hand and watches your eyes flutter shut as he tilts forward. He can feel your breath fanning his face in gentle, anxious puffs, and he savors this moment. The anticipation of the next step – the deep breath before the plunge. 

“Fan-tastic,” he whispers, gently knocking foreheads with you and breathing in your sigh as the tension reaches a boiling point. 

For over a year, this is all he’s wanted, all he’s thought about, and now that it’s here, he’s almost afraid to go forward with it. Not because he’s worried it won’t be everything he’s imagined and more, but only because, somehow, Eddie knows once he does this, there’s no going back.

There is a tangible fear that comes with that, despite the urgency he feels, imploring him to hurry up and kiss you already. He wants nothing more than to do exactly that, but he can’t help but linger in these final moments before his life changes forever.

He wants you to look at him when he does it, and bear witness to that change because after you, he’s never going to be the same again. He hopes you like the person you make out of him because people have been careless enough to mold him before and they haven’t always liked the results.  

Eddie thumbs the hollow beneath your eye, as if to banish an imaginary teardrop, and gently nudges your head back. He watches you, and he waits, hearing the way your breathing hitches as your lips part. After a moment, your eyes flit open curiously, bathing him in the warm glow of your attention, and only then is he ready to kiss you. 

BOOM.

Your bedroom door bangs loudly against the wall as it comes flying open, and Eddie has never been on his feet faster.

Shot full of adrenaline, his fingers twitch at his sides in anticipation of being told to “put his hands up”. But instead of the cops and your parents and a whole host of other authority figures ready to crucify him for deigning to drag you down to his depths, it’s just Carol standing there, leaning against your doorway, looking far too pleased and much more sober than she was the last time he saw her. 

“Hands to yourselves, Perverts,” She drawls, “There are underaged people in the audience.”   

Eddie’s got no idea what the hell that is supposed to mean, he only knows that if he doesn’t manage to regulate his heartbeat, he’s actually going to keel over and pass out.

And then, a high, squeaky voice cries your name, and suddenly you’re shouting right back.

“—Dustin!” You squawk, twisting around to peer across your bed at the smaller body that has appeared in your doorway, “What are you doing here?!”

The boy, who cannot be any older than twelve, has no front teeth and stands there furiously lisping back at you.

“What are you doing?!” he fires back, “What the hell is going on here? And who the hell is that?”

You ignore all three of his high-pitched questions in favor of one of your own.

“How many times have I told you – you have to knock!” you stress, and Eddie is half convinced that no one has ever spoken with such authority, even he feels chagrined about it.

Sometime, in the last few minutes, the party ended with a fizzle, rather than a bang, but neither of you has seemed to notice this with everything else currently going on. 

“Yeah Kiddo, you almost got an eyeful of something you could never unsee,” Carol stresses, leering across the room at Eddie, who suddenly has no idea what to do with his hands. 

“Is that your little brother?” He asks.

It feels like a stupid question to be asking, considering he’s fairly sure you don’t have any siblings, but then again, what does he know except that he's panicking and he doesn’t think he’s ever been so embarrassed in his life.

“No,” You huff, “That’s just the kid I babysit.”

“Just?!” the kid – Dustin, evidently – shouts.

Eddie looks at you, then at him, then back at you, and while he’s no expert on people’s younger siblings, he’s fairly certain he’s missing something.

“I thought you said you babysat Jonathan’s brother.” He says, offering you his hand as you begin to stand.

“I do,” you huff, putting your fingers in his and letting him pull you up, “But mostly I babysit this little shit.”

“LITTLE SHIT?!” He’s gone so red he’s almost purple now. “That’s it, this is over – right now!” 

He turns on his heel and storms back into the hall. 

“Dustin—” you call, to no avail.

“Right! Now!” He reiterates and disappears into the house.  

“What’s that mean?” Eddie asks.

Beside him, you breathe out hard through your nose and your shoulders drop.

“He’s gonna tell on me.” 

It’s almost funny, in a wholly bizarre, completely bewildering sort of way. 

If either of you were paying better attention to the rest of the house, and the sudden and conspicuous lack of music, or overall chatter, you might have noticed that something is suddenly very different about the front room.

“Oh, by the way,” Carol starts once the kid is gone, eyeing her manicure and still looking far too much like a cat in cream for Eddie’s comfort, “You should know, somebody called the cops.”

“What?!” You yelp.

“Yeah, I don’t know – something about somebody bringing drugs? You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you, Eddie?” she purrs, and behind her, he gets the first glimpse of flashing red and blue lights, painting the room through your front windows. “Anyway, they’re looking for you.” 

His stomach bottoms out, and just like that, there goes the other shoe. That’s what this was all about, the real reason Carol wanted him here so badly tonight. 

He doesn’t know if she called them or if it was one of your neighbors, but here is the Hawkins PD, coming to break up a party and cart him off to jail if he doesn’t get out of here right now.  

Before he can even begin to form a plan of escape, you seize Eddie by the front of his shirt and drag him around to your bedroom window. “You have to go!” 

“Oh, brother,” Carol sighs, “What kind of chivalrous bullshit–”

You force the window up in its frame with a deafening shriek, and the cool autumn air comes rushing in, clearing the air and Eddie’s mind of everything that just happened in the last two minutes.

“Go now!” 

He doesn’t need to be told twice. He’s out your window and gone the second his feet his the grass, and suddenly this all feels a lot more familiar than he’s happy with. Leaving a party out some side window and hitting the breeze while the Hawkins PD descends is pretty much par for the course for these little get togethers.

Except this time, there is the added bonus of being able to hear you distantly arguing with Carol – you accusing her of putting in the call, and her stridently defending herself against such a hideous (and likely true) accusation.

Beyond all of that he sees Jim Hopper, marching up your front lawn and into your house while his deputies try in vain to catch all the stray fishies pouring out of your home in droves. If Carol is telling the truth – which, to be fair, it is highly plausible that she is not – the chief of police is entering your house with the sole intention of rooting him out, and when he doesn’t find him, when he hears the talk about where Eddie’s been all evening, it’s going to be pretty easy to surmise what happened.  

You’re gonna take a lot of heat for what you just did for him, and he doesn’t know if you realize that.

How many little selfless acts can you perform for him without a second thought? And how can Eddie stand here and take it without doing something to repay you?

He has to do something, but what can he do? 

Well, it occurs to him that he can do exactly what you just asked him to do, as would only be right. 

But that’s crazy, right? He doesn’t have time for that kind of ooey-gooey “lasso the moon” nonsense when he ought to be long gone by now. The last thing he needs is to get caught and spend the night in jail, waiting for Wayne to get off shift and bail him out.

He doesn’t need to be running from the cops, either – he’s got a pair of handcuffs nailed to his bedroom wall to remind him of exactly that – but it occurs to Eddie that he can’t just leave, not without thanking you. Not without saying goodbye.

What kind of friend would he be if he did that? Certainly not your best friend, and certainly not more. 

He’s stupid, he’s foolish, he’s taking his life into his hands — he’s skirting back across the grass and hitting your windowsill with a muted thump.

When Eddie pops up, you’re still standing there, too preoccupied with fending off Carol to notice him looking in. The coast is clear, for now, so if he’s gonna do this, he better do it fast.

He reaches up to tug at the hem of your sleeve, and your name is out of his mouth before he has time to think better of it. You turn, and brace your hands on the windowsill to lean out and look down at him with wide, confused eyes.

“Eddie,” You gasp, “What are you still doing here? You gotta—”

He lifts up on his toes and kisses you. It’s only a quick, chaste brush of the lips to the corner of your mouth – he calculated wrong and misaimed – but it’s enough to send an electric shock ripping through both of your bodies. You freeze and go rigid, and behind you, Carol snorts out her disgust.

“Oh, fucking gross—” she gags.   

When Eddie drops back down his face is on fire, but he doesn’t wait to see what happens next.

He turns and runs, leaving you standing there, hanging halfway out your bedroom window as the first inkling of the police chief’s voice comes booming through the house.

“Okay – party’s over!” Jim Hopper shouts as Eddie escapes into the night, grinning wildly and laughing because, despite his better judgment, he’s pretty goddamn sure he's in love love love, and he’s home free. 

[bizaar]

Hiya! Just wanted to stop by and share how IMMENSELY re-readable I find endless/cruel summer to be. I think what calls me to come back to it, and think about your story time and time again are the collective decisive narrative moments. Especially, Part 7 where the narrative begins to converge with season four's plot-line.

It's one of crossroads where I cant help but think What if? Where would the characters be if they hadn't been thrown into that supernatural setting and remained in a mundane setting? Do you think Eddie would have discovered Reader was still in town, or would they have co-existed in Hawkins completely removed from each other's orbit with him being none the wiser?

I'm curious if this is something you've given any thought to!

p.s. it's been a delight to read endless summer and slowly watch our beloved dyad become more recognizable to who they develop to be in cruel summer. agh! good stuff!!

Bestie oh my God…. oh mY GOD you’re really gonna make me write another fic CAN YOU IMAGINE THAT???? I gotta sit down… I gotta think about this

[bizaar]

hey i really enjoyed the epilogue but im

a bit confused as english is not my first language. will there be more parts in the epilogue or is it an open ending?

much love 💝

Hi there! I’m glad you’ve enjoyed it so far — sorry for the confusion, there is at least one more part to the epilogue coming.

It’s on the back burner at the moment, because I have a few other things I need to finish first, but don’t worry, the cliff hanger will be wrapped up soon!

[bizaar]

You just utterly destroyed me with that two part epilogue my friend. WOOF.

😬😬😬

It wasn’t actually supposed to end like that but Tumblr took one look at me trying to post this beast and went “get out of my house”

Anywhomst, you get a snippet from the future too, just for being a good sport:

—

The thought made him panicky, even though it was only a sack of flour squeezed into a baby bonnet, and Eddie snatched him off of the desk before she could even reach for him - Frank.

He’d named him Frank, and that made him real.

He made some kind of an excuse about doing all the work, making sure they passed, and she dropped the subject without a fight. If he wanted to do it so bad, who was she to stop him?

Shelley found a new partner, and with the teacher’s permission, Eddie went on to single parent Frank.

At the end of the unit, he got the first and last A grade in his long and storied career at Hawkins High and then proceeded to go through a bizarre period of grieving when he had to give him back.

He couldn’t really explain it at the time, except that he was still so raw from being abandoned. He’d deluded himself into thinking that if he could raise that sack of flour without incident, raise it better than he’d been raised, it would mean he was worth a damn.

It would mean he was someone worth sticking around for.

That evening, Wayne took him out to celebrate the A grade.

Eddie sat opposite his uncle in the parking lot at Foster’s Freeze, ate his dinner with slow, meticulous bites, and cried silent tears for one more thing that was supposed to be his, and one more thing he was not prepared to lose.

Oh well.

No use crying over flour sack babies. Not with the real thing coming down the line.

[bizaar]

E92GE9WGW9DHEOWSNE9H39DBFF9RBWOS

translation: me letting you know to please keep going

I have so many comments from both part 1 and part 2 but it kind of all blurred together by the end into one heart-aching keysmash. that prologue left me fucking winded. I adore how you approach their trauma and healing post s4, some of the more ugly realities intertwined with the love they have for one another. Both of them having that underlying desperation to make sure the other is there and safe, that they actually both got out.

they just feel so real, it makes me that much more invested in their story. Truly, loved it so much.

so grateful for this story and you, as always 🖤

(also I have a desperate need to see Wayne and Eddie have that heart to heart)

You don’t know how much both yours and @jo-harrington ‘s commentaries mean to me 😭😭

I swear I didn’t mean to make it so angsty. I just wanted to write a silly little smut chapter but I’m The Worst™️

Don’t worry, though, there will be a heart to heart, I’m a considerate lover 😉 (when I’m not tired)

—

“Did y’all fight?”

Eddie shakes his head and flinches under a lingering stiffness in his neck that makes him think of braces and bandages and grueling physical therapy he couldn’t be bothered to do.

Betcha wish you’d stuck with it now, Moron.

Wayne makes a gravelly, displeased sound in the hollow of his throat.

“...well, somethin’ happened. A feller don’t get put in the doghouse for nothin’.”

That makes it sound like you kicked him out, but that’s not hardly true, because Eddie left on his own volition. He cut and run, stealing away with his tail between his legs and his heart in his throat.

He’s not supposed to do that anymore. He thought he’d broken that habit, down there in the dark.

[bizaar]

The devil works hard but fanfic authors work harder 🖤🖤 take a gold star ⭐, an optional forehead kiss 😘, and a mandatory glass of water💧 you all deserve the world

[bizaar]

Okay, I’ll give you two, one for each upcoming chapter— just ‘cause you’re all such good sports 💙

anyway, when is too soon to post a teaser for the Endless Summer update asking for a friend

[bizaar]

anyway, when is too soon to post a teaser for the Endless Summer update asking for a friend

[bizaar]

Cruel Summer Epilogue - Part Two

Masterlist - Part One - Part Two

pairing: Eddie Munson x fem!reader

warnings: sexual content (18+) minors DNI (you guys they go the fuck off idk what to tell you, gird your loins), pregnancy, mentions of sickness and vomiting, traumatic flashbacks, angst, swearing (please let me know if I missed anything, there's a lot going on here)

word count: 10k (still a beast but come on tumblr)

a/n: you guys don't look at me I am not kidding when I tell you this is NOTHING but filthy rabid smut

“Please,” you cry, “Please, please, please–”

“Good girl,”

You barely have time to register the way those words cause your walls to flutter and clench before he catches you in a tight, wet seal of heat, and goes to work with the soft warmth of that worship you’ve been waiting for. 

Your eyes slide shut, and your head drops back into the pillows. Somewhere in the distance, your mixtape has changed tracks again, and Heart is playing a heady soundtrack of commiseration as Eddie makes a meal out of you.  

Ohhh, he’s a magic man, Mama… and you can’t help but agree. 

The sweet warmth of concentrated attention fills your senses and makes your insides feel heavy — tongue, lips, gentle suction, bright burst of pleasure, rinse and repeat. 

A single direct graze, the stuttered rise and fall of your chest quivering on the beginnings of a needy whimper.

Christ, you always forget how good he is at this. You don’t know why, except that maybe the reverent finesse with which he applies the perfect combination of tongue and teeth and lips is enough to completely wipe your memory.

Eddie has always had a knack at turning that good head atop your shoulders into a useless piece of wanting, whorish meat, and part of you is certain that is never going to change. 

Your knees drift impossibly wider, allowing him the space to do all that he has to, and with every confident swipe of that lithe muscle, you feel yourself growing a little stupider in the best possible way. 

He teases your drooling center with the tip of his tongue, drawing a tight circle ‘round and ‘round and gently probing until your jaw goes slack on a moan that you swallow before it can escape. 

You set your teeth, breathe in through your nose – steal half a dozen pregnancy tests and go all the way across town to drop your jeans and pee on the stick and wait wait wait – 

“Eddie—” you whine. 

“That’s it. Keep talking, Baby…” Eddie hums, you flinch against the fanning of his breath against your slick folds, “Wanna hear that sweet voice of yours…” 

Shit — fuck, oh fuck… should you keep trying to tell him? Where did you leave off? 

Thankfully, your man is nothing if not a gentleman and is more than happy to prompt you. 

“Something good but…?”

“B-but…” You stutter, gasp, “But it's-it’s kind of –ahh, hmm– kind of … s-s-scary.” 

Your fingers drifting instinctually down to knot themselves in the tangled halo of still-damp curls set snuggly between your trembling thighs. You’d intended to use your grip to ease him back — because you’re going to need the use of your brain if you expect to get anywhere with this confession— but you suddenly don’t know which way is up and end up pulling him closer rather than edging him away. 

You rake your nails over his scalp and tense against the way he hums in encouragement, bucking your hips forward and grinding against his face in search of more more more… 

Eddie hooks his hands under your hips and pulls you closer. Closer, closer, he always needs you closer, and you’re nothing if not happy to oblige him. 

A vulgar wet smack rings out a little too loudly through the room and your stomach clenches, cheeks burning with the lewdness of it. 

For a time that seems to stretch on and on and on indefinitely, the pair of you simply exist like that, sealed together by one lewd point of slurping, sopping, writhing connection. You’ve lost complete track of yourself, where you end and Eddie begins, and suddenly there is nothing and no one but you and him and this moment of mounting ecstasy. 

If you had any functional use of your brain at that moment, you might have tried to reign yourself in a little, because you’ve suddenly become exceedingly vocal – vocal in the way your neighbors are bound to complain about later on – but what's a girl to do when her head has gone so empty?

You’re aching inside, moaning so loud that you’re practically howling with ecstasy, and you can barely hear the music, imploring you to come on home girl – you’ll be there before you know it if he keeps up like this.

“So good to me,” Eddie moans when he breaks for air, “Always so good to me – let me be good to you, huh? Let me treat you right…” 

Pussy drunk is perhaps the best way to describe the slurring, heady timbre he’s suddenly adopted, and the notion would have made you laugh if you weren’t feeling its effects too. You can barely think through the fog of impending orgasm.

You lick your lips and nod your head — yes, he’s so good, it’s so so good and you’re so close– 

“Huah fuck! Jesus Christ—!” You yelp, hips bucking up at the sudden and startling intrusion of the two thick fingers you were not prepared to receive, stretching you and crooking up to tease the coil in your belly tighter and tighter. 

“Nope, still me,” he says — Jackass — and you can feel his teeth on your pussy as he smiles.

“Fuck you” you’d meant to say, but with your wires so hopelessly crossed, you get lost along the way and forget just who the sentiment is meant for.

“Fuck me,” you gasp, head lolling back again into the pillows as it swells and becomes suddenly much too heavy to lift.

“Be patient, Sweetheart,”

Oh, he’s the worst – he’s the absolute worst.    

The rational part of your brain that wants so badly to be heard might usually suggest that a fella ought to warn a girl before he goes doing something like that, but it has gone suddenly very quiet under the muffled howling of your animal brain when Eddie turns his attention to that swollen bundle of nerves, so woefully unattended to.

You curl your hands into fists in his hair and you pull. Harder than you’d meant to, but there are no small measures when he’s sucking and fucking you like a drowning man fighting for air.   

A particularly sharp burst of pleasure has you yanking hard enough on his hair to jerk him up ever so slightly, and Eddie makes a noise that nearly sends you over the edge. It’s the kind of noise that is going to haunt you later in the most inopportune moment, and he grips your thigh so tightly, you know it’s going to bruise. 

You don’t care. That useless slab of meat occupying space in your skull is more concerned with canting your hips forward and back in a stuttering rhythm, trying so desperately to match time with Eddie’s fingers, all while he’s still got your clit trapped in the tight seal of his lips — sucking, sucking, fucking hell, you’re so close.

Tragically, before you can let him in on that secret, he releases you with an unbearably loud slurp that sends a chill rocketing up your spine. A man’s got to breathe, sure, but you still whine out your disappointment in the sudden absence of that sinful mouth. 

Eddie leans heavily against the trembling flesh of your inner thigh as he fills his lungs. He rubs his face against you to wipe away the slickness coating his lips and chin before evidently changing his mind about that, and lapping it back up with gentle kitten licks. Each shy swipe of his tongue brings with it a hungry sound of ecstasy, rumbling up from his chest.

You shudder and clench almost painfully around his probing fingers, and you can feel him smiling against you again — God, he’s the worst — working you in the way he knows best and getting off to it. 

You can’t see him doing it, but you can feel the bed moving independently of you, and the haggard uneven cadence of his breath fanning your folds and drying the sweat in the crook of your thigh tacky. You can hear him tugging on his cock, using your slick to ease the friction, and it’s entirely too much. 

The sound is already halfway out of your mouth before you realize you’re even making it. You’d only meant to try and breathe out, but the raunchy schlick schlick schlick of skin on skin as he fucks his fist forces a strange, guttural sound out of you. One that Eddie quickly mimics.

“Yeah?” He pants, “Getting close, Sweetness?”

Close is a gross understatement – you’re right fucking there.

He curls the fingers inside of you in a come hither motion, pressing firmly into that coveted spot on your inner wall – the one you can never reach on your own – and your body lights up like a live wire. 

You pull your lower lip tight between your teeth but quickly release it as you cry out, nodding emphatically as tears suddenly prick at your lashes.

“So close,” you mewl, “God — I’m so close—“

“Don’t cry, Baby,” he says, slipping his fingers from the quivering, clenching walls of your pussy and reaching up to stroke your cheek fondly – wetly – the unabashed raunchiness of the gesture has you clenching tragically on nothing, gasping — sobbing. “Don’t worry – Daddy’s coming…” 

Ugh, God… 

He’s lucky you’re so hot for him because it just about kills the mood entirely. 

“You’re the fucking worst–” you moan, and he cackles villainously in a way that sends an electric shock right down to the base of your spine.

Eddie wipes his hand crudely on the mattress beside you, then inexplicably, he untangles himself from your legs and retreats. 

What the fuck?

In the moments it has been since he stopped finger fucking you, the coil in your belly that had been so tight, so close to snapping only moments before, begins to lose tension.

You shift up to look at him with hazy, half-lidded eyes and are devastatingly confused to find him just sitting there, sphinxlike, and watching you with immeasurable patience.  

He’s not even touching himself anymore, he’s just got that shitty little mischievous smirk on his face, and you know whatever it is he’s about to do, it’s going to be unbearable. 

Oh, it’s not fair, it’s not fucking fair. You were right there.

You squirm, trying to catch the climax that is so steadily slipping through your fingers, but every time you move your hips to try and entice him once more, he shifts backward a little further and denies you your prize. 

The coil continues to unravel, losing slack at a devastating pace. This time when you try to reach him, Eddie pushes your legs up to pin your knees against your chest, and he holds you there, bearing down on you with all his weight. 

“Eddie–” you whine. “Come on–” 

“Take it back,” he says, and you almost don’t believe you heard him correctly.

“...Huh?” you gasp, blinking stupidly up at him as he looms over you in a way that might be misconstrued as menacing on anyone else. “Take what…?”

“Tell me I’m the fucking best,” He demands, shifting off the mattress and slowly easing out of his boxers. 

“W-what?” you stammer, trying not to get caught on the way his cock bounces up to slap audibly against the taught line of his stomach. 

He kneels back on the bed, never taking his eyes off of you as he moves with a glacial, calculated stoicism.

“Who’s the fucking best?” he calls in a gentle sing-song, spreading your legs and pushing them flat against the mattress, splaying you open and taking a good long look at what you’ve suddenly got on display – his gaze is blown dark and wide when his eyes flit back up to your face, “And who’s the best at fucking?”

You groan. 

“Jesus – you and that fucking ego—” 

You bite your sentence off with a startled yelp as, with both hands on your hips, he yanks you further down the bed and slots himself in place between your legs.

You watch him watching you as he takes himself in hand and begins teasing you with a raunchy, painfully slow-up and down. He nudges the domed tip of his uncut cock through the dripping slick of your folds, only just barely there and not enough to actually do anything useful. 

“Take. It. Back.” He says slowly, emphasizing the words with each agonizing pass through your wetness. 

You grind out a deeply frustrated groan and push up on your elbows, shifting uncomfortably as the waterbed rocks beneath you – stupid waterbed – and opening your mouth to give him a piece of your mind.

“What makes you think you can–ah!” He snaps his hips into place with all the grace and finesse of a cowboy holstering his gun.

Eddie slides in all the way to the base and is seated firmly in your guts before you feel the press of his hips on your ass. 

Your mind turns to meat again – giddyup.

“Say it.” He says, thrusting into you and setting an agonizingly slow pace – fucking you the way he’d lay fucking the bed – and it already has you coming apart at the seams. 

You suppose that’s what you get for teasing him earlier.  

“Hah–!–fucking shit! I take— Jesus Christ — I take it back!” 

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.” 

You feel every inch as he pulls back and almost all the way out before snapping back again, each hungry thrust slamming home with enough force to make you see stars. Your arms tremble and fail under your weight, and you drop back into the pillows.

He’s punishing you for something, you know it. Maybe for being mean, for yelling at him, or maybe for making him wait around all afternoon and refusing to tell him where you went, but it’s punishment all the same. 

Eddie’s not cruel, but he likes to take his time as he dismantles you. He likes it painfully slow and hard enough to knock the headboard against the wall, and you are nothing if not the impatient recipient of his love.

“...you’re so… hah – s-so…” You try to say, but he drives the words right out of you with a sharp snap of his hips.

“So what?”

He knows exactly how stupid he’s making you. 

“So f-fuckingg mean…”

You can feel the vibration of his laughter buzzing into you through his cock and it’s nearly enough to make you seize.

“Yeah, but you like it, don’t you?” he pants, “Tell me how much you like it,”

You try to answer, to tell him to fuck off and stop bossing you around, but you’ve been rendered understandably mute as you fist your hands in the sheets and do your best to push back against him and meet his every thrust. It’s difficult with the waterbed roiling beneath you, but you try all the same because you know at this pace he isn’t going to last long and you’ll be damned if he runs out of steam before you cum. 

And then, almost as if he’d anticipated the thought, Eddie puts a hand on your hip and forces you down, holding you pinned so you can’t do more than take what he has to give.   

It is only enough to keep you teetering on the torturous edge, never enough to send you over, never too little to draw you back, but it feels so fucking good.

This is why you really let him fuck you into oblivion every night. Not because he needs it or because it’s one of the only things that stirs the embers of his old personality. 

It’s because he’s really, really fucking good at it.

You can feel the litany of whorish noises flowing from your lips more than you can hear them over the vulgar sounds that fill the air with every pass of his cock through your aching hole. 

You’re painfully tuned into it all: the harsh slap of skin on skin, his soft grunting and moaning fills the room as he moves, and the slick mess dripping down the backs of your thighs, making for a smooth glide in and out of you and helping him to sustain his quickening pace. 

You’re suddenly so wet. You can feel it making a sopping wet mess of him as well as yourself, and it’s enough to make your toes curl and your walls flutter. You clench over the length of him, drawing a low rattling moan from deep within his chest, and feel a bright burst of warm satisfaction flood your veins.

Good to know you’re not the only one so affected by this. 

You’re only vaguely aware of all the things Eddie has begun to say as he fucks you. The raunchy little questions and affirmations to which you can only nod along in consent, too drunk on the delicious sensation of being so perfectly stretched to form any kind of coherent response.

You can’t believe you weren’t going to let him fuck you tonight.

Yes, it feels good — so, fucking good. Yes, you like it when he fucks you like this —faster, more! Yes, you’re his good girl, taking him so well — don’t stop — yes, yes yes yes…!

“God–” He grinds out, cutting into the endless tide of your babbling, “—I can feel you squeezing me – Jesus — fuck, you’re so tight…”

The sudden vice Eddie has on your waist is a crushing thing as he forces your knees up and bears down on you with all his weight. He’s suddenly so much deeper than he was before, pressed flat against you and as close as he can possibly get (without slipping beneath your skin). 

He begins a punishingly slow, grind, just the perfect amount of friction against the swollen, needy bundle of your nerves to have you writhing under him.

Now, this? This is exactly how you like it. 

Your eyes roll back and slide shut as you press your head into the pillows and arch beneath him, exposing the tender columns of your throat and mewling at the intensity of this new position.

“Oh— f-f-uh—!” You bite the curse off with a shrill gasp, one hand flying down to grip his wrist as his palm splays over the lowest point of your belly, applying pressure there like he is in danger of bursting through your abdomen and needs to hold himself in, “Fuck! E-Eddie—!”

“I know, Baby,” He grinds out, cupping your cheek with a tender, sweaty hand, “I know…”

You’ve got your lower lip pulled so tightly between your teeth that you half expect to taste blood as the heat in your abdomen quickly begins to bloom and wind itself into the tight, vibrating coil which had eluded you before. Your lips part on a gasp, and he presses the pad of his thumb down into the middle of your tongue. You close your mouth around the digit and suck the lingering salt of your own desire from where it has dried tacky on his skin. 

Eddie moans, and after a moment, you can feel him beginning to tremble. He falls forward to brace a hand on the mattress beside your head, and he keeps fucking you, but with decidedly less gusto than a moment before as his thrusts become sloppy and immeasured.

You heart jumps in anticipation of what is about to happen.

“Are you close?” You ask, curling your fingers around his quivering, sweaty forearm.

He’s breathing so hard over you, you might be surprised to learn he wasn’t teetering on the edge of an earth-shattering orgasm, but only if you didn’t know what you knew about Eddie’s stamina these days.  

“Uh… hah – n-not quite, Sweetheart.” He says, swallowing hard and gasping out a haggard, raspy breath, “Not yet… but I’m getting there.”

Oh, shit – you were afraid he was gonna say that. He’s getting tired, too tired to keep up this pace at least, and that means you’re suddenly on a time limit here. 

The problem with Eddie on top these days is he has, unfortunately, become all bark and no bite. 

He can’t do a lot of things he used to, like sit up straight in a chair for too long, or run faster than a staggering jog, or fuck you like he used to without cramping, stuttering, and losing steam before either of you can finish. 

It’s not his fault, and yet it is, because he quit physical therapy before he could make any real headway, and more specifically because he smoked half a pack of Camels today.

Suddenly faced with the possibility that he might not finish, you take matters into your own hands.

“Come on,” you say, reaching up to hold the back of his neck, pulling him down so you’re nose to nose. You kiss him, “Don’t stop, you’re almost there.”

He nods and does his best to find his rhythm again, and you do all that you can to assist him in that. You hook a leg over his hip when he paws at your knee, feeling only the slightest bit of difference in this new position, lying on your side and facing him. 

“Doing so good,” you say, hoping that a little praise will be as effective on him as it is on you, “Keep going – that’s it, that’s my good boy…”

“Oh, fu– fuck!” he stammers, sweaty fringe sticking to the both of you as you knock foreheads.

Normally, referring to Eddie as your “Good Boy” is just about enough to turn him completely feral, and despite the eagerness it attempts to muster in him, he only manages a short burst of wild thrusting before he stutters and falls off his rhythm altogether. 

It draws a pitiful whine from deep within you as the orgasm you’d been hurdling toward begins to turn gossamer and slip through your fingers.

You try to take as much of the slack as you can and smother him with everything you know drives him crazy. 

“Such a good boy… so good for me,” You moan in a hushed and breathy whisper. “Love you fucking me like this – love you so much. God – don’t stop, Eddie… don’t–”

He tries to oblige you – he really does – picking up the rhythm again and again, but it’s slower every time he falters, and the desperate canting of your hips becomes borderline violent as you attempt to compensate for the way he’s steadily flagging.

He’s burning so hot and shaking badly enough that you have half a mind to put your hand on his forehead and check his temperature, but you know his is a fever of a different kind, and it sends a hot wave of pressure blooming in your stomach. 

You’re almost there, you just need a little longer and you’re almost certain you can get him there too if you can make this last, but after only a few more arrhythmic stops and starts, Eddie makes a harsh sound and hitches as something evidently pulls in his bad side. 

“Ow, shit–!” he yelps, stopping to grasp at the spot where it suddenly hurts, “Ah – Goddammit…”

“What’s wrong?” You ask, but he’s shaking his head, and you know before he says anything that he’s reached the end of his tether.

“I can’t–” he says, fighting for breath between every word, “Baby, I’m sorry … I gotta … I gotta stop,” 

He drops heavily on top of you, crushing you flat, and just like that, he’s finished without either of you managing to cum. 

Goddammit indeed.  

You try not to let him hear the agitated sigh you breathe as he rolls off of you, painting you in his sweat and sliding onto his back with a weighty groan. For a moment, you just lay there, staring at the ceiling and listening to him try to catch his breath as the euphoric high of your bunnyfucking steadily begins to fade.

“Sorry, Baby,” Eddie’s voice comes lilting up from your right side, bracketed by the charcoally rattle of his labored breathing. 

You pull your shoulders up and cross your arms over your chest, hugging your biceps as you sigh. 

“You tried your best,”

“Don’t say that,” he says, sounding incredibly hurt by the idea that that could be his best.

He didn’t even finish.

“Why not?” you ask, turning over to face him, “Didn’t you?” 

It occurs to you that it sounds a tad too much like an accusation, but before you can rethink your tone, it’s his turn to sigh. It’s a deeply frustrated thing that quickly turns into a loud groan as he throws his arms over his eyes.

“Fuck me,” Eddie growls.

After a moment, you sit up and cross your legs, staring down at the pitiful, sulking form of your boyfriend – another image you would hang with the placard of “man’s mounting shame” – then again, maybe not, considering the indecent little detail of his hard-on is still lying stiffly against his belly. 

Evidently, not every part of his body got the message that the game was over. He may be done, but his dick is not, which means it’s not all bad news.    

He did just ask you to fuck him after all. 

“Lay back,” you say.

Eddie drops his arms to watch as you swing your leg over to straddle him.    

He puts his hands on your hips and gets caught in a volleying back and forth of looking up at you and looking down at where you’re settling over him, like he can’t believe you would do something so generous. 

“You sure?” He asks unevenly, and you shush him.

“Just lay back,”

“...You’re an angel, you know that?” Eddie sighs and does as he’s told, settling back into the pillows and letting you take the reins.   

You resist the urge to tell him you’re only trying to get off, and let him believe it’s a tirelessly selfless act as you lift up onto your knees, carefully taking his tender, twitching cock in hand and guiding it home once more. 

If he knew how self serving the gesture really was, you don’t think he would mind, because at least this way he still gets to cum. 

You do all the work, and you’re still the vessel. 

Eddie breathes out a weighty, relieved sigh, and you shudder as he slips in with only the slightest bit of resistance. You never get used to that initial stretch the pull of gravity gives in this position as you sink down over the broad flare of him. 

You’d been on top the first time you’d ever slept together, and you remember thinking that it was a deeply generous gesture on Eddie’s part, letting you set the pace like that. He’d pulled you so tight against him that night and held you close as he guided you through those first few moments of bright and blinding discomfort. It was the best first time a girl could hope for, and you used to love being on top, but these days, it’s never as good as it used to be. 

With you on top, Eddie is more than likely just going to lie there with his hands on your hips while you do all the work. He’s a considerate lover when he’s not tired, or at least he used to be, but you can’t imagine he���s got much steam left after the earlier pace he’d set. 

What it really means, however, is that you have got to be very careful how you proceed, or the orgasm you’d been hurdling toward moments ago will have a very good chance of wandering off entirely. So, you shut your eyes, and you go to work, with your brows furrowed and your lower lip pulled taught between your teeth in concentration.

At some point over the course of the last few minutes, your mixtape ended, so the room is nearly silent as you bounce and listen to the soft, wet sounds that steadily begin to fill the room again. The much quieter groaning and muttered praise – coming entirely from Eddie’s end this time – your own breathing, the halfhearted creak of the bedframe, and worst of all, the loud slopping of the mattress roiling beneath you.

It’s all suddenly unbearably gross.

You do your best to shut it out and focus on the stretch when you drop, the pull when you lift up again, and how you can feel every ridge and imperfection sliding through your pussy. 

It's not nearly as effective as it was before, but then again, you don’t have nearly as much help this time. Something stirs in the pit of your stomach, and it is tragically not the first inklings of an orgasm. You breathe out slowly to try and banish the sick feeling roiling there, and distantly feel a muted stab of pleasure make an attempt at rising to claim the real estate it vacates. 

It’s middling, at best, but it’s better than nothing.   

Had you been looking, you would have seen Eddie staring, eyes hooded and mesmerized by the joining of your bodies.

You would see him looking so completely lovesick and watching the creamy slick ring dripping down to wet the thatch of coarse hair at the junction of his trembling thighs. It might even be enough to help you skip the prerequisite buildup and jump right to the ecstasy, but you’re not looking. You’re too busy rising up on your knees and dropping back down at a starkly disciplined pace – not so fast that you might bite things off too soon, but not too slow as to lose the steady building of bright sensation, welling in the pit of your stomach for the third time.

You shift, trying to find the perfect angle, to emulate the way he so easily takes you to pieces. Every one of your calculated movements is made with extreme caution as you work to construct that elusive tower of power. You don’t understand how Eddie does it, how he always knows exactly where to touch you, where to find that perfect spot and press on it until you’re a blubbering sloppy mess. 

Maybe if you can just – a slight shift backward. A little to the left … you know it’s there, if only because of how aggressively he’d been pounding on it only a few moments ago – bastard. You grit your teeth and breathe out hard through your nose, searching… searching … getting warmer. 

You jump as you feel the tip of him graze it – that elusive spot – and gasp at the bright sensation darting shyly across your midsection and fight to remember just exactly what you did to get there.

Then, your concentration falters when you feel Eddie reach up to paw at your tits and tug impatiently at the hem of your shirt.

“Take this off,” he says, voice thick with the gravely timbre of arousal.

You swat his hands away.

“Shh, I’m trying to concentrate,” 

It’s suddenly so much harder to pretend that this hasn’t become a completely self serving act – the bloom is officially off the evening’s rose. He makes a put-out sound in the hollow of his throat and answers you with no small amount of sarcasm. 

“Oh, boy, isn’t that sexy?” 

“Eddie – shut up,” you warn him and brace your hands on his stomach, tilting forward ever so slightly to try and change the angle without losing your rhythm.

You’re not trying to be sexy, you’re just trying to get this over with, and if he’s too stupid to realize that, that’s his problem. 

Don’t be unkind – that little nagging voice can shut up too. If Eddie doesn’t let you cum this time, you’re going to kill him.

The rocking of the waterbed is so much worse up here, and suddenly you’re teetering on the edge of seasickness. You drop your chin to your chest as another wave of nausea threatens to overtake you, and you grab for Eddie’s hand, peeling his fingers away from the fat of your hip and moving them to the point of your connection.

The way you see it, he might as well do something while he’s doing nothing.  

Thankfully, he takes the hint without needing to be asked, and presses his thumb down, drawing tight, firm circles over your clit that sends out an immediate beacon of relief. Waves of ecstasy bleed up into your abdomen, steadily smothering the sick feeling scrambling for purchase there, and you sigh out a wistful moan of pleasure.

And thank God for that.

“Like that–?” He tries – you put your hand over his mouth.

Normally, you like how mouthy he is during sex, but under those circumstances you would have already cum twice by now, so what you need is for him to shut his goddamn mouth and let you do this.

Why can’t he just shut up and let you finish what he started? That fantastic, euphoric thing?      

You need to feel that again, feel him, but you’re not as good as he is at this, and you’re starting to grow numb under the continued up and down, hitting all the wrong spots and hopeless to find the right one again without his help.

You fold under the weight of the conflicting sensations – the middling results of your bouncing and the building pressure of his thumb on your clit – and you fall forward. Forearms braced on the bed, bracketing Eddie’s head, your hips stutter and you fall off your rhythm. 

You drop your head to press your forehead to his and hum out your frustration. 

“Help me,” You say breathlessly, and if there is one thing you can trust in on this good green Earth, it is that Eddie will do anything you ask, no matter what. 

You gasp when he rolls his hips and instantly strikes the spot you’d been working so hard to find. It’s a halfhearted effort because he’s too tired to do much else, but he curls his free arm around your back and pulls you flush to his sweat slicked body.

Your legs drift wider over top of him, and with the gentle rocking added to the dutiful ministrations of his fingers on your clit, you finally start to get somewhere.

You bury your face in the crook of his neck and moan, and the part of you that loves him so badly you feel insane with it sometimes, even when you can’t stand him, urges you to bite him. Not hard, you don’t want to hurt him, but there’s something primal about the need to feel his skin between your teeth.

Something about his neck has always made you hungry, ever since you first met, you’ve always felt the need to sink your teeth in, but the tender, puckered skin beneath your lips as they part reminds you that you are not the only creature who has ever given in to that urge. You want to bite him, to thank him and let him know just how much you love him, but it’s because you love him that you won’t do it (even if he did it to you first).

You press your tongue to the ruined skin stretched over his jugular and taste the salt of him. The hand pressed to the small of your back comes up to cradle the back of your neck as you lathe and gently suckle the spot, hyper conscious of every wonderful sound it pulls from him, waiting for the slightest hint that it is becoming too much. 

But fucking him like this suddenly feels so unbearably impersonal – he could be anyone laying beneath you. Not truly, because his is the only body you’ve ever known and you know his body as well as you do your own.

You’d know him in the dark with your eyes closed (you have, many times before) but a misplaced, creeping dread building at the base of your spine is suddenly so worried he won’t be there if you look, despite the needy pull of his hands and the gentle fanning of his breath warming you. It’s been too long since you checked to make sure he is still here with you.

You need to be sure, but, if you open your eyes, you’re half afraid you’re going to lose your concentration and all this will have been for nothing – it’s never for nothing, but some nights you need those means at the end of that long and winding road as badly as he does – so you reach out with scrabbling fingers and take a possessive fist of his hair. 

Eddie groans out a pitiful sound, and when you give a sharp tug to his scalp, his hips buck up, driving him deeper into the greedy sucking heat of your pussy. 

You gasp and share the sentiment of “oh, fuck”, which comes tumbling from both your mouths when you spasm around him.   

“Shit—getting close,” Eddie says, and you’re struck with an oddly contrary feeling.

You’re not nearly there yet, so you pull tighter, and you rock your hips back and try to force some kind of a synergy into your conjoined, sloppy movements. No matter how hard you try, you can’t seem to manage to get in sync. 

You roll your hips over top of him like he isn’t even there, and fuck him the same way you would fuck a pillow you’d forced into the shape of something. You’re using him to get off rather than working together, and if you were thinking clearly, if you weren’t just trying to cum, you might understand that that was the issue here. 

You feel the muscles in his abdomen tense and release as he makes a high, desperate noise and tries to swallow it down. He starts to squirm and writhe beneath you, and you know he’s reached the edge – he’s about to cum.

You also know that by the way he’s suddenly gone silent, he’s probably fighting tooth and nail to hold on to it until you can get there, and you hate him for being such a gentleman. 

“Fuck-fuck –” he pants after a long moment of squirming, “Baby – tell me-tell me you’re close – I can’t…m’gonna–”

“Don’t–” you gasp, seizing him by the jaw and pushing bolt upright so you can ride him in earnest. “Don’t you dare!” 

You don’t even want to hear him say it. He hums out a pathetic whine, but nods in agreement. He won’t cum until you do, and you’re gonna hold him to it. 

You rock your hips violently back in forth, rising on your knees until he’s almost slipped out of you entirely and dropping with enough force to make him grunt with the effort. You feel almost panicky, heart pounding against your ribs as you desperately try to feel him as deeply as possible in one last ditch effort to beat him to the finish line.

You hadn’t realized that’s what you were aiming for until this moment, but that nasty little competitive streak in you has lit a fire in your belly that doesn’t feel nearly close enough to an orgasm as you need it to.

You know he can go deeper, and yet you can feel his hip bones kissing bruises into the backs of your thighs, and when that math refuses to explain itself, you release your hold on Eddie’s jaw and tilt backward, bracing your hands behind you on his trembling thighs.  

Beneath you, Eddie squirms with the effort of trying to stay above water. Had you been looking – and part of you truly wishes you had – you would have seen how he’s flushed a bright, pretty crimson all the way down to his chest, brows pinched, jaw set, teeth clenched, and upon closer inspection, you would have seen tears pricking at the corners of his eyes as he goes to pieces beneath you. 

You can’t see how you’re tearing him to pieces, but you can hear it. Every needy little sound he makes as you ride him to the end of the earth.  

“Oh, God–” he chokes, “Mmmgonna cum… Baby – Sweetheart, please let me–”

“Almost there–” you gasp, reaching down to flick at your clit, “Just– just a little longer…”

“– I can’t I can’t – hnnghfffuck  – please!”

You ignore him in favor of bouncing faster, trying to keep Eddie from going to smoke beneath you, trying to keep him here with you, and he makes a harsh, pitiful noise, something crossed between the agony of ecstasy and a pained yelp.

Almost there, almost…

“Don’t stop,” you say, over and over in a breathless mantra, as if they were the magic words to push you over the edge, “Don’t stop, dont—don’t stop…” 

And then, he braces his feet on the mattress (as best he can, stupid fucking waterbed) and arches as he drives up into you, three sharp thrusts that hammer the elusive spot in your furthest wall with enough bruising force to nearly send you toppling over backward.

You would have done just that if he hadn’t seized you by your forearm to aid in the movement he wasn’t prepared to make, but it’s the last blessed push you needed to get there. 

It hits you like a freight train, without any hint of warning. Fire explodes in your belly in a storm of ecstasy that shoots sparks out to every corner of your body. You tense so hard your bones creak under the duress of your orgasm, and the sound that tears itself from your lungs is loud enough to savage your voice box. 

You’re powerless to resist the way your body seizes under the force of your climax, though distantly, you realize that’s not you – when it struck you and sent you hurdling over the side of that cliff, you pulled Eddie right down with you.

His face is screwed up in that devastated look of agony as he punches his hips up and pulls you down in the same moment. The muscles in his stomach spasm and heave with every beat of his orgasm, painting your inner walls with ropey bursts and filling you to brimming.

It’s just enough to keep the hot bloom in your abdomen undulating for that much longer, and when the initial brightness of climax releases you and finally begins to subside, you continue to tremble under the waning aftershocks of pleasure. 

Eddie sinks bonelessly beneath you, and hisses from the blessed kiss of overstimulation every time you clench over him. You don’t mean to keep doing it, but yours is a hungry pussy, and she never seems to know when enough is enough. 

When it becomes too much and those little noises become distant and pained, you push up on shaking knees. He slips out of you, you slump forward, and you lay your head on his heaving chest to listen to your favorite song as his cock grows soft against his thigh.

Eddie’s heart thumps with the erratic fervor of exhaustion as you lay pressed together, gulping down needy breaths of stagnant, sex tinged air. 

You’re vaguely aware, lying atop Eddie like this and bearing down on him with all your dead weight, that you ought to roll over, so you don’t hurt him, but your body has taken on the consistency of half-set Jell-O and you’re not certain you could move if you tried. 

Suddenly, the heavy up and down of wounded lungs fighting for air is replaced by a mirthful shaking, and you realize that Eddie is laughing. 

“Jesus fuck–” he says, completely spent yet totally satisfied and you can’t help but share the sentiment. 

You pat the side of his face with your open, sweaty palm.

“Good job.” 

“Team effort,” He peels your hand from his face and raises it to clap with a weary high five, “Go team,”

Your body trembles as you begin to snicker, and the bed moves right along with you.

“God, I hate this motherfucking bed.” Eddie sighs, and your insides bloom with residual pleasure. You win. 

You keep the triumph of that to yourself, however, and just pat him gently on the shoulder.

“I know, Eds.” 

As the blissful numbness of the afterglow begins to fade, you start to come back to your senses and realize with no small amount of aggravation that you’re going to have to get back in the shower. 

At least this time it’ll be easier to coax Eddie in with you.

Your palms stick as you brace your hands on his chest and push up, slowly, because you’re still too wobbly to trust that you won’t go toppling over again. 

When you look, there are angry red marks in his skin where you hadn’t realized you’d dug your nails in when you came, and you feel a pang of despair over hurting him.

He follows your eyes down to them, and regards them with a gentle, probing hand.

“Like ‘em?” He asks, “I just got ‘em done.” 

“Did I hurt you?”

He offers you a lopsided shrug.

“I’ve taken worse knocks,” he says, “What about you?”

“I’m okay…” you say, trying not to think about how unpleasant the cooling slickness between your thighs is. 

It suddenly reminds you far too much of sticky blood spurting with every thump of your erratic heart, and your scar throbs with the memory of how badly your hands shook as you fought to tie a tourniquet off at the top of your thigh.

You feel the pinch of fingers at your elbow as Eddie fumbles with putting a hand on you.  

“Hey, you good?” he asks unevenly, lifting his head to peer at you through heavy lidded eyes, “You’re shaking.” 

You banish any lingering feeling of your trauma, attempting to claw it’s way back to the front of your mind and give him a wry smirk.

“Wonder why,” 

He makes a pleased, fucked out sound in the hollow of his throat.

“You ready to say it now?” he asks, and when you give him a puzzled look, his eyebrows jump with innuendo, “Who’s the best at–”

You whip the pillow out from beneath his head before he can finish and hit in in the face with it.

He really is the fucking worst, and you hope he never changes.

This time when you step into the shower, you do it together. You lean heavily against each other as the stream washes away all evidence of your lovemaking – save for the bruises, of which there are many – and after, you let Eddie towel you off.

Neither of you has it in you to change the bedsheets, so you settle on laying a towel down. You’ll do laundry in the morning – it feels oddly hopeful, that there is something waiting for you on the other end of this strange, strange night, even if it’s only laundry. 

Tomorrow well and truly is another day. You settle into bed together, and take great comfort in that – you did you best, and you can try again tomorrow. 

Back to front, knees tucked in behind yours, arms around your midsection pulling you tight against him, you lay against Eddie and feel his heart beating between your shoulder blades.

Forget all your petty grievances and fears and frustrations. Forget anything but this moment and every moment you’ve had like this since you first climbed up into the hospital bed to lay against him. Whatever happens, whatever you lost, this is enough. 

It has to be, because you almost lost this, and you don’t know what you would do without it. You don’t know what you would do without him. 

Laying there in the still dark of four hundred square feet, you begin to feel something drumming on your throat. Not Eddie or anything tangible, but the urge to speak, to spill your guts, to tell the truth. 

Oh, fuck off, you tell the feeling, Alright already.

It’s only when you feel his breathing go slow and deep, and you are almost certain he is asleep do you finally muster your courage.

You’re possessed with a sudden calm. Maybe it’s because you’re certain Eddie isn’t listening, and maybe it’s because secrets are always easier to spill when whispered in the dark, but that hot coal of truth has suddenly become too much to bear. 

Behind you, Eddie shifts in his sleep, readjusts, and pulls you tighter against him so he can rest his head on yours, cheek pressed against your temple. 

You’ll tell him for real tomorrow, but right now you have to say it out loud, if only to make sure it sounds right. 

The words have to be perfect.

“Eddie, I’m pregnant,” you say to no one but the ghosts. 

Your voice bleeds into the room and sounds eerily hollow against your eardrums, but there is a truth to the words that is inarguably relieving. 

Like releasing a breath you’ve been holding too long, the tightness you’ve had in your chest all day begins to dissipate, and you finally feel like you can relax.  

And then Eddie sits up. 

“What did you just say?” He asks, and your heart leaps up into your throat so quickly you’re half afraid it’s going to come flying out of your mouth. 

Every muscle in your body goes tense as you freeze against him. You hold your breath and wait to see what will happen, what he’ll say. Maddeningly, he doesn’t say anything, he just sits there. 

You twist over to face him, and with him leaning over you, you can see the faintest suggestion of his eyes shining in the dark. For a long moment, you just lay there, staring up at him, waiting for him to speak, and suddenly so afraid of all the unknowable things that must be running through his head.

“I’m pregnant.” you say again, a little softer now that it’s the real deal. 

“Oh… okay…” He says, suddenly sounding so painfully boyish it makes your chest ache. “…okay…”

Kids having kids. 

You don’t know what to say to try and ease the shock of it all, because you’ve already been through the rollercoaster of thoughts and feelings and emotions he is bound to be experiencing and you hadn’t done so well with the information yourself.  

After a moment, the silence becomes unbearable.   

“I just… thought you should know…” You say, “…It’s yours.”

“Oh…” he says again, then “...yeah, ’course it is.” almost like he’s assuring himself of that fact rather than agreeing with you.

Whose else would it be? It’s not like you’re opening your legs up for anyone else around here. Still, the way you can’t read any sort of emotion on Eddie makes your chest go tight with panic. You want to shake him and snap him out of the paralysis that seems to have seized him, but you can’t make yourself move. 

“I don’t know what to do.” You say, and it’s finally enough to get him to look at you again.  

“Me neither.” He says. 

It’s a deeply disappointing thing to hear. You hadn’t realized just how much stock you’d put into Eddie telling you exactly how to proceed. How heavily you’d been leaning on that crutch. With it kicked so unceremoniously out from under you, you fall.

Your voice is wet and burbling when you speak, tears are collecting on your lashes and it would be almost startling if they hadn’t been simmering just beneath the surface all day – all month if you were being honest with yourself.  

“What should I do, Eddie?”

Something changes in the dark, a shift in the air, a flicker of something across his face that is gone before you can read it, and he lays his palm on your cheek. 

“...You should go to sleep, Sweetheart.” He says softly, “We’ll talk about it in the morning.”

It’s not what you wanted to hear. You wanted him to have all the answers, to solve your problems with a gentle guiding hand, but you conveniently forgot that he doesn’t know any better than you do. 

He is right, though. There’s nothing you can do about it right now. You could stay up talking about it all night, you suppose, but what good would that do?

You’re tired. He’s tired. Even without the rabid session of mindless bunnyfucking, you had yourselves a day and a half, and you can feel it turning to sediment in your bones. 

You need to sleep. You should sleep while you still can.

And then, you're struck between the eyes with the memory of having heard somewhere that most new parents don’t sleep for the first year of their baby’s life. You don’t know which part of that intrusive factoid is more startling: the idea that you’re not going to sleep for a whole year or the concept that you are going to be parents. 

Eddie can’t be somebody’s father, you’re thinking as you cross your hands over your chest and stare up at the ceiling, He can barely take care of himself. 

Don’t sell yourself short, Babycakes, the Eddie part of you chides. You’re not doing so hot yourself. 

Out of the dark, you feel the real Eddie’s hand come down to grip yours and crush your fingers into a fist. 

“Don’t worry about it,” He says, the sweet sureness of his tone chasing away the snarling angry doppelganger that lives in your mind’s eye, “We don’t have to worry about it until tomorrow,” 

We.

The relief you feel to have someone shoulder the burden you’ve been struggling with all day is enough to push you back to tears. You swallow hard and breathe out a shaky, wet sigh, and sniffle when Eddie squeezes your hand and tells you once again not to worry about it.

Easy for him to say, he’s not the one who is about to become a human incubator.

But he is right.

There is nothing either of you can do about it in the hours preluding twilight. Tomorrow is another day, and for now, you only have to do exactly what you’ve been wanting to do all evening.

You’ll sleep this weirdness off, and feel better in the morning.

Somehow you don’t believe that for a second.

You roll over, and let your eyes slide shut when Eddie pulls you snug against him again, but you don’t sleep. You just lay there feeling his shallow breathing fan your neck and his fingers flex periodically over the curve of your hip. 

A little while later, he shifts and rolls away from you. He sits up, and you can feel him looking at you, trying to decide if he thinks you’re sleeping, and then the mattress sloshes as he gets out of bed. 

You listen to Eddie padding back and forth across the apartment, moving aimlessly from corner to corner as his mind no doubt spins out with worry. There is the muted rustling of things being moved, the telltale thump of a shoe being dropped and the pawing of searching fingers in the dish by the door. 

He’s putting on his shoes. He’s looking for his keys. He’s leaving.

He's actually fucking leaving. 

The notion is terrifying, but something about the way you left it has you paralyzed.

You’re committed to this charade of sleep, and there is nothing that can rouse you from this bed. Not even if the floor opened up and swallowed you whole.

You don't care what Eddie decides to do. You’re going to sleep, and you’re going to feel better in the morning, even if it kills you.

You hear Eddie call your name softly from the other end of the room, and you do your best to stay perfectly still, feeling his eyes on you in the dark, watching for any sign of movement.

You’re asleep, you’re listening, you’re holding your breath and waiting to see what he will do. 

After a moment that feels like eternity, Eddie breathes an uneven sigh, and you hear the telltale sign of the knob twisting. The door unsticks, swings inward, and he slips out. 

It shuts with a hollow thud, and you squeeze your eyes shut tighter and tighter, tight enough to squeeze a salty bead of moisture out from your tear ducts as there is the distant whine and thump of a car door shutting. 

The van’s engine fails to turn over immediately, but the second time he tries, it roars to life with enough gusto to wake your neighbors, had they already been in bed. 

You sit up and watch the door, and listen to Eddie leave. You don’t wonder where he’s going. 

There is only one place he would be going at 10:30 on a Thursday - only one place he can go. 

You drag yourself from the bed and move to the phone, feeling your legs wobble beneath your weight with the residual of your evening activities as much as nerves. 

You punch in the numbers you’ve long since memorized and put the receiver to your ear, feeling an emptiness begin to claw at you as you listen to the line ring. 

Brrzzzbrrzzz. Brrzzzbrrzzz –click —

“Y’ello.”

“Hiya Wayne,” you chirp, your voice cracks. 

“Well, hey there, Sweetheart — wasn’t expecting a call from your neck of the woods ‘til tomorrow.”

Eddie and Wayne have a standing weekly conversation — Fridays at two — and you feel a wave of giddy panic wash over you as you begin to wonder about all the things they’ll have to talk about tomorrow.

“Everything okay?” he asks when a silence you hadn’t meant to allow room for stretches between you. 

“Yeah… yeah everything’s—” you can’t make yourself say it, “I’m sorry, I know it’s late—“

“Nah, don’t you worry about that. What’s up?”

The sudden urge to spill your guts rises violently in you, and you have to clench your teeth to stop it from tumbling out.

I’m pregnant, Eddie’s not coping, nothing is ever going to be the same as it was and we can never go back. 

I don’t know what to do and I’m scared. Help me, help me, help me.

But in a feat of stunning self control, you manage to keep the tide of that existential madness at bay. 

You clear your throat in a futile attempt at keeping your voice steady.

It quavers anyway. 

“Eddie’s on his way over.” You say, trying and failing to sound casual about it.

Wayne doesn’t respond right away.  

Because Eddie hasn’t driven anywhere by himself in fourteen months, let alone to the other end of town in the middle of the night on a random Thursday in June. 

Something is wrong, and he knows it.

“He is, is he?” He deadpans, and you can practically feel the intention to ask why. 

You can’t stand to hear him ask, because you have no idea how to answer. What would you even tell him? The truth? 

You can’t even begin to try explaining that to Wayne, especially when whatever the hell just happened feels entirely too much like you had a fight, and it’s your fault. 

You can’t stand it.

“I just thought you should know,” you mumble into the phone, “He just left.” 

The words stay ringing in your ears far too long and then are quickly followed by a measured silence that stretches before you like the unending march of time. 

He left, he’s leaving, he’s gone – you try to swallow against the way your throat has begun to close and put your back to that door.

You hold against it, the fear, the worries, the impending future and everything else you have no hope of stopping. 

By the time Wayne finally responds, your brain has begun to crawl with spiders and your hands are trembling.  

“Alright then,” he says with no small amount of finality, “You want me to send him back to you after or…?”

You shake your head for no one in particular. 

“No… I think — it might be better if he stays over with you. If it’s not too much trouble.”

“No trouble at all. I’ll keep him for the night and send him home in the morning — don’t you worry, I’ll set him straight.”

The words are out before you can stop them. 

“… please be gentle with him,” you hate to have to say it, because if there is anyone on this earth who does not need to be reminded how to treat Eddie, it’s Wayne, but you still can’t help yourself, “He … he had a rough day…” 

The hum that comes rattling up from the elder Munson’s throat reverberates through the phone and makes your back teeth buzz. 

“You gonna be okay?” he asks and your heart palpitates.

Suddenly, the urge to tell the wretched truth sits once more balancing on the end of your tongue.

“I will be—” you lie, “...bye, Wayne,”

“G’night, Sweetheart,” 

The line clicks, and on the far side of town, Wayne Munson heaves a sigh that carries the weight of the world. 

He puts the phone back on the receiver and feels that weight settle into his deeply tired bones as he runs through all the possible scenarios laid out before him. A fight, most likely, a real knock down drag out if he knows anything about Munson men and their penchant for hitting the breeze. Then again, that doesn’t fall in line with the call you just put in to warn him of his nephew’s impending arrival, and it’s not as if Eddie can get very far on his own anyway. 

He spends the next few minutes wondering if he ought to go out and try to meet the boy halfway, pick him up and stop him before he can blunder through some terrible mistake that is bound to upset the lives of everyone around him for the foreseeable future.

He wonders if that’s even possible where his nephew is concerned.

He ultimately decides against that kind of tom foolery. He’s got better things to do on a Thursday night than go chasing Eddie around town.

Got to let kids make their own mistakes, he tells himself. 

Anyway, he doesn’t know why the boy is on his way over. You said he was coming, nothing more, nothing less. And yet, Wayne can’t shake the trill of warning raising the hair on the back of his neck. He knows what it looks like when someone is about to cut and run, he’s spent an entire life watching that kind of behavior play out before Eddie was even born.

He swallows that doom saying, and takes small comfort in the fact that at least his nephew has got sense enough to come and ask for help before he runs for his life.

Usually. The previous spring notwithstanding. 

Of course, those were extraordinary circumstances, this is just Thursday, so he tells himself he doesn’t know anything. 

He moves to the kitchen, flicks on the light, and puts a pot of coffee on the stove to boil.

It’s going to be a long night.

[bizaar]

Cruel Summer Epilogue - Part One

Masterlist - Part One - Part Two

pairing: Eddie Munson x fem!reader

warnings: sexual content (18+) minors DNI (you guys they go the fuck off idk what to tell you, gird your loins), pregnancy, mentions of sickness and vomiting, traumatic flashbacks, angst, swearing (please let me know if I missed anything, there's a lot going on here)

word count: 23k (oof)

a/n: tumblr is really gonna make me split this thing up more than I already was going to — oh well, it doesn't matter because it's here! Forgive me for how I had to lay this out, and for everything that follows, because part two is going to be nothing but complete rabid bunnyfucking...

Melvald’s is slow today. 

Of course, that’s nothing out of the ordinary. Melvald’s is always slow. You don’t think there has ever been such a thing as a morning or afternoon rush within these cluttered walls, and you’re fine with that. 

You have to be, because it’s not like you have a lot of other options left in Hawkins. 

After everything went back to normal again — as normal as normal can be, considering the circumstances — you didn’t dare go back to ask for your job at Benny’s. You tell yourself it’s because you’ve got too much self-respect for that (and certainly not because you’re quite sure they’ll laugh you out of the building if you tried) so now you stock shelves at Melvald’s.

The hours are long and the pay is crap, but your commute is a quick ten-minute walk, and that’s more than you can ask for. Because you never got your car back after you went sailing out the front doors at Benny’s with the singular purpose of finding Eddie, getting out of town, and never coming back – a purpose you mostly succeeded in. 

Mostly.

You found Eddie, but you never managed to get around to getting out of town. You did eventually end up coming back, though only to discover that while you were away your trusty little Toyota Corolla had been towed.

Figures. 

Funny how you can’t just leave a vehicle sitting unclaimed in a private lot for over a month and expect there to be no consequences. 

By the time you got around to finding your car, you ended up having to sell the damn thing just to cover the impound fees, and you quickly learned that despite what all those sappy greeting cards like to say, you can put a price on your memories. Hundreds of hours of carpooling trips to and from school and the arcade and movies and innumerable Corroded Coffin gigs, all the jam sessions and make-out sessions and “you gotta hear this song” sessions that resulted in blown out speakers and deeply existential conversations and fights about nothing and everything. All the time and people, friends and lovers and emotions permeating it’s dingy cloth seats and hard plastic siding was whisked away in the blink of an eye. 

Your bittersweet adolescence, gone in exchange for a measly four thousand dollars. Somehow, you’re never going to forgive yourself for letting it go like that. 

And yet, for as sad as you were to part with and old friend, it wasn’t all bad, because even with most of that blood money sent off to the Roane County municipality, you still had a little left over. 

Enough to get the van towed out of the ditch and back into working order, at least. It wasn’t pretty, and it needed more work than any of you could really wrap your heads around just to bring it back to its previous semi-shitty condition, but it was alive and that was all that mattered. 

If selling your car meant that Eddie didn’t have to lose anything else, then you were happy to let it go.

Anyway, you like your walk to work. It’s short enough that it doesn’t give you time to think about anything that isn’t immediately in front of you. It doesn’t remind you of anything you might be mourning from back in the good old days, and it means, if need be, you can get home as fast as humanly possible.

Unlike at Benny’s, nobody at Melvald’s gives you shit if you have to go sailing out the front doors and across the parking lot to rescue Eddie from his demons.

That mile-and-back commute does not, however, keep you safe from the perils of being late for work. Not in the cold blue light of morning, when Eddie snakes his arms around you and holds you hostage, leaving sleepy, sloven kisses down the stretch of your neck and sending shivers up the length of your spine as he begs you for five more minutes, and five more minutes after that. 

You find that you have a hard time arguing with him on mornings like that when the only thing that can chase away the lingering sting of bad dreams and worse memories is to lay pressed together in a heap of tangled limbs, listening to the muted thump thump thumping of his beating heart and feeling the steady rise and fall of his chest as he breathes.

You’re spending a lot of mornings like that lately, laying in as late as you possibly can before slinking into work a cool twenty minutes late. And if anyone on Melvald’s barebones staff cares about that, you haven’t heard about it. Even if you did, the feeling would not be mutual.

Who gives a shit where you decide to spend your mornings? Mornings are for people who never came so close to losing everything, so what’s the harm in five more minutes? 

Plenty, it turns out, when you finally manage to extract yourself from that tangled mess of limbs and are hit with a wave of nausea like a speeding train the moment you sit up. You were late to work this morning, sure, though not because you couldn’t stop indulging Eddie in five more minutes, it was because you couldn’t stop your insides from turning into outsides and spent almost a full half hour with your head in the toilet.

You mostly don’t wanna talk about that. 

If you have to, you chalk it up to the bizarre sickness you can’t seem to shake. You just can’t stomach much of anything these days, except for herbal tea, and that is only consumed against your will, because herbal tea is gross, despite how it’s the only thing that abates your nausea. 

Well, you thought it did. 

Joyce Byers is on an extended smoke break, so you’re alone in the store when it hits you. 

One minute, you’re sitting behind the cash wrap, absently flipping through Cosmopolitan Magazine with a steadily cooling cup of stagnant bog water at your elbow, and then someone hits the ejector button. The next thing you know, you’re sprinting for the bathroom with a harsh squeak of Chucks on linoleum.

You barely make it to the stall in time to send your prayers to that eternal porcelain god.

Zero to sixty in half a second, just like this morning and every other morning this week. 

By the time you come slinking in again from the employee’s bathroom, wiping your mouth with the back of your hand, Joyce is still not back from her fifteen-going-on thirty minute break. There are no customers, no coworkers, just you and the lingering air of your spectacular Regan MacNeil impression – getting better and better every day – because it’s just another boring Thursday afternoon, and Melvald’s is always slow. 

Your insides cramp with the threat of sustained illness as you slide in behind the cash register, ready to resume the spell of your boredom, then, you find yourself face to face with a pharmaceutical ad you don’t remember seeing when you last flipped the page. 

You stare down at the image of a beautiful woman with her face stretched into a wide, open mouth smile, which is manic enough that you could easily mistake her for screaming rather than laughing. 

You begin to feel a cold, creeping dread raising the hair on your neck and arms as you read the copy. 

“Morning sickness? Not me!” 

Jesus Christ, you think with no small amount of disgust, Somebody got paid a million dollars to write this – and yet all it takes is those four measly little words.

They fall into place one right after the other, each with a hollow boom that sends shockwaves radiating out across the expanse of your body with goosebumps. A previously darkened part of your brain slowly begins switching on as the phrase is fed through its internal processor over and over until something starts to come into focus.

A question you haven’t yet asked yourself, and the answer you’ve been subconsciously dodging, like lightning in the storm of your sudden onset illness.

Morning sickness? Not me… surely not me…

Still, you immediately begin counting the weeks on your fingers and think yourself in circles, trying desperately to remember when you had your last period. Last week? Last month? You don’t remember. You’ve never been the type of person to keep regular track of something like that, though only because you never needed to. 

You were a virgin until you met Eddie and now you can’t seem to recall when you had your last period.

It takes you too long to remember, and when you do, you don’t believe it, so you count it out three times just to be certain and swallow hard against the sick feeling roiling in your esophagus.

January… February… March… March? No, that can’t be right… 

You rustle a piece of scratch paper from the register to draw it out so you can visualize it, and when the data still doesn’t change, you get up to go and find the calendar in the employee’s locker room just to be certain that it really is – June. 

According to your math, you haven’t had a period since March, and according to the calendar, that was two months ago. 

Holy Shit.

If you were thinking rationally, you might understand how two months could pass without a person noticing, especially when they’ve been living their life by the second. 

But you’re not thinking rationally, and if you were being honest, you haven’t been since last Spring. 

Time stopped for you in the other place, when Eddie’s heart stopped down on the wrong side of the world, and ever since you slipped back through, it hasn’t really started back up again in a way you can wrap your head around. You live your life by the days of the week, so how were you supposed to know something was amiss when your only basis of passing time is “it’s Thursday again,”? 

Something heavy settles in the pit of your stomach and you feel like you could be sick again as the facts begin to present themselves in neat little lines. 

You and Eddie are living together now. 

After everything that happened, when the dust finally settled on the Forest Hills trailer park, the folks from the Hawkins Lab came out from their fortress like feudal lords in lab coats. They took samples, corded things off with a mountain of red tape, performed test upon test upon test on the ruined contents of the trailer, and after all was said and done, it was deemed “uninhabitable”. 

Which meant the Munsons were out of house and home. Wayne, it turns out, could get temporary housing through the Plant, but only so long as he was actively working. Someone was going to have to be the steward of Eddie’s recovery once he got out of the hospital (and that was shaping up to be a full time job in and of itself) but if Wayne took any time off to take care of him, he was going to lose his bid for company housing. Without it, he would have to move the pair of them back into the extended stay rooms in the Motel 6 out on the interstate, which he could only afford to pay for if he was earning a steady paycheck – such are the perils of selling your soul to the company store. 

So, Eddie came to live with you in your icebox of a basement apartment, which seemed like the most practical, level headed idea until you were left alone and the reality of your sudden and total privacy settled in. It didn’t take long for the both of you to completely lose your minds in a haze of traumatic aftermath and unchecked hormones.

To you, it was the greatest idea anyone had ever had in the history of mankind – to your neighbors, Eddie moving in has been a catastrophic turn for the worse. 

Because at the end of the day you’re just a couple of horny kids, sharing four hundred square feet of space, most of which just so happens to be taken up by a queen sized bed. 

There have been noise complaints abound, but honestly, what did anyone expect to happen? 

And what did you expect to happen when all either of you seem to do outside of basic human function is fuck like bunny rabbits? 

You bury your face in your hands and choke on a horrified moan as you wrack your brain trying to think if, in fourteen months of domestic bliss, you ever once remembered to use protection..

The answer is a resounding no.

Who has time for condoms when you’re busy living your life to the fullest? What’s the saying? Wrap it before you tap it? Not me! You both almost died, remember? Live a little! 

At least that’s been the logic for fourteen fucking months. 

Jesus wept. 

In the silence of the store, in between the waning notes of royalty-free Muzak and the gentle murmur of outside traffic, you can hear the tick, tick, ticking of the overhead clock. Wretched time, quietly counting down the seconds as potential disaster comes hurtling toward you like an atomic bomb.

Your stomach is cramping again as you move out from behind the cash wrap and stagger over to aisle three on stiff legs–

Oh my God Oh my God Oh my God Oh my God 

– where you drop to balance on the balls of your feet and come face to face with the little white and purple boxes hanging there – pregnancy tests. 

You think back to the way you’d so casually racked them the day before and cannot believe it never once crossed your mind. 

Morning sickness. 

Except you aren’t just sick in the morning, are you? You’re sick all the time, any hour of the day… so it’s probably not that, right? You probably just contracted some weird parasite at the lake or from a bad burger and now it’s wreaking havoc in your guts, right? 

Right! a condescending voice tells you, It’s called a fetus. 

Your mind outright rejects the notion, but now that the idea is there, the hint of nagging possibility will not be dismissed. So you sit there, eyeing the vaguely feminine graphic design, promising quick results in big bold letters.

Ten minutes or less. 

You nibble your thumb and reach for the box before thinking better and stopping short.  

Do you really want to know? And what are the consequences if you decide you don’t? 

Maybe nothing. 

Maybe big ones. Big round baby-belly-shaped ones. 

You abuse your lower lip between your teeth and glance reflexively at your watch, which you discover is not there, but you’re too pressed to notice as you twist around to find the clock on the wall — half past one, and still no sign of Joyce. 

You turn back to the promise on the box burning itself into your retinas — ten minutes or less — and count the months again. 

The math doesn’t change. You’re definitely late, which means you are definitely— 

Shut up! Don’t say it, don’t jinx it! 

Then again maybe not…it’s a fifty-fifty chance, either you are or you aren’t. The answer lies in front of you, readily available in ten minutes or less. 

…So, what’s ten minutes? 

Joyce is still on a smoke break, so there is no one to cover for you, but what can possibly happen to an unmanned store in ten minutes? In Hawkins? On a Thursday?

Melvald’s is always slow — what are the odds you’re going to be hit with the first rush in the history of it’s time as a brick and mortar staple if you decide to pop back into the bathroom for a moment? 

Ten minutes more like.

You tell yourself it doesn’t mean anything as you snatch the box off the shelf and wobble back out of the aisle on stiff legs. 

Back to the employee’s restroom to take a pregnancy test – the reality of that information is profoundly disturbing. 

You’ve never taken a test before — never had to — but you distinctly remember instances back in High school where you’d been enlisted to stand guard outside of a bathroom stall while Carol Perkins and Tina Burton took “just in case” tests. 

You just want to sate a curiosity — just in case. What’s the harm in taking a test? 

It’s ten measly minutes. 

When Joyce finally comes back in, it’s been fourty-five minutes since she originally left, and you’re a vibrating ball of nervous energy. You sit, bouncing your knee erratically, fidgeting with the ring with the dark stone sitting snug on your finger – a promise, given, returned, and given again, pulling your t-shirt up and asking for five more minutes… just five more minutes – and she greets you with a tight-lipped smile.

You hardly wait for her to get through the door before you’re rounding the counter.

“I don’t feel well,” You say in a garbled rush, snatching your bag from where you’ve had it strategically stashed at your feet since you slunk back out from the restroom a second time, “D’you think it’ll be okay if I head out?”

She blinks back at you, and for a very brief moment, you’re terrified that for the first time since you started here, someone is finally going to give a shit about you leaving.

Thank God Melvald’s is always slow. 

“Oh. Sure, Honey. That’s–” Joyce begins, brows tweaked together in confusion as you rush past her.

You’re out the door and headed up the street before she can finish asking if you’re alright. 

You don’t think you could stand to answer that question right now, and she couldn’t help you even if you did. 

You need a quiet place to sit and think. You need to be swaddled in a blanket of cloying familiarity while you watch the rest of your world come crumbling down. You need… Eddie?  

No, a voice answers, startling you almost as much as what you’d learned in those previous ten minutes. You don’t need Eddie. Not right now, at least.

Right now, what you need is for it to be like it used to be. You need an adult, you need to go home, but you don't live there anymore, and your parents haven’t lived in Hawkins since the Summer of 1985. You can't even call them, because if you do, they’re just going to come down here and try to take you away again, like they did when you got out of the hospital.

You can’t have a repeat of that mess. You can’t leave Eddie, but you also can’t face him just yet. You need to be sure before you can go home, and before that, you need to get as far away from Melvald’s as you possibly can.

You briefly consider calling Wayne, just to try and get the closest thing you can to fatherly advice, but what is he going to do for you? What is anyone supposed to do for you right now besides tell you that you ought to have known better? 

You don’t need to be told what you already know. You need a second opinion, and you cannot get that sitting at home, socked in to four hundred square feet of domestic bliss with the ghost that haunts those walls.

But there is nowhere else you can go … not unless you want to make that long hike up Cornwallis and bang on the Henderson’s door like it’s the good old days and you’re there to babysit. 

You’re not about to submit yourself to the abject humiliation of Dustin (or, God forbid, Claudia Henderson) finding out, because you can’t just go closing yourself up in their hall bathroom for ten minutes (or less) with no explanation. You'd have to tell them what was wrong, why you couldn't use your own bathroom, and you're not ready for that kind of drama.

You can just picture the look Dustin would give you, admonishing you with a terse utterance of your name and a heaping helping of as much paternal disdain as a fifteen year old boy can manage. 

“Why weren’t you using protection?” He would demand, “— that’s the first thing they teach us in health class,” followed very quickly by a not so gentle reminder that “they hand out condoms at school like candy!” 

As if you didn’t know that. As if you (and everyone you knew) didn’t used to come home with those shiny little packages lining the inside of your bookbag like legal contraband. For the duration of your tenure at Hawkins High, you lived in the surety that you could open any drawer in your bedroom and be sure to find a condom there.

Not that you needed one. 

You were a virgin until you met Eddie, but none of that is any of Dustin’s business, and beyond the fact that you’re not in school anymore, you’re not going to go all the way up to his house just to take a pregnancy test.

You don’t need to, the soiled plastic applicator you’d hidden way down at the bottom of the wastebasket back in Melvald’s employee bathroom has already told you everything you need to know.

Suddenly, all you want to do is go home, crawl into bed and pull the covers over your head. You want to go back to the days of everyone telling you “you’re just a kid,” and you want to revel in the frustration of it.

More than anything, you want to smack yourself in the face for ever daring to suggest you were “grown up” enough for anything.

You’re just a kid. Eddie is just a kid. How could this have happened? Why on Earth didn't anybody stop you?

You just want to go home, but you can’t go home. Not yet, so you walk. One foot in front of the other, aimlessly without really seeing, and the next thing you know, you’re sitting at the warped, termite infested picnic bench in the woods behind Hawkins High, and you have no memory of getting there.

You know you should be more concerned about that.

Your shift is technically over at three, and you really should try to get home sometime around then (just so Eddie doesn't start to worry) but time was fake before you slipped back into the eternal dark of November ’83, and now you have no use for it at all, especially when you're so patently avoiding going home.

It seems like just yesterday you were sprinting out into the parking lot at Benny’s, ready to throw caution and everything you ever thought was important to the wind to go and save the jerk who’d so spectacularly broken your heart the previous summer – fifty-four Saturdays ago, your subconscious unhelpfully informs you.   

It’s a wonder you’d actually convinced yourself that anything of what followed that week could be the scariest thing you’d ever have to endure. Turns out, giant man eating bats and interdimensional wizards are nothing compared to realizing your period is two months late. 

You trace your thumb across the faded carvings in the tabletop and linger over your inscribed initials x E.M. – you did that, in the summer between your Sophomore and Junior year, in the first weeks of your official attachment to Eddie.

It felt like such an important gesture back then, but you had no idea what important looked like in those days.

You think back to those stupid kids who pledged to stand together against the world without knowing what that really meant, or just how viciously people could hate, and your heart throbs.

After everything that happened, Munson Mania in Hawkins has never been worse. 

The good people of Roane County had already done all the mental gymnastics to decide that Eddie killed Chrissy. It fit perfectly in their narrative about him, and it would be too much work to untangle the mess they made coming to that conclusion, no matter what the second coming of Jim Hopper said. Guilty or not, they whisper among themselves, point fingers, hurl insults, and shout accusations. 

Freak. Murderer. Psycho killer – qu’est-ce que c’est? – Barbed wire candy-grams for the town pariah, hurled like molotov cocktails, even in the light of the truth. The murky, inconclusive truth.

You had to learn how to adapt very quickly to the ramped-up prejudices of all these nice God-fearing people, because for a while there, Eddie couldn’t even walk down the street without fear of being reminded that everyone in this town thinks he’d be better off dead. The bolder of the good people of Hawkins have no shame about telling him so, either. 

Now, Eddie stays mostly out of sight of all your neighbors and you take care of everything that has to be done.

You go out, do all the shopping, work to pay the bills, keep your life support afloat and you bend yourself painfully out of shape to be his shield. You provide the bread and butter and all the love he could ever possibly need. You smother him in it, keep him well fed and swaddled in affection so that he never has to feel the cold touch of its absence. 

You're everything to him. Friend, lover, caretaker – you wish there was room for just a little bit of help in that, but Eddie doesn't have friends anymore.

He just has you.

Anyway, how are you supposed to explain to Adam and Jeff and Gareth that the Eddie lurking in the shadows of your basement apartment isn’t the Eddie they remember? What would they say if they knew he can’t make his fingers work well enough to play the guitar anymore, or that he can barely even look at his D&D books without breaking into a cold sweat? 

You know what they’d say – they’d want to know why. They’d want to know what the hell happened, because when they’d tried to visit Eddie in the hospital, they got one look at him before making a bullshit excuse about needing to leave, and he didn’t want to see them again after that. 

So now, when they call (and they so seldom call, these days) you tell them he's fine, and you hold them at bay, because it's your job to protect Eddie, no matter what. If that includes keeping all his friends in the dark, then so be it.  

If you can’t get around to explaining what happened to Eddie, and what is so terribly wrong with him, you can’t even imagine trying to break the news that you’re pregnant.

Christ, how are you supposed to tell people when you can barely conceptualize it yourself?

How are you supposed to tell Eddie?

He can barely hear that you’re going to be working late or picking up a shift, because it means he’s going to have to stretch his imagination to find ways to occupy his time without you. It means a change in his routine, and routine is all he has besides bad habits and nightmares.  

And now you’re just supposed to add a whole other person to that? One who can’t take care of themself or tell you what’s wrong or when they need something or when they’re on the brink of death or… or or or…? 

Your stomach is in knots again, because having a baby is suddenly starting to sound just like having a whole other Eddie to take care of, and you can hardly manage one of him. 

You have no idea how he is going to react to hearing that your tight little twosome is about to expand.

Eddie doesn’t have a lot of things that are strictly his, and when it comes to those things he is not exactly the sharing type. 

He’ll go blue in the face arguing he doesn’t get jealous, then turn around and have a conniption when you stay on the shore of Lovers Lake with Dustin and send him out in the boat with the others… dot dot dot - dash dash dash - dot dot dot…

You bite back the cloying scent of mildew suddenly filling your sinuses and dig shallow crescent moons into your palms until you feel your feet touch back down on Earth. Then, all the hideous questions you’ve been successfully holding at bay all afternoon come flooding in like the tide. 

What if Eddie doesn’t want this? What if this is one of those cataclysmic deal breakers and you lose him forever… again? 

And why does this all suddenly feel like your fault? 

In an instant, you’re once more brimming with that irrational anger, because if this is anyone’s fault, it’s his. He’s the one who always wants five more minutes, who pulls you back into bed and paws at your clothes and does all the little things he knows you can’t resist and takes and takes and takes. 

He’s the one who did all the work – what did Carol and Tina used to call it? The good ol’ pump and dump? 

How many mornings have ended with Eddie taking those five minutes more, then rolling over to go back to sleep while you run around trying to clean up the evidence and pull yourself back into shape?

He’s the master behind this little ritual, you’re just the vessel – and what is the vessel for if not to carry the seed?  

You need to walk, you need to think. You need to talk to Eddie.

You take the long way home, going past the haunts of your youth and all the places you don’t go anymore. All the places you’ll never go again — all the places that don’t exist like your childhood home, the Starcourt Mall, Benny’s Diner, and the cozy little double wide on the far end of town, and you think about how Hawkins is a ghost town that doesn’t know its dead. 

You walk, and you think about Eddie, like you always do.

You think about how bad those first few months were, about his nightmares and how he could barely stand to shut his eyes, let alone sleep because of the monsters waiting for him beyond the hypnotic pull of his circadian rhythms. You think about how in the beginning, sometimes he didn’t even have to close his eyes to become trapped down there in the dark again. 

You think about how hard you’ve worked to get him to where he is now, all the blood, sweat, and tears it has taken to curb the itch for all the bad habits that got infinitely worse in his attempt to soothe all the things that hurt. Everything you had to do to center your world around his needs, his worries, his recovery, to make him feel safe. It’s taken a long time, with a lot of set backs, and a lot of bad days, but you tell yourself that you’re happy to have them at all. 

Recovery is a road, not a destination, or at least that’s what Eddie’s physical therapists liked to say before he quit on them – if all you have to worry about is making sure the rent is paid and the pantry is stocked and the door is barred against the monsters out there, you’re fine with that. 

Nevermind your nightmares and all the little things you have to do to cope.

You’re only the one who had to sit there and lie to Eddie that everything was going to be okay while his lips turned blue and his eyes went dark. You’re the one who had to stand at a basin in the hospital and try to scrub his blood out of your clothes, your skin, your hair and lock your knees to stay upright while you did everything you could to try and keep your shit together.

You’re the one who had to sit at his bedside and tune yourself in to the new normal of monitored heartbeats and machines forcing compressed air into collapsed lungs, feeling so incredibly helpless to do anything but wonder how you ever told such a hideous lie. 

Everything is gonna be okay… you wish you could make yourself believe that. 

On your really bad days, that helpless feeling comes roaring back so powerfully you feel like you’re going to collapse in on yourself like a dying star. It's those days that you can’t pull yourself away from Eddie no matter what, where you need those five minutes just as badly as he does, because you’re the one who sat there and told him he was going to be okay and then watched him die.  

And then, when the feeling passes, you pull yourself up, straighten yourself out, and you go to work, because the only thing that matters is Eddie.  

He’s the only thing you can count on when the world gets too loud, the memories of that other place get too close, and you begin to feel yourself slipping away. He’s the only thing keeping you grounded, even if he doesn’t know it, and you’re suddenly so worried that introducing a third element to your duet will blur those lines again. 

You think about all your progress, how on your best days it almost feels like things are back to good, and you think about how all of that hard work is about to become extremely fucking secondary to the little parasite nestled in your womb – not a baby so much as a tapeworm.

The notion causes your insides to stir with anxiety.

How could you have been so careless?

And why would you or anyone expect anything else to happen when you’re just a couple of stupid kids playing house and sharing a studio apartment, which is getting smaller by the moment. 

Kids having kids. 

You should have known better. 

Because time isn’t real, the sun is starting to set by the time you finally make your way home, well past three o'clock.

Past Melvald’s and ten minutes down the street to the concrete stone steps and into the recessed well containing the red door, marked with a tarnished silver six. You can still see the faintest outline of the other two sixes someone recently graffitied on either side of the metal placard – just in case anyone happened to forget who lives here – and suddenly you think you can hear the distant tones of Iron Maiden playing somewhere beyond.  

Let him who hath understanding reckon the number of the beast, for it is a human number… 

It is not the first time you’ve had the misfortune of living in Apartment 666, and as you fumble with your keys and glare at the lingering shadow of permanent marker on paint, you are certain it won’t be the last. 

Funny how you never used to hate Hawkins before. 

Now, you’re painted red with the feeling as you plunge the key into the lock and twist it hard enough that someday you’re certain the blade is going to snap off (and then what are you going to do?) Today, however, is not that day. 

As you turn the key you hear the rotor shift over with a satisfying THUNK. You twist the handle, push the door, and nothing happens. 

You groan to stop yourself from screaming, because despite what you think, the door is not out to get you. 

You’re just having a very bad day. 

The humidity the humidity signaling the inevitable heatwaves of the Indiana summer causes your front door to swell and stick, and you have to give it a firm kick to force it open. You know this, despite how you may have forgotten under the weight of everything else currently on your mind. 

And yet, today, when the door sticks, it feels personal. 

You grit your teeth and shut your eyes against it as you put your foot in the door and give it one more solid push. It swings inward, taking you with it and sending you staggering across the threshold and into the apartment. 

The door swings shut behind you with a loud THUMP, and all goes quiet inside your head. 

Just like that, you’re home. 

A singular room made up of kitchen, dining, living, and bed area, all squeezed into four hundred square feet of what the landlord had originally referred to as “cozy living”, when it was just you and your broken heart.

Now, it’s a chaotic mish-mash of all your things and what you could salvage of Eddie’s before someone went and burned what was left of the Munson residence to a smoking husk. 

When you get in, he is sitting on the unmade bed wearing the same sweat-stained t-shirt and pair of ratty pants he’s been in for the last three days. His hair is greasy and hanging limply around his face, which is lined in the shadow of a patchy stubble. You try to think back to the last time you remember him showering, shaving, brushing his teeth, doing anything but laying in bed watching television.

You aren’t shocked when the memory fails to arrive. 

Don’t be unkind, that gentle voice comes again. You stamp it out before it can finish. It’s hard to be kind when all you have to cling to is the way things used to be. 

Eddie used to have hobbies and interests and friends. Now, he only watches television and reads the TV guide until he’s got it memorized and waits for you to get home so he can use you to chase his demons away.

Eddie’s depressed and you’re pregnant – it’s not much to go on, competition-wise, but the poison of your mood is inclined to suggest that you got the short end of the stick on that one, considering it’s his depression that got you that way.  

Nothing gives such an instant boost of dopamine like an orgasm, after all. 

The apartment is a mess. There are dirty clothes and dishes everywhere, mixed in with piles of the clean you have yet to put away. Socks and underwear hang draped off the backs of the two rickety dining chairs from where you’d washed them in the sink and lay them to dry six days ago. The bedsheets are pushed down and hanging off the mattress, exposing half a dozen Hostess wrappers sitting on the rumpled, stained top sheet. 

And there sits Eddie in the middle of it all with a hand down his pants and a lit cigarette pinched between his lips. 

Your blood flash freezes and boils. 

He’s supposed to be quitting. That same gentle – nagging – voice whines from the back of your mind. And he promised he wouldn’t smoke inside. 

You have to clench your teeth until your ears start ringing to shut that little voice up. 

“Hey!” Eddie yelps the moment you appear, leaping up and waving his arms around to try and disperse the smoke as he kicks the evidence of his afternoon indulgence off of the mattress and steps down with a hard thump – he’s limping ever so slightly as he crosses the room to you, “Hi! Shit… um… this isn’t what it looks like,”

Which is a bald faced lie – it is exactly what it looks like, and suddenly you can’t stop the mental tally of all the things you asked him to do today, and all the things that remain undone. 

It makes your skin itch, then as he gets closer, you see the holes in his socks – holes in his neck and ribs where he’d nearly been eaten alive – and you remember too late that you’d promised to pick him up a new pack of crew socks on your way home from work. You forgot. 

Part of you supposes that makes you even, and you stuff it down with everything else you’re not presently available to feel. 

You decide you don’t care. 

You don’t care that he’s smoking again even though he’s still not fully recovered from his collapsed lung, or that he gave up on physical therapy because it was too hard, or that he never does anything he says he’s going to and still always expects you to give him five more minutes.

And he probably still expects you to let him fuck you later on, even after all that. 

You don’t care you don’t care you don’t care. 

And after a moment, you’re surprised to find that you really don’t, (you do, you really fucking do) you’re just trying to see where the cigarette went when he less-than-subtly flicked it away.

The last thing you need to end your shitty day is to have the apartment burn down.  

Eddie mistakes your silence for anger, as he always does, and you watch him begin to fidget as he waits for you to speak. 

You don’t, because you don’t have anything to say, but also because he’s not wrong. You are angry.

You’re standing there, clenching your teeth and fists and doing everything in your power to swallow the urge to yell at him, or to nit pick all the things that are out of place in your apartment – no, not just yours anymore. He lives here, too – this is his home now.

“Where’ve you been?” Eddie asks when the tense silence becomes too much. “I was starting to get worried,” 

He reaches for you and you surprise yourself by letting him pull you into a tight hug that feels a tad too much like it’s meant to try and distract you from everything he evidently decided was less important than smoking cigarettes, eating Twinkies, and playing with himself. 

You’re mad as hell, and if you were paying any attention you would realize that the emotion is getting stronger by the moment, but you lean into him and snake your arms around Eddie’s midsection. You bury your face in his shirt and sigh against him as you chase the comfort of his embrace, waiting for the world to fall away and the cocoon of his safety to envelope you. 

Once upon a time, all you needed was a good Eddie hug to chase your worries away. Now, under his touch, all you can think is how he reeks of nicotine and smoke and days old deodorant and everything else that comes with unwashed boy.

But you have to remind yourself that you don’t care, because he says he was getting worried. 

“You were?” you ask, and your voice sounds odd against your ears. 

“Yeah,” he shifts back and holds you to the spot, like he needs to get a good look at you to make sure you’re still you and that nothing has changed in the few hours it’s been since you left that morning — he worries so much these days. “I went to get you from work when you didn’t come home,” He says. “But you weren’t there.” 

It sounds strangely accusatory, and you aren’t exactly sure what to do with that as a solid lump begins to form in the back of your throat. 

He rubs his hands up and down your arms in a soothing gesture, like he’s attempting to create friction in slow motion. It’s something he’s always done that has been comforting in the past, but right now it is only making a sore spot where he’s rubbing the skin raw. 

You look from his attempt at gentle, reverent contact to where he is carefully watching you, and feel your brows creep toward one another as that irrational anger begins to rise in the pit of your belly.

This is all his fault, and part of you seems to think he knows that, even if he doesn’t know. 

“Okay, I can see that you’re mad…” Eddie starts, doing his utmost to remain as diplomatic as possible so as not to set you off but also to accept no responsibility, “… are you mad?” 

You don’t answer. You don’t even look at him, instead you crane your neck trying to see around him to find that goddamn cigarette before it can catch and send everything up in smoke… literally. 

You feel Eddie’s fingers flex on your biceps.

“Don’t be mad. I was gonna get around to it, I swear, but then you didn’t come home from work and… and I was worried! I didn’t know where you were,” . 

Anger subsides — if only briefly — and you get almost all the way around to feeling guilty about that until you clock the cigarette butt smoldering on the yellowing linoleum in front of the kitchen sink, and then Eddie finishes his sentence. 

“...And I didn’t know if you were gonna be home for dinner,” 

He flinches when your head snaps around and you finally level him with a poisonous look. 

“So you smoked half a pack of camels and ate a box of Twinkies?” you scoff. 

You want to ask where he even got those, but then you remember. He went to Melvald’s looking for you, and when he didn’t find you there, he must have figured he deserved a treat for braving the big, scary world. 

He gets a treat and you get to watch your world crumble – you could spit fire. 

Eddie’s mouth falls open like he’s going to say something to defend himself, but then he just laughs. You can tell it’s out of nerves rather than humor, the way he always does when he’s caught red handed and doesn’t know what to say to get himself out of trouble. 

You would punch him if you weren’t half certain he would break into a thousand pieces if you did. Even then you’re not so sure you’d feel worse about breaking your boyfriend or having to vacuum him up off the floor after. 

“I was worried!” Eddie insists when you turn away and throw your keys into the dish with a thunderous crash.

“You said that already.”  You snap, storming across the tiny living space and stooping to pinch the half burned stock of cinders and throw it into the sink with a hiss. 

You almost wish that he would have just given you that kicked puppy look, then you could have at least felt bad about biting his head off. But no, he had to go and get irreverent on you. 

Hi honey, welcome home! I know I said I would clean up and do some house work and stop smoking so I don’t get lung cancer by the time I’m thirty and die, but you see, I can’t be fucked to care about anything but myself! But remember, it’s not my fault, I’m depressed!

You’d spent so much time worrying about what you were going to say to him, how you were going to break the news, but as you step out of your shoes and drop your bag onto it’s designated doorside hook, you decide that if he can’t be fucked than neither can you.

Those little pink lines say differently. 

You suddenly feel ready to burst. 

You cross to the bed, snatch up one of the pillows and press it to your face, then you scream as loud and long as you can. When you’re satisfied that your lungs are completely flattened, you lean forward and drop down onto the mattress with a muffled THUMP, and let the tide take you out. 

It’s just one more thing that douses you in a fresh layer of red. Because your first foray into real adulthood didn’t begin with moving in together, or engaging in excessive amounts of sex just because you could, or even the unexpected addition to your lives — it began with the waterbed Eddie had insisted upon. 

After he was discharged from the hospital, you learned very quickly that your mattress was too soft for his broken body, and the nice, “sensibly priced” one you’d gone out and tried to replace it with had ended up being too firm. 

After all that talk and research and careful consideration, all the work you put into trying to make him comfortable in his new home, in this new situation, and the mattress was too goddamn firm. 

Then came the waterbed, and Eddie’s first full night of sleep since leaving the hospital, and you didn’t dream of sending the damned thing back, no matter how badly you hated it. 

You still hate it as you lie there, coasting on the waves and stewing in all the ugly thoughts and feelings and emotions that you are meant to be safe from inside the vacuum chamber of your apartment. 

For a time, all you hear is the muffled sloshing of the trussed up waterballoon and the gentle murmuring of informercials playing on the half muted television. Then, you hear the slow thump of footsteps approaching and feel the mattress dip and slosh beside you. 

Your guts heave and for a brief, yet terrifying moment, the nausea returns. 

“...D’you wanna talk about it?” Eddie asks tentatively from somewhere not nearly close enough. 

“No.” You say, knowing well enough that this is not a conversation you can keep putting off. 

“Okay…” he says, sucks his teeth, then tries again, “D’you wanna hear about my day?”

“No.” You insist. 

“Great. So today, I got up at a reasonable hour and totally didn’t sleep in until two-thirty again. I did everything you asked me to and ate a healthy, full balanced meal and only watched, like, half an hour of tv – don’t worry, just PBS, Babe, only the really boring, educational shit. But I swear on my life, this whole place was spotless … and then out of no where – WHAM! You’ll never guess what happened.” 

He pauses for effect, and waits for you to play along, to rise to his prompting like you normally do, but he’s sorely mistaken if he thinks you’re in the mood for games. You wire your jaw shut and leave him waiting for you to answer. When you don’t, Eddie repeats himself,

“You’ll never guess what happened.” 

Finally, he prods you sharply under the armpit with two fingers, and you flinch, curling into yourself with the kind of high yelp that can only come from being tickled. 

“Ask me what happened.” he prompts when you uncover your face to glare at him. 

You tell yourself you won’t, but you’ve never been able to resist him, even when you’re mad. Especially when you’re mad, and especially with the way he’s leaning over and looking at you, all soft eyes and long lashes. Because in spite of the smoking and the lying and everything else, every part of you loves every part of him, even when you want to punch him in the face. 

“What happened.” You mutter reluctantly, not a question so much as a submission – Eddie smiles. 

It’s a half hearted thing that doesn’t reach his eyes, but you know what it’s meant to convey – Good Girl. Your heart skips a beat and you kick yourself for still being so stupid for him, even after all this time. You’re supposed to be mad at him. 

He shrugs. 

“Killer Klowns,” He says, and you roll your eyes.

“...you gotta be kidding.”

You turn away to bury your face back in the pillow, and Eddie keeps on talking and talking and talking, because that’s all he does anymore – try to talk himself out of trouble. Funny, the way he never seems to remember how that never works for him. 

“Baby? Baby – hand to God…” he says, pausing again. You just lie there and wait for him to finish, “...They were from Outer Space.”

And when his joking fails to garner any sort of joy, the sentiment goes out of him in an almost tangible wave. For a moment, there’s nothing but measured silence as the refrigerator kicks on and vibrates gently against his guitar, hidden from sight and collecting dust. 

In the interval of time between your release from the hospital and Eddie’s homecoming, you went looking for what could be saved in the wreckage of the Munson trailer. Thankfully, you knew where to look for what was most precious, like the family photos and heirlooms. You rescued what you could and replaced what you couldn’t, but there are some things that are too precious to ever replace.

Things like Eddie’s guitar.

When the world came tumbling down in those last few moments of whatever the hell happened at the end there, Sweetheart had taken brutal damage, and that was before someone burned the place down. She was barely clinging to life when you finally unearthed her from the rubble – all but one of her strings had snapped, the heat of the fire had caused her resin to bubble and warp, and without its protective layer, someone had been able to stomp her body nearly to oblivion. 

The violence of it broke your heart, and you’re not ashamed to admit you’d kneeled over her carcass and wept when you found her.

It made you physically sick to have to return her to Eddie in such a state, but there was only so much you could do without taking time and money you couldn’t spare to get her out to the Guitar Center in Indianapolis. 

She’d once been his prized possession, the focal point of his bedroom put on proud display, the only other woman in his life, now, she’s just some forgotten thing tucked into the space between the refrigerator and the wall, hidden from sight and collecting dust. 

Somehow that’s worse than any of it. 

Eddie told you it was because the apartment was so small and she fit so perfectly in that alcove, but you know it’s because after all that happened, he can’t stand to look at her. 

The refrigerator vibrates against her twisted body, and slowly, the room begins to fill with the muted buzz of a low E.

“I’m sorry, Sweetheart.” Eddie sighs, and it takes you a moment to realize he’s talking to you.

You feel the mattress dip as his hand comes down to rest at the side of your hip, caging you in beneath him, “I’m just trying to make you feel better… honest.” 

You heave a weighted sigh and roll over onto your back, throwing your arms over your eyes and baring down until you see spots and colors and stars. He settles down over you, and when you feel his weight come down to rest on your belly, your heart briefly palpitates. 

You have to stifle the urge to tell him to be careful, because he doesn’t know. How could he know? You haven’t told him. 

“I’m sorry,” He says again, and you can’t help yourself. 

“You’re always sorry when you get caught, but you always do it again.” You bite. 

You feel the corner of his mouth twitch against you and for a long time you both just lie there, wondering how the hell you got here. 

You like to think that under normal circumstances you might not stick around for so much bullshit, but unfortunately for you, your life never got back to normal after you put it on hold to go looking for the jerk last spring, and now you’re committed to him, warts and all. 

And the pair of you have always existed outside the bounds of “normal circumstances” anyway. 

It occurs to you now that this is exactly why you’d been so leery about coming straight home. You’d needed time to prepare before facing Eddie, to be certain before having to explain yourself, because it’s your job to protect him, but how are you supposed to protect him from himself, especially when he’s hell bent on following this path of self destruction to the end of the line?

But you’re still not certain, and you’re starting to think you really need to take another test…

“Where’d you go earlier?” Eddie mumbles dejectedly - you feel his voice rumble in the pit of your stomach and it sends the faintest stirrings of something you absolutely do not want to be feeling down through your central cortex – arousal. 

“Nowhere.” You say, distantly feeling your lips move and the vibration of your voice, but not hearing yourself speak. 

Before you realize what you’re doing, you shift your lower body, ever so subtly trying to move your hips up in search of a little friction.

Stop that, you silly bitch. You are not going to give him a pity fuck just because you feel bad about making him feel bad. 

You sigh. 

“I just needed to walk a little… stretch my legs… guess I lost track of time,” and then, “Sorry,” 

Eddie says something, and you are vaguely aware of responding – him asking if everything is okay and you dismissing the question, building up another layer of that lie and reassuring him that everything is fine…

At least, you think that’s what you said, you can’t be certain because his voice is still buzzing down through your belly and stirring that raunchy little pot, and you’re still fighting tooth and nail to stop your hips from squirming.  

You know if you don’t do something, you’re absolutely going to end up giving him a pity fuck, and that’s exactly how you ended up in the situation you’re in now. Because when Eddie calls, you come running, no matter what. 

I should tell him. 

You try to take another one of those deep, steadying breaths to banish the skittery tightness forming in your chest, and you choke on it.

Something begins to press in at the back of your eyes, welling up and crowding them in your sockets. Your vision blurs and before you realize what is about to happen, your lashes flood with hot, stinging tears.

You begin to cry. 

Goddammit. It really has just been a very shitty day. 

You uncover your eyes long enough to mask the motion of wiping away the wetness streaming across your cheeks by checking your watch, and you see that it is not there. A bright burst of panic sparks in your chest sending adrenaline shooting down to the tips of your fingers and toes before you remember how you’d removed it to wash your hands after being sick in the employee bathroom at Melvald’s. 

Before your life came grinding to a halt in ten minutes or less.

I should tell him. 

You imagine – you hope – your watch is still sitting there on the edge of the sink. And then you remember that it doesn’t matter if it is, because time stopped in November of 1983. 

Time isn’t real, it’s just another Thursday. 

You heave another one of those measured breaths – this one a little wetter and shakier than the last – and drop your arms to come down gently over Eddie’s shoulders. 

You sniffle and sigh, and he immediately twists over to look up at you. 

You look down and meet wide brown eyes – sad eyes – duller than they’ve been in months, red rimmed and ringed in dark circles like bruises. He’s so pale, his full lips are dry and cracked and raw from where you know he’s been biting at them. 

Eddie’s brows come together to form a deep crease of worry and suddenly your face is bracketed in his hands, brushing at the wetness you can’t manage to stem and apologizing endlessly for everything he’s ever done wrong. 

He doesn’t know what he did to hurt you, but he’s sorry for it. Sorry, sorry, always so incredibly sorry – how many times can someone say something before it loses all meaning? 

Sorry doesn’t mean shit coming from Eddie – yes it does, don’t be unkind.

He’s depressed, and you’re pregnant, and now you’re crying about it and he’s desperate to take the blame for it. 

To his credit, Eddie hauls himself up to meet you and pulls you into his arms, crushing you against him as you go to pieces. You can feel the uncertainty radiating off of him. 

He wants to know why you’re crying, so you should just get it over with and tell him, right? You can’t make the words come out, and now that you’ve started crying, you can’t stop. 

He deserves to know, but it’s your job to protect him, and so long as you keep this secret to yourself, he’s still safe from the harm it might cause. Everything is still okay, you just have to keep holding that door.   

It takes what feels like a very long time before you calm down, and even after you do, you just lay there facing each other, feeling Eddie’s eyes boring holes into your forehead. 

You have to tell him. 

“Are you mad?” Eddie asks before you can get the chance, reaching across to thumb away one last stray tear from the hollow beneath your eye – the lump in your throat threatens to swell again.

Tell him now.

You swallow hard and try not to choke on it.  

“Yes,” you say honestly, “But not at you … not really,” 

The corner of his mouth twitches again as he tries and fails to smile.

“Who do you need me to beat up?” Eddie asks in his best approximation of something he might have said once upon a time. It doesn’t hit quite the way it used to, and despite the shy smile that quirks up at the corner of your lips, you feel a sharp stab of grief for the person you lost on the other side of the world.

It's not a fair thought to have. He’s still here, part of him at least, and he’s fighting to get back to you with everything he’s got. 

You know he’s trying, and it immediately floods you with guilt. About biting his head off, about lying, about going missing long enough to leave him wondering what the hell could have happened to you. 

That was selfish of you, but you’re not going to apologize for it, because above everything else he said he was going to do, he promised to take better care of himself.

You suppose that makes you even. 

The silence that follows is unbearably weighted, like a sopping wet blanket – like the air in the other place – and you have to make yourself look at him to make sure you haven’t gone suddenly deaf, and to make sure he’s still there.

When you look, you’re not surprised to find that Eddie is looking too, like he’s had the same thought and it’s struck him with a bolt of blinding fear. You both do that a lot now, go checking to make sure the other is still there, even when you’re laying pressed against each other like this. 

He’s giving you that strange hard look you’ve come to know very well. It’s the same look he had on his face every time you caught him staring at you over the course of that long, terrible week last spring – the one he gives you when he knows something is wrong, but he is too afraid to ask on the off chance that he’s right about it. It’s the way his face looks all the time, now, ever since he got out of the hospital.  

Are we okay? He wants to ask, Do you still love me?

Because no matter how many times you tell him, it never seems to settle in. He always needs to hear it one more time. 

He always needs five more minutes. 

Just five minutes more more more more more –

Well, what about what you need? You’re the one watching your life fall apart, you’re the one who’s pregnant.

Then again, how do you know you haven’t been hallucinating the whole thing? You do have to tell him, but you really ought to take another test, just to be really, really sure before you share your findings with the class.  

A false positive isn’t unheard of. What’s the harm in a second opinion? You won’t know until you know.

Eddie follows when you sit up, and quickly takes your hands back from where you’ve begun scrubbing them furiously against your face, trying to rid yourself of the cloying miasma of salt drying tacky on your skin. 

“Don’t do that,” he tells you, and you don’t even bother asking him why. 

He does it because you would have done it to him. 

That’s how he operates now, relying heavily on what he knows you would do moment to moment, because he’s still that lost in the reeds. It’s the only way he knows how to take care of himself anymore: what would you do for him in any given situation?

The next thing you know, you’ve got your arms around his neck, squeezing him as tight as you dare, as tight as you think he needs to be held just to remember that he’s still here, and you wish like hell he would just pick up what you were putting down already. You wish he would know exactly what is going on with you without even asking, like he used to.

But you know he can’t, his mind is too clouded for the kind of clairvoyance lovers share anymore.

Eddie’s head thumps forward to rest atop your shoulder and strong arms – less strong than they used to be – squeeze you tight enough around the midsection to cause something in your back to pop. You don’t care. It’s grounding and it’s what you’ve needed all afternoon. 

You go chasing the feeling as you breathe in another two-count and exhale on three, twisting your head to bury your nose into the crook of his neck.

He stinks like days old sweat and your perfume. 

“I’m sorry I was mean,” you say into the filthy curtain of his hair, and you’re suddenly reminded of how you’d stood together like that in the dark of his bedroom a lifetime ago, counting down the moments you had to spare before you slipped back into the other place for the last time.

“S’okay,” Eddie slurs, and you feel the guilt of it throb painfully in your chest as you nuzzle against him, trying to slip beneath the surface and occupy the space beneath his skin. 

It’s the only way he’ll ever feel close enough without being inside of you – the gentle rumbling of your prior arousal begins to stir again, and you have to remind yourself that you’re not doing that.

“I love you,” 

He makes a soft sound and you feel his fingers flex against you, digging needily into your skin and pulling you up into his lap.

“Say that again,” he says, holding you against him.  

The fibers of his well worn t-shirt make the beginnings of a friction burn against your cheek as you shift to compensate for this new position – it’s hard to stay tucked against him now that you’re sitting above him, harder still not to sit right down and press the seam of your pussy against the bulge you can feel forming in his sweatpants. 

For the sake of your own self preservation – why? It’s not like he can get you more pregnant than you already are – you sit back on his thighs and bring your hands up to grace the curve of his throat. Eddie tilts his head back to follow and gaze up at you through his lashes. 

“Say it again,” he says, and days old stubble scratches the ridge of your knuckles as you stroke the side of his face.

“I love you,” you say thickly, for all the times you said it and he didn’t believe you, and all the times he needed to hear it and you kept it to yourself.

You listen as Eddie breathes out a shaky, charcoally sigh. His eyes slide shut and he lets his head drop forward to thump against your sternum. For half a blessed second, everything feels exactly like it should. Not like it used to, but as right as it possibly can be after everything that’s happened. 

It’s just you and Eddie. 

You and Eddie and the sea monkey growing inside of you.

Just like that, your brief moment of perfect peace begins to crack. You curl your arms around his neck in defiance of it and squeeze him a little tighter and do everything you can to hold it in place. 

He’ll be okay if you just hold him tight enough. Everything will be okay – nothing bad can happen when you’re together. 

Except for all the bad that happened at Rick’s Place and Lover’s Lake and on the other side of the world and… shut up shut up shUT UP!

Everything is going to be fine.  

You’ll tell Eddie your secret, and he’ll tell you that everything will be alright. You’ll figure it out, like you always do, and you’ll be happy to have whatever you end up with.   

You press your lips into the crown of his head, and he makes a soft sound beneath you. 

You tell yourself you ought t0 do it now. Don’t make a big deal out of it, but tell him and get it over with all the same so you don’t have to worry about it anymore. 

Eddie will help you – you don’t know how, but he will. He’s the only one who can help you, so just tell him. 

“Are you hungry?” You ask.

Coward.

He shakes his head and breathes a deeply melancholic sigh into your collar. Of course he isn’t, he’s full of sugar and coffee and nicotine, he’s not going to be hungry until next week. 

Still, you know he’s going to crash hard and be sick in the morning if you don’t make him eat something besides processed pound cake. He’s not hungry, but he’ll eat if you’re eating — the thought of food makes your insides clench and heave. 

“Are you?” He asks, shifting back so he can look at you again – in another life you watch him retreat to the stove at Rick Lipton’s place. 

“I made dinner,” that Eddie says, and you’re thrust into a memory of sitting with your heads bowed together over a flaking linoleum table, a sticky pot of Spaghetti-o’s and a hundred and one unsaid things between you — your stomach roils with nausea. 

“No, I’m good.” you tell this Eddie, your Eddie. 

That Eddie was your Eddie too, and sometimes you miss him so badly you can hardly breathe. 

You shift further back on his knees so you can look at him, really look at him, and tell him – you have to tell him – and you take his hands in yours. 

“Eddie, listen – there’s something we need to talk about…” You start, and feel him tense beneath you. 

You know what he’s thinking, more bad news. He’s about to lose something else, and you don’t have the heart to quell those fears just yet. If you get stuck trying to make it all better before it even begins, you’ll never get the words out.

You have to tell him. 

Deep breath in – the words sit on your tongue like burning coals, and yet you continue to fail to spit them out – just say it.

Two measly little words and it will be over. 

I’m pregnant.  

Say it, say it now … for the love of God, say anything.  

It’s only when you turn Eddie’s hands up to see his palms that you are saved from your sudden onset muteness as a spot of bright blood drying tacky in the creases of his hand makes itself known.

“Oh, my God!” You gasp, wondering how in the hell you didn’t see that before, “What happened?”  

“Nothing.” He mumbles, jerking his arm back to try and hide the wounded extremity. “It’s just a splinter.” 

You can feel your face pulling into a frown, even if you aren’t conscious of intentionally emoting, and you reach after him. 

“Let me see,” you say — Eddie says, because you’re out in the woods with two broken fingers that need setting and a black eye courtesy of Jason Carver, “Baby, let me see…” 

To his credit, Eddie doesn’t put up as much of a fight as you did back then, though only because you think after all this time he doesn’t have much fight left, and gives you his hand when you reach for it back in the here and now. 

Fingers in his, you turn his palm up again to scrutinize his shoddy work and feel your heart stutter.  

He’s dug a needlessly ugly crater into the calloused meat between his forefinger and thumb. Sticky, semi-coagulated blood is still oozing up in a ring around the faint shadow marring his flesh, and for half a second you’re afraid he’d gone and done something stupid like try to extract the foreign agent with a pair of scissors. 

When you look, you’re semi-relieved to see that it is only a pair of worn needle nose pliers balancing precariously on the bedside table. Still, you bite the pulpy mass you’ve spent the day chewing into the inside of your cheek until you taste blood to stop yourself from saying anything about it.

Eddie has always been such a boy, blundering through life and bashing his skull against problems because someone once told him to “use his head”. He always makes everything harder than it needs to be, and then wonders why he doesn’t feel any better by the end of it.

“I couldn’t find the tweezers,” he explains sheepishly.

You look up at him and gaze into those big sweet doe eyes — pretty eyes. Sad eyes. 

“They’re in the drawer —” You remind him, taking gentle hold of his face in one hand and squeezing, “—where they belong,” and then you push up to stand over him, “I’ll get them.”

You turn for the bathroom and don’t let go of his hand until the pull of distance demands it – his fingers slip from your grasp, and you blink back the beating of heavy wings and gnashing teeth, wrenching you out of his touch and into the dark of your mind’s eye.    

Across the room and into the little bathroom, you shut the door behind you. 

You click the lock. 

You don’t know why you do that, except maybe because you’ve been doing it all day, and you’re desperate for a moment to yourself in this four hundred square foot box of self pity. You tell yourself you only need a moment, but suddenly you can’t imagine that naïve girl who had been so ready to never have to bother with something like personal space and boundaries again.

What a foolish little thing she was.   

Young love doesn’t have the foresight for things like the shock of falling into the toilet at three o’clock in the morning because Eddie’s never lived with someone who doesn’t take a piss standing up and you’ve never had to navigate sharing a bathroom with someone who does. 

The learning curb has been steep. 

You drop the toilet seat with a loud clacking thump and you upend the grocery bag of prenatal contraband you’d smuggled out of Melvald’s. 

Part of you hopes Eddie didn’t see you grab your bag off the hook, but you suppose if he did, you’ll have to explain that behavior later, though at that point, you imagine he’ll have a lot more on his mind than wondering why you need to bring your purse with you to the bathroom. 

You drop your jeans, pee on the stick, and gnaw your fingers to the bone as you witness a little more of your life flash before your eyes with every passing second until you count out ten minutes … or less, as the packaging so boldly promised.

And when you receive your second opinion, you decide you could stand to get a third, so you lean over the bathroom sink, guzzle as much tap water as you can stomach and you do it all over again.

Colors and shapes and stars explode across your vision in a kaleidoscopic dance as you dig the heels of your palms into the jelly of your eye sockets and you wait … wait… wait to see what will happen next. 

There you sit, wringing your hands, bouncing your knees, and you wait ten minutes and ten minutes more until you get your results in thin pink lines and bright blue tabs and little green plus signs.

Positive results, which means… 

“Shit.” You hiss — the plastic casing creaks and begins to tremble in your hands, “Fuck!”

A sharp rap on the door sends you leaping damn near out of your skin and the test goes clattering to the floor. 

The action is followed by a cautious utterance of your name, muffled by layers of wood vinyl and hollow core. 

Your heart lurches– along the bottom of the bathroom door, you can see the subtle shadow of idling movement. You forgot about Eddie, and you wonder with a start just how long he has been standing there, waiting for you. 

For ten minutes or less, you imagine. You have to swallow the urge to tell him to go away.

“Are you okay?” He asks, and you suddenly feel ready to burst into tears again – goddamn hormones.

You glance down at the strip of plastic casing and cardboard bullshit, at the two pink lines standing boldly against the soiled backdrop and grinning wickedly at you for all the smart decisions you didn’t make over the course of the last fourteen months of domestic bliss.

The answer rockets to the front of your mind.

No. You’re not okay. You’re pregnant.

You swallow hard to try and banish the cobwebs blooming in your throat, and when they thicken, you swallow again. 

Eddie is speaking before you can decide how to answer him. 

“… are you feeling sick again?” 

You just manage catch to catch the burst of bitter laughter before it can come bleating out of you, and you shake your head for no one in particular.

“Yeah – I mean no.” You say unevenly, “I’m okay, I’m just–” Pregnant. “–feeling a little bit off.” 

You know between the vagueness of the answer and the discovery of a locked door between you, Eddie’s mind is bound to be spinning out with worry. 

He worries so much about everything these days — just wait until he finds out about the baby, that’ll really give him something to worry about. 

You listen to him shifting his weight from one socked foot to the other on the carpet, to the soft thump that follows and has you picturing him resting his forehead on the door jamb. 

You brace your hands on your knees and push up to stare at your reflection, eyes heavy and ringed with exhaustion, about to get so much worse when you’ve got a tiny helpless creature screaming its lungs out at you in the inability to communicate.

You hear the tentative rasping of your name eke out from behind the door, and watch the handle jiggle in the mirror. 

All you want is to go to bed, sleep this weirdness off, and wake up tomorrow to find that everything has gone back to normal. 

Not the normal of this morning’s blissful ignorance, but the normal of days past. Of school days and homework and gossip and when the only thing you had to worry about not getting caught sneaking out of class just to steal five minutes behind the bleachers with Eddie.

The salad days.

You just want things the way they were — Eddie the way he used to be and you the way you used to be, sitting tucked away together in his bedroom at the old place, before anything went wrong and it was just you and your dreams for the future. 

More than anything, though, you wish you could buck up the courage to tell Eddie you’re pregnant so you can drop this suffering in silence bullshit. 

You carefully wrap everything back in that same plastic bag you never want to see again and stash it in the cabinet beneath the sink, tucked in behind all your forgotten bottles of shampoo and cleaning supplies, where no one will accidently find them. 

Then, you push up on creaky legs and address the elephant in the other room. You don’t unlock the door.  

“I’m gonna shower,” you watch your reflection say, it is a hollow, robotic sound, and Eddie doesn’t answer right away. You can hear him just outside the door.

Thinking. Worrying. 

Pouting more like. 

And you know he’s going to ask before he even says it. 

“…D’you want some company?”

Bingo.

Never has a sentence embodied a more desperate plea to be let in — he may as well have been scratching at the door and whining like a dog who’s been locked out. 

Let me in let me in let me in please let me in. 

You clench your teeth and blink back another wave of those pervasive tears pressing at the backs of your eyes as a strange, misplaced resentment wells suddenly in you.

It’s a startling feeling.

Not the same as the cheap, petty anger you’d felt before but a black and violent thing that does not belong to you. It has no business existing inside of you, and yet here it is, telling you that you can’t stand it. You can’t stand how much Eddie needs you all the time. You give him everything you have and he always needs more. 

Just five more minutes, please just give me five more minutes. Don’t leave me, just love me, let me in, let me in Please please please.

It’s not his fault. You tell the violent feeling. He’s depressed. He doesn’t have hobbies anymore…

He doesn’t have anything anymore — it bites back, he just has you. 

You shake your head in melancholic defiance of these conflicting feelings.

He needs me. You insist.

He’s using you up. It responds. He’s smothering you.

And you hate the feeling for being right. All he does is take and take and take, and you’re nothing if not a fool for giving him everything he needs and then some. You love Eddie more than anything, more than everything, but if he doesn’t stop taking, there’s not going to be anything left for you… for this— 

“—Baby?” Eddie calls faintly, startling you again. 

You have to take a moment longer than is probably necessary to calm yourself enough to decide whether or not you can stomach his “company” right now. 

“No,” you sigh, “I just wanna wash the day off.”

You imagine the pang of fear lancing through his chest as an invisible box is ticked off: the second sign of trouble.

Locked door. His alarm bells are ringing. Can’t get to you. You’re trapped trapped trapped. Let me in let me in let me in let me –

There is the scratching of the chewed edge of his thumbnail digging into the painted wood, peeling it — probably causing another splinter — and you have to bite your tongue to keep from telling him to stop doing that, because you’re not going to get your security deposit back. 

Who cares about security deposits or contraception or personal space, you both almost died, remember? Live a little!

You turn away from the stranger in the mirror and face the door, forcing yourself to sound chipper as you make empty promises about the future to the foreign shell of the person you have to remind yourself you love. 

“I’ll be out in a jiffy,” you call unevenly, “…just let me rinse off, okay?” 

There is a long moment of disappointed silence before Eddie finally responds. 

“...Mm’kay…” 

Fading footsteps thrum a gentle beat as you step out of your abused and crinkled jeans. Oddly, you feel like you’ve spent more time out of them today than in them, and that might almost be funny if it weren’t for the circumstances.

There is a moment of peace as you continue undressing, then the rapid thump thump thump of returning steps. A sharp knock summons another one of those long-suffering sighs whooshing up from the deepest recesses of your body.

“What do you need, Eds?” You ask a little too harshly, pinching your eyes toward the bridge of your nose with your forefinger and thumb. 

You tell yourself you’re not angry with him, you’re just tired and uncertain and scared of that uncertainty. 

“Tweezers.”

Oh. Right. 

They’re in the drawer, neatly tucked away and exactly where they belong. Just where you said they’d be. 

You crack the door as far as you dare and don’t look at your boyfriend when you take his palm in your hand, despite the holes you can feel him boring into the top of your head. 

Don’t shut me out — please – oh, God, please let me in! he begs you with only a few short breaths as you pluck the thick spur of plywood from his hand and douse it in rubbing alcohol for good measure. 

Eddie hisses and bends to kiss you on the cheek. You let him do it, then shut the door in his face. 

If he didn’t know there was something wrong before, he’s bound to be crawling out of his skin with it now. 

You don’t care, and you feel terrible about it as you lean over the tub to pull the pin and turn the water on. 

The shower head roars to life, and as it fills the room with noise and steam, you can barely hear yourself think – thank God.

You stand under the stream and let the water run hot on you until it goes cold, and even then you linger and accept the beating it gives you. 

Eyes shut, senses dulled, body pinging with goosebumps, you feel your muscles begin to loosen and relax. The outside world goes swirling down the drain, and you finally let your hand creep up to touch your belly. You splay your fingers over the expanse of skin and hold it there, feeling for something, anything, some sign of the life lurking there among your guts. When you don’t feel anything — why would you feel anything when the baby is not even a baby yet — you try your hand at rubbing the spot, back and forth, like you’ve seen people do to their fake pregnant bellies in the movies. 

The results are middling beneath pruning fingers and the shower head is pinging ice at you now, stabbing you in the scalp, so you decide with no small amount of disappointment that it’s time to get out. 

Just as you expected, Eddie is waiting for you when you flick off the bathroom light and re-emerge into the bedroom/living room/kitchen combo.

You’re almost surprised to find that the room has been more or less straightened. It’s not clean, by any stretch of the word, but trash, clothes, and all manner of discarded knick-knacks have been removed from the floor and stashed in other strategic places. The bedsheets have been tidied in the best approximation Eddie can manage for making a bed, though you can’t say it looks much different than it did before. He couldn’t do it right before he had his guts ripped out, and time and practice has had no effect on that inefficiency. 

He’s sitting there on the bed, trying to look casual with his long legs stretched out, ankles crossed, arms crossed, fingers crossed, and you give him a weak smile as you enter, holding your towel and heading for the chest of drawers on your side of the bed. You stop short when you notice the clothes he’s laid out for you: an oversized Houston Oilers t-shirt you’d thrifted for him before he came to stay and a soft pair of shorts – how unbearably sweet. 

“Feel better?” He asks hopefully, boyishly, as you step into the shorts. 

You nod, and you can’t even call it a lie, because getting the muck of the world out of your skin and hair has made enough of an impact to improve your headspace exponentially.

At least you don’t feel like you’re about to start screaming anymore – Jefferson Starship is happy enough to do that for you, howling to the elusive Jane, still playing that same old game she never can win. 

Eddie’s put on the mixtape you made him in the summer of ‘84, which you’re not certain he’s ever heard the end of – if only because he can’t make it through Dancing Queen without saying something snide about ABBA and disco as a whole – but he’s trying to make it better.

You tell yourself that, in spite of everything else, you have to give him credit for that as you slip the t-shirt over your head and walk your towel back to the bathroom. 

And if he’s trying, then you’re a fool for not trying too, so you do your best to put a happy look on your face when you reemerge and jerk your thumb over your shoulder.

“Okay, your turn.”

His mouth drops open, but you don’t let him protest. 

“Go on – git.” You say, affecting a thick southern drawl to try and lighten the mood. 

Eddie just frowns at you.

“If you wanted me to shower you shoulda let me join you,” He grouses. 

You stick him to the spot with a pointed look.

“If I’d let you join me, we wouldn’t be getting clean in there, and you know it.” You press, “I mean it, Eds. You smell like a garbage truck. When’s the last time you showered?” 

He snorts and does his best to make the jab to his ego look like feigned hurt feelings, but you can see the edges of his mask flickering. Not even near death had been enough to dampen that ego of his. 

It’s a bizarre thing to witness what is left of the Eddie from before fighting for real estate with what has grown into the Eddie here and now. If you could capture it in an image, you’d hang it on the wall and call it “the duality of man,”, but that wouldn’t help you to get Eddie into the shower any more than your attempt at gentle coaxing. 

You have to resist the urge to offer some sort of trade off, because there are scant few things that motivate Eddie these days that don’t end with you opening your legs for him. And you have to remind yourself, once more for the people in the back, that’s exactly how you wound up in your silly little predicament. 

Back when you were in high school and still strangers to one another, there had been a wildly circulated rumor that Eddie would trade weed for head … funny how that has circled back to reflect you and your recent penchant for sexual bargaining chips – if you take a twenty minute shower, I’ll go down on you when you get out.

You don’t wonder how your shitty old friends would react to learning about that development in your behavior, because you rarely ever think about Carol and Tina these days. 

You do wonder how you’re going to get Eddie to stop giving you that sulky look while holding your ground.  

He needs to shower (on his own), and you need a little more time to yourself. 

You hate to press the issue, because it makes you feel too much like his mother – and you cannot even begin to unpack the Oedipal concept of that dynamic – but you absolutely cannot spend another moment pressed against his side and breathing shallowly under a cloying musk of days old body odor. 

“I’m fine,” He insists, crossing his arms and still trying to pretend like he isn’t bothered by your indictment of his personal hygiene. 

“No, you’re not.” You say, “You have to take better care of yourself. I know you don’t think it’s gonna make any difference, but I promise you it will. You’ll feel better.” 

Eddie offers you one of those half hearted smiles, and quirks his brow.

“You always say that.” 

“Yeah, so what? I’m always right. Do it for me, okay?”

It takes him a minute more of contemplative pouting, but eventually he relents, because for as soft as you are for him, he’ll do anything for you, even if it means bruising his ego a little. 

He slaps his hands on the bed and pushes up in the fading glimmer of a gesture he might have made back in the old days – your heart throbs painfully in your chest as you watch him flicker in and out of frame – then makes a show of stretching his arms high over his head. 

You watch as he comes to immediately regret the motion when his bad side hitches and he quickly remembers his limited range of movement. 

Eddie pretends like it doesn’t hurt as he makes his way across the room.

“Okay,” he says softly, pausing to kiss you on the cheek as he passes, “But only ‘cause yer so damn purty,” 

The affectation of the southern drawl you’d used before sounds much better on Eddie, and you lean fondly in to the press of his lips, not even bothering to be annoyed when he takes a cheeky handful of your backside. 

You feel your insides burn with what the touch suggests, and for half a mindless second, you tell yourself that maybe you could stand to follow him in there. Just to help him wash, of course, get the spots he can’t reach… nothing else…

Then, your rationality comes snapping back into place when Eddie strikes you hard on the ass with an open palm. 

You yelp in alarm more than pain and jump. Even after every time he has done that before, you never expect him to do it, and your face is burning as you turn to watch him go, disgustingly pleased with himself and snickering.

“Wash your hair,” you call, knowing it will add at least another five minutes to his shower, and your coveted alone time. “And brush your teeth.” 

Eddie acknowledges you with a dismissive wave and something grumbled under his breath as he disappears into the bathroom, leaving the door cracked in a stark contrast to the way you’d shut him out when you slipped away into the next and only other room. 

Therein lies the ultimate problem of your living situation. You keep trying to build a barrier, brick by brick, because you need your space, but Eddie needs it too, so every brick you put up he takes right back down.  

You feel a muted pang of guilt over that which dissipates the moment you hear the shower hiss on. Then, and only then, do you breathe a sigh of relief you didn’t realize you were holding. 

Your time begins now. 

Because you absolutely cannot abide the state of the bed, even after Eddie’s futile attempts to pull it into shape, you spend the full duration of Jefferson Starship’s regression back into the days of Airplane attempting to wrestle the top sheet into position as Jane fades into White Rabbit. 

Then, as the first strummed notes of More than Words begins to play, you brave the tide and pull the blankets over your head, curling in on yourself protectively. In the dark, the wet sloshing of the mattress is so much worse, so much weirder, and you try not to think about how womblike your cocoon suddenly is. 

You didn’t want the waterbed. You wanted a normal mattress to try and live your normal lives, but Eddie already wasn’t sleeping because of his nightmares, and you couldn’t stand to see him in any further pain, not when it was because of something you could so easily remedy.

Sure, it was a real kick in the teeth to have to send five hundred dollars you couldn’t afford down the drain on a mattress, but thankfully the retailer would accept an exchange on a product of equal or lesser value (emphasis on lesser) and that’s how you’d gone and found Eddie in some back corner of the store, starfished and riding the surf of the floor model waterbed like a blissed out Goldilocks.

The stuff of your nightmares.  

“Babe, it’ll be so cool,” he’d told you when he was trying with everything in his power to convince you to say yes.

He’d spouted some bullshit statistic he’d skimmed in a pamphlet at physical therapy about the benefits of hydrotherapy, and you’d informed him that sleeping on a giant water balloon was not hydrotherapy. But you were just so glad he was getting excited about something, and because mattress shopping is an exercise in twentieth century torture, you took it home for a tentative trial. 

Fourteen months later, here you lay, trying to relax, trying to sink into a quiet, thoughtless meditation, but you can’t stop your mind from spinning.

Because you hate this fucking waterbed. 

You hate the way it lists back and forth when you climb into it, and when Eddie slinks in after you and startles you awake with the sudden lurch of blaring panic, like stepping off a curb in your dreams. 

You hate the leaks it springs, you hate the crinkling duct tape patches that poke you through the sheets when you roll over. 

You hate how it holds the cold in the winter and radiates heat in the summer. 

But you don’t hate how happy it made Eddie to see it delivered, or how you’d lay awake giggling together that first night. You love the childlike glee you’d shared that night, taking turns bouncing each other on the creaking tide and whispering back and forth like kids having a sleepover. 

Of course, that giddy episode of play was the only prelude to what was perhaps the worst night’s sleep you’d ever had, but you’re almost happy to ignore that.   

In a turn of events which you pretend not to be shocked by, Eddie’s shower lasts nearly twenty-five minutes. By the time he shuts off the water and re-emerges, scrubbed pink, clean shaven, and reeking of peppermint, you’ve let the gentle rocking of the bed lull you into a sleepy stupor. 

“How was it?” you ask, regardless of what you already know.

You don’t ask him how long he actually spent washing and how long he just stood there under the tap (you also don’t ask if he allotted any of that time to jerking off in the distant hope that he’ll be satisfied enough to leave you alone) because the subtle change in his posture is all the evidence you need to know you were right. 

Like always. 

He looks over at you and smiles that same goofy smile that made you fall in love with him back in high school, and his brows come down. 

“Cold.” He says, “You used up all the hot water,”

Oh, whoops. He levels you with a sidelong glance which you imagine is meant to make you feel guilty for not letting him share the hot water with you, but somehow you can’t manage to get around to feeling that way. 

He’s clean, that’s all you care about.  

You can’t help but stare as he drops his towel in a wet heap and stands comfortably naked, pulling open drawers and looking for a pair of boxers and a clean shirt – wonder of wonder, miracle of miracles…

“Sorry,” you hum, watching with rapt, unblinking attention.

Eddie turns at the sound of your apology, and it takes a moment too long for your gaze to snap up when he comes to face you. You smile innocently, but he’s already smirking at you. 

“Are you?” he asks, “...or are you just enjoying the show?”

You tilt your head down to press your shoulder to your ear. 

“Maybe,” 

He rolls his eyes and steps into the faded blue plaid boxer shorts.

“Maybe, she says – move over, will ya?” 

You hold the blankets up for him to slide beneath. Pulling the shirt over his head, he settles in beside you and you sit together in silence, listening to the distant sounds of your mixtape playing as you wait for the bed to stop sloshing. 

You know deep down he secretly hates it too, but he’s too proud to admit when he’s wrong, especially after campaigning so hard for it. You don’t care, you’re in this for the long game — you’re gonna make him say it before you do.

You curl your arm around his back and immediately go to work knotting your fingers in the tangles of his hair, tugging gently at the damp baby hairs curling at the nape of his neck and making a mental note to help him comb it out before you fall asleep. 

Eddie rests his head atop yours with a contented sigh and you feel the poke of his tongue in his cheek as he swipes it over his teeth. 

“So, are you ever gonna tell me about your shitty day?”

“Who said I had a shitty day?” You ask.  

He breathes an easy chuckle out through his nose and you hear it rattle all the way down in his lungs. 

“You and that attitude of yours,”

 Before you can say anything in defense of your self, the next track begins to play, bringing with it the iconic intro to Dancing Queen. And because Eddie cannot abide ABBA, he is on his feet in an instant. 

The prelude to a great disappointment begins to well in your chest, because unlike Eddie, you do in fact remember being young and sweet, only seventeen, and you cherish those days – the earliest days of your entanglement with the town pariah, before you’d finished dancing around each other. 

“Eddie don’t–” You whine, but he’s already thumping across the room to the stereo sitting precariously balanced in your rickety bookcase. 

When he reaches the unit, he makes the executive decision that you can neither dance nor jive, and you will not be having the time of your life. He begins agitatedly punching buttons, and the song cuts out.

The track skips, and the next thing you know, your blood is thrumming along to the beat of a crunchy baseline, and Steve Perry is crooning you make me weak, and wanna die… and you know exactly what is coming next. 

The main event. The lovin’, the touchin’, the squeezin’... your insides squirm with an unhelpful reminder of your deep dark secret, and you muster every shred of self control you have. 

You will not be having sex tonight, no matter how good Eddie looks naked, no matter what he does to try and sway you, and no matter how much Steve Perry insists he’s tearin’ you apart… 

You cross your arms and breathe out hard through your nose with wavering determination as Eddie turns back to you, once again disgustingly pleased with himself. 

“That’s better,” He says, crossing back to the bed in two long-legged strides and throwing himself down beside you.

The mattress jumps and rolls, and your muscles tense as you do everything you can to stay upright and sulking.

“Why do you hate fun?” you ask as Eddie crawls over top of you on his hands and knees.

“Hate fun?” he echoes, like he cannot believe you would accuse him of such a thing.

“You know I love that song.”

 “Yeah, but, Sweetheart, this is a great song! It’s the best song on the list,”

Never mind the fact that he skipped three tracks to get there. You set your teeth and try not to take offense to his criticism of your taste in music because you’ve long since agreed to disagree.  

“This is a sex song.” You correct, resisting the asking fingers he’s begun to drum along your tightly crossed arms.

When you fail to open up for him, Eddie rolls his head to the side and looks up at you through his lashes in that very specific way he knows drives you just a little bit crazy.  

“It’s your tape, Babygirl,” he says evenly, “I’m just a humble disc jockey.” 

You snort out your displeasure with the statement, but you can’t deny it. Because you had indeed hidden Lovin’ Touchin’ Squeezin’ among the tracks on your Summer Fling mixtape back in the summer of ‘84 in the raunchy little hope that it would inspire Eddie to do just that to you, and you know that he knows that as well as you do.

So, whose fault is it really when he slips his hands up under your shirt and starts kissing your neck?

You curse yourself for being so unbearably hot for him back in the day, and for the way that, after two long years, nothing has changed.

“Can I make a request?”

He hums out an easy laugh.

“Nope, sorry. We’re only playing mood music for the rest of the night.” Eddie says, and you tilt your head dutifully back when he nudges your jawline with his nose, “Unless you were gonna ask for Dio, ‘cause you always gotta remember to leave room for Ronnie–”

“If you try to put on Holy Diver again I’m leaving.”

He giggles then – actually giggles – and this time when he kisses you, you feel the press of his tongue on your throbbing pulse point.

You tell yourself this is as far as you’re going to go. You can stand to let him suck a bruise into your neck if that’s what it takes to make him happy but you’re not going to have sex, even if you’re suddenly squirming beneath him to alleviate the thrumming between your thighs.   

With everything you still have to talk about, you can’t afford to let Eddie distract you like that.

Of course, you already know what he’s going to say, the question he’ll ask you — what do you want to do? 

You don’t want him to ask you that. You want him to tell you what to do. You want him to have all the answers and put your mind at ease because you’ve been driving yourself crazy asking yourself that question all goddamn day.

What do you want to do? What are you going to do? How far are you willing to let this go? 

Are you prepared to go all the way with Eddie Munson? You’d asked yourself that once in a situation not so dissimilar to the one you currently find yourself in.

Of course, that time had been significant, because it had been the first time, and even now you remember that cold November afternoon so vividly. You should have been in school, but instead, you were parked outside a record store an hour outside of Hawkins, laying in the back of a van beneath the boy you so desperately loved and letting him send you to pieces with a kiss.

It wasn’t a chaste, pretty kiss like you see in the movies — at least no decent kind of movie — it was a heavy, dirty thing, with tongue and teeth and gasping breath. He held your hands pinned above your head, and you lay there rutting up against him in desperate search of something that only your animal brain could explain. 

The natural progression of things, the way of the world and of girls and boys since time immemorial.

You might have briefly entertained the thought of having his baby back then, in the murky heat of the moment. In hindsight, you’re fairly certain that was just latent Darwinism reminding you that you are a mammal and that your only true purpose on this Earth is to breed – so breed, Baby.

And then your rational human mind prevailed, and asked you that terrible question: are you ready for this?

You’d thought you’d been scared of what the question meant then, but the virginal fear of the thing lurking between a boy’s legs — between your legs back then, prodding you through Eddie’s jeans and asking for a respectful permission you could not help but deny — holds no candle to the uncertain, impending future, which you no longer bother planning for.

Pledging your undying love as a horny teen fresh out of a very close brush with death is one thing, but tethering yourself to something and someone indefinitely?

Are you ready to commit to that with Eddie Munson?

Are you prepared to love him and take care of him on good days and bad, no matter what? Through night terrors and fugue episodes and days and days and so many hard days of wishing he would just snap out of it and come back to his old self?

Are you prepared to have his baby? 

“Ground control to Major Tom.” Eddie calls distantly, and you feel a gentle tapping at the center of your forehead, “Can you hear me, Major Tom?”

He guides you gently from the mire of your existential thoughts and fears, and you blink back at him as he waits expectantly for an answer to whatever it was he’d just said.

“Hmm? Oh — sorry, Eds,” you say absently, reaching up to cup his cheek in your hand, “What were you saying?”

He glares at you, but the effect is ruined by the shy twitch of his lips, quirking at the corners despite his best efforts to play mad at you. He’s still on his hands and knees, a mere inch of distance between your noses as he glowers at you in mock offense — how dare you not be fully engaged in the first steps of this stunning foreplay.

Oh please, as if you don’t do this every goddamn night. 

“Only that I need you so bad right now,” he says, “But it’s not so easy getting that message to Mars. I guess NASA’s not really in the business of passing love notes.”

You scoff and roll your eyes, hooking a finger in the collar of his t-shirt. The lingering effects of the shower waft up in a puff of clean air when you release the fabric, and even through the haze of shampoo and toothpaste, you can smell the bitter undertone of all the cigarettes he smoked today.    

“You need me so bad every night.” You remind him. 

He grins and you feel his teeth when he tips forward.   

“Can’t help it.” Eddie says against your lips, attempting to resume the stilted progress of his foreplay by ducking his head to press a less than chaste kiss to the space beneath your ear — flicking tongue, scrape of teeth – his voice reverberates against the drum and you shiver, “It’s Kafkaesque.”

You snort and wonder as he snakes his hands up under your shirt and takes your breasts in hand if that was meant to impress you. 

“Pavlovian.”

“What’s that, Sweet Girl?” He asks, changing direction without missing a beat.

Eddie rocks back on the balls of his feet, and lifts your thighs over his, pulling you down the mattress a tick – your head thumps against the headboard. Ouch.   

He helps you sit up straight with an apologetic hand, boring holes into you with those big dark eyes – pretty eyes. 

Hungry eyes Eric Carmen might have told you, were you listening to the radio and not Journey’s endless waning call of “nah nah nah-nah nah,”.  

“You mean Pavlovian,” you tell him, bracing your hands on his shoulders when he hugs you by the waist and pulls you into his lap.  

“How do you know what I mean?” he asks as you settle into this new position. 

You drum your fingers along his collarbones and tilt your head, smiling coquettishly as you innocently prepare to bore him to death. 

“Because Pavlov trained dogs to drool at the sound of a bell by ringing one every time he fed them,” you say, “and Kafkaesque suggests that you’re trapped in an authoritarian situation that you can’t escape, so I don’t think that really applies … unless you’re trying to tell me something about our relationship.” 

Eddie hums out a low, performative moan, deep from the back of his throat. It’s not so performative a sound, however, that you can’t feel the hard length of something prodding into the crook of your thigh. 

“I love it when you talk dirty,” he says, baring his teeth at you in a wolfish grin that looks almost like something the old Eddie would have done. 

Eddie before the trauma and surgeries and blood transfusion on blood transfusion on blood transfusion. 

You roll your eyes and trail your fingers down down down his abdomen until you’ve reached the less-than-subtle tent in his threadbare boxers. He draws in a sharp intake of breath when you skim your fingers over the tip of his bulge before taking an immodest palmful of his dick. 

Once upon a time you would have wilted at the thought of doing something like that, but time and practice and the way Eddie’s eyes slide shut as he nods his encouragement has turned a gesture like that into something as casual as late night television. 

He rolls his hips forward and you already feel a bead of heady wetness blooming in the fabric of his boxers when you swipe a cheeky thumb over his tip.

His breath hitches, and Eddie has to clear his throat to keep his voice steady as you begin to work him in your fist. 

“Go on,” He says, and you’re nothing if not happy to oblige.   

“You … getting a hard-on …every night at bedtime… is Pavlovian…” You say, stroking him in a measured up and down. 

Big smile, front teeth poking out, cheeks indenting with an elusive dimple, Eddie shakes his head, pulling you forward to press bodily against him, and sandwiching your hand indecently between you. He doesn’t stop moving his hips. 

“You’re so smart,” he rasps, and you detect the faintest hint of a quaver in his voice when you make a ring with your index finger and thumb, encircling the broad flare of him through the fabric and squeezing.

His mouth falls open on a heavy breath, and you close it right back up with a finger on his chin. 

Still moving in short lazy thrusts, he sighs against you and kisses the line of your jaw, teasing your head back once more with a gentle nudge and exposing the taught columns of your throat to him.

“It’s so fucking sexy.”

You fail to suppress a snort and are almost shocked when it doesn’t immediately kill the mood.

“Is it really that sexy or are you just horny?”

“Who says it can’t be both?” Eddie says, “You’re smart and sexy… and I’m super fucking hot for you right now,”

And because he absolutely cannot help himself when he is reminded of even the faintest hint of a song, suddenly he’s singing under his breath.  

“—hot-blooded, check it and see—” Eddie’s Foreigner impression plays against the waning backdrop of Journey turning over to Pat Benatar, insisting We Belong from the competing stereo.

It’s entirely too much, and you burst into a fit of undainty laughter.

“Don’t laugh, this is important.” He says, grinning, “— I got a fever of a hundred and three,”

When you don’t stop, Eddie kisses you, and even under the seal of his lips, you can’t manage to stifle your giggling.

Of course, now you remember why it’s more fun to fool around and have sex every night than it is to be sensible adults who keep their hands to themselves. Because that’s how you get the old Eddie back – fun Eddie – the one who made you lose your mind and fall in love with him that first Tuesday night at the Hideout a hundred Tuesdays ago. 

Even then, you’d loved him so bad you could have screamed. And you did scream, you recall. You’d screamed yourself hoarse even as Corroded Coffin got booed off stage because you were their biggest fan – their words, not yours – even if their name was stupid and made you giggle behind their backs. 

So what if you only ever see that version of Eddie anymore when you’ve got his cock in your fist? As if to punctuate the thought, he stammers over the next lyric and gasps out a breathy moan when you give him three quick jerks.

He laughs.  

“Naughty,” 

You giggle along and part his lips with a cheeky swipe of your tongue, happily swallowing every little sound he makes under your touch and feeling your insides begin to quiver in turn.

You’ll keep jerking him off because it’s fun to watch him steadily go to pieces, but you’re not having sex tonight – so, why do you have to keep reminding yourself of that?

“Babe,” Eddie says, lips clicking wetly as you part, “It’s not funny, it’s a serious medical condition – you don’t have to read my mind, to know what’s on my mind – Man, those lyrics are stunning.”

“Sheer poetry.” You say, nodding and his eyes light up.

“Right? Guy’s an artist,”

You’re still giggling when you feel the scrape of Eddie’s teeth along the tender veins lining your neck, pinching just a little too sharply on your jugular.

It sends a bolt of adrenaline shooting down like sparks to sting the tips of your fingers and toes, and suddenly it’s not nearly as funny or sexy as it was a moment ago.

You gasp. Fight or flight kicks in — you freeze.

Your heart hammers in your chest, your hearing whites out, – your hands are trembling as you struggle to unwind the soiled bandage tied tight around your broken fingers. You press it to the ugly wound in Eddie’s throat, spurting blood as he tries and fails to breathe through it – he coughs and gasps against the pain it causes him and chokes on your name in a way that makes you never want to hear him say it again… help me, it pleads, don’t let me die, make it stop…

You breathe out harshly and shake your head against the intrusive image of blood turned nearly black in the dark of that place. Your hands come up to brace firmly against Eddie’s shoulders, fingers trembling as you dig them into the muscle there, and you shove him without really meaning to.

“Stop—” You gasp.

It’s okay, you’re okay, You tell yourself, the same way you tell Eddie every night he thrashes awake in a blinding terror, You’re here. You’re safe, you’re home — just breathe. 

“Sorry—” He says immediately, “Too much?”

But you can barely hear him over the roaring in your ears.  

You focus on what you can see — the walls of your shared bedroom/dining room/living room, all your collective things illuminated in the amber glow of the flickering table lamp sitting across the room.

And you focus on Eddie, drying curls backlit and flyaway, framing his face — his handsome face — not spattered in blood and twisted in agony, but freshly scrubbed and tweaked in alarm and a less than subtle hint of concern. 

You’re okay, but more importantly, he’s okay, he’s here with you, and nothing bad can happen when you’re together — but you’d been together while he lay there bleeding to death, hadn’t you? 

“Are you okay?” he asks, all traces of teasing gone from his tone. 

It’s amazing how quickly he can shut it off when the mood shifts. Your sweet boy. 

“I’m okay,”

“What happened?”

“Nothing,” you say, “I just — I didn’t expect you to do that.” 

It’s bizarre that the motion triggered you like that, especially since you’re not the one who had your throat cut down there.

Down there. 

“...do you wanna stop?”

You fight to suppress a shiver and the urge to immediately agree – yes, you should stop, especially since you have no intention of letting this go any further than heavy petting, but you don’t want to be a killjoy.

You shake your head to try and disperse any lingering memory of that night – that eternal night – and absently pet the side of your paramour’s face.

“No,” You say, “No, we don’t have to stop.” But you’re painfully aware of the lack of enthusiasm in your tone.

Eddie’s brows furrow over his eyes, and you can tell he doesn’t believe you, so you tilt forward to press a kiss to the corner of his mouth. 

“Let’s keep going,” you say.

You kiss him, attempting to rekindle what has already begun to die out, and when he doesn’t reciprocate, when you try to kiss him again and he leans back, you feel your insides seize with disappointment. 

“I’m fine, Eddie,” you say, and he pulls a face.

“Liar,”

“I am. I promise.” 

You watch disbelief shadow his face and the muscle in his jaw flex. You can tell he’s getting impatient, not for the starting and stopping, but because he knows you’re not telling him something.

Isn’t that the understatement of the century?

After a moment, Eddie drops his head and sighs your name dejectedly, you try not to flinch or hear it forced out on a burbling bloody timber begging you to make it stop. He slumps onto his hip beside you and he walks two cheeky fingers up the length of your thigh before resting a hand at the top and giving you a gentle squeeze.

“—we don’t have to do this.” He says, “We can just go to bed.” 

You wish that were true. 

You rock back into the pillows and force yourself to smile, feeling your cheeks pull as your insides go tight and twisty. 

Sure, you could just go to bed with a chaste kiss and a “see you in the morning,” and wake up in a few hours to find Eddie on his third cup of coffee, watching late-night television and chain smoking. Or, and far more likely, you can wake up to him thrashing and screaming beside you through the endless circadian reruns of his death and spend the rest of the night trying to calm him down.  

No actually, you can’t just go to bed. You have to do something to help him relax, so that he’s too tired to do anything but sleep through the night.

And the best way to do that, you have found, is to get him off. As it turns out you can only therapy fuck your boyfriend for so long – approximately fourteen months – before it starts to have consequences, like unplanned pregnancies and his being unable to sleep without you getting him off first.

Your hesitation to answer speaks volumes, and Eddie finally shakes his head.

“Let’s just go to bed,”

“No,” you press, pawing at the front of his shirt and hating how whiny you sound as you say it, “I want to keep going.” 

“Don’t just say that because you think it’s what I want to hear,” he says a little too harshly.

“I’m not.”

“You have to tell me if something’s wrong, Sweetheart. I’m not a mind reader, I can’t help you if you don’t talk to me.”

It’s startling to hear, like the clanging of a bell. He knows something is up, and while he may not know what it is, Eddie’s not nearly as stupid as he pretends to be, and you’re a bad liar.

So, quit beating around the bush and tell him already.   

You don’t know why, but you’re committed to denying it now, so you wire your jaw shut and shake your head. 

“I’m fine, you just startled me. I didn’t expect you to do that,”

Eddie gives you that hard look again, and you do your best not to wilt under it. 

“And…?” 

“…And I’m–” Pregnant. “– a little tired…” Pussy. “…and my head hurts.” Stupid. 

Oldest cliché in the book — not tonight honey, I have a headache.  

When he still doesn’t let up, you throw your hands up in a lopsided shrug and catch his face to bracket on the way down, as if that’s going to do anything to soften the blow of rejection you’re trying so desperately to avoid.

Suddenly, it feels a lot like you’re the one about to receive it, and you hate how desperate that makes you feel. What are you fighting so hard for? You’re not having sex tonight, remember?

“I found out I have to go in on Saturday to do inventory,” you fib, pulling your shoulders up and fully committing to the bullshit subterfuge, “That’s why I’ve been cranky… sorry, I should have just told you.”

And then, Eddie’s shoulders drop and he relaxes under the blissful satisfaction of the truth. It makes you feel grimy, 

“Ah-ha,” he says, “Melvald’s workin’ you to the bone, huh?”

You nod.

“One box of Kotex at a time.” More like one box of neatly packaged pregnancy tests — results in ten minutes or less! 

Eddie's features soften, and he dips his head to brush his lips across the slope of your shoulder. 

“My Baby’s just tired, huh?” He hums against you, “Poor Baby...” 

You suppress a flinch and silently wish he would stop saying things like that. 

“Yeah.” You say dejectedly, “Anyway, there you go. My shitty boring day. Stocking shelves, live in technicolor,” 

Eddie hums thoughtfully and you watch as he begins a steady descent down your body.  

“That’s hot. Think we could get it on pay-per-view?”

You push up on your elbows just as he slides down to come face-to-face with your midriff, and you clear your throat. 

“Where do you think you’re going?” You say, as he slips a cheeky finger beneath the band of your shorts. 

He pauses to give you a sly look.

“Down unda,” Eddie says, grinning and effecting a thick Australian accent. 

Oh no, absolutely not. Jerking him off is one thing, but if you let him go down on you, it’ll be a one-way ticket to Stupidtown, and you’ll absolutely end up letting him fuck you. 

You’re determined not to let that happen, so you pull your knees up and cross your ankles over his back, squeezing tightly. Eddie makes a put-out sound when you cage him in and he finds he can go no further. 

“You got a passport, Crocodile Dundee?” You deadpan, quirking an unimpressed brow.

“Jeez, can’t a guy worship at his altar in peace?” he says, trying to wriggle free and butter you up in the same breath, “The goddess? My inspiration?” 

You roll your eyes but you don’t let him go when he begins to squirm in earnest. 

It is an effort in futility. 

Back in the day, you spent many an afternoon sitting around the trailer watching professional wrestling, and those sessions typically ended with you in a headlock after boldly claiming you could beat Eddie in a fight. To his credit, he always at least let you try before flipping you ass over tea kettle and holding you pinned to the carpet until you said “uncle”. In those days, you never stood a chance, but that was then, and unlike Eddie, you actually bothered to go to your physical therapy sessions and still have full functional use of your body. 

You’re not trying to hurt him, so you aren’t putting nearly enough pressure on his ribs to really hold him, but he’s out of breath before you’ve even broken a sweat.

“Release me, Foul Temptress.” He demands, struggling against you and the vice you have on him. 

You cross your arms and make a show of leisurely checking your nails. 

“Say uncle.” You say innocently. 

“You’re evil,”  

“No, I’m winning.”

When he stops moving long enough to glare back at you, you push out your lower lip in a feigned pout. 

“Had enough yet?”

You watch the muscles in Eddie’s jaw flex as he contemplates all the biting retorts he could possibly hit you with before evidently decides against retaliation. 

He sighs and goes slack against you, forehead dropping to knock against your belly, and you once again have to resist the sudden and bizarre urge to tell him to be careful.

He doesn’t know, how could he know when you haven’t told him yet? 

Of course, it’s only lost in this brief but looming thought that you momentarily let your guard down, and Eddie finds his ace in the hole.

He presses his nose to the tender softness of your belly and makes a gentle, needy sound, and your thighs involuntarily tremble. 

You unhook your ankles and let your feet drop to the bed on either side of his hips with two solid thumps that sends you rocking back and forth on a sloshing tide.

You don’t know when he started to work your T-shirt up, but suddenly your flesh is exposed to him and those damn lips. 

He doesn’t kiss you, so much as part his lips and breathe out, a long, quivering breath that has your throat closing up and your knees edging open far enough to let him drop and lay with his stomach pressed flat to your pubic bone. 

“I just wanna be good to you,” he says, muffled against your stomach, searching hands skittering up up up over your thighs and into the open legs of your shorts to grace the supple curve of your hip. “Wish I had something nice to say … to make it all better…”

He brushes his lips over the spot just beneath your navel and you feel something flutter there. 

You can’t be sure if it’s just the phantom sensation of your secret crying out to be known, or the way you’ve noticed how he’s begun rocking his hips into the mattress. He still has a hard on, after all, and he knows how much you like to watch him get himself off like that. It causes your breath to hitch in your throat, but you manage catch Eddie’s hands before he can get your shorts off.

Under the looming threat of complete and total mental blackout, you muster your courage, and try once more to pick up where you left off. 

“I – I have something to tell you … actually,” you say tentatively, worrying your lower lip and trying not to get caught on the slow, purposeful canting of his hips.

It piques his interest enough to stir him from where he’s tucked himself between your legs and turn curious eyes up at you, blown dark with needy expectation. 

“Oh, yeah?” His voice is a deep and husky rasp that sends a bolt of want like lightning down to the thrumming apex of your thighs. “Something nice?”

You swallow hard and, despite your subtle hesitation, lift your hips off the mattress to assist him this time as he slides your shorts down and discards them over his shoulder. 

They land softly over top of the lamp, plunging you into a sudden and deeply muted semi-darkness – mood lighting, something inside you suggests and you have to force yourself to watch Eddie work to keep from rolling your eyes.

You’re not going to have sex with him… but that doesn’t mean you’re not just a little curious to see what he has in mind. 

You know exactly what he has in mind, Stupid.

You forgot to make him eat dinner so now he’s just going to have to make due.

“I don’t know if it’s necessarily nice, but it’s something.” You breathe, watching transfixed as he eases your knees open as far as they will go, exposing the thin, damp fabric of your panties to the air.

He hums, a gentle rumble in the hollow of his throat that sends goosebumps flash freezing across your arms and legs when it catches on the end. 

Distantly, you see his hips jump as he catches on a fold in the sheets, and you throb in wanting commiseration.   

“… good or bad?” He rasps, punching a breath out from your already flattening lungs as he skims the junction of at the crook of your thigh with the tip of his nose and moves lower … lower. 

“Oh… good.” You say, voice an embarrassing octave higher than normal, “It’s good… hhmmaybe. I...uh... I-I haven’t decided yet.”

Teeth in the elastic of your panties, a sharp tug pulls his lower lip down before it snaps back into place, and he groans.

You fail to suppress a shiver as Eddie eases your legs up over his shoulders, still working his hips against the mattress at an agonizing pace. Suddenly all you want is to be the bed, laying beneath him as he rocks steadily into you, using you to chase his release, just like he does most nights. 

It briefly occurs to you that if you’re having that thought, it means you’re steadily approaching the point of no return. If you had any sense at all, you’d pump the breaks while you still can, but then you can feel the smooth plane of his face nuzzling the flesh of your inner thigh. You feel the press of his lips, and your tongue goes fat and useless in your mouth. Under the gentle prelude to the way he begins to press slow, reverent kisses along the expanse of your scar, you forget how to breathe, let alone do something so pointless as speak. 

The scar is the only physical thing you carry from that day you slipped through to the other side of the world. It’s a jagged, ugly thing that extends from your knee to your bikini line because while the initial wound had been expansive, the surgeon who attended to you that night last spring knew fuck all about fuck all and somehow managed to make it worse. You’re lucky, because most of your trauma is invisible, but you shouldn’t be thinking about that right now, you should be thinking about something normal, something sexy as Eddie continues with those soft, open-mouthed kisses, leaving cooling wet crescents over the length of the raised puckered skin, higher, higher…

And what’s sexy about scars and surgeons and the lingering evidence of eighty-four stitches?

Nothing, absolutely nothing, but it doesn’t stop you from reaching down to hook your fingers in the fabric of his t-shirt. You tug and pinch and gather material until you’ve made a little progress, trying to undress him while he’s busy grinding his cock into the bed, but you’re having a hard time getting it done from this angle.

Thankfully, the reverence of your touch does not go unnoticed — Eddie ceases his ministrations to push up on his knees and help you. Flushed and sweating, he reaches back and takes a fist full of the fabric, pulling the shirt over his head and discarding it in one swift movement. 

And then, just like that, you can see all the punishment he took trying to save you, down there on the wrong side of the world. All his scars and the evidence of just how close you came to losing him. Your heart thumps solidly against your ribs – yours is ugly, but his are worse, and you don’t think you’ll ever get used to seeing what those nasty little fuckers did to him. You keep that strictly to yourself, however, because Eddie already hates the way he looks bad enough without the burden of your opinion. He doesn’t need to know how they make you feel. 

You reach for him, suddenly desperate to touch him, and he takes you by the hand. He holds you firmly in his smoldering, blackened gaze, and you watch as he presses your index and middle fingers together. Then, he slides the compressed digits into the dark wet heat of his mouth and sucks on them until you’re flushed so hot your face has started to burn.

On the surface of your brain, the feeling of his tongue slipping up between your fingers, edging them open and flicking at the soft nook of flesh at the valley of their connection is unbearably gross, but that message doesn’t seem to make it down to the places where it matters. Nobody tells your animal brain that it isn’t the sexiest thing you’ve ever seen in your life. Your fingers go sliding out with a sickly wet slurp, and you shiver.

“Save these for me,” he says, “For later,”

Later? What the fuck is that supposed to mean? What’s going to happen later? You find, as he slides down the length of your body, that you don’t actually care. 

What happens in an hour or ten minutes (or less) is none of your goddamn concern when Eddie is busy parting your legs in a mirror image of the way he’d just parted your fingers.

You find you don’t have the capacity to wonder any further than that when he slips back down to prop your legs over your shoulders and hook his fingers in the dampened gusset of your panties. You breathe out a long, wanton noise that something in the back of your mind tells you is whorish when you feel the first puff of air fanning your bare pussy.

That damning something in the back of your mind suggests you should be embarrassed about that, but you can’t manage to feel anything but heated as he eases your underwear down your legs and banishes them to some far corner of the apartment.

Eddie kisses the nook at the highest point of your thigh, directly to the right of where he’s begun to trace the faintest ghost of a touch over your entrance, and suddenly all you can hear is your own heart pounding in your ears. He applies a whisper of pressure and dips into you up to the first knuckle, and you lay there, barely able to take it, wringing the sheets in your fists, telling yourself that at any moment cooler heads will prevail and you’ll put a stop to this.

Stupidtown looms on the horizon, and he’s barely even touched you.

Then, on top of everything he’s doing to you, Eddie has the audacity to try and get you talking again.

“You were saying?… ‘something good, maybe’ … but…?” he says, stretching the word lyrically in a way you haven’t heard him do in a long, long time. 

You don’t get the chance to revel in that before the question is followed by the sharp pinch of flesh between teeth as he bites you, just beneath your scar. Hard enough to bruise, but not enough to break the skin. You yelp and jump against him, but he holds you firmly to the spot so you can’t escape, then he soothes the offended flesh with the wide flat press of his tongue before sucking it in past his lips – it burns, and you can’t stand how much you like it.

“Hey, g-go easy with that, will you?” You try to tell him, “Easy…” but then he uses two fingers to spread your pussy open wide, exposing you to the air.

You trail off into a long, high whine, which turns sharp and loud when he flicks the blunt edge of his nail over your painfully neglected clit. The bundle of nerves screams, and your hips buck up hard enough to break the seal of the bruise he’d been busy sucking into your thigh. 

When he presses his thumb flat to that howling little bitch, you blow right past the point of no return. 

“Oh, fuck! – Eddie!” you gasp, and when he smiles you can feel his teeth as he gives you one last gentle nip for good measure. 

“Ask me nicely,” He growls, and you lose your goddamn mind. 

Never mind all of your bullshit principles. Never mind tests or little pink lines and blue tabs and green plus signs – you need him to fuck you, and you need him to do it now.  

“Please,” you cry, “Please, please, please–”

“Good girl,”

[bizaar]

You guys (gn) i am tHIS CLOSE to finishing with the first part of the epilogue, but all these Hoard gifs on my FYP are making me absolutely feral so I just need to share this one part with you really quick okay? okay