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bizaar · 3 months ago

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Endless Summer ✧

Part 4: Dead Man's Party

Cruel Summer Masterlist

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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.

#eddie munson #eddie munson x reader #eddie munson x you #eddie munson stranger things #cruel summer prequel #endless summer fic #stranger things fic

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bizaar · 3 months ago

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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

#asks #celestialpercy #cruel summer asks #also this is the sweetest thing anyone has ever said #the fact that you all love this fic so much really is a balm to my soul #I wrote this silly little fic to channel my feelings while my dad was dying and you’re just out here helping me heal #truly this is a wonderful community #and I’m so lucky to have you all here with me #the BIGGEST hugs for everyone

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bizaar · 3 months ago

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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!

#asks #cruel summer asks #anonymous #I never intended to even have two parts and a cliff hanger #but when I say I’m long winded I am putting it lightly #ya girl is a yapper

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bizaar · 3 months ago

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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.

#asks #cruel summer asks #big-ope-vibes #someday I will stop hurting this boy #but today is not that day #as always if you see typos no you don’t

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bizaar · 3 months ago

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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.

#asks #cruel summer asks #fracturedarkness #cruel summer epilogue

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bizaar · 3 months ago

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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

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bizaar · 3 months ago

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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

#cruel summer prequel #endless summer fic

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bizaar · 3 months ago

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anyway, when is too soon to post a teaser for the Endless Summer update asking for a friend

#endless summer fic #cruel summer prequel #eddie munson

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bizaar · 3 months ago

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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.

#cruel summer fic #eddie munson x reader #eddie munson x you #eddie munson fanfic #joseph quinn eddie munson #eddie munson #there is more than can come from this so let me know if I should keep going

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bizaar · 3 months ago

Text

Cruel Summer Epilogue - Part One

Masterlist - Part One - Part Two

pairing: Eddie Munson x fem!reader

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,”

#cruel summer fic #eddie munson x reader #eddie munson x you #eddie munson stranger things #eddie munson #eddie munson fanfic #joseph quinn eddie munson #tumblr really told me to fuck myself with this one didn't it?#well part two is going up anyway and it is ENTIRELY filthy smut so you're welcome i guess

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bizaar · 3 months ago

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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

#cruel summer epilogue #don't even look at me i don't know how to act #if you see typos no you don't #also i'm gonna have to split it into two parts because this girlie is gargantuan

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bizaar · 4 months ago

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so ... Cruel Summer on Ao3 is turning out to be a lot different than Cruel Summer on tumblr...

#cruel summer fic #eddie munson x reader #i was like 'i'll just change this one little thing' and realized that it changes everything....#it's the same fic but its also an entirely new fic...#like a directors cut or an extended edition #anyway it's going up and i should be writing the epilogue but here we are lmao

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bizaar · 4 months ago

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Endless Summer ✧

Part 3: Band on the Run

Cruel Summer Masterlist

Prev - Next

pairing: eddie munson x afab!reader

warnings: sexual content (18+ minors dni), horny-loser!reader, brief descriptions of sexual fantasies, swearing, and so much pining

word count: 19k

a/n: we're back baybeee! also, 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!!

In the three hours it has been since you got home from school, the floor of your bedroom has become almost totally obscured by what is essentially every article of clothing you own. You’d made the mess in a frantic attempt at putting together an outfit out of thin air because you don’t actually own anything cool enough for how you’re planning to spend your night.

You’re supposed to be babysitting, just like every other Tuesday night you’ve spent since you were thirteen years old, but this week, for the first time in history, you did everything in your power to get out of that duty. You’d pulled out all the stops to convince everyone that, despite the perfect health of your earlier day, you’d somehow managed to contract a sudden onset, highly contagious illness sometime between fifth-period chemistry and now (one you intend on making a swift and miraculous recovery from) and for the safety of everyone around you, you should not be disturbed under any circumstances.

You blame it on how you’d spent four hours out in the cold, taking Dustin and his friends around to trick-or-treat last night, though all that does is get your mother on your case about how she “told you to wear a coat”, but would you listen? No.

It took almost a full hour of debate, all the tricks you’d ever seen employed in movies to fake sickness, and what you like to think of as an Oscar-worthy performance on your part, but your parents eventually gave in and called across the street to deliver the news. Part of you feels like it was only because they didn’t want to argue with you anymore, but in any case you got what you wanted.

Dustin was going to the Wheelers, your parents were going to their weekly Tuesday night extracurriculars, and (unbeknownst to everyone else) you were going to see a band play at the Hideout.

Though not just any band.

The only reason you’ve gone to such lengths to get out of all your previous plans is because you’ve been personally invited to go and see Corroded Coffin play — Eddie’s band.

Of course, you didn't know that at the time of the initial invitation, which came through Gareth, just as the school bell was finishing its cacophonous ringing to signify the end of fifth-period chemistry.

“Hey, so, what are you doing tonight?” he asked, leaning less than casually on his elbow to peer down the length of his nose at you.

You remember thinking that the way he was twisting at the waist looked terribly uncomfortable, but you were only half conscious of anything going on around you as you began the arduous task of orienting yourself toward your original plans for the night.

“Homework.” You replied in an absent monotone, trying for the millionth time not to get sucked back into the memory of the lunch period spent “swapping eyes” with Eddie Munson.

It’s been five days since then, but who’s counting?

Certainly not you and all the assignments piling up in your locker, waiting on the promise of “later” you’ve been making since the moment you finally managed to drag yourself out of those woods.

You were vaguely aware of Gareth answering with some kind of a droll response – which was entirely on brand for the likes of him – but you hardly heard him say it.

You had a lot of other things on your mind, all of which seemed much more important than divulging your wholly uninteresting after-school plans to your lab partner.

Tonight, you’ll be sitting at the Henderson’s kitchen table doing all your overdue assignments while your prepubescent charge plays Atari, nothing more, nothing less.

Talk about a rip-roaring good time, right?

Still, it beats the “casual hangout” in Steve Harrington’s backyard Carol had tried to coerce you into attending under threat of major bodily harm. Not that being forced to sit around a pool in early November, fifth wheeling while everyone around you sucks face doesn’t sound like just the most fun a girl could have, but you told Carol the same thing you told Gareth about your plans for that night – you’ve got to do your homework, and it’s not even a lie.

Normally, you like to think you’re a much better student, and while you’re not entirely sure that line of thinking is warranted (as is evidenced by your last report card, which saw you pulling straight C’s) you know for a fact that any and all thoughts of academia flew right out the window the moment Eddie put himself in the seat across from you in the lunchroom.

And aren’t you so incandescently glad he did?

It is a sentiment your teachers do not share. That morning (the first day back after a long weekend spent miserably pining) you’d even received the dreaded summons from your guidance counselor, who sat you down and asked if “everything was fine at home”.

Why? You’d wanted to ask – because you were seen slinking off to the woods with Eddie Munson or because he wasn’t in school the next day and you haven’t turned in a single assignment since? You might remind them that with the long weekend, there are only technically two days of work missing, but you know they don’t want to hear that because this isn’t really about the homework.

This is about you following Eddie out into the woods.

How are you supposed to think about things like formulas and essays when you can still see him gazing back at you from across the picnic bench every time you close your eyes? With that dreamy look on his face?

And more to the point, how are you meant to explain to an adult that everything is fine, it’s only just you haven’t seen him in nearly a week and, not to be dramatic or hideously cliche, but you can’t seem to eat, sleep, or concentrate on anything so banal as homework when you’re fairly certain he was getting ready to kiss you out in those woods before the bell rang?

You’re not positive that’s where things were headed, but you’re pretty damn sure, and it's enough to get your girlish libido ringing the warning bells of your imminent demise with every day that passes out of Eddie’s presence.

No, you can’t explain that to an educational professional or Carol, or anyone else without raising some serious alarms. Because you’re not even supposed to be talking to Eddie Munson, let alone sneaking off to the woods to become as completely captivated by him as you are.

And he didn’t even kiss you…

God, how you wish he would have just kissed you, especially after the way he seemed to make himself scarce the moment you took your eyes off him.

You’d put quite a lot of time and energy after you got home that Thursday evening into wondering what it would have taken to get Eddie to lean over that table, and quite a bit more into wondering whether you ought to have bucked up and done it yourself.

Not that it mattered, because he didn’t kiss you and you didn’t kiss him, and there you remain, unkissed and suddenly the topic of everyone’s conversation.

Because on top of everything else, there is that side of it.

Like somehow a spell had been broken that afternoon you followed Eddie out of the lunchroom, everybody and their mother is suddenly keenly interested in you. People who have never given you the time of day suddenly know your name, and they want to know all the intimate details of what you did with Eddie Munson out in the woods, or rather, what he did to you.

You probably should have known that was coming.

Still, you hate to indulge them with any kind of answer, even if it happens to be a big fat nothing. They only want to know so they can wrinkle their noses and sneer and shout about how “fucking nasty” that is — shacking up with the Freak King — just like Carol did in the lunchroom the day before all your dreams came true.

You would spare yourself that humiliation if you could, but more than that, you’re struck by how you don’t want them talking about Eddie that way.

You have become inordinately fond of him since that afternoon, more than you already were, and in a very specific way. Somehow, you can’t help but feel that, even though your conversation lasted less than twenty minutes altogether, you understand each other now.

You’re simpatico.

You might even venture to say that you’re almost friends.

Strange how a little quiet intimacy was all you needed to curb the rabid edge of your obsession. Eddie is still all you think about, but in a decidedly calmer way, because he thinks you’re nice and approachable, and you think the same about him.

Still, in the five agonizing days it’s been since that big fat nothing happened, the questions have not stopped. Part of you wants to give them an answer if only to shut them up, but somehow you don’t think “he captivated me” is going to satisfy the people’s ravenous appetite for gossip.

You’re certain everyone has already made up their mind about what they think happened, anyway. In the food chain of high school social constructs, it doesn’t matter what did or didn’t happen, it only matters what people say happened. and you’re absolutely certain that you’re going to hear all about it sooner or later.

You realize now that’s probably why Carol was so desperate to get you to come out and fifth wheel tonight when she knows you have to babysit. She keeps telling you that you owe her because you didn’t go to Tina’s Halloween party, but somehow you’re not convinced she was that upset to have missed you.

Maybe it’s just that she doesn’t trust you not to lie to her about where you’re going to be and who you’ll be with, who will see you with them, and how that will come back to reflect on her. Guilty by association is the law of the land at Hawkins High, after all.

With all that weighing heavy on your mind, you ignored any further questions Gareth had about your after-school plans and shoved your books into your bag, ready to submit yourself to the quiet death of study hall.

Ugh… study hall… you’d rather eat glass. Then again, you’d also rather not have to spend your summer watching the sweat beading on Mrs. O’Donnell’s upper lip in summer school, so down the hall you went, headed against the flow of traffic in the busy hallway.

Somehow, it feels like overt symbolism bashing you over the head – you’ve always hated a cliché.

Lucky for you and your impending academic doom, Gareth was not so easily deterred and scrambled to follow you out the door.

“Why don’t you come out tonight instead?” He asked innocently, like it was the most casual thing in the world and he wasn’t struggling to keep pace with you as all your classmates shoved past.

The question hit you square in the back, punching your lungs flat and wrenching you out of your thoughts with enough force to make your head spin.

“Excuse me?” You gasped, pulling to a stop and whipping around so suddenly that Gareth, who you hadn’t realized was skirting along at your elbow, nearly took a blow to the solar plexus in his attempt to keep up.

Your insides clenched and forced your heart up into your throat, but before you had the time to decide whether or not Gareth had just asked you out, his eyes went comically wide, and he began to backpedal as if his life depended upon it.

Then again, it might have, if what he said was true and word got back around to Eddie.

“Not like a date!” He yelped, throwing his hands up and showing you his palms in a way that flooded you with a strange and instant relief, “Just as friends—”

Oh, thank God for that.

You could barely wrap your head around the concept that Eddie feels any sort of intimate way about you —and you’re still not entirely convinced about that — but to suddenly learn that you are the object of two affections? That’s too much revelation for one week, and you can only thank that dim lucky star that so infrequently passes you over that it had been nothing but a misunderstanding.

Not like a date, Gareth said, Just as friends, and you’re fine with that.

From there, he had your full attention as he went on to explain that his band was doing a set down at the Hideout, and he was extending you a personal invitation to come and see them play. You had no idea Gareth was in a band, though that was perhaps stupid on your part based solely on the boy’s appearance – of course, Gareth is in a band, and of course, that band’s name is Corroded Coffin (which you’re only slightly ashamed about giggle-snorting over when he told you) Between that and the location, your gut reaction was to refuse.

Gareth is great, especially when he’s playing the herald to all your hopes and dreams, and especially when he isn’t asking you out, but no.

Absolutely not.

You would not be going to see Corroded Coffin tonight.

Lucky for you, you’ve had the perfect excuse to get out of anything and everything that sounds like a colossal bore since you were thirteen years old, and you were all too happy to trot it out.

“Oh man, I wish I could,” you began, trying to mask the faintest hint of smug satisfaction in your tone with an apologetic scrunch of your features, “...but I’m babysitting tonight.”

And you would have been content for the conversation to end there, but you didn’t count on Gareth having an ace in the hole, one he was all too happy to knock you upside the head with and send your brains splattering all over the crusty school linoleum.

“Aw, really? Damn, that’s a bummer,” he hummed, “I know Eddie would’ve been stoked to see you.”

Your heart skipped a beat and you had to fight to stop yourself from seizing Gareth by the front of his shirt.

If you had, you would have shaken him like a ragdoll and demanded he tell you everything he knows. Instead, you did your best to remain calm as you stared back at him and the look of smug self-satisfaction he suddenly had plastered across his face.

For some reason, it made you think of the message you’d promised to take back out of the woods last week.

“Tell the smug bastard to mind his own business,” Eddie said, and you didn’t, because Gareth never asked you how it went. He just gave you a sly smug look, the same one he was currently giving you right there in the hallway five days later.

“Oh,” You said, feeling about as casual as a heart attack, “Is Eddie going to be there?”

Your voice hitched and wavered as you did your best to casually skip over his name. You were cool, calm, collected, and definitely not internally shrieking with the sudden potential of a “part two” of last Thursday…

The potent spike of desperation that thought sent rocketing through your midsection was enough to drive color bleeding up into your cheeks and a cold sweat beading across your brow.

It is a reaction you are certain Gareth was not unwise to as he continued without missing a beat.

“Yeah, he’s our frontman,” He explained, knowing full well what he was doing dropping that kind of information, “Technically it’s his band – he started it back when he was in Middle School or something,”

Well, put me in a fucking chokehold why don’t you? Something inside of you screamed to have had such a treasure trove of lore opened up to you.

Like the blessed hand of deus-ex-machina — cheap bitch that she is — opportunity comes a-knocking.

A personal invitation has been extended to you and you’ve never been more anxious, because you?

At a rock show?

At the Hideout?

Who the hell do you think you are? You’ve never been to a concert – which is not an astounding statement to make in and of itself considering your inclination toward introversion – so you have no idea what to expect.

There are a great many things you’ve never done. For instance: you’ve never lied to your parents to get out of babysitting, so you can sneak off and go to a rock concert in a dingy dive bar you’re not legally old enough to get into, to see a boy you are strictly forbidden from speaking to.

You’ve got no business being involved with any of that and as the school day came to a close and the final pieces of your plan steadily fell into place, you had to ask yourself whether you were seriously going to go to such lengths, just to see Eddie?

The answer was a resounding yes.

You’re going to see Corroded Coffin perform tonight if it kills you.

As you stand there looking back at yourself in the mirror, dressed in the fifth outfit you’ve tried on in as many minutes, you begin to wonder if it might just do that.

Your parents have been gone less than five minutes, and you’re already getting cold feet.

Yet another thing you’ve never done is try to approximate dressing to impress someone, let alone the boy you regularly spend your nights and mornings fantasizing over with all the ravenous fervor of a pack of hungry wolves.

You have no idea where to start.

What are you supposed to wear to a rock show in a dingy dive bar? Jeans and a band-tee, maybe? And if so, what kind of jeans, and which band-tee?

It occurs to you that you ought to try and match the vibe of the band, but you have no idea whether they skew toward Credence Clearwater Revival or Judas Priest.

Then again, with a name like Corroded Coffin, you can’t help but feel it is probably the latter, but you’ve been wrong before.

So, maybe jeans and a t-shirt is too casual and you ought to try something a little more risqué.

Maybe a little denim skirt and the pair of ripped nylons you haven’t gotten around to throwing out… or is that too risqué? How exactly does one strike the right balance between sultry and slutty without outright screaming “I want to feel you in my guts?”

You remember then how you once skimmed an article in Cosmopolitan Magazine about the prospective power of underwear, so you go digging through your top dresser drawer and are very quickly dismayed to find that you don’t have a hidden stash of lacy panties carefully concealed beneath your days-of-the-week underwear.

Of course, the fact that you’re even considering what kind of underwear you ought to be wearing tonight on the very far-off chance that someone is going to see them is enough to send you into a fit of hot-faced embarrassment.

No, not just anyone – the fact that you’re considering the far-off chance that Eddie Munson is going to see what kind of underwear you’re wearing is almost enough to give you heart palpitations.

Christ on a fucking bike.

And then just like that, you’re imagining how gentle he’d be.

Laying you back on a tufted leather couch as he kneels before you and reaches up with long, dexterous fingers to unbutton your jeans — should you wear jeans tonight? — and carefully, oh so gently, peels them down your legs at an agonizing pace while puffs of warm breath fan the bare skin at the top of your thighs.

Then again maybe not, maybe he’ll be fast and rough with you. Maybe he’ll manhandle you and throw you around like a doll, and you’ll like it.

Crowding you against the cold brick of a wall and holding you there, his body pressed flush against your back as stone bites your palms and the side of your face. You gasp when he tears at the back seam of your skirt — oh, okay so you are wearing the skirt — ripping both it and your nylons in half, exposing you to the cold air and the hard strike of his palm as he brings it down on the tender skin of your—

You’re blushing so violently that you have to go to your hall bath and splash cold water on your face. Even after you’ve calmed enough to wander back to the black hole of mess that is your bedroom, you still have no idea what to wear.

It’s times like this that you curse Carol for shirking her duties as your best friend. Between the two of you, she’s the expert at dressing to attract male attention, she ought to be here helping you with something like this.

But she’s not here, she’s sitting out at the pool at Steve Harrington’s playing tonsil hockey with Tommy. That’s where you ought to be, too – sitting at the pool, trying to look anywhere but at them, going at it.

That’s where you belong, in Carol’s shadow or perched on the plush sofa at the Henderson’s with your knees up and Speed Racer reruns steadily turning your brain into soup.

It occurs to you that you might be a bad person, or at least a very selfish one – if you’re going to skip out on Dustin like this, you might as well do it to hang out with your friends, not to try and carve out a brand-new cherry-flavored personality for yourself in a crowd you don’t belong to.

You’re not equipped for something like this. You have no business with rock shows and dive bars and people like Eddie Munson – you’re just a boring, midwestern babysitter from a town no one has ever heard of, and you would do well to remember that there is no changing lanes in a place like Hawkins.

You’re just about ready to admit defeat and march yourself across the street with your tail tucked firmly between your legs when you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror.

Plain-Jane, boring little you, with the same haircut you’ve always had, same silhouette, same clothes, same as it ever was, and suddenly you can’t stop thinking about what Eddie said to you out in the woods…

“You’re not what I expected…” He’d said, twisting the rings on his thick fingers and looking at you so wistfully, in a way you’d convinced yourself was full of hope and an expectation you desperately wanted to meet.

You still want it. You want so badly to be the girl he expects to see at the show tonight, not some trussed-up idealized version of what you imagine might impress him.

He likes you for you, after all, just the way you are, and it’s enough to stoke the fires of your courage, even if it doesn’t help you decide between the jeans and the skirt.

By the time you finally throw something on that you’re halfway happy with, you’ve spent too much time wondering about hypotheticals and outfits and whether– in the event of an intimate collision – you would actually like to be spanked. Before you know it, you’re running late.

You’ve almost convinced yourself that it’s fashionably so as you snatch up your keys, fly out of the house, and down your front steps. All the coolest people are fashionably late … at least that’s what Cosmopolitan Magazine says.

It’s only a short jaunt down Cornwallis to the Hideout, and when you get there, there is a semi-shitty Chevrolet van parked crooked across two spaces with the back doors flung open wide.

It’s vaguely familiar, the way all vans of its type are, though perhaps you only think you’ve seen it before because of the posse of boys meandering around it, moving gear between the vehicle and the curb.

Your headlights briefly illuminate the familiar faces of the group before passing them over as you pull into the first parking spot you see.

There is Gareth, of course, alongside Adam and Jeff, who you only actually know by reputation and the quick debriefing of the band he’d given you earlier that afternoon, but you cannot help but notice that there is conspicuously no sign of Eddie among them.

You try not to be too immediately disappointed by that as you kill the engine and unbuckle your seatbelt.

Oh, will you relax already? A voice chides you from somewhere in the back of your mind. Just because you didn’t see him doesn’t mean he’s not here.

Across the tiny lot, Gareth drops the end of the amp he’s got propped between himself and Adam (you think) and skips over to meet you as you steal one final look at yourself in the inset mirror of your sun visor.

You’re not a natural when it comes to applying makeup — yet another thing you could have used Carol’s help with tonight — but you did your best to look presentable.

You imagine if there is anything glaringly clownish about the way you look, it will be easily obscured by the dark and dingy atmosphere of the venue. Bar. Whatever.

And then the crisp November evening air comes rushing in to flash freeze you with goosebumps as Gareth opens your driver's side door and stands practically bouncing on his toes with excitement.

You brace yourself against the cold and suddenly cannot imagine trying to endure sitting out at the Harrington’s pool on a night like this.

“You made it!” Gareth cries as you slide out of your trusty little Toyota Corolla and it strikes you with just how nice it is to have someone glad to see you show up for once.

Your friends are typically less enthusiastic about that.

Still, you don’t want to appear overly eager, so you can’t help but try and mask it by pulling a face – you’d told him you’d be there, after all.

“Was that ever in doubt?” You ask, shouldering your bag.

You shut the door and twist your keys in the lock before quickly stashing them.

“Well, you never know.” Gareth says, shrugging, “People get busy.”

Yeah, and people also bend over backward to get out of prior obligations to keep their word.

And then, you find yourself wondering if it’s totally weird that you jumped through so many hoops just to make sure you could keep yours.

Lying to your parents, lying to Mrs. Henderson, lying to Carol (who called you ten minutes before you left and demanded once more that you come out before cursing you when you declined again).

Somehow you can’t help but get the sense that if anyone knew, if anyone could have been a fly on the wall of your life this afternoon, you might come across as desperate, especially considering you could take or leave the band.

You’d gone through all that effort just to see Eddie, who so far as you can tell is not even here.

Shit — you’re starting to wonder if tonight is going to be a huge bummer when Gareth brings you back.

“Come over and meet the guys,” he says eagerly with a hand at your elbow to guide you across the darkened pavement.

Every step leads you closer to the van, to the band, to the impending night, and you find yourself second-guessing your outfit for the umpteenth time that day. You wonder if you’re underdressed, and whether you should have cowboyed up and opted for the skirt, which you’d decided was a bit much for the occasion.

Was it the skirt or the fantasy that went with it?

The world may never know.

“Guys!” Gareth calls once you get within distance, “You know–” when he says your name, their heads snap to tandem attention in a way that reminds you of meerkats.

It might have been funny if it wasn’t for the way they stand there gawping at you, eyes big as dinner plates and out on stalks.

The silence that hangs between you is deafening, and standing there under such intense scrutiny you can’t help but feel suddenly like you’ve made a terrible mistake.

You twist your fingers out of nervous habit and shift from foot to foot, wondering if you’re allowed to be here, or whether Gareth remembered to mention that he’d invited you out tonight.

“Well, say something, for Christ’s sake,” Gareth says through his teeth.

“Oh, r-right… hi–” Jeff stammers, tripping over your name like it’s a hot coal sitting on his tongue.

Adam is not so smooth.

“What are you doing here?” He asks, like he absolutely cannot fathom that you, of all people would coincidentally be here at the same time as them, and certainly not for their benefit.

It makes you feel frighteningly out of place and you have to force yourself to put down roots to stop yourself from turning right around and going back to your car.

Before Gareth can finish telling him to shut the fuck up, a figure appears from the shadowy depths of the van and your lungs go flat.

Lo and behold — Eddie Munson, in the flesh.

Just the sight of him makes every part of your brain light up like a cathedral and chant his name as if it were singing Hallelujah.

Eddie Eddie Eddie!

He’s halfway through some tirade and stumbling over a thick black cord that he has somehow become hopelessly tangled in.

“Hey – you assholes are doing a lot of standing around and yapping for–” he is saying before he looks up, sees you, and cuts himself off with a startled yelp of your name.

Despite the semi-comical octave to which he speaks your name, your insides flood with warmth as he practically falls out of the van. He skips over, dragging what you quickly come to realize is a microphone with him in his simultaneous attempt to free himself and close the distance between you.

It goes about as well as anyone could expect.

Before you know it, you’re standing toe to toe in the span of a heartbeat, and like a balm to your worries, you forget that you were ever nervous about being here tonight. You forget the awkwardness of Gareth’s friends, your stress over your outfit, and the lengths you went to be here, because here he is, staring back at you like everything else has melted away.

All is once again right in the world.

“Hi!” He says, quickly wiping his grimy hands down the front of the ridiculously tight jeans he’s wearing, the ones you’re desperately trying not to notice or wonder just how he’d managed to get into.

“Hi, Eddie,” You purr, feeling the muscles in your cheeks already beginning to pull for how wide you’re smiling at him.

Eddie Eddie Eddie.

Had you been looking, you might have noticed the way the rest of the band was watching you, exchanging looks of varying degrees, throwing elbows and shushing each other, but you’re not looking, not at anything but the beautiful boy standing before you.

His hair is wild, like always, but tonight Eddie’s got what looks like dark kohl liner smudged messily around his eyes and half rubbed off, like he’d tried something new and immediately second guessed it. It’s so incredibly endearing that it makes your heart throb in the stupid cupid fashion you’ve been chasing ever since that Thursday in the woods.

Your veins flood with ecstasy and just like that, you’ve got the fix you’ve been itching for all week.

With his tight jeans, the thick studded belt bursting out of its loops, all his chains and rings, steel-toed boots, and the faded band tee cropped at the waist and shoulders you can see him wearing underneath his jacket, he looks like something off the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine.

He’s dressed like the guy who would push you up against the wall and rip your skirt off, and you’ve never felt more like a stupid girl with a silly little crush than you do now.

It might almost be intimidating if it weren’t for the way that he’s looking right back at you, as if you hung the moon and the stars and were personally responsible for the shining magic of the cosmos.

Like the guy who would take his time unbuttoning your jeans.

You look at him, and he looks right back at you, and you feel something begin to flutter in the space behind your lungs — something warm and frantic, like the beating of a tiny bird’s wings.

Right now, standing in this parking lot, you could be the only two people in the world, and you’d be just fine with it.

And then, there is a cough, a conspicuously cleared throat, and the spell is broken.

Eddie shakes his head, like waking from a trance and simultaneously pulling you from yours.

“What - uh- what are you doing here?” He asks – it hits you like a fist to the gut. “Not that it isn’t great to see you… it’s just— I didn't expect to see you.”

Oh.

You can feel the corners of your mouth twitch where your smile begins to falter.

“I came to see your show,” You say quietly, fighting a losing battle against the tide of your nerves as they come rushing back in with enough force to sweep you under.

Eddie’s dark ringed eyes go wide and his mouth falls open, and you feel a cold lump drop into the pit of your stomach with a hollow thump.

“You did?” he gasps, voice lilting up into that comical octave again, “Really?”

Oh, great. So, nobody knew you were coming.

For as mortifying as that is, it doesn’t sting half as badly as the disappointment battering you over how you’d spent your afternoon thinking Eddie was as excited to see you as you were to see him.

He didn’t even know you were coming — stupid Gareth.

Suddenly, your subconscious is whispering horrible things to you: maybe he doesn’t like you as much as he’d originally let on. Maybe that moment you shared out in the woods was all in your head, maybe you’d misread the signs and he was just being nice for the sake of the loser virgin, tripping over herself to try and win the affections of the local drug dealer.

It makes you feel particularly stupid about how you’d sat there at a soggy picnic bench out in the woods, desperately waiting for Eddie to kiss you – why the fuck would he kiss you? He doesn’t even know you.

You can’t even touch how embarrassed you are about how much time you’d spent fantasizing about him undressing you.

Christ, you’re pathetic. But you’re also here, and you ought to at least try to make an effort to appear like you’re not the socially inept loser everybody seems to think you are.

“Oh, y-yeah… I mean, it’s no big deal.” you fumble to explain, gesturing vaguely like it’s going to help smooth over the growing awkwardness of this moment

Maybe if you keep talking, nobody will get the chance to say anything that sounds too much like a rejection.

You give your best approximation of a casual shrug and continue.

“Gareth invited me.” You say, and somehow it feels oddly accusatory, “He said it was cool… unless…”

Uncertainty makes you strangely brave, brave enough to lean into the awkwardness of the moment at least – if there’s one thing you’ve learned after years of being Carol’s punching bag, it’s that if you can’t beat the joke, join in.

“…Unless?” Eddie prompts.

You furrow your brow.

“Unless he conveniently failed to mention that I was coming?”

Of course, the moment your gaze snaps over to regard him with a harsh, unforgiving glare is when Gareth conveniently decides it’s time to get back to hauling gear.

With a fistful of each of their shirts, he drags the others away, spouting some bullshit about “call times” and “sound check” and leaves you standing there with Eddie in the chasm of the awkward silence fighting tooth and nail to settle snugly between you.

You refuse to give it the satisfaction as you watch them retreat, and you make a displeased sound.

Bastard coward sons of bitches. A pox on all their houses.

“Well,” you start, “This is awkward, I don’t mind saying…”

Once the rest of the band has circled around to disappear beyond the far side of the van, you begin to feel the faintest hint of that same warmth from the woods settling over you, and you take a chance to lean into Eddie’s space.

“Hey, listen,” you say dropping your tone, “It was great seeing you — really, it was … but if it’s totally weird that I’m here I can take off—”

“Oh, no!” Eddie says a tad too loud. His voice rings out and echoes across the empty spaces before he reigns his enthusiasm in, “No – it’s not weird! You should totally stay!”

“Really?”

“Yeah, for sure. You should definitely stay, right guys?” You look just in time to see a nondescript door set into a wall of the bar slamming shut, leaving the two of you alone in the cold, “…Whatever, forget those assholes — I’m glad you’re here.”

And there you go grinning your face off again.

“You are?”

“Yeah, are you kidding? It’s awesome to see you. Also, nobody’s ever actually come to see us play, so that makes you the closest thing to a fan we’ve got.”

“Oh, good.” You say.

“Great.”

“Excellent.”

“Fan-tastic.” He says, stretching the word lyrically and moving to shut the back doors of the van with a hard THUNK, “Only you gotta do something for me if you’re gonna stick around,”

You move quickly to fall into step as Eddie starts toward the side door set in between a stack of pallets and a dumpster. The same one the others had only just slipped through.

“What’s that?” You ask, doing your best to pretend that you don’t smell the toxic waste that is bar trash permeating the air.

He yanks the door open and reveals the murky interior of the Hideout, waiting just beyond like the portal to another world.

The smell of wet trash is quickly overwhelmed by the strong tang of smoke and alcohol, hitting you in a wave of thick, roiling air. You grit your teeth as it washes over you, accompanied by the tinny din of a Jimmy Buffett song playing over the jukebox.

“You have to promise you’re gonna cheer super loud to balance out all the booing,” he says, holding the door open for you, “We aren’t exactly what you’d call popular with the local wildlife.”

You have to bite the inside of your cheek to stop yourself from telling him that Gareth already warned you of that during his earlier sales pitch.

Something along the lines of “we’re terrible, please come see us play,” had been uttered as a backdrop to your giggling over learning the name of the band, back when it was only a silly anecdote and you knew nothing of the gravity of the invitation.

You banish the thought to the back of your mind and bite down harder on your cheek to try and distract from the way you can feel your heart beating against your ribs as Eddie’s hand comes up to hover at the small of your back, ushering you inside.

“I can do that.” You say with a quick nod.

“Perfect – after you, M’lady.”

You almost don’t remember to be worried about getting into the bar when Eddie guides you over the threshold with a short, sweeping gesture.

The side door deposits you at the far end of the bar, and despite only the slightest change in atmosphere, it takes your eyes a moment to adjust to the neon signage and overhead bulbs.

All your fears of bouncers and fake IDs dissipate when you arrive and there is no one waiting to card you on the other side.

You do your best to breathe as subtle a sigh of relief as you can, because you made it, you’re in, whatever that means for the rest of your night.

The Hideout is a full-on hick dive, as much as you expected. Booth seating, pool tables, and the vaguest suggestion of a bandstand in the far back corner next to the jukebox where you finally see Gareth and the others again. They’re busying themselves with the task of setting up amps and instruments beneath a slapdash Corroded Coffin banner hung crookedly over the drumkit.

It’s clearly homemade and looks very much like it has been spray painted, black over red on a stained white bed sheet. It’s incredibly tacky in the most endearing way.

The bar is not too terribly full for seven-forty-five on a Tuesday night, though in taking in the faces of the blue-collar working-class patrons, the general décor, and the type of music shuffling through the jukebox as the track turns over to play Loretta Lynn, you can’t help but feel that this is not really their crowd.

Not really your crowd, you tell yourself, not that you have the experience to know such a thing.

If you thought you felt out of place before, standing among the band, the feeling is amplified tenfold as you begin to notice the way half a dozen people have turned around to gawp curiously at you.

Of course, it doesn’t occur to you that the reason they’re staring is that you’re standing there tucked in against Eddie Munson, who you also had not realized was standing so close to you.

You erupt into a fever of goosebumps as you rock back on your heels and feel the contours of his chest graze your shoulder blades. Eddie’s hand comes up to grip you kindly by the shoulder as he guides you further into the dingy building and starts to give you the rundown.

You do your best to focus on his words to keep yourself grounded, trying to assure yourself that you’re allowed to be here.

If he’s not nervous, you’re not nervous.

“We’re gonna go on soonish,” he says, depositing you at an empty barstool, separated from where a handful of patrons sit nursing their drinks, “– we’ll probably play for like half an hour, maybe longer depending on how many songs they let us play.”

“How many songs do they usually let you play?” You ask, having to project your voice to be heard over the din of the bar.

You do your best to hop up onto the stool in a way that is cool and elegant as you have almost perfected with your squat metal seat back in Mr. Kapz’s class. This one is taller than you’d estimated, however, and you immediately find yourself struggling to get up over the lip of the polished wood.

Eddie, ever the gentleman, doesn’t hesitate to help you up and steady you.

“Three or four,” He hums without missing a beat. “Our record is six, but that was only one time, so I wouldn’t hold my breath for that many with this crowd. Also, don’t be surprised if they pull the plug on us — like, literally kill the power.”

“You’re kidding…”

“It’s no big deal, it’s just something they like to do in this fine establishment.”

He says it like it's funny, but suddenly you can’t help but think back to Gareth’s plea that you come and watch them play. For the first time since he’d invited you that afternoon, you are suddenly struck wondering just what you have really gotten yourself into – you have no idea what kind of music they play, whether they’re halfway decent or as terrible as Gareth let on.

You have to work to remind yourself that, regardless of the quality of Corroded Coffin, you’re here to support your friends.

Which is only really half true – you’re here for Eddie.

You’re watching him closely when another body appears at his side and claps a loud, forceful hand down on his shoulder. Your heart spasms in tandem with the way Eddie jumps under the sudden contact, and you brace yourself for whatever is coming as his head whips around to address his assailant.

Then, much to your patent relief, his features light up and his face splits into a wide grin.

“Oh, hey! Wayne!” He yelps with a rush of boyish excitement, “What’re you doing here? Are you gonna watch us play?”

The man – evidently Wayne – wheezes out a chuckle that is a little too sarcastic to be kind before answering, speaking in a thick Appalachian drawl that is bizarrely out of place in this town.

“I get enough of y’all’s music at home, thanks very much. Just sayin’ hi on my way out,” he rasps, squeezing Eddie’s shoulder with an unmistakable affection before turning his bright blue eyes on you, “Who’s yer friend?”

Eddie makes quick introductions, and once names have been traded back and forth, Wayne touches the brim of his faded ballcap.

“Pleased to meet you,”

“Oh – sure. I mean, likewise,” you stammer, stiffening your spine to keep yourself from wilting under the intensity of the man’s gaze.

It’s almost intrusive, and makes you feel like you need to go home and put on another layer of clothing just to keep him from seeing your deepest, darkest, inner most thoughts and feelings.

X-ray specs got nothing on this man’s penatrative gaze, and when it's just about enough to send you crawling out of your skin, then there goes Eddie saving your life again.

“Isn’t it bad luck to wear a hat indoors?” He asks with a mischievous smirk.

Wayne catches him expertly by the wrist as he reaches for the hat, like he’s a certified expert at avoiding such a motion, and guides Eddie’s ring-bedecked digits safely away from his headwear.

“Bad luck to put a hat on a bed.” Wayne corrects, “Bad luck to open an umbrella indoors.”

Eddie snorts as he takes his hand back and nudges you with his elbow, gentlemanly letting you in on the joke.

“Wayne’s a nut for that kinda stuff.” He says, gesturing to the older man with no small amount of humor, like it’s simply the goofiest thing anyone has ever heard. “Real superstitious,”

It doesn’t feel mean, so much as a deep set rapport built over a lifetime of back and forth like this.

Wayne makes a thick, gravelly sound in the back of his throat which you recognize as the beginning rattle of a smoker’s cough.

“Least I know where the bad luck’s comin’ from when it shows up,” The man hums, “Anyways. What time are y’all goin’ on?”

“In a few minutes. Why?”

In lieu of answering, Wayne just hums again, thoughtfully so this time. Then that bright gaze slides back over to you.

“They got earplugs behind the bar if you ask for ‘em,” Wayne says with a clipped gesture, “Just so’s you know.”

“Hey—!” Eddie begins with all the moody indignance of a child.

Wayne cuts him off with raised hands, begging no offense.

“Just tryin’ to be neighborly in case yer friend don’t know what she’s gettin’ into,” He stresses, “Y’ever heard these fellers play?”

“Uh, well— no, actually, I—” you start,

Wayne’s brows jump.

“Like skinnin’ a cat,”

It sends you right back to the incident in the quad the week before, to what Eddie had said about Carol’s screeching tirade, and suddenly the look Wayne is giving you is so familiar it’s almost eerie.

You realize with a start that it’s the exact same look Eddie gave you out in the quad.

The resemblance is uncanny. The joke, however, does not land.

“Well, it was nice seeing you, Wayne,” Eddie fumes, clapping the man on the shoulder in a stilted mirror image of the way he’d done a moment before and maneuvering him past you.

If you didn’t know better, you might have said that the faintest flush of color had bled into Eddie’s cheeks, but you tell yourself you don’t as he pushes Wayne past you and attempts to maneuver him out.

“Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

Wayne stops short then, turns, and gives Eddie a very stern look, thrusting a finger up at him in a way that feels oddly paternal as he warns him with a low utterance of, “Hey now,”.

You know that look well enough from having seen it on your father. It means “watch your tone”, and it does the job it’s meant to.

You watch as Eddie puts his hands up and retreats a step, and the tension dissipates before it’s even had the chance to settle.

Suddenly, they’re friends again and your brain is crawling out of your skull with curiosity over who this man is to Eddie – what a strange dynamic they have, decidedly charged with something but clearly softened by a kind of underlying affection.

Almost like family – exactly like family, you realize.

If you didn’t know better, you might almost guess that this man was Eddie’s father, but of course that couldn’t be true, because you know exactly where Al Munson is meant to be, and it’s not here at the Hideout.

After a quick back and forth that you only catch bits and pieces of, Wayne gives you one last parting look, brows jumping.

“I’m serious about them earplugs.” He says, then claps Eddie on the back as he takes his leave. “See you at home, Bud,”

“Yeah, okay… later.” He mutters – he gestures after the man once he’s gone, “My uncle.” Eddie explains, and suddenly everything makes a little more sense.

You just had the pleasure of meeting the elusive other Munson, who you’d heard talk of around town, but whose reputation (or lack thereof) has been vastly overshadowed by the likes of his brother and nephew.

“He seems nice.” You offer for lack of anything better to say.

“Yeah, he thinks he’s real funny with those earplugs – weird seeing him here though, he usually drinks out at The Attic on — hey, what’s the matter?” Eddie asks suddenly, brows creeping toward one another to form a deep crease of concern between them, “You’re not scared are you?”

You swallow hard and try not to stare at him, suddenly backed in a multicolor glow as the stage lights come on, leaving him looking like some kind of ethereal rock god.

“No.” You lie.

Eddie grins at you like he knows you’re fibbing, and he reaches up to touch your arm.

You do your best to suppress a shiver under the way he gently squeezes you there.

“Hey, you showing up like this? Biggest thing anybody’s ever done for me. Y’think I’d let anything happen to you after that?”

He barely gives you time to read into the sentiment before something over your head draws his attention and the moment ends.

“Anyway, you’re perfectly safe. Laverne here’s gonna look after you,” He gestures to the space behind you, “Right Laverne?”

You turn to see the woman behind the bar that he is speaking to, face split into that big, winning smile of his — a little sleazier than it was a moment before — and are suddenly struck by the knowledge that this is the second person Eddie has introduced you to in this place in less than two minutes.

You catch yourself wondering just how much time he spends skulking around this bar as a tall, middle-aged woman with a big cloud of frizzy hair dyed a red so deep it’s nearly purple comes into view.

Laverne — the bartender, evidently.

She’s got a blown-out tattoo on her bicep that you think must have been a snake at one point in time, and her massive, freckled breasts are just about spilling out of the top of her too-tight tank top, stretching the name of the bar until it’s almost illegible. She looks entirely too rock and roll for this place, like some kind of a transplant from a seedy biker joint on the Sunset Strip.

By the way she’s glaring at Eddie, you can tell that she is immune to his attempts at charm.

“I don’t pay you to stand around flirting.” Laverne drawls, jerking her thumb over her shoulder toward what you can only imagine is the back of house, “An’ you left a whole pile’a dishes stacked up back there when you ran out to put yer makeup on.”

Eddie’s grin wavers under the impromptu lecture and you can’t help but feel your insides squirm on his behalf.

“Gee, Laverne, I never knew you liked me so much,” he tries, but she is not done.

“Don’t you think for one second I’m gonna cover yer ass so’s you can cut out early an’ go diddle yourself or whatever it is you do on your own time. When yer here, yer on my time, an’ I don’t appreciate my time bein’ wasted, so, who d’you reckon is gonna do them dishes, Junior?”

All the sleazy charm ekes right out of him and you watch as Eddie goes white as a sheet.

“Green around the gills” is what a distant relative of yours would have called the look on his face, and you can’t say you disagree.

You have to resist the urge to reach out and put a steadying hand on him, purely on babysitting instinct, because if you didn’t know any better – which you don’t – you’d think he was about to keel over, and it’s almost startling.

Based on his schooltime bravado, part of you imagines Eddie would be made of stronger stuff in the face of such ire, but you’re quickly beginning to understand that the Eddie you know from school is not an accurate depiction of the man behind the mask. Then again, you’re not certain you know anyone who would be able to stand there and take a dressing down like that, so maybe Eddie is made of that elusive “stronger stuff” after all.

Suddenly, you can’t help but imagine what would have happened in the alternate universe where Carol found herself here with you, standing in his place. You’d like to see her try running her mouth then, face to face with the likes of Madam Hideout.

Back in the real world, Eddie casts a wary gaze in your direction before answering the woman who you have quickly come to realize is his boss.

“I’ll do ‘em after,” he mumbles, suddenly much less an ethereal rock god and more a sullen child.

The muscle in Laverne’s jaw flexes as she grits her teeth, and you can suddenly see her right at home standing behind a great oak bar in a saloon, eyes shaded in a big Stetson, spitting a fat gob of dark, rotten chaw to the sawdust floor as she chews through her thick Texan drawl.

“They shoulda been done b’fore you punched out.” She spits in the tobacco-less, non-Old West version of herself.

“I’ll do them after, Laverne.” Eddie insists, sliding back into the boyish indignance from before.

She rolls her eyes and stalks off, muttering something unintelligibly rude as she goes, and an indiscernible emotion wells painfully in your chest. It is deeply offended on Eddie’s behalf, whatever it is, and moves you to want to protect him, though you don’t know how you would manage to do that.

You don’t typically feel this way about anyone over the age of twelve, and don’t know whether to try and pick a fight with Laverne or to drag Eddie out to the parking lot where you’ll be safe from the ire of rude bartenders – that’s what you would have done with Dustin had you encountered a bully somewhere out in the wild, but somehow you can’t imagine either scenario going over well with Eddie swapped for Dustin.

The lack of options leaves you paralyzed, and by the time Eddie is talking again, you’ve gone and said nothing in his defense.

The indignant emotion deflates and leaves you feeling cold and guilty.

“Yeah, that Laverne…” he says, “She’s a real peach.”

You watch the woman saunter to lean over the end of the bar furthest from you, and once you are almost certain she is out of earshot, you lean in close.

“Do you work here?” You ask in a stage whisper, if only to be heard over the din of the music and murmuring conversations.

Eddie’s gaze snaps back down to you and you watch as he grows suddenly and strangely shy. You can see his guard cautiously slipping into place as he reaches up to scratch at the back of his neck and offers you a lopsided shrug.

“Few nights a week, yeah.” He admits, almost like he’s embarrassed to have been caught in the conundrum of playing a set in the place where he works, “Pays the bills, y’know?”

You wonder how much of the interaction with Wayne followed directly by the one with Laverne is coloring this moment, and you’re mortified to have put him in this situation.

If you weren’t here, he would be up on the bandstand with the rest of the guys instead of looking after you, and both interactions may very well have been avoided entirely. Suddenly, you’re desperate to take responsibility for your presence and put him at ease.

“That’s cool.” You tell him, and for once, it is exactly the right thing to say.

Eddie immediately brightens.

“You think so?” He asks.

You nod, because if you’re not nervous, then he doesn’t have to be, right? Suddenly, this interaction feels a lot like babysitting, and you take no small amount of comfort in the familiarity of it, even if Eddie is most certainly the one babysitting you here at the bar.

“Totally! You’re basically getting paid to play a gig every week – do you know how many bands would kill for that?”

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

“Yeah, exactly!” He starts before second-guessing his tone and attempting to reign in his enthusiasm, “I mean – hey, it’s not Saturday night at the Garden, but a gig’s a gig. At least until we can get the band off the ground and get a record–”

Over the rumble of the bar, you hear somebody shouting from the direction of the bandstand – Jeff, you think. His voice is laced with annoyance as if this is the third or fourth time he’s called Eddie, and he is quickly losing his patience.

“MUNSON!” He shouts, “LET’S GO!”

Eddie twists at the sound of his name and you watch as he pulls a face, almost like he’d forgotten there was a greater purpose to being here other than standing around chatting you up at the bar.

“Whoopsie – guess that’s my cue.” He says, shrugging out of his jacket as he turns back to you, “Hold on to this for me, will you?”

Your heart rockets up into your throat and you hope that Eddie can’t see how your fingers are trembling as you accept his jacket and hold it against you.

You clench your teeth to keep something cheesy from floating up past your lips like you’ll guard it with your life.

You think you must be making a face, then, one Eddie mistakes for anxiety as he gives you a soft look and his voice turns gentle.

“You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.” He assures you, “You’re with the band, remember? Fan numero uno.”

He raises a finger to emphasize the notion, and you nod, watching him turn and trying to beat back the spike of fear that surges in you when he leaves you sitting at the bar.

He’s fine if you’re fine, and you’re fine if he’s fine, but only so long as you’re enveloped in the safety blanket of his presence – but you remind yourself that you’re a big girl.

If you can lie to everyone you know and sneak out of the house to slip into a bar to see a band, you can sit alone in a room full of strangers for a few minutes before the band starts to play.

And yet, sitting there, watching Eddie move into the crowd, you’re suddenly struck with the sensation of how stridently you don’t want to be left alone in this place where you so clearly don’t belong. But you don’t have to be so overt about it, so you shout at Eddie’s back in the far-off hope that it will make him turn around and look at you once more.

“Y’know, you keep saying that,” you start, “But I haven’t even heard you play!”

He turns on his heel and shoots you full of holes with that big, goofy grin of his.

“Oh man, you’re gonna love us!” He calls back, and you can’t help but snort out an undainty laughter.

“That’s not what Gareth said!”

Eddie pulls a face and cups a hand at his ear like he didn’t hear you before throwing a shrug and disappearing into the throng of people milling about the pool tables.

You take great comfort in the fact that for as cool as you think he is, you are starting to understand that he is an incredible dork. That makes things so much easier, especially with how you want so desperately for him to like you as much as you like him.

And you like him so, so much.

Too much – it doesn’t feel like just a schoolyard crush anymore, not since the moment you shared out in the woods, and again back in the parking lot, and just now, here at the bar.

Sitting here, with a big dopey look on your face and hearts in your eyes, you think you could very easily fall for Eddie as you watch him jump up onto the bandstand and exchange an indiscernible something with Gareth, grinning wolfishly as he does.

You’re almost too busy sifting for gems through the last five minutes of conversation to realize what you just told yourself – you think you could fall pretty hard for Eddie Munson.

The thought startles you enough that you have to move to try and escape the way it makes you feel, twisting on the stool to face the bar. You sit there, letting the din of the environment wash over you in sickly waves of overstimulation, and you remind yourself of what Gareth originally assured you about this outing.

Not like a date. He said. Just as friends.

In the wake of your most recent revelation, the idea stings just a little bit more than you are prepared to endure.

Then, there is the abrasive sound of a throat being cleared. It’s only then that you look up and find yourself face-to-face with Madam Hideout herself.

Laverne gives you a hard side eye from where she stands at the tap directly to your right, pouring a tall pint of foamy beer.

If you’re blushing, you hope she can’t tell under the deep, colored lighting.

You try to smile at her, but it’s little more than a flattening of your lips as your mouth stretches horizontally, and somehow you know it isn’t coming across as polite as you’d intended. She doesn’t reciprocate.

Behind you, an amp flares with staticky feedback that makes your hair stand on end as someone plugs in a guitar.

The sound of a dozen disgruntled barflies rumbles through the room as the band finishes setting up, and you find yourself witness to a sudden mass exodus. You twist in your seat again and watch as at least half of the patrons very quickly make their way out into the parking lot, following Wayne Munson’s lead after the fact.

By the time the herd has been thinned, the room is not empty by any means, but you can suddenly see the bandstand at the far end of the room where you couldn’t before. It gives you the perfect vantage of Eddie.

Corroded Coffin has similarly noticed how the room has cleared out, much to their own varying degrees of chagrin. Eddie is fumbling with the strap on his guitar, adjusting the length as he scans the room with a furrowed brow – then, as he finds you, right where he left you, his face splits into that same wide grin.

Suddenly shy under the cast of his attention, you gesture to the state of the room – get a load of these guys – and give an overexaggerated shrug. He responds in kind by sticking his tongue out at you and you feel your insides go tight and squirmy.

You don’t even realize how you’ve been grinning back at him until your face starts to hurt, and as quickly as the spotlight finds you, it’s gone again when Jeff leans over to say something to Eddie, snatching his attention away and leaving you sitting there alone on your stool again.

Brimming with what you would argue is too many feelings to process all at once, you reach around to grip the bar and spin yourself in a tight circle, hoping that maybe a little gravity will help sort out those big scary emotions.

“Quit that spinnin’.” Laverne snaps. “I ain’t moppin’ your little brains up off this floor if you fall.”

“Sorry.” You say immediately, bracing yourself on the bar to stop from going around once more – tragically, it leaves you facing her and the apparent disdain she holds for you, simply by way of association.

You avert your gaze.

Somewhere, you can hear the theme to Cheers playing distantly over the muted rumbling of half a dozen conversations.

…sometimes you wanna go, where everybody knows your name, and they’re always glad you came…

Some less than others.

When you work up the courage to chance a look, you find that Laverne is still staring daggers at you. More than that, a cursory glance reveals that most of the people still sitting down the length of the bar are stealing curious looks at you.

You can feel your throat going dry under the attention of so many strange eyes. It’s not that you’re necessarily an inherently shy person, only that without Eddie to bolster you, the feeling of being somewhere you clearly do not belong is attempting to crush you flat.

You do your best to make yourself as small as humanly possible as the beginning of a beat gets thumped out on the drum set before abruptly stopping.

Soundcheck.

Your mouth is suddenly full of cobwebs, and you muster your courage to steal one more look at Laverne, whose eyes you can still feel burning holes into the top of your skull.

You peek up at her, hoping her ire will have eased, as if miraculously in the last thirty-seconds you’d done something to earn her respect.

No dice.

“Do you think I could get a coke?” You ask, cringing inwardly as your voice wavers and cracks.

You don’t really want the overpriced, watered-down soda she’s bound to give you, but you’re willing to do anything to distract from how much you stick out among the half-drunk onlookers pressing their faces in on you like kids at the zoo.

Thank God for the shield of Eddie’s jacket, you are once again so thankful you’d foregone the tight little skirt and boots combo.

Laverne gives you a hard look, and you feel a twinge of sudden bravery begin worming its way through your midsection. This time, you stare back at her.

Then, she throws a dish towel over her shoulder as she makes her way to you, chunky Doc Marten’s thumping hard on the spongy mat behind the bar.

As uncomfortable as you are to be sitting there under her gaze, some nagging part of you at the back of your tongue meets the annoyed twinge steadily rising in you, and together, they wish she would climb down out of your ass already.

Finally, after what feels like an eternity, she pulls the trigger on the soda nozzle and fills a dark red, textured glass to the brim – no ice.

She sets the drink on the bar in front of you with a hard thump and you watch the foam leap up over the brim of the cup and spill down the side before dissipating with a soft hissing.

Laverne pops a straw into the cup and somehow it feels like an insult, like something Carol would have done.

You’re supposed to inhale, Dummy! pared down to a simple gesture with that same patent disdain.

Still, you’re nothing if not fatally imbued with unflinching manners, and the words are tumbling out over your lips before you can stop them.

“Thank you,” you mumble, and the nagging little voice on the back of your tongue cries out at your treachery.

Laverne grunts out a response and quirks a thin, penciled brow at you.

It takes her forever to speak, and you wish the band would just start playing already so that you would have an excuse to turn your back to her.

“The Chief’s been known to frequent this place,” she begins, and in a brief moment of deep confusion, all you can do is stare at her, waiting for her to clarify, “Of Police.”

You have no idea what to do with that information.

“Oh,” you say dumbly, “You don’t say,”

She nods.

“Might even be inclined to call him a regular customer,”

Somehow, you can’t help but get the sense that it’s less a statement of fact than it is a threat, and if that is the case, you can’t deny that it’s more or less effective.

The last thing you need right now is to find yourself sitting, wilting under the gaze of Chief Hopper while he reads you the riot act and lists in detail everything you’ve ever done to make you such a terrible person — faking sickness and sneaking out to go and see a boy you’re sweet on in a bar you’re not old enough to be sitting in when by all rights you should be sitting on the Henderson’s couch watching He-Man.

For lack of a better response, you twist idly on your chair, nice and slow so Laverne can see you do it and come all the way back around to the other side.

The phrase, “if looks could kill” passes through your mind for a brief, yet terrifying second – something in the back of your mind is inexorably calm as it assures you that you haven’t done anything wrong.

You’re supposed to be here. You’re with the band, no matter how anyone may happen to feel about that.

Leaning over the bar and taking a long, innocent sip from your straw, you make a show of swallowing, smack your lips, and shrug.

“Funny. I don’t see him.”

In spite of all your affected cool, you feel your guts twinge with anxiety when Laverne levels you with a hard look and crosses her thick, tattooed arms over her generous bosom. Suddenly you’re half worried you’re about to be “bounced” or whatever the official term for being forcibly ejected from a bar is – one more for the list in your long night of firsts.

Then, in a shocking turn of events, the corner of the woman’s lip twitches in the faintest hint of a smile, violently suppressed, of course.

You’re oddly pleased, in the way only a goody-two-shoes like yourself can be under the attention of anyone who could even remotely be perceived as a figure of authority.

“How old are you?” Laverne demands.

Just like that, the twinge blossoms to a nagging feeling of angry defiance, lurking far in the back of your throat.

Stupid question. You think, biting the inside of your cheek, because it’s not like you’d tried to order a beer.

“Forty-five.” You say, matter-of-factly, suddenly unable to adjust your tone as you remember how rudely she’d spoken to Eddie before.

She holds you in that hard, deadpan gaze.

“That’s funny,” She sniffs, “Bet your rock star boyfriend thinks you’re real funny too.” She hurls it at you like a slur and your heart spasms and lurches up into your throat.

“Oh, he’s not my—” but the bartender is already walking away, so you clamp your mouth shut and hum out your annoyance.

You swallow hard.

Boyfriend.

The word clangs around in your ribcage, and you wonder if that’s what people assume when they see you and Eddie together.

Just like that, you’re feeling breathless again.

No wonder your teachers are all so freaked out – you don’t get the time to worry about that before Eddie’s voice cuts through the room and strikes you square in the back.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we’d like to thank you all for coming out tonight–” he says smoothly into the microphone, “Before we start the show, we’d just like to say one thing…”

You turn in your seat and find yourself immediately locked in his gaze. Even across the room, it sends a chill up your spine and goosebumps flashing across the expanse of your body.

You’re gripped in the feeling that suddenly, you’re the only two people in this room, that no matter what happens next, it will be for your eyes only, and you’ll cherish that to the end of time.

Eddie leans in, grips the microphone and looks you dead in the eye.

“This one goes out to all the ladies.”

Oh. Nevermind.

“Oh, my God,” You say under your breath.

Boo. Hiss.

He’s so uncool, you can’t stand how much you like him.

The strike of sticks on cymbals masks the agonized groan that rumbles throughout the bar and with the first few hard chords, the show begins.

Corroded Coffin is not the greatest band in the world, but they’re also far from the worst.

It was an over-exaggeration on Gareth’s part to say that they’re terrible; they can carry a tune, they’re mostly on key and in sync, and that’s more than you can say you expected from how you’d been prepared.

You find that they mostly play covers of metal songs – the likes of Judas Priest and Black Sabbath – which garners a general disinterest from the bar, save for one sloppy drunk biker who just about loses his mind when they go into a crunchy rendition of War Pigs.

You’re certainly losing your mind and falling a little bit harder than you’d expected you would be when you woke up that morning.

Eddie Munson in front of a cafeteria audience is one thing, but Eddie Munson on stage, a real-life honest-to-God stage is another animal entirely. As far as you are concerned, he was born and bred for the stage, and you’re enraptured, watching him move under the lights. The way he grips the neck of his guitar as he teases a melody out of the taught strings and growls into the microphone settles in your bones in a way you know is going to linger for months if not years to come.

It is mesmerizing in the most intoxicating way. If you thought tearing your eyes from him at school was difficult, you’re fairly certain you don’t blink from the start of their set to their less-than-grand finish.

They play a whopping five songs before someone unceremoniously kills the power, just as Eddie had prophesized.

“Bummer.” You hear someone groan out of the dark from the direction of the stage.

Luckily, it’s a total blackout to the whole bar, and not just the stage, saving the band any overt embarrassment in the face of their less-than-adoring public.

Your ears are ringing in the sudden absence of sound and the darkness lingers only a moment before the power comes back on again.

Loggins and Messina are back on the jukebox in an instant, the patrons turn back to their drinks, and just like that, your introduction to Corroded Coffin is cut short, one song shy of their record.

With the lights on and free from the cloying miasma that can only come from standing in the crowd at a rock show, you manage to claw your way back to your senses enough to remember your parking lot promise.

You surprise even yourself by erupting into a cacophony of thunderous applause, whooping, and hollering just like any self respecting number one fan would do. Then again, if you’re being completely honest, and if the drunk biker hollering unevenly doesn’t put up too much of a fight, you might happily accept the title.

It doesn’t take much effort to shoulder your way through the meager crowd, particularly with the way it is steadily thinning. Evidently, the end to the show was enough to call for an end to the night for a good number of people here at the Hideout.

You cross the room in a hop, skip, and a jump that deposits you at the foot of the bandstand, where you stand craning your head back nearly to the point of pain just to look up at the object of your affection.

You hold Eddie’s jacket clutched reverently against your chest and imagine your steadily beating heart imbuing it with all kinds of emotion — super-charging it with what Huey Lewis and the News is now telling you must be the power of love.

“You didn’t tell me you were good!” You cry, and are almost immediately chagrined.

You’re half deaf from the set and even through your screaming ears, you know you must be shouting. Worse than that is how you would dare to say something so incredibly awkward.

Why can’t you be cool for once in your stupid life?

Eddie is positively slick with sweat, pushing his hair back from his face and grinning again as he comes down to your level.

He drops into a squat you’re half surprised he can manage with just how tight his jeans are — the other half of you is too busy noticing how now that he’s down here, you’re almost nose to nose.

You try not to stare at his jeans, or the sweat dripping down from his hairline to grace the curve of his cheekbones and drip off the sharp line of his jaw. His shirt has gone semi-translucent and is clinging to his chest like a lover as you force yourself to meet his honey-warm gaze.

“You guys are great.” You try again, hoping it comes out sounding a little cooler this time around.

No such luck.

“Yeah? Well, what’d you expect, Sweetheart?” Eddie drawls, showing you his teeth in a way that makes your insides go tight — he tilts his head over to press his ear to his shoulder, “They don’t let just anyone up on this stage, you know.”

“Yes, they do.” Jeff counters from somewhere behind him, and you watch Eddie’s brows come down in aggravation, “Remember when they let that guy do forty minutes of close-up magic?”

Somewhere, very far away, Gareth is shrugging his shoulders from where he still sits, comfortably perched behind his drumkit.

“That guy wasn’t half bad.” he posits, much to the chagrin of his bandmates.

“That dude was wearing a cape.” Eddie scoffs.

“And you’re saying you wouldn’t?” Jeff snorts.

You’re too caught up in the way your heart is beating itself senseless against your ribs to hear the back and forth continue between them because Eddie called you Sweetheart.

Normally, you like to think such a pet name would leave you roiling in disgust, but nothing about the way you feel about Eddie is normal.

And you’re not being any shade of normal about this. Forget whatever bullshit it says on your birth certificate, forget all the little pet names anyone has ever given you — Eddie Munson reached down and christened you Sweetheart, and as far as you’re concerned, that’s your name now.

You feel like your head is going to crack open and burst with electric light as the name rattles around and around in your skull until it finds a tight little corner to wedge itself into and stay forever.

Sweetheart, Sweetheart, Sweetheart.

Sweetheart and Eddie.

Sweetheart Munson.

It’s so goddamn saccharine you’re almost surprised when your teeth don’t come tumbling out of your head.

As you get lost further down the road of delusional fancy, the band’s bickering carries on without you.

“I dunno… d’you guys think we should invest in capes?” Adam posits, and it’s almost enough to send Eddie into apoplectic shock.

“Corroded Coffin does not wear capes!” He snarls, and an intrusive little voice can’t help but beg to differ, because to you, Corroded Coffin sounds exactly like the type of band who would come out on stage wearing capes.

“At least he had style.” Gareth huffs, “And the crowd liked him a whole lot better than they like us, maybe we can learn something from Magical Marve.”

“Jesus Christ, you guys — you’re blowing it in front of our number one fan!” Eddie gestures to you as he says it and you blush bright red, suddenly terrified that you’ve been caught with hearts in your eyes as the rest of the band’s attention snaps over to you — their apparent number one fan.

In a few years, when you would read Misery, you would spend a full week brimming with resentment that Stephen King would dare to suggest that it could be anything but a term of endearment. But that was a thought for the future, and only because he wasn’t there to see Eddie Munson dub you Sweetheart.

Right here and now, you are just happy to be included. Because it’s like Eddie said before, you're with the band… who is still bickering as they go about the quick and dirty business of breaking down their equipment.

It takes a solid twenty minutes, even with you fumbling to try and help anyway you can. Your vision goes briefly spotty when Eddie hands you his guitar and asks you to “hold her a sec”, briefly — accidentally — hooking his pinky finger with yours in the exchange. A promise of something yet untold — his jacket, his guitar, anything he gives you, you’ll guard with your life.

It sounds just as stupid as you feared when you can’t stop yourself from saying it this time, but the way he laughs eases the sting of your embarrassment, if only a little.

When everything is more or less put away, moods have not yet recovered from the previous moment’s tiff, but Gareth is never one to be deterred.

“Come on, you guys. Why the long faces? That’s the longest set we’ve played in a while!” he says, nudging you with his elbow, “I’d say that’s reason enough to celebrate.”

It’s perhaps the first suggestion that night which isn’t immediately met with a dissenting chorus of booing and hissing.

“Yeah, what do you say, fellas?” Jeff throws a neighborly arm over Eddie’s shoulder and gives him a shake for good measure, “The Palace’ll still be open for a few hours, how’s about we order a couple pizzas, get a six pack and go for a few rounds of Dragon’s Lair? Quarters are on me.”

It sounds about as fun as any average Tuesday with Dustin and his friends, not nearly as special as anything you would do to celebrate such a monumental night as this, but being the guest here, you defer to the group. You look to their leader to gauge the appropriate reaction to Jeff’s suggestion, and you notice with a start that he does not share his friend’s enthusiasm.

Call it babysitter’s intuition, but you seem to be the only one who has noticed that Eddie’s mood has taken a sudden and immediate nosedive into the creaky laminate flooring.

Everyone else is too busy listening to Gareth get his feathers ruffled over the plan to notice Eddie’s exchanged look with Laverne, still tucked in at the back of the bar with her arms crossed.

You watch all of this happen with the privilege of blessed invisibility, preserving both the excitement of the moment and Eddie’s dignity as a decision is quietly made.

He’s not going.

Your heart sinks.

“Oh, so you’re just gonna oh-so-graciously offer to pay for the cheapest part of that plan?” Gareth snaps.

Jeff fishes a ring of keys from the front pocket of his jeans and jingles it in the other boy’s face.

If Eddie’s not going, you don’t want to go either, but you don’t dare embarrass yourself by saying that out loud, so you keep your mouth shut.

“I’m also gonna drive. You can be a cheap prick too when you get your license, Freshman.” Jeff says with no small amount of smugness, “What d’you say, Eddie? You in?”

He does his best to approximate an apologetic smile, then shakes his head, sweat damp curls bouncing as he does.

“Not tonight, I’ve got some stuff I gotta finish up here.”

He does his best not to look directly at you as he says it, but you’re starting to learn that if there is one thing Eddie has a hard time doing, it’s not looking at you. You aren’t sure how to process that information and for a brief yet terrifying moment, it swells inside you to the point of pain.

“You sure?” Gareth presses, glancing less than subtly between you and stretching his words past the point of pain, “Big night. Worth celebrating.”

You level him with an unimpressed look.

Real smooth Gareth, why not just spell it out for him?

Still, you suppose you have to give him Brownie points for trying because you wouldn't even be here if it weren't for him.

Eddie is already retreating when he gives his final answer, waving you off in a way that feels almost painfully casual.

“Yeah, no, you guys go ahead. I’ll catch up with you later.”

You watch him go, and he watches you watching him. You can’t tell for certain, but it feels almost as if something significant is passing you by, a moment you’ll never be able to get back if you don’t snatch it out of the air before it’s gone.

It fills you with a stinging burst of panic, especially when Eddie turns and lets you out of his sight.

You came here tonight to see him. You’re only here for him.

You’re almost shocked to hear your name being spoken then, and when you snap back over to reality, Jeff and Gareth are looking expectantly at you — Adam, who could evidently not care less who comes or stays, is already halfway to the door.

They had him at pizzas and a six-pack.

“—how ‘bout it?”

You blink back at them stupidly.

“Me?”

Jeff shrugs.

“Sure, it’s like the man said, you’re our biggest fan, you ought to share in the glory too.”

Strange how you had assumed that invitation would not be extended to you, stranger still is how you’re suddenly considering it.

Pizza and beer at the arcade is not the worst way you’ve ever spent a Tuesday night, but there is something nagging at you, stopping you from immediately accepting. It’s that same feeling as before, opportunity slipping past you and an incredibly powerful pull asking you whether you ought to stay as you turn back to watch Laverne step aside to make room for Eddie as he rounds the bar.

Stay? At a bar?

Where you have been so summarily informed that the chief of police is likely to pop up at any moment like a cheap jump scare in a bad horror movie?

It’s certainly not the worst idea you’ve ever had.

It’s not even the worst idea you’ve had all day.

“I think…” you start, “Actually, I think I’m gonna pass… it’s been a lot of excitement ...and my curfew is coming up soon.”

It’s not expressly untrue, but you feel a sharp pang of regret when Jeff shrugs and so willingly accepts your polite decline.

Part of you wishes that they would have fought a little harder to get you to come out – even Carol won’t take no for an answer the first time around – but that part of you is very quickly whipped back into shape.

You’re not here to hang out with Adam and Jeff and Gareth.

“Suit yourself,” he says flippantly, then claps Gareth on the back, “C’mon G.”

He doesn’t follow right away. Gareth, never one to miss a quiet exchange, remains, giving you a pointed look.

“What’s up?” He asks quietly, “You good?”

You wait for Jeff to get out of earshot, then lean in.

“...Do you think I should stay?” You ask.

Gareth’s brows furrow in a confusion that you can only imagine must be the mirrored echo of your own previous thoughts. You can almost hear him warning you that Chief Hopper hangs around here, and then something like realization flashes across his features as he glances past you.

You follow his gaze over to where Eddie is disappearing into the back, tying a dingy apron around his waist.

“Yes,” He says quickly, with a wide stretch of his mouth, “I think that’s exactly what you should do.”

“You do?”

“Yes, absolutely – you stay, and I’ll see you tomorrow,”

You watch Gareth disappear out the front doors and linger a moment beneath the multi-colored lights.

The jukebox has since flipped over to play Dusty Springfield, and she is warning you that being good isn’t always easy, no matter how hard you try, and it gives you courage enough to slink back to the bar, where your soda sits long empty.

“You’re not getting a refill, so don’t even ask.” Laverne snaps, startling you.

“I just wanted to pay for it.”

She makes a gruff sound in the hollow of her throat and begins wiping down the bar.

“It’s paid for.” She says reluctantly.

Before you can ask what that could possibly mean, she continues.

“So, I reckon you’re stayin’ behind.” It’s not exactly a question, so you don’t feel pressed to answer, and when you don’t, she hefts a tub of dishes up onto the flattop. “Why don’t you take this back to Junior, since you’re so keen on hangin’ around. Save me the trip.”

You look from Laverne to the dishes, and back again, feeling the wheels of your brain creaking under the duress of trying to see the invisible pitfall ahead of you.

“...Am I allowed to do that?” you finally manage to ask, and for half a moment Laverne stares back at you like it was the dumbest thing she's ever heard anyone say.

“I don’t give a shit” She finally huffs, “You do what you want, I’m goin’ out for a smoke.”

She’s gone out the side door in a flash, and it takes you far too long to work out the pieces – Eddie paid for your drink, and she’s giving you an excuse to go back and see him.

Boy, are you dense sometimes.

Still, you can’t help but wonder if it’s all some clunky ploy to get you thrown out of the bar. You also can’t help but wonder who is going to watch the bar while Laverne is gone, but you decide that isn’t your problem as you seize the plastic tub and heft it down to brace against your hip.

When you slip behind the bar and into the back, Eddie’s standing at the sink, elbow deep in suds and glaring at them like they’d personally wronged him.

You linger in the doorway, selfishly taking in as much of this candid moment as you can steal, and scrounging around for what is left of your courage.

“Hiya.” You say, once you find your voice.

It startles him bad enough to send him leaping back from the sink.

“Oh, shit,” Eddie says, stumbling over your name in a way that makes your insides go tight, “I – uh – I thought you left with the guys.”

“Nope.”

“What are you–?”

You tilt the dishtub toward him and jostle it in a way that is less tantalizing than you mean for it to be with the way the dishware shifts dangerously.

“Special delivery.”

Eddie’s brows come down over his eyes and his shoulders sag.

“...Oh, great. Thanks,” he says, then gestures to the metal surface piled high with dishes. “Just put ‘em wherever you can.”

The task is daunting. You’re not sure you’ve ever seen as many dishes in your life – it’s going to take him hours to get through them.

You tentatively shove the plastic bin in where you can fit it, careful not to disturb the topsyturvy stacking method that has been employed here, and linger idly as Eddie wipes his soapy hands on his jeans.

A measured silence settles between you, through which you can still hear the muted sounds of the bar trilling distantly on.

“What happened?” Eddie finally asks, “How come you didn’t go with the guys?”

“Oh, well…” you start, electing to fib a little rather than do something so embarrassing as tell him the only reason you’re here tonight, “You know, as thrilling as sitting around in a parking lot drinking cheap beer sounds, I figured somebody ought to stay behind and keep you company. And I figured since you bought me a drink and all, it ought to be me.”

He huffs out a humorless laugh.

“Lucky me.”

You try not to let the biting sarcasm of the response dig its teeth in as you continue.

“...That was sneaky, by the way. You didn’t have to do that.”

Eddie shrugs, and rests a hand on the curved metal lip of the three-basin sink.

“Least I could do for our biggest fan.”

He sounds less enthusiastic about that this time around and it is enough to make your stomach clench.

“...You guys were great, by the way.” You try again, for lack of anything better to say.

Eddie shakes his head.

“Nah, we weren’t. We were actually pretty rough, I’m surprised they let us play as long as they did … but thanks for making the effort, though.”

“Well… you were great.” You press, folding your hands behind your back and taking a step closer, “I mean, you were pretty much the best part of the show.”

Distantly, you see his eyebrows jump beneath the sweaty fringe drying tacky to his forehead. The corner of his mouth twitches.

“You keep stroking my ego like that and I’m gonna have to buy you dinner to go with that drink,” Eddie warns you, and something inside of you shrieks with unabashed hormonal joy.

You cannot think of anything more tantalizing than that … except for maybe one of your two fantasies from earlier in the evening, but neither of those scenarios is on the table for tonight.

At least, you’re fairly certain they aren’t.

You thank your lucky stars he’s so fixated on washing dishes that he can’t see the way you turn bright crimson.

“I’m serious. You were great, Eddie.”

It’s enough to finally make him look at you again.

“You think so?”

And of course, now that you have his attention, you can’t help but go embarrassing yourself.

“Yeah, absolutely. You’re a goddamn rockstar…”

He grins.

“D’you kiss your mother with that mouth, Sailor?”

You curl your lips in past your teeth on instinct and drop your gaze to your sneakers as the suggestion sends you hurtling back to the picnic bench in the woods behind school.

You’re so sure Eddie was going to kiss you out there – you watched his eyes go heavy and lidded as his gaze slid down to your lips. You saw the shift in his posture, the oh-so-subtle way he tilted forward, curling his hands into fists, moist pink tongue darting out to wet the plush spread of his lips.

He’s not looking at you like that now, and it’s the worst goddamn thing in the world. You have to force yourself to think of something – anything else to stop it from completely destroying you as you stand there, listening to Eddie washing the dishes.

Oddly, there is only one thing that comes to mind.

“...Can I ask you a question?”

The lewd soapy sounds of suds on ceramic sends a chill up your spine.

“Sure, hit me.”

“Before you went on, when we were standing at the bar... why did Laverne call you Junior?” You ask, and the question seems to catch him off guard, so you elaborate to fill the awkward silence before it can settle between you, “She did it again just outside when she told me to bring these back to you… I was just wondering about it…”

Eddie doesn’t answer right away, and you’re just about ready to tell him to forget it by the time he opens his mouth to speak.

“Ah… hmm,” he hesitates, “… it’s a … it’s a little inside joke some folks around town like to roll out.” Eddie explains, then after a beat of silence, he gestures vaguely, “Munson Junior.”

“...Oh.” You say lamely – the subtext is not lost on you, and suddenly you’re sorry you asked.

A heavy silence settled between you, and then Eddie clears his throat in the prelude to what you'd feared was coming all night long.

“Hey, listen … it was real nice of you to stay behind…”

Uh oh. Here comes that dreaded rejection.

It was nice of you to stay but it’s actually super weird that you’re here at all and you should probably go home before you embarrass yourself more than you already have.

You do your best to stamp that line of thinking out before it can settle and elect to fold your hands behind your back, rocking on your heels and doing your utmost to look carefree.

“But…?”

You don’t care if he’s about to ask you to leave, but you hope to any God out there listening that he doesn’t.

“But… you should probably head out.” Eddie sighs.

Okay, so you lied. You care so much, and you can feel the corners of your mouth tremble as your smile begins to waver.

Eddie continues.

“This is gonna take a while, Sweetheart… and I’m sure you’ve got better things to do than stand around watching me play in dish water.”

Sweetheart. The nickname fills you with foolish courage, and suddenly you’re taking another step closer.

“Not really,” You admit, “I actually cancelled some plans to be here tonight…”

He breathes a halfhearted laugh out through his nose.

“Betcha wish you hadn’t.”

Oh, how wrong he is. If only he knew just how far you’d gone to make sure you could be here tonight.

“...Can I help?” You ask tentatively, forcing yourself not to look away when Eddie’s gaze snaps up and he clocks your sudden proximity with a soft, strangled sound in the hollow of his throat.

You pretend not to hear it for both your sake, “...it’ll speed things up. And... and then you can buy me dinner, right?”

You watch him stare back at you and can practically see the cogs turning in his brain, as if he absolutely cannot fathom the request you’d just made of him. When he continues to fail to answer, you try again.

“Here, let me help.”

You reach for the rumpled dish rag, but Eddie catches your hand.

Your lungs spasm and go flat and for the brief moment you exist under his touch, you forget how to breathe.

He shakes his head and tries to lead you away from the sink, releasing you entirely too soon for your liking.

“No, you don’t have to do that.” he says, and for half a moment you’re afraid that nothing you say is going to convince him to let you stay.

Then again, it’s not exactly like you’re asking for his permission.

“I know…” You hum, feeling your tongue go fat in your mouth and taking another step toward him, “But I want to.”

Eddie doesn’t retreat from your advance, but he calls your bluff with narrowed eyes and a furrowed brow.

“You wanna waste your night doing dishes in the back of a bar?” he deadpans.

Of course you do.

You want to tell him that you want to do every trivial task under the sun if it means you get to do it with him. You’d happily sit and watch paint dry if Eddie was going to be there with you, but somehow you’re not certain that is going to do anything to make you sound cool and attractive.

“Sure, why not?” you shrug, rolling your sleeves up as far past your elbows as they will go and sidling up so you’re standing nearly hip to hip.

Your heart is hammering behind your ribs when you dare to steal a cautious, casual glance up at him, “I don’t have anything better to do right now.”

Eddie stares back at you, brows furrowed quizzically before he shakes his head, mutters something unintelligible to himself, then reaches into a milk crate sitting beneath the sink that you hadn’t noticed until he fishes out a pair of oversized yellow dish gloves and hands them to you.

“Yeah, okay – since you’ve got nothing better to do – put these on. We don’t want those fingers going prune.”

It takes you much longer to get through the dishes than you anticipated when you originally offered your services.

Two hours later, your sweater is soaked down the front, you’ve got suds in your sleeves, and you can smell the faintest hint of budding mildew wafting off of you, but you finish the dishes in half the time you imagine it would have taken Eddie to do them on his own.

When you’re done, you bid Laverne a cheerful farewell, one she does not acknowledge, and you leave the bar together.

Eddie has been talking animatedly about a hundred different subjects the whole time, though the last five minutes of conversation have been allotted to his guitar – which he tells you is an N.J. Warlock series, and you have no idea what that means.

You don’t mind though, you’ve been listening quietly without interjection because your newest revelation is just how much you like to listen to Eddie talk when he gets going. Not the heated preaching you’ve witnessed a hundred times in the lunchroom, but an excitable deep dive into something he is clearly very passionate about.

In your deepest flights of fancy, you imagine him talking to someone about you like this, and as you cross the parking lot and arrive at the back of his van, it makes your insides flutter with a girlish excitement.

Unfortunately, he mistakes your silence over the past few minutes for disinterest and grows sheepish.

“...Anyway, I didn’t mean to talk your ear off like that,” Eddie says, rolling his shoulders. “When I get going it’s hard to shut me up sometimes … sorry.”

You shake your head.

“No, not at all! I didn’t want to interrupt your flow, I just don’t really know anything about guitars.”

A look of patent relief flashes across Eddie’s face and is very quickly replaced with something sly as he pops open the back doors to the van. Inside sits half a dozen pieces of Gareth’s drum kit, two amps, and a sleek, black, rectangular case.

Eddie rests a hand on the hood of the case with a thump and you watch his gaze slide over to you.

“You wanna meet her?” he asks.

You don’t respond right away, if only because you don’t know who he could possibly mean, here in this deserted parking lot, but he doesn’t give you the opportunity to linger in the limbo of that unknowing.

He pops open the hinges and flips the lid up, revealing the angular crimson body of the guitar. Eddie lifts the instrument carefully from its crushed velvet bed and presents it to you with all the reverence of a lover.

You reach out tentatively to trace the smooth resin of her body with your finger pads and suddenly the moment feels supercharged with something heavy. The air is thick with it, whatever it is, and it settles in your lungs with a cloying film. You can’t be certain as to why, but you can suddenly feel your heart beating in your stomach.

“This is Sweetheart,” Eddie says, voice dripping with an admiration that makes your insides clench.

The heady atmosphere dissipates almost immediately, and you drop your hand back to your side to try and mask the way it makes you flinch to hear him call the guitar that.

Sweetheart?! No, it most certainly is not.

You’re Sweetheart. That’s your name now, remember? He only went and gave you the goddamn thing, now here he is telling you it’s just some random term of endearment he slaps on anything shiny and new that happens to catch his eye?

Fucking lame.

“Oh. Wow. It’s pretty.” You force yourself to say, because it’s not untrue, even if you are suddenly gripped in a ridiculous burning jealousy over his relationship toward an instrument. “Really pretty.”

And then Eddie pulls a face of sheer and total mock offense.

“Hey now,” he warns you gently, “Show a little respect for the love of my life here, will ya?”

You glance up at him and for half a moment aren't entirely sure you’re in the mood to meet him there. But it’s stupid to be jealous of an inanimate object. That would be like finding out Eddie was jealous of your vibrator or something stupid … which also suggests he’s fucking his guitar, so no, maybe it’s not like that at all.

Still, the thought manifests an image, which immediately sears itself into your frontal lobe and sends the blood rushing to your head so quickly you’re half surprised it doesn’t pop.

“...she’s pretty?” you hum, feeling suddenly like you’re about to faint.

Eddie gives you a satisfied smile – one you don’t see for how your vision has briefly gone spotty – and nods.

“Damn right she is," he says, laying her back in her case and snapping the lid shut.

If you’d been looking, and not feeling a stupid sense of satisfaction to see her get so summarily shut away, you would have seen Eddie go suddenly shy as his eyes slide over to peek at you from his peripheral.

“...Second prettiest girl in the room tonight.”

It hits you like a slap in the face and is oddly grounding. Your vision clears, your ears stop roaring, and just like that everything goes back to normal. Just you and Eddie standing in an empty parking lot with the echo of his attempt at a smooth line lingering between you.

Your mouth falls open and you choke on a loud bark of startled laughter.

Ha! Take that, Sweetheart.

Eddie wrinkles his nose and pulls a face like he immediately wishes he could take it back, not knowing that you’d strike him dead before he would even dare. He’s a total fucking dork, and that’s yours now. There will be no takebacks. Not now, not ever.

“Damn,” he mutters, squeezing an eye shut and reaching up to scratch at his brow, “That was super fucking corny, wasn’t it? Not my best effort – sorry.”

You press your lips together in a tight seal in a desperate attempt to keep a hideously giddy sound of animalistic joy from bleating up out of you, and you shake your head.

“That’s okay.” You start, dismissing the thick layer of cheese with a flippant wave, “I’m sure Laverne would be flattered to hear you say that about her.”

It takes him a moment to catch on, but when he does he snorts and rolls his eyes, mumbling something under his breath about Laverne. He doesn’t correct you, and you let the moment die with dignity because you know what matters.

Eddie Munson thinks you’re pretty, and that will forever be etched on the front of your brain, whether he likes it or not.

“So,” Eddie begins, shutting the van up again and leaning back against the door. He fishes a rumpled pack of camels from his jacket pocket, and you elect not to say anything about that, “It’s a little late for dinner… but how would you feel about a midnight snack?”

You know the muscles in your face are going to be sore in the morning for how widely you’ve been grinning back at him all night, and you nod, hoping you don’t look too overeager, but also not giving a damn if you do.

“What did you have in mind?”

He pops a cigarette between his teeth and goes looking for his lighter.

“Let’s see. I think Fosters might still be open. You could get a milkshake, chili dog, banana split, – whatever your heart desires, Sweet Thing. Your wish is my command.”

The thought of riding out to Foster’s Freeze on the far end of town with Eddie Munson is tantalizing in the best possible way. You’re beaming as you bring your wrist up to glance at your watch and try to visualize what you can stomach so late.

All thoughts of your growling stomach sail right out of your head as your heart rockets up into your throat before dropping into a free fall because it’s nearly midnight.

“Jesus Christ!” You gasp, head snapping up to share your horrified look with the class.

Eddie blinks back at you.

“Nope, just me–”

“Can I see your watch?” You’re taking hold of his wrist and pulling it up to stare into the digital face of his Casio before he can answer, “Oh, God – it’s so late.”

“What’s the matter, you turning into a pumpkin or something?” He teases, lighting his cigarette with his free hand.

“My curfew was like half an hour ago,” You say quickly, dropping his wrist and nearly upending your bag in the frantic search for your keys.

“Oh… shit,” Eddie mumbles, “Well, d’you need a ride? I’ll get you home lickety-split–”

You elect to ignore any intended innuendo there in lieu of your mounting panic.

“No, thanks, I’ve got my car – listen, I really gotta go,” You say, “But let’s do a raincheck, okay?”

You don’t wait for him to answer before you turn and bolt for your car shouting back to him as you go.

“I mean it, Munson! You owe me that midnight snack!”

You’re fumbling with your keys in the lock and whipping your door open with a harsh creak before you remember yourself and spin on your heel.

“Oh— Eddie, wait!” He’s circled around to the driver’s side and is standing on the runner, already half way up into his seat when his head snaps up, and you grow suddenly shy, “Thank you for this, it was – I mean, you’re – I had fun tonight. More fun than I would have had sitting at home, anyway.”

He gives you a strange look.

“...you really mean that, don’t you?” He asks after a moment, “Truly. Dishes and all?”

You nod, and you watch him shaking his head in a way you imagine must be accompanied by a good-humored chuckle as he takes a final drag on his cigarette and tosses it.

“Well, bless you for saying so.” He says, “Let’s do it again sometime.”

“Absolutely. I’ll do the dishes with you anytime.” Oh my God, why the fuck did you just say that? You’re cheesy and boring and stupid – just a stupid girl with a stupid crush.

And Eddie is laughing.

“Get home safe, Sweetheart.” he calls, “Wear your seatbelt.”

“Yeah, you too… goodnight, Eddie.”

Despite the traded goodbyes, you both linger a moment longer, looking back at one another halfway into your respective cars and so reluctant to part despite the ticking time bomb hurtling toward you at breakneck speed.

You need to get home, and yet…?

“Penny for your thoughts?” Eddie calls, and you feel yourself flush.

“It’s just… you know … what Shakespeare said…”

Across the lot, he steps down from the van and nods.

“Sure. Good ol’ Willy Shakes.” and when you don’t elaborate, he gently prompts you, “What’s Shakespeare say, Sweetness?”

The saccharine twist on your new nickname has a lump forming in your throat, one you almost don’t get the words around as it swells and threatens to strangle you.

“Parting is such sweet sorrow.” you sigh.

It’s perhaps the uncoolest thing you’ve said all night, and you don’t even have the good sense to be embarrassed about it, because it’s also the truest thing you’ve said all night, and suddenly your heart is pounding in your chest.

You really, really have to go, but you don’t want to.

Eddie crosses his arms and leans back against the van.

“Yeah… it sure is.”

The silence endures, and as the seconds tick by, you continue to fail to tear yourself away. The last time you left him like this, you didn’t see him again for five days, and after tonight you’re not sure you can survive another five days without Eddie in your life.

Maybe you can stand to miss your curfew. Maybe your parents won’t notice your car is gone and won’t come to check in on you. Maybe you can sneak in after midnight or stay out all night … maybe you can just stand here saying goodnight over and over until the sun comes up and never have to get to the parting part.

“Go home, Sweetheart.” Eddie says then, “I don’t wanna get you in trouble.”

The sentiment causes the lump in your throat to swell, and you have to force yourself to breathe out slowly to ease the pressure it puts on you.

You watch him climb up into the van and feel your heart thumping again. One of you had to go first, you suppose. Last time it was you, this time it’s only fair it’s him.

“Bye Eddie.” You call, and when you still fail to get into your car, he heaves a long-suffering sigh, which is a little too fond to be just that.

“You sure you don’t want me to drive you home?” He asks, “It’s like I told you – lickety split.”

Don’t make a promise you can’t keep. You want to warn him, but all you can manage is a smile.

Then you slide in behind the wheel of your car and shut the door behind you. You linger a moment longer and when you feel that lump threatening to return – one you quickly realize is the prelude to melancholy – you can’t help but steal one last look out your window, back at the van.

Eddie is still there, and better still, he seems to have had the same thought as you, because when you look, there he is looking at you again.

It fills you with a bright and warming sense of satisfaction. It's not so easy to tear yourself away, is it?

Then, as if to answer, Eddie waves.

You grin, return the gesture, and start your cars at the same time. It only takes a short dosey-do around each other to exit the parking lot side by side. You turn left, he turns right, and you watch in your rearview mirror until his taillights fade into the dark.

Yeah, you think you might have fallen pretty hard tonight, and you’re going to have a very hard time getting up again.

#eddie munson #eddie munson x reader #cruel summer prequel #endless summer fic #stranger things #eddie munson imagine #eddie munson x you #eddie munson fanfic #joseph quinn eddie munson

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