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The Older Brother Conundrum VI

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"I thought you thought he was hot?"

"Objectively attractive," Eddie corrects Gareth, staring blankly at the ceiling above. There were still spots where the glue from glow in the dark stars used to be.

He can't see it, but he knows his friend is rolling his eyes at him.

"So you're freaking out because you're not into guys?" Gareth presses on, trying to at least understand what the problem is. If an 'objectively attractive' girl came onto him, you wouldn't see him complaining. A guy would have to be at least Axl Rose levels of hot, though. Well, depending on how drunk/horny he was, but he'd probably be down to at least make out.

Eddie opens his mouth to respond, but hesitates.

"Maybe."

Gareth groans.

"Then just tell him! It's probably gonna be weird but if he's as cool as Henderson claims, then he'll understand."

"Yeah," Eddie agrees, thoughts already fleeting away. Steve has been so scared when he rejected him. How could he do it again?

===

Eddie is, obviously, a coward, and chooses to avoid the Hendersons household instead. And it works well, until a rolled up notebook hits him in the back of his head.

"I've heard you failed the last math test."

He grabs the thick roll of paper before it can hit him the second time.

"Yeah? From who?" he asks, sweeping his squinting eyes through the crowd of his so-called friends.

"Doesn't matter from who." Dustin crosses his pudgy arms over his chest after a few unsuccessful attempts to get his notebook back. "What matters is you haven't been over for two weeks."

"So? You miss me that much?"

"Your grades clearly do." Dustin quirks an infuriating eyebrow at him. Eddie quirks his right back.

"No, they don't."

"You've also forgotten two of your last English assignments."

Eddie opens his mouth.

"And you haven't started the essay you have due this Friday."

"That is just a rude assumption!"

"That is a correct rude assumption."

Eddie glares at him.

"So what?" he grumbles, swinging the notebook back to him. It's just a small satisfaction that Dustin stumbles back with the force of it. "We can't all be geniuses like you, Henderson."

"We could." Dustin glares back. "If we listened to my genius ideas. Listen," he says in his exasperated tormented-genius tone as he squeezes himself in to sit next to Gareth. Who, bless him, immediately pushes back to make him fall. Unfazed, Dustin walks over to the other side, where Jeff slides to make space for him. Eddie doesn't blame him, sometimes the best way to deal with Henderson is... not deal with him.

"Listen. You don't have to come over to mine, though it's obviously the best place--"

"Of course, with a genius on hand."

"Yeah. We could make a study group, Gareth will probably--"

"No."

"Or Jeff." He looks to the side expectantly. Jeff, without making eye contact, shrugs half-heartedly. "See?"

"That didn't look like agreement to me," Eddie points out.

"It wasn't instant denial." Dustin nods in Gareth's direction. The older boy flips him off lazily, leaning on his palm.

Eddie rolls his eyes.

"Okay, Henderson," he says. And, considering the conversation over, digs back into his lunch.

"Okay what?" Dustin hisses, the conversation apparently not done on his end. "You know it was working!"

"It was." Eddie nods. "So I said, okay."

"Okay what?!"

"Okay, I will come over. Now pass me Jeff's tray."

"Okay. Good."

Jeff doesn't protest when Eddie snatches the juice off his tray.

-----

"Is it a Steve thing?"

"Jhesus!" Eddie jumps a foot in the air and barely saves his elbow from going straight through his windshield. "What the fuck, Henderson?! I'm too young for a heart attack!"

The kid looks him up and down with doubt in his eyes. The audacity.

"He's been weird since you stayed over last time."

Eddie would rather discuss his prematurely depleting health, thank you very much. He's been having weird heart palpitations for the last month or so. That was probably a cause for concern.

"Yeah? And you think it's my fault again?" Eddie busies himself with opening his car so Dustin couldn't read from his eyes that it very much was. His irises would probably scream his guilt out like tortured banshees.

"I don't know, is it?"

Eddie wills his irises to fucking drown. Maybe if he looks up into the sun real quick, they would collapse somewhere deep inside his skull where they can't betray him.

He looks down at his younger friend.

"Maybe."

Oh, so the mouth is what he should have been worried about all this time. Figures.

"What do you mean, maybe? What did you do?!" Dustin is at his annoying decibels again, so Eddie ushers him inside the van.

Worst case scenario he will drown his voice with his tape collection and then lose him in a ditch somewhere on the way.

"I..." Eddie mulls his words over, sloshes them around in his mouth hoping they start tasting better while he turns the key in the ignition. "Executed my right to say 'no'." There. That sounds good.

"No to what?" Dustin stares at him like he's talking gibberish. Like he's not being perfectly clear and reasonable.

"That's adult stuff, sorry."

His eyes widen even more.

"What are you talking about?"

"Birds and bees, you wouldn't understand." He waves him off with a flick of his hand, trying to focus more on smoothly backing out of his parking space.

"I know sex, I'm not a child!" Dustin bristles, and Eddie lowkey wants to throw himself out of the car after hearing his innocent freshman sheep say "sex". Alas, he's not driving fast enough yet.

"Sure you do, buddy." He nods instead, because pushing buttons is one of his cardinal sins.

Dustin glares at him but doesn't say anything, which might be actually worse than him talking a mile a minute. It means he's thinking, which is never good to anyone in his closest vicinity.

"So what, he asked you out and you said no?"

Eddie's hand jerks, making his van swerve sharply to the left for a second.

"Jesus, mind the precious cargo!" Dustin shrieks, holding tightly onto his seat.

"How did you know my weed was in the back?" Eddie snarks and then smiles widely at another glare.

"Why did you say no?"

"What?" He was only half-playing dumb. Filtering out Dustin was slowly becoming a second nature if he wanted his sanity intact. And ego. And dignity.

"Why didn't you go out with him?"

"You're sailing pretty smoothly over the fact that he asked me out, considering you've claimed he's not gay not so long ago," he points out.

To his bafflement, Dustin just shrugs.

"So he's branching out; good for him."

"Good for him?!" Eddie slams on the breaks harder than he was meaning to, wide eyes turning towards his friend.

"What, you're gonna be weird about it?" Dustin spits back. "Because you're sailing pretty smoothly over the fact that a guy had asked you out."

Eddie has to bite his tongue in half and swallow the remains not to tell him that he's been more propositioned than asked out by his older brother.

"When have I ever been normal about anything, Henderson?" he points out instead.

"Fair point." Dustin nods. "So why did you say 'no'? You could branch out too."

"Yeah, because changing your preferences is that easy." Eddie rolls his eyes.

"Well, I don't know if I like a new ice cream flavor until I try it."

"Don't compare being gay to ice cream, I swear to everything unholy, Henderson. This is not a flavor thing."

"But it is a trying thing."

"Shut up. Have you considered that your brother might not be everyone's type?"

"No." Dustin shakes his head stubbornly, in perfectly faked obliviousness.

"I'm not fucking your brother, Henderson." He decides to bring out the big guns. It works, partially, and his friend's face twists with disgust.

"Ew. Don't say it like that."

"You fucking started it!"

Thankfully, they finally reach Henderson's house and Eddie parks in the driveway.

"Just say you'd never go out with another guy and I'll drop it," Dustin challenges him, which should be easy but...

"If," he hisses, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. "I ever went out with a man, it would be a fellow metalhead. Hair longer than mine, good music taste, tattoos up to his neck. Sporty guys may be my type ten universes away from this one."

"Okay," Dustin agrees quickly. Too quickly. Eddie turns his suspicious gaze towards him. "You wanna tell him?"

Resigned, he follows the chin movement of his friend, to find Steve peeking at them from behind the window curtain. He quickly disappears when their eyes meet.

"Nope," Eddie sighs, but turns off the engine anyway.

He's inside before he feels ready, and Dustin is yelling:

"Steve! I think you should grow out your hair!"

It takes everything in him not to slap the kid across his precious head. A little concussion might do him good. Everyone, probably.

"Why?" Steve curiously peeks his head from the kitchen. It doesn't go unnoticed that he's not giving Eddie a single glance.

"Guys dig it," Dustin explains shortly, having no idea how close he is to being strangled to death in his own home.

"O-kay..." Steve trails off, his curiosity getting the better of him, so now it's Eddie who has to pretend he's not seeing him. "So I would look more like a girl?"

"Does Eddie look like a girl to you?"

"Don't pull me into this, Henderson," Eddie groans, like he's not the unspoken yet obvious source of this conversation.

Steve doesn't answer long enough that he dares a look in his direction and immediately regrets it when he's met with his appraising gaze. He can feel his cheeks heat up.

"If you hit it from the back..."

"Ew!" Dustin screams at the same time Eddie says: "Fuck you, man!"

Steve only shrugs, turning his gaze to his brother with almost an eerie calmness.

"Stay out of this, man. I mean it."

"Fine!" Dustin throws his hands in the air and stomps away towards the stairs. "I don't want you getting together anyway! You'd be too fucking gross!"

A shuffle to his right stops Eddie from making any additional crass jokes, and when he looks at the kitchen doorway, Steve has already disappeared back inside. Dustin is already upstairs and he really wants to follow him, would rather write five essays than deal with this, but he's trying to be a better friend. Which apparently involves appeasing older brothers.

He also doesn't want to be the cause of any more distress to Steve. As the the local metalhead freak and alleged satanist, his victim profile leans more into god-fearing small-minded prudes. There's nothing like making grannies shake in fear at the grocery line. He should get back when the guy is old and on his way to the Sunday service and shake his leather clad ass in his face then.

Or something.

Eddie steps into the kitchen, knocking gently on the doorframe.

"Hey--"

"Don't," Steve interrupts him, barely sparing him a glance. "Whatever you're gonna say, there's a good chance I don't want to hear it. You're not interested, I misread some situations, end of story."

Eddie stares at his back, at the muscles moving gently while he's washing the dishes.

"Well, unless you want to cuss me out or something, then please, go on," he jokes dryly.

"What, for liking guys?" Eddie frowns. "No, I kind of came to do the opposite."

Steve straightens up, giving him a curious glance over his shoulder, and Eddie doesn't feel so confident in what he wants to say anymore. He probably never did.

"Like, I don't have a problem with it," he tries anyway, looking anywhere but at Steve who suddenly seems too interested in what he has to say. "You're just not-- We're too different, you know?"

And oh, oh no, Steve is grabbing a dishtowel to wipe his hands into and turning fully around. Eddie has his undivided attention now and the last time that happened, his heart almost gave out prematurely. He's crossing his arms, and was his chest always so... defined? He would have noticed, right?

"You don't have a problem with it, or am I not your type?" Steve asks with a raise of one judgmental eyebrow.

Eddie gapes at him.

"What about opposites attract, huh?" he presses. "My best friend is a language nerd and I've barely passed French, I have no idea what she's talking about half of the time but it works."

Now Eddie crosses his arms too.

"Well, why don't you ask her out?" he fires back, suddenly annoyed. Which is not what he's supposed to be doing now. He came here in peace.

"Well," Steve says in the bitchiest tone Eddie's ever heard which he unfortunately finds impressive. "Because she's my best friend."

"Friend is a good place to start--"

"And she's gay."

"Oh." Eddie's eyes widen. The cogs turn. Slowly and painfully but they turn. "Ooooh, okay. Okay, yeah, I can see how that could be a problem." He nods.

"If you tell anyone, you're dead," Steve says, straightforward and almost nonchalant, but his eyes say he's being completely serious. If he told Eddie now that he had killed before, he'd probably believe him.

"I won't!" he assures him quickly. "I haven't-- Well, I've told Gareth, but she's not relevant to my story, so..." Eddie withers under his furious glare. "He's the only one, I swear!"

"What about Dustin?"

"Dustin is an evil genius who you share a roof with, that's not on me!" he protests immediately, hands in the air.

"Sure," Steve agrees to appease him, but his glare only shifts into bitchier territory, making Eddie feel like he hasn't left school for the day yet. "Whatever you say, man, just keep the death threats in mind. I've dealt with worse than you." With that said, he turns his back towards him and opens the cupboards to put the dishes away. As if the conversation was over.

Eddie tamps down the urge to skitter away like a kid dismissed from the principal's office. But he didn't come here just to get scolded for his misdeeds. He came with a peace offering. Damn, he's all out of weed today, should have brought the peace pipe with him.

"But uh, we're good, right? We can stay on friendly terms?" he asks, wetting his lips.

To his horror, Steve throws him an incredulous look over his shoulder.

"You want to... forget about it?"

Eddie squirms under his gaze, no longer feeling like a scolded freshman, but more like a worthless worm. Well, freshman would still apply, probably.

"You don't?" He frowns. Then adds a small depreciating laugh. "Surely you'll get over someone like me pretty quickly."

Steve chuckles, looking away again, and Eddie doesn't like the sound.

"Surely you don't know how hot you are." He says it low enough to be dismissed, but Eddie's ears grab it and put in front of his heart to examine and fuss over. "Yeah, we can stay friendly," Steve says louder. "No more lap sitting, though."

Eddie laughs nervously, now more than ready to skedaddle out of the kitchen.

"Travesty, but I think I'll live." He takes a step back. "Gotta go now, essays to write, worlds to conquer, you know the drill."

Steve hums, busying his hands with... is he straightening out tea bags? Did Eddie break him?

"I know. Good luck with your homework."

"Thanks," Eddie says as he bolts out of the kitchen.

He takes a small stop in the bathroom to look at his reflection, pulling on his frizzy hair. Is he hot? His dating life would beg to differ, unless...

Is he attractive to gay guys? Has he been missing out all this time? Should he reconsider Steve's offer? Maybe he's been barking up the wrong trees all this time.

Barking at cats while he should be barking at other dogs. Which, a dog on a tree would be concerning, he should definitely bark at it. In this very hypothetical scenario.

He slaps cold water on his face, reminding himself that what he should do is focus on graduating this time. And not fucking his friend's normie brother.

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