#brain’s a little mushy but sometime among academic writing like a maniac i also wrote something floaty i hope this is okay 🤍

[flowercrowngods]

Loving Eddie Munson is a full body experience. Steve can feel the lightness in his chest and the heaviness in his arms, can feel his hands tingling and his legs itching — itching to stay, to follow, to buckle and fall and float.

Eddie’s touch leaves goosebumps on Steve’s skin, his smile leaves a giddiness, his laugh a shortness of breath because, suddenly, Steve is laughing, too. Because of Eddie. With Eddie. Forgetting to breathe because he takes it away with gentle touch and playful wink, rendering Steve useless and utterly devoted.

But even when his eyes closed and they’re not touching, Steve isn’t safe from feeling this love in his entire body. Because Eddie is there. He’s always there; in his thoughts, his memories, this week‘s calendar, yesterday‘s Polaroid picture, tomorrow’s dreams.

Or here, right now, in bed, so close that warmth is radiating off him, but not close enough to touch yet. But Steve only needs to reach out with his pinkie and he could wrap it around Eddie‘s. Only needs to shift his leg just so to brush his knee against Eddie‘s thigh.

He’s there, he’s here, and Steve can feel him. Can hear Eddie’s smile in the air, can feel the the love in the safety of their little box-spring bubble, can smell belonging in his own shampoo mixed with Eddie‘s scent, can taste the words still that Eddie pressed to his lips earlier.

Loving Eddie Munson is a full body experience. All senses and more. Past, present, future. It’s all there, in the centre of Steve’s chest, slightly to the left as if always reaching for Eddie, drawn to him. Like the Fates knew upon the creation of humans that Steve’s heart would long for Eddie’s. His body would defy the laws of anatomy if it had to, he knows.

It makes him smile. It makes him want to cry, too.

Eddie is so close, so warm, so perfect and so still for once. And Steve wants to cry because the lightness in his chest needs to be filled somehow.

“You have your thinking face on, Stevie,” Eddie whispers then before Steve can lose himself in it, before he can let go and fall; fall so hard, fall without a landing, and still have Eddie catch him.

Eddie always catches him. Even when Steve isn’t falling. That’s another thing about loving Eddie Munson.

He doesn’t open his eyes, leaves them closed, the dim light of the room painting the world behind his eyelids in a beautiful sepia tone. That’s what he wants his future to look like. Not bright and loud and colourful. Just like this. Calm, serene, quiet, and with Eddie by his side. He deserves it. They deserve it. After everything, they deserve a future that will become a sepia past, the kind that will make people feel it in their whole body, too. The kind of story that will make them smile and cry at the same time, the kind that leaves behind lightness and space and the feeling that love could conquer worlds. The story of Steve and Eddie. Sepia-pretty, full of love and adoration and tingling hands.

He hums. “Not my thinking face.”

There’s no elaboration; because while Eddie knows Steve loves him, is in love with him, irrefutably, and can’t imagine loving anything or anyone as much as he loves Eddie, Steve still can’t tell him this. It’s his little secret. His safety belt in a world that moves so fast outside of this bedroom, outside the dim light, outside the safety they’ve made for themselves and each other.

“What’s that face then?” Eddie asks, but Steve just smiles. Hums. Dismisses the question, locks away the answer.

It’s the face that says, I love you so much, I can’t even stand to look at the world because that would be one sensation too many and I would break. Surely, I would break.

Eddie, however, refuses to let him go that easily.

“Stevie,” he sing-songs, moving closer until warmth turns to touch and lips are brushing over his face in butterfly kisses.

Steve smiles, a laugh bubbling out of his chest that’s still entirely too light, and leans both into and away from the touch, shy and brave at the same time.

“Stevie, baby,” Eddie continues, brushing kiss after kiss to his eyes, his brows, the tip of his nose. So warm, so close, so much and yet not enough, but still the perfect amount.

It doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t have to, not when Eddie kisses his smiles into Steve’s skin and leaves them in his memory for all eternity. Breath has left Steve’s lungs and he only lives because Eddie kisses him, loves him, adores him so entirely.

“Tell me, tell me, tell me,” Eddie begs ridiculously — still smiling, still grinning, still laughing into Steve’s skin. Every time Eddie laughs, Steve feels so young. As though he were a little boy, because only children feel this kind of joy, this kind of safety and invincibility. That’s what people say, at least. They’re wrong. Obviously, they’re wrong, but Steve doesn’t fault them, because they don’t have Eddie Munson in their bed — and they never will.

So maybe it’s another secret of his now.

“It’s nothing,” he says, playfully pushing away Eddie’s face, only to chase after it just a second later, hovering above him. It’s Steve now who laughs into Eddie’s skin, who chases faint blushes on sepia skin with his lips and leaves a trail of kisses in a familiar path from his forehead down to Eddie’s lips; right into his heart.

He rolls his hips into Eddie’s and swallows the breathy sigh, the hum, the moan, only realising now that he was starving. He was bursting with emotion and still he was starving.

“Doesn’t feel like nothing,” Eddie breathes into his mouth, reaching for Steve’s hands with his own until their laced fingers rest above his head and he’s meeting Steve’s eyes with this rare look of quiet devotion. Staring for just one second. Two. Three.

It’s that look that makes Steve fall. It’s that look that catches him.

That makes him say, “I love you so much it’s like my body doesn’t know what to do with it.”

He doesn’t elaborate, wouldn’t know how even if he wanted to. But the way Eddie’s face shifts into something soft, something so vulnerable, makes Steve feel like maybe he’s not alone with it.

He swallows and buries his burning face in the crook of Eddie’s neck. Not shying away from vulnerability — not with Eddie, not anymore — but not quite strong enough yet to meet it head-on. Face first. Eyes open.

“That’s what that face was.”

Eddie frees his hands from Steve’s grasp only to wrap his arms around his middle, holding him tightly and securely. Like he’s loving him with his whole body, too.

“I love you, Stevie,” he says. Quietly, like it’s not for the world to hear, not right now. Like it’s only for him. Only for Steve. “So much. So, so much. I don’t even know what to do with it most of the time, either. You’re okay, baby, you’re so perfect. Don’t even have the words for it.”

“Words are overrated,” Steve says, lifting his face to press his lips to Eddie’s in a conquering kiss. Licking his way into Eddie’s mouth, he swallows any and all words that might have followed, just to make a point. But Eddie doesn’t seem to mind.

Steve pulls away just for a beat, his body still on top of Eddie’s, and rolls his hips once more.

“But you can show me.”

Oh, and Eddie does.