Random question just for funsies: What movie have you watched most recently? What did you think of it?
Oh man, I've been watching some goodies lately - most recently, I watched 28 Years Later, which I thought was excellent. Super excited to see the new one later this month.
I also recently watched Bugonia (weird but compelling), GDT's Frankenstein (OBSESSED), Predator Badlands (cool as hell), The Vourdalak (highly recommend), and a TON of old horror movies from the 60s, 70s, and 80s (mostly Hammer Horror flicks and all the Amicus anthologies)
But I'm a horror girlie, so that's what is on most constantly in my household.
The way I’m in desperate need of and Eddie fic of yours. Cruel Summer is seriously one of my favorite pieces of work I’ve EVER read.
I’m begging for an angsty S5 fic where the reader was dating Eddie, with a reader x Steve and reader x Dustin dynamic (ALL PLATONIC). The reader and Dustin clash because they’re grieving Eddie in completely different ways, leading to a raw heart-to-heart. And even Steve steps in says the, “If I’m the idiot, why am I still standing here?” to the reader—setting her off before giving her the same brutal lecture he gave Dustin about how she turns Eddie into a knight in shining armor to cope, even though he died for nothing. It should end with them making amends, but I need the reader aching, yearning, and devastated over sweet Eddie the entire.
I understand you probably have may other things at hand but your work can never be topped and I know you would absolutely DELIVER with this prompt. Forever will love and appreciate your work<3
Hi nonny, appreciate the request and the kind words! I have not watched the new season so unfortunately most of this has gone straight over my head! Sorry!
Hi chat! I just wanted to extend a huge heartfelt thank you for the influx of love and support that has been flowing my way during the long hiatus and in the couple of days it has been since I posted again 💙 truly this is the best little community and I have missed you all
Summary: You leave Hawkins after the implosion of your relationship, hoping to bury yourself in college classes and forget you ever heard the name Eddie Munson. But when your grades start to slip and you find yourself put on academic probation, you have no choice but to slink home and try to decide what to do about the future, and about the feelings you can't seem to shake for your ex.
Word Count: 6k
Tags: exes -> friends -> lovers
Warnings: Angst, mentions of a break-up, allusions to suicide
AN: Just a little something based on an ask I received, posing the question about what Cruel Summer would look like without any of the supernatural elements. I'm going to do my very best to keep this a little more concise than the other two entries to this series (famous last words), but anyone who is not new here knows how long-winded I can be :) I am also very rusty with fanfic, so please forgive me as I trundle along through this (as always, if you see typos, no you don't)
College is not the fresh start you imagined it would be. Distance was supposed to help – sever yourself from the stagnant waters of Hawkins and get a fresh start – but it didn’t. Turns out, cutting and running from your problems like that only makes things worse, and you’re more than just a little embarrassed that you thought things would be different.
New town. New people. New life. Same shit, different day.
Maybe the problem was that your best approximation of picking up and starting over only saw you shifting two hours to the west. Terre Haute is still Indiana, after all. You’d planned to get as far away as humanly possible but never managed to buck up the courage to cross state lines into Illinois, no matter how frequently you flirted with the idea of taking yourself up to Chicago. That would have been the kind of distance that could really make a difference. The kind of new people and new life that could help scrub the stink of Hawkins off you for good.
You had it all figured out. Do a couple of semesters at Indiana State, get your grades up, and transfer to CSU. Get your degree in something cool, something worthwhile, and start your new life. Forget you ever came from a place that no one has ever heard of, or that you ever had your heart broken there.
It all seemed so easy as a concept.
You even had your eye on a little studio apartment in a mid-century walk-up overlooking the river, before it all went to shit. The number of the leasing agent is still scribbled on that scrap of paper and tacked to the wall next to your phone back in your dorm room. You like to tell yourself you would have called her tomorrow, but tomorrow is a deeply tantalizing notion, orgasmic at best when kept at arm's length. You’ll call her tomorrow, you’ll schedule a tour of the apartment tomorrow, and you’ll buck up the courage to go and speak to your guidance counselor about the state of your grades tomorrow.
But tonight, you’re on Route 46, barreling headlong into the complete dark of a new moon, gripping the steering wheel of your old Toyota Camry, and tilted forward into the last gasping breaths of your heater.
It was already well past midnight when the notion to run gripped you in the vice of existential panic, when you received the clear to pass go. That panic has since turned to a dull giddiness that always seems to accompany a prison break. You suspect the sun will be rising by the time you reach your point of berth, wherever that happens to be (you know damn well where you are headed, no matter how petulantly you refuse to let that information surface in your mind), and you wonder too late if you shouldn’t have left a note for your roommate.
Gone home for spring break – back in a few weeks.
Except if that were true, you wouldn’t have packed up everything you owned and crammed it into your shitbox car. But you’ll worry about that when those consequences rear their ugly little heads. Right now, you’re still riding that high. Escape is like an explosive burst of anger, an instant injection of intense dopamine, which you know will leave you trembling and dissatisfied in its paralyzing refractory period.
But you don’t have to think about that now, or where you’re headed, or what you’re running from (you’re not running, you’re just on Spring Break), or how you’re not-so-subtly intending to strand yourself there in an attempt to escape your new problems.
You just have to drive.
The night is a stalwart guardian, holding the waning orange glare of your singular headlight at bay as you limp along this lonely stretch of two-lane highway on three decent tires and one rubbery donut you keep meaning to change out. Another item for tomorrow’s checklist.
You are the only person on this road, headed for the turn-off, which you know will either take you north to Bloomington (and then Indianapolis beyond) or south to Hawkins. The choice leaves an acrid tang on the back of your tongue. You tell yourself you haven’t decided which way you’ll go when you hit it, with all your meager belongings stuffed into boxes and duffel bags and occupying the seats of your car like the evidence of a crime scene, scrubbed haphazardly of any evidence you ever existed in a tiny dorm at ISU.
You tell yourself for the hundredth time in the last hour that you’re going back next semester, and that lie doesn’t sound any more convincing than it did the first time you told it.
Still, you indulge yourself in the fantasy, so that you don’t have to think about the conversation you had in the moments before you cut and run (you’re not running, remember? You’re just going home for break). In a few weeks, tomorrow will come. You’ll talk to your guidance counselor, you’ll call that leasing agent in Chicago, and see about touring that little riverwalk apartment.
But that is then, and this is now, and you don’t have to decide anything now.
You just have to make it to the turn off, and until then, you just have to sit here, lulled into a sleepy stupor by the heat and the quiet and the confines of this little car.
No music, because all your music belongs to him. No cars to count. No headlights to flinch against. Just you and the velvet dark, swallowing you whole.
You blink once, twice, three times, and suddenly half an hour has passed.
When you hit the turnoff, you don’t have to think twice before making a decision. You hit your indicator, pull your wheel over to the left, and head south to Hawkins, where you’ve been headed from the start.
The sun is coming up over the treetops when you pull off the interstate and take the long way around to Cornwallis. Weaving your way through farms and the long stretch of woodland that leads you past the Hawkins Lab and beyond.
The trailer park sits where you left it, spilling radiation like an open wound, and demanding your attention as you roll past it.
You briefly consider turning the wheel as you creep up on the entrance to the park, hanging a left and moseying all the way down to the third trailer on the right, like you have a hundred times before, but you clench your teeth and let autopilot take you right past. Up the road, taking the long stretch of roughshod treelined road you have spent your whole life chasing the length of.
You don’t think about him, even though he is there, pressing in on the backs of your eyes. The sky is turning pink by the time you reach your neighborhood, still not thinking about him, even though you can hear the sleep-thick rasp of his voice pushing you on. Telling you to come home.
When you finally pull into the driveway of your childhood home, the shadows have grown short and blue, and the sky has gone pastel. There are no cars, because your parents are cruising in Bermuda for the spring, and you can see the electric white of the hide-a-key rock nestled into your mother’s geometric shrubs from here.
Home again, home again… jiggety jig.
You sink back into the cracked leather seating as you cut the engine, and a familiar sensation washes over you as it dies with a phlegmy rattle. The Toyota has seen better days, and it buzzes and pops in the aftermath of its journey, sounding an awful lot like it’s contracted the same terminal illness that once gripped Eddie’s van.
The thought is startling enough to send an electric bolt of adrenaline lancing through your midsection. Somehow, you’d managed to go the whole night without allowing his name to jump to the front of your mind, and here you are. You haven’t even gotten out of the car yet, and already he’s trying to force his way in, infect you again. You would be angry about that if it weren’t for the fact that he’s been your ghostly companion, idling in your passenger seat from the moment you left school.
It’s infuriating at best, and heartbreaking at worst, because he’s the one who chased you out of Hawkins in the first place. He’s the reason you left, and now he’s the reason you’ve come back.
Well, to be fair, not the whole reason. Your academic probation is the reason you’ve come back, but you’d be lying if you didn’t give Eddie Munson at least a little bit of the credit.
You’ve been thinking about coming home for weeks, turning yourself inside out with a desperately wanton desire for something familiar.
He’s just the one who finally gave you permission to act on those feelings.
You can still feel the phantom indent of the plastic where you’d held the phone pressed so tightly to your face, and the press of his voice in your ear.
“I don’t know what to do,” you’d whispered into the receiver only a few hours earlier, voice thick with the tears streaking down your face, huddled under a blanket with your roommate snoring softly on the far side of the room.
You didn't want her to hear you come apart at the seams, calling someone you have no right to be asking for help.
“Come home,” Eddie told you, offering an unspeakable kindness after nearly a year of radio silence, of angry, seething nothing.
You still can’t retrace your steps to understand how you suddenly found yourself on the phone with him at a quarter past two in the morning, spilling your guts like nothing ever changed, and he was only a few minutes down the road instead of half a state over.
You called, and Eddie picked up on the second ring, answered with a breathless utterance of your name, like he’d just moved heaven and Earth to haul ass and get out to the phone.
No pretense or preamble or even a sleepy demand to know who the hell was calling so late/early. Just your name, thick and breathy, as if he knew it would be you, and he’s been waiting all this time for you to call.
You don’t know why (yes, you do, you’re just too stubborn to admit it), but it broke you, and you sat quietly sobbing into the receiver, failing to vocalize what exactly was wrong. How to explain that everything is wrong and it's all your fault? You're too proud to admit that to him.
You're too proud even to admit that you just wanted to hear his voice. You can tell yourself that you dialed the number, hoping no one would answer until the cows come home. Best-case scenario, you get the machine, and the mere act of listening to the Munson’s outgoing message would be enough to still the way things had begun to spin inside of you.
A quiet act of self-destruction, sure, but even things that are bad for you can be endured in small doses. But in your heart of hearts, you know that is not true.
You needed to talk to Eddie. You wanted his permission to leave school, which is crazy, because it’s been nearly a year since you broke up.
You’re supposed to be unshakably angry with him, and yet, in your moment of screaming desperation, his name is the one that jumps to the front of your mind.
Even after all this time, and everything that has fractured between you, he’s still the first person you think to call when your world is falling apart and you’re busy trying to turn yourself inside out. And he’s still the only person who will tell you exactly what you need to hear.
“Come home, Sweetheart,”
You didn’t need any further convincing. You can’t even remember if you managed to stop crying long enough to say goodbye.
Academic probation means you’re not invited to enroll in classes next semester. Your grades are bad, your attendance is worse, and now your scholarship is in jeopardy.
Eddie will understand.
He knows better than anyone the violent, creeping dread that holds you in its claws. If you don’t get your shit together, you’re going to get kicked out of school. They don’t make you repeat the year in college. They just throw you out.
You’ve got an appointment to meet with your guidance counselor today at 9am, to try and figure out what went wrong and how best to get you back on track, but considering you’re in Hawkins, you don’t imagine you’ll be making that appointment. Not unless you get right back in your car and speed the whole way back to school.
But you won’t be doing that. It’s too embarrassing to come to terms with the fact that you’re failing your classes in the first place, but to admit that it is because you seem to have been infected by the academic tendencies of a boy repeating his senior year for the second time?
You’re supposed to be smarter than that, more practical. And it’s deeply impractical of you to go around broken-hearted over someone you broke up with in the first place. Maybe that’s why you didn’t stop over at the Munson place when you got into town.
You’re sure that, after a call like that, Eddie probably waited up for you.
He always waits up for you, even when you aren’t estranged and wailing into the phone like you’re near suicidal. But he should know by now that all you’re good at doing anymore is disappointing him.
You linger in the driveway, marinating in all this long enough that a sticky layer of sweat has started beading between your shoulder blades.
You could still swing by. There is nothing expressly barring you from going over to see him. You wouldn’t even have to drive. The walk across town to the trailer park would probably do you some good. Clear morning air to clear your head, get it on straight, explain yourself, but you don’t move.
In your rearview mirror, you watch the paper boy go pedaling past on a rusty Schwinn. The newspaper hits your driveway with a muted thump, and it is finally enough to force you into action.
You're here now. Better to make the best of it.
You pull the handle on your door and pop it open, breaking the inner seal of the cabin, and the morning air comes rushing in to meet you like an old friend. Cold, wet, biting on your tongue as you heave yourself up onto stiff legs and breathe deep the tang of spring storms, lingering in the atmosphere. There sits your house, right where you left it, and when you turn to gaze across the street, there sits the Henderson’s place, same as it ever was.
Nothing ever changes around here.
You know this town’s circadian rhythm better than your own, so you know without having to check that it’s the last Friday before spring break. It’s Dustin’s freshman year, Eddie’s third senior year, and (probably) your last semester at college. All of that scared you bad enough to shift you into a panic, back in Terre Haute, but here in Hawkins, they are just facts – things you know to measure against the things you believe – and you’re oddly calm about it now that you’re home.
Home.
You shut your car door with a hard thunk, promising yourself to unpack your life in a few hours, when the world is a little less fragile, and start up the drive. At the sight of your home, looming and large, you feel your strings snap, and the exhaustion of the last few hours hits you like a speeding train. You let your brain shift over to low-power, lulled into a stupor by your weariness, and operating on muscle memory as you retrieve the hide-a-key, twist it in the lock, and let yourself into your childhood home.
The air tastes stale like it always does when your parents are away. In a few hours, you’ll have to remember to open up the windows, air the place out, you’ll have to remember to take a shower, and scrub Indiana State University off of you the same way you’d tried to do with Hawkins that first day on campus, but you’re too tired for that now. You make your way to your bedroom, kicking off your shoes, and climb fully clothed into your still-unmade bed.
You know you should change out of these clothes, get into something clean, something unburdened by the weight of everything you just left behind, but right now, you can’t be bothered.
In a few hours, you’ll have to decide whether you’re brave enough to call your guidance counselor and apologize for missing your appointment. You’ll have to decide if you want to carry on the charade of scheduling another appointment you have no intention of keeping, but for now, you don’t need to do anything but shut your eyes, let the road fade, and the familiar stillness of an empty house settle back into you.
It's too late to sleep, but you’re not sleeping. You’re just resting your eyes.
BANG BANG BANG — comes the sound of a fist, pounding on your front door (though it's loud enough that you could easily imagine it is your bedroom door) and startling you out of the pull of Morpheus’s embrace.
You swear your head only touched the pillow a moment ago, and yet as you lurch bleary-eyed into an upright position, you see that the quality of light in the room has changed significantly. It is suddenly much more day than morning, and there is someone hammering impatiently at your front door.
Your first instinct is to assume that it is Eddie, because as much as you hate to admit, he is on your mind – you are always on my mind – and as much as you hate to admit, you wouldn’t put something like this past him.
That Munson temper is a helluva thing.
And the last time you spoke (the cold blue hours of this morning, notwithstanding), you were far from his favorite person. From what you recall, the words, “get the fuck out of my house,” may or may not have been uttered.
The pounding at your front door continues and grows gradually more frantic until it is a constant thunderous noise, echoing up to the ceiling, and it sends you flying out to the front room. You’re the only one home, but that does not give Eddie the right to come kicking your door down like you owe him something just because you had a lapse in judgment and sent him an ill-advised SOS.
By the time you reach the front door, it is rattling on its hinges under the force of the knocking, and you’re nearer to a blind rage than anything else when you seize it by the handle and whip it open. Who the hell does he think he is?
You open your mouth to tear him a new asshole, dive headlong into the continuation of the fight that stopped your relationship in its tracks almost a year back, and realize that it is not, in fact, Eddie Munson standing on your front step, despite the presence of the demon-faced mascot for the Hellfire Club sneering back at you.
It’s Dustin Henderson.
He is across the threshold of your front door, throwing his arms around you and squeezing you so tightly you feel something in your lower back pop before you can vocalize your surprise.
“You’re back!” He’s saying, over and over and jumping up and down like a puppy moved near to ecstasy with the joy of your return, “You’re back you’re back you’re back!”
It’s nice to have been missed. You rest your hand on the top of his baseball cap and give him a startled, if not wholly affectionate pat.
"Hi Dusty,” you say absently, remembering too late that he is fourteen now and far too old for that same pet name you’ve been using since he was barely ten, “It’s good to see you too,”
He wriggles out of your touch before you can embrace him properly and sticks you to the spot with a half-crazed look, like he cannot believe you are actually here.
“When my mom said your car was parked in the driveway, I thought she was seeing things, but then I saw it too and I had to be sure it was actually you,” he says, talking a mile a minute and slurring around his braces – those are new, “When did you get in? How long are you staying?”
Before you can answer, the Casio on his wrist beeps twice, drawing your dual attention to its button-bedecked calculator face.
“Shit,” Dustin says, and you understand at once what that means.
He’s late for school, because when is Dustin ever not late for school? The fact that High School has not changed that for him is weirdly assuring. He doesn’t even have to ask before you are moving on instinct.
Just because you have nothing better to do at seven thirty on a Friday morning, you snatch up your keys and slide into your rickety Toyota, shifting the box occupying your passenger seat into the footwell to make room for him.
Then it’s back down Cornwallis and to the school, listening to him rattle on from one subject to the next while you ferry him to Hawkins’s hallowed halls of learning. Just like old times.
You have a lot to catch up on in the ten minutes it takes you to get across town.
“— the problem is,” Dustin is saying as you roll to a gentle stop at the red light before that final turn into the school parking lot, “Lucas has been missing sessions to do basketball practice and tonight he’s got this big game he’s playing for the championships or whatever, but tonight is also the big final standoff with Vecna—”
“That's the evil wizard, right?” you interject.
It’s been a while since you had to try and follow along with Dungeons and Dragons rhetoric, and you’re finding it difficult to snap back into that mindset, running on roughly forty-five minutes of sleep.
“Right!” Dustin says impatiently, “And he knows how important this session is! It’s the culmination of the whole campaign we’ve been playing all year!”
You really don’t care about this. You’re much too tired to mediate on something this trivial, and you aren’t even getting paid for this anymore, but after years of practice, you can’t help but try to shift him over to the side of empathy.
Call that a babysitter’s instinct.
“I get that, but have you stopped to consider that maybe basketball is important too?”
Dustin wrinkles his nose and recoils, like it’s the most annoying thing anyone has ever asked him.
“No,” he says, “Basketball is stupid.”
You inhale deeply through the nose, hold it a tick, and exhale slowly as the light changes. Suddenly this is starting to feel very familiar. Trivial and overimportant and clearly about something else. Suddenly, it’s starting to feel like the last fight you had with Eddie.
Don’t you think graduation is important too? You’d asked, and Eddie had wrinkled his nose in that same disgusted look that Dustin still has plastered to his face. No, He’d said. Graduation is stupid.
You pull carefully into the intersection to wait out the flow of oncoming traffic.
“It clearly isn’t stupid to Lucas, if he’s been choosing it over D&D,” you say slowly.
You will not get mad about this. This has nothing to do with you or Eddie or graduation.
“That’s not the point—” Dustin insists, “Lucas is choosing some stupid championship over his friends!”
You force yourself to take another one of those slow breaths as traffic thins and you make the turn into the parking lot.
“Is anyone going to the championship game tonight?” you ask. “You or Mike or Will or anyone else?”
You clock the van before you’ve even reached the parking lot, and your insides burst into a spectacular fit of acrobatics.
Oh, shit.
“No,” Dustin replies distantly, “We’re all going to Hellfire because we made a commitment.”
He says it like he’s got half a chance in hell of convincing you that Lucas is in the wrong, and that he isn’t being a pig-headed baby getting bent out of shape over his friend having outside interests. Yeah, this is starting to sound very, very familiar. And the van is getting closer.
Oh shit oh shit oh shit.
You can't see Eddie out in the parking lot, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t there. That used to fill you with disappointment rather than careful assurance. He used to be someone you were excited to see.
Dustin is still talking about how he is right and Lucas is wrong as you pull into the first open spot you see, which just so happens to be one row over from the van. You hate that. Once you’ve parked, you twist around to address Dustin with your full attention, all the while you can feel it looming behind you, boring holes into the back of your skull.
“So, if none of you are showing up for him, then why should you expect him to show up for any of you?” you ask, all the while your hindbrain chants a constant Eddie Eddie Eddie.
The question sends Dustin into a pout.
“It’s not the same.” He insists, though the effort of arguing has suddenly gone out of him.
Your insides seize as you watch his eyes track over from your face to somewhere beyond the side of your head.
You know it’s coming, and it doesn’t stop you from leaping out of your skin when it happens.
The door opens with a loud pop, the crisp morning air comes rushing in, and the voice strikes you square between the shoulder blades.
“Hey—”
Your lungs go flat, and your throat slams shut, and suddenly you are shaking so violently you have to clench your hands into fists so that Dustin will not see you threatening to come apart at the seams.
“Eddie!” Dustin chirps, and you can feel the Earth shift as he looks at the burning figure of light looming over you in the doorway, then to you, trying with everything in your power not to crumble into a pillar of dust in his wake, “What are you—?”
“Get lost, Henderson.” The Sun commands, his voice moving through you and leaving you shot full of holes. There is nothing you can do to suppress the shiver it spurs in you, the sound of his voice, suddenly so close after so long.
Come home, Sweetheart, he’d said, and by God if you hadn’t been powerless to do anything but obey.
“But—”
“Go.”
Dustin does as he’s told, begrudgingly so, gathering his stuff and casting the both of you confused, sullen looks as he fumbles for the handle on his door and vacates the cabin of your Toyota, still packed full of everything you brought with you when you fled Hawkins, and everything you brought back when your return was ordered.
You have half a panicked inclination to ask Dustin to stay. To beg him not to leave you alone and face the consequences of your actions, but he disappears into the hungry maw of the crowd before you can work to unglue your mouth.
For a long, tense moment, you don’t move. You can feel him there at your back. Hungry, waiting, accusatory. You turn stiffly, because you cannot just sit there refusing to look at Eddie, pretending he doesn’t exist after you were the one to reach out. You have to be brave, but you can feel your heart thumping a little faster with every second that passes and the more he is revealed to you.
You force yourself to look at him, if only to prove that you are not so powerless in the blinding light of his sudden presence, all the while you sit damning yourself for insisting on driving Dustin to school.
You are not prepared for this, to see Eddie again so soon, and it takes you a very long, frightening second to remember how to breathe under the steely shadow of his usually honey soft gaze.
He looks almost exactly the same as he did when you left him. Maybe a little rougher around the edges, tired, bedraggled, though that could as easily be an effect of a sleepless night as many long months of mourning.
You can’t decide if you hope he has been torn up over you or if he hasn’t bothered at all, because you can’t decide how you feel about it from one moment to the next.
You’ve missed him, that much you cannot deny, and despite the whirling ball of nerves settling in your stomach, you are happy to see him.
Part of you expects him to shout at you. You expect anger and fiery condemnation to burn you to the ground, but what you don’t expect is that familiar pinch of his brow.
That quiet, searching concern.
The cautious, piteous pull to his features.
“I waited…” he starts, “I thought you would come over.”
Which you already guessed, but it doesn’t hurt any less to hear the faintest tinge of disappointment in the rasp of his voice. Part of you had thought you would too, and you can’t help but wonder if he got any sleep after he got off the phone with you, or if he’s just been sitting up, waiting for you.
Worrying.
“Oh,” is all you manage to squeak out, before shaking your head, “No.”
Of course, you were never going to actually go over to his place. You’re not that far gone, yet.
The press of Eddie’s mouth goes flat and hard, like he was expecting you to say it, but the singular utterance of such a word is so painful that he has to brace himself against its impact.
It sends you scattering to the wind in a hundred thousand pieces. You want to comfort him, to apologize, but that feels more like a learned behavior than an actual want.
You want to tell him to get in the car, and you want to tell him to go away. That you haven’t thought about him in months, and that he’s the reason you’re two steps from being thrown out of school – you are always on my mind.
And what about that bizarre, shared clairvoyance that only really seems to exist in lovers? That you would call him without a thought for recent history out of the blue, and he would answer without letting it ring. No hello, no what the hell do you want, just your name.
You’ve always loved the way he says your name. You can sense it there now, resting on the end of his tongue, and you are suddenly so afraid to hear him say it, to have it weaponized against you.
For all you know, he hates you, and in spite of everything, you don’t think you could stand to hear that suspicion confirmed. You don’t know what he is going to do – you’ve never been at odds like this – and you don’t know what you’re liable to do to protect yourself against that unknowing.
Still, it is good to see him, even if it feels wrong. This parody of the same moment you have existed in with Eddie a hundred different times, colored a hundred different ways. The way he stands, hanging in your open doorway, looking down at you like this.
You’ve seen this look on him before. This guarded, cautious, angry look. And you can sense a sympathetic reaction in yourself.
He’s expecting you to hurt him, and you realize with a start that he doesn’t trust you anymore.
“Are you okay?” he finally asks, forcing the words out with all the grace of spitting a hot coal.
Of course, he has to ask you that. Because you called him last night and burst into violent, choking tears. You can only imagine what kind of panic it shifted him into, and when you didn’t show up, you’re certain he assumed the worst.
For some reason, you are deeply chagrined about that. You find yourself wishing you’d just bottled it down like every other ugly feeling you’ve suppressed since you left Hawkins. Why couldn’t you have just grinned and borne it?
“I’m fine.” You lie.
He doesn’t believe you. You can see it on his face. Worse than that, you watch his features darken in the shadow of the lie.
“Last night—” he begins before thinking better of whatever it was he was about to say and starting again, “I thought…”
Eddie trails off like he can’t bear to say the words out loud, in case he was wrong. In case he was right.
He thought you were going to swallow a bottle of pills or the barrel of a gun. He thought you were calling to say goodbye or hello or whatever else he’s been waiting around to hear you say since you left. He thought you were going to come crawling back on your hands and knees, begging him to forgive you. He thought you were coming over.
The lump suddenly swelling in your throat is something akin to a softball in both size and density, and you nearly choke trying to swallow it down.
“I shouldn’t have called you.” You manage to croak around it.
Beneath the stringy fall of his fringe, his brows twitch toward one another, and you watch the sentiment settle in him. Eddie draws in a subtle inhale, feigning nonchalance, but you catch the sharp edge of it. The hurt.
He drops his gaze and gives you one curt nod, and that is the end of it. He got what he wanted, as dissatisfying as it may have been, and now he’s done.
He’s not sorry. You’re not sorry either, but at least you’re finally back on the same page.
You still care about each other, that much is evident by the way you spoke to each other last night, by the way you’re speaking to each other now, but you don’t trust each other anymore. And isn’t that just the saddest thing you’ve ever heard in your life? It’s a start, if nothing else.
But the hardest part of anything is starting, and you can’t stand to exist in this moment any longer. When you reach for the handle, he lets you pull the door shut, and for some reason that hurts almost as bad as anything else does.
This time last year, if you’d tried to do that, Eddie would have held that door firmly in place. He would have made you explain yourself, prove to him that you were alright. He would have forced a reconciliation, no matter how painful that process would be. By the end of it, you would be back on each other’s side.
This time last year, Eddie would have fought for you, but now, he just stands there, resigned to watching you back out of your parking space and getting smaller and obscured in your rearview as you drive away with angry tears flooding your lashes.
Here come the consequences of your actions, much sooner than you are prepared to receive them. Once again, you are reminded that this is all your fault, and there is nothing you can do to fix it.
heyyy are you still writing endless summer, i’ve been eating it up especially during the build up to the next season
Hi Nonny, thanks so much for asking - tbh, it's on permanent hiatus.
I've really fallen out of the headspace for it (I haven't even watched the trailer for the next season), but I miss this little community so much, and I think about all of you who were here with me all the time
Hi! Missing Cruel Summer a lot recently. If you're open to chatting about it I was curious to know, do you have a personal favorite moment/scene from Cruel Summer?
oh man, big same Nonny, I'm missing it a lot recently.
A lot of what I love most about Cruel Summer is actually in the early chapters before Reader and Eddie find each other again. I really enjoyed fleshing out the story pre-show canon, and if I were going to go back, I might not make it follow the story so closely.
I received an ask sometime last year asking about what the story would look like if none of the supernatural elements ever got involved, and it has lived rent-free in my brain ever since. I get sad sometimes that I'll probably never write that fic lmao
But other than that, I personally love the scene between Eddie and Chrissy at his locker. It's the first scene I wrote for this fic.
warnings: sexual content (18+ minors dni), kissing, slight heavy petting, fluff, horny-loser!Eddie and reader both, mentions of parental abuse, mentions of drug use, swearing
word count: 19k
a/n: back from the dead after... what, like a year? I really wanted to get this out, because it was almost finished and literally just sitting in my drafts (I don't have a gif for this one, sorry chat!)
Bad things come in threes, or at least that’s what people always tend to say.
You certainly find that to be true in the days following the party as your life comes screeching to a full stop in perfectly sectioned thirds.
First (and most obviously) was the party itself. While ultimately and surprisingly not so terrible as a whole, it turns out that when the cops show up to break up a house party in a nice little suburban neighborhood, it’s not as simple as it looks on television.
On TV and in the movies, the worst thing that happens is they send everyone home, in real life, somebody has to answer for the perceived crime. Since the ruckus occurred in your home – and since you sent Eddie out your bedroom window – the duty of scapegoat fell upon your shoulders.
You can at least take some comfort in the fact that Carol had not been fast enough to scurry off into the night with the rest of the vermin, so when the Hawkins PD sat you down on your mysteriously wet and sticky sofa, she was right there next to you, with her arms crossed and face pulled into a raging sulk.
She even wailed when her parents arrived to pick her up. Actually wailed, like a little kid throwing a tantrum.
“It wasn’t my fault!” She howled, “I didn’t do anything wrong!” and you were immensely pleased to find that no one believed a word of that garbled bullshit.
Your parents were tragically (thankfully) not there to take the brunt of Chief Hopper’s ire, so it was thankfully (tragically) up to Claudia Henderson to step in and take responsibility for you.
Considering this was your first offense, you got off with a strict warning coupled with an angry finger thrust into your face and a heaping helping of oddly misplaced paternal disdain from Hopper.
Afterward, it was Mrs. Henderson’s turn to tear you a new asshole. Which is to say, she stood on your front porch and dabbed her eyes and nose with a crumpled tissue as she blubbered through a spiel about “not knowing if she can trust you to make the right decisions,” and “having to think about where to go from here,” all while you went blue in the face swearing up and down that you had nothing to do with the party.
You were ambushed and held hostage in your own home, and unlike Carol, you truly didn’t do anything wrong. (Being caught with the town pariah in your bedroom, milliseconds away from tumbling headfirst down an untoward rabbit hole notwithstanding.)
The problem with telling the truth — and the second bad in this nasty little trifecta — was how you effectively threw Carol under the bus to do so.
According to you, it was all her idea, because it was all her idea, and she is not going to forget that betrayal any time soon. Compounded with what she witnessed occur just outside your bedroom window and how it effectively put the nail in your coffin of social pariahdom, you’re only counting the seconds until the bill comes due and she beats the ever-loving shit out of you in front of God and all your classmates.
Thankfully, the party preceded a long weekend, one in which you did not leave your house for the duration, except to clear out Melvald’s for cleaning supplies.
Because of this, you have not heard from Carol (or anyone else for that matter) and thus have not yet had to face that wretched music. But you know it’s coming. There is a spell of mighty suffering waiting for you somewhere down the line, and you are not looking forward to meeting it.
The third and final toll of the knockout bell came when your parents made their spectacular return from the land of extended business trips after receiving phone call after many, many phone calls informing them of the caliber of their daughter’s crimes.
They came home, they saw what you did (or rather, what you’d allowed to happen), and they grounded you within an inch of your life.
In three little steps, your world has become inordinately small; strictly and summarily boiled down to three locations: school, home, and the Henderson’s, though only when your parents are feeling generous enough to extend your leash.
Everywhere else is strictly forbidden under penalty of death (you can only assume).
Prison would be kinder. Banishment even. Eternity in some black and oozing oubliette, destined never to see the light of day again.
At least then, you could rest easy in the knowledge that there would be nothing you could do about it — about Eddie – and the unshakable feeling that everything is different now.
No matter what happens to you at the end of this punishment, nothing will ever go back to the way things were, because he kissed you.
He kissed you. You get heart palpitations just thinking about it.
Sure, you may have been the one who asked him to do it, and you’re not entirely sure it even counts as anything more than a temporary lapse in judgement, but you swear you felt the Earth shift beneath your feet when he pushed up to meet you in the window like that.
And with everything you said to each other preceding that perfectly imperfect moment? All that intimate back and forth about being friends and all?
Despite all that talk, it feels more important than that. Somehow you can’t shake the feeling that you’ve blown right past the threshold of friends and barreled headlong into something else.
More than friends, whatever that entails.
Then again, you can’t be sure you aren’t just feeling that way because it was your first kiss, haphazard as it may have been, or simply because you still have Eddie’s jacket, allowing you to keep the moment alive every night as you lie awake.
In the rush to get him out your window and into the clear, he left it lying forgotten at the end of your bed.
What a boon it had been to discover such a tantalizing souvenir, what a blessing.
You’re only slightly embarrassed to admit that, upon discovering it, you hugged it tight and buried your face in its material, breathing deep and trying to drown yourself in the smell of him.
Cigarette smoke and Oldspice and the faintest hint of whatever cologne he’d been wearing that morning, all mixing together with the musky undertone of something earthier, like the natural scent of his flesh.
You held it close and said his name aloud, just because you wanted it there on your tongue, and because there is power in a name, his especially.
That’s something you’ve known since you were just a kid, and standing there with his jacket in your arms, you used his name like a magic word, in the mindless hope that the act of speaking it would summon him back to the close confines of your bedroom.
Back to you.
It didn’t work, obviously, but it hasn’t stopped you from keeping the jacket in a treasured hiding spot beneath your bed, like some kind of sordid little relic of power. It’s one of the few things left in your life that is wholly yours, your little secret, but your prison warden has a watchful eye, and you have to keep that treasure very carefully hidden away. Because your mother has taken to conducting almost daily cabin checks to make sure you haven’t quietly fallen into a bad habit.
Oh, if only she knew what exactly you were falling into, she’d wish it was something as easily dealt with as a recreational drug habit.
On top of all that (and to make matters for you infinitely worse) Will Byers never came home that same Friday you had your “temporary lapse in judgment”.
Apparently, while you were busy tearing down the walls of your home, brick by brick (and the walls of your heart, if you’re being entirely honest) Will slipped quietly away into the dark, somewhere between his home and the dense copse of wood surrounding the Hawkins Lab – the one he and his friends all so lovingly referred to as Mirkwood.
The only thing left of him was his bike, and from what you understand, it was in pretty bad shape when they found it, and somehow everyone has decided that is your fault.
That was bad enough, but when Barbara Holland didn’t show up for school that following Tuesday, your life went into complete and total lockdown.
Suddenly, every adult you know has been whipped into a frenzied panic, and you’ve been placed under a microscope – no more cloak of invisibility and no more secret rendezvous with Eddie Munson.
Just you, the watchful eye of half a dozen sets of parents, and the enduring question no one has bucked up the courage to ask you yet – why weren’t you there?
Of course, there is nothing in place to suggest that you ought to have been looking after the boys that night and you’d hardly ever said two words in passing to Barb, but when kids start disappearing in a small town, everyone looks to the local babysitter for answers.
Jonathan only asked you the one question when he called the following morning, but after you hung up, you could feel the others falling quickly into place.
Where were you when it happened? What was more important than making sure they got home safe? Why weren’t you there?
You’ve been asking yourself that all week, and the shame you feel over the responsibility you’ve been shouldered with is an unwieldy and cumbersome thing.
Suddenly, nobody seems to care that you even had a party, which makes it all that much worse. They only care that you’re a babysitter, and a kid in your sphere is missing, and you’re sick with the guilt of that.
Because while you were having a party and making bashful moves on a boy you’re sweet on, playing the role of the average American teenager to the letter, Will Byers was off getting himself lost or kidnapped or worse, and now you’re just going to have to live with that.
You wake up with that knowledge, go to school, and go straight to the Hendersons after, because executive decisions are the law of the land and it’s been decided that it’s safer if you and Dustin stay together while the search parties are underway.
You’re the babysitter, so you babysit.
You do all this, and you don’t see Eddie, and you hate how that is starting to become a trend between you.
One deeply meaningful exchange followed by an extended period of absence.
It’s not fair, it’s not fair, it’s not fair, it’s not fair.
It’s another Friday morning and you’re carpooling again, though your passenger is decidedly less exciting than last time. Dustin doesn’t give a shit about your cassettes or Judas Priest, or anything else that had held you so enraptured this time last week.
He didn’t even want the ride to school this morning. He wanted to ride his bike to the point of urgency – even insisted upon it – but his mother went into near apoplectic shock at the mere suggestion that he go anywhere without supervision.
She threatened to break his neck if he didn’t get in your car, and because neither of you had ever heard her threaten anyone, he did exactly as he was told.
The atmosphere of the cabin is stifling.
You drive the distance down Cornwallis in silence, with Dustin curled over toward the passenger door, muttering conspiratorially into his walkie-talkie, and you gripping the steering wheel, trying desperately not to fixate on comparing this ride to the last one you shared.
It does not even come close.
“You can put a tape on if you want–” You offer, but Dustin brushes you off with a clipped gesture and lifts the walkie to his ear.
You don’t talk, you don’t laugh, and you’ve never missed Eddie more than you do now.
When you pull into the lot, you park on the far end like always, so that you’re equidistant to Hawkins Middle and Hawkins High. This time, there is a little more behind it than just the fairness of distance, but you don’t get the opportunity to linger on it.
You don’t even get the chance to look for the big-bodied silhouette of Eddie’s van. Dustin is out of the car and slamming the door behind him before you’ve even managed to finish pulling the hand brake.
“Hey –!” you shout, cranking your window down to call after him where he is scurrying up the grade toward his campus, “Meet me back here at 3:15!”
“I’m meeting Mike and Lucas—” he begins to protest, but you cut him off before he can even get going.
“Your mom is going to kill me if I come home without you!” you stress, “3:15 or else!”
Dustin dismisses you with a dramatic eye roll and the muffled utterance of something that sounds a tad too much like “yeah, whatever” for your liking and turns to disappear into the throng of kids.
You’re left staring at the spot he had occupied only moments before, and you find yourself hoping that he isn’t still mad at you for the hasty back and forth you’d traded the Friday before.
It’s highly plausible. You did call him a little shit, and you haven’t gotten around to apologizing for that yet. You might have even chased him down and done it right then and there if it weren’t for the sharks in the water.
So far, you’ve successfully managed to avoid Carol following your so-called betrayal, but the danger of an encounter is ever-present, especially in interim times like these.
You’ve found the safest way to steer clear is to lie low, stick to your hiding spots, and stay in your car until the late bell has started to ring, which, according to your watch, is less than ten minutes away.
Ten blessed minutes of silence and then one mad dash to campus with your head on a swivel, and you’ll be home free.
Before you can settle in to bask in the comfort of that plan, the vacuum seal of your sanctuary is suddenly and unceremoniously broken as your passenger door pops open, and the cool morning air comes rushing in.
“Hey!” A voice says, and you gasp on instinct.
You recoil as the body belonging to said voice falls into the seat beside you and brace for impact (because you’re not fully confident that Carol isn’t angry enough to haul off and punch you in the face) and in your momentary blinding terror, it takes you far too long to realize that it’s only Eddie sliding into the seat beside you.
“Sorry,” he says, grinning, “Did I scare you?”
“Jesus Christ!” you yelp, and the swear is punctuated by the door clicking shut.
He gives you a wry look when he turns to face you.
“Nope, just me,” Eddie says, resting his elbow over the center console and leaning over so that he is tilted toward you.
Your heart immediately begins to flutter against your ribs like a bird. Instantly it is like no time has passed since you last saw him and that you’ve been meeting like this every day since you rode to school together last Friday.
It fills you with a suffocating glee, one you are quick to stifle in the lingering effects of your adrenaline surge. It takes everything in your power not to throw your arms around his neck and gush about how much you’ve missed seeing him. That would not be very cool or mysterious of you.
“Where’ve you been? I’ve been looking all over for you.” he asks, and it reminds you instantly of his bashful greeting, standing pressed against your bedroom door with a party raging on behind him, “What, are you avoiding me or something?”
The question is heartbreakingly boyish and you’re quick to dismiss the notion with a shake of your head.
“No, of course not.” You insist.
“Oh, of course not.” He hums, “And you’re just oh-so-casually changing your class schedule around, too?”
You bite the inside of your cheek – and then there’s that.
“You heard about that?”
He scoffs.
“Heard about it? Gaw-lee, it’s all Gareth’s been talking about — you’d think you broke the poor kid’s heart the way he’s going on about his new lab partner – it’s Adam, by the way, and he’s devastated.”
You feel the faintest urge to giggle at the news, but you get caught on the gnawing hurdle of your guilt and only manage to pull a pained look of remorse.
“That was an act of self-preservation.” you insist, hating how much it feels like a lame excuse and elaborating when Eddie gives you a dubious look, “I had three classes with Carol, and she pretty much wants my head on a pike, so…”
The sentiment fills the cabin with a weighted silence, broken only by the muted ticking of your watch and the steady beat Eddie is drumming out with his fingers.
“Are you in a lot of trouble?” he asks tentatively, and you sigh.
“I’m on house arrest.” You say, “They only let me out for school, where you may have noticed I’m officially being shunned.”
He scoffs and shifts in his seat, not far enough to put any real distance between you, but enough that you have to resist putting a hand on his arm to keep him from going any further.
“And why would I notice that?” Eddie asks, almost bashfully.
The feeling leeches out of him and into you like the sun, melting the frost of an early spring morning. It lodges in your throat, and you happily swallow it down to feel it bloom deep in the pit of your stomach.
You’re suddenly bombarded with echoes of the last time you sat together in your car like this, swaddled in the intimacy of each other’s company, feeling his energy move through you and co-mingle with yours until you were a singular entity, and you cannot stop yourself from teasing him a little.
“Because you’re obsessed with me,” you venture, the corners of your mouth curling mischievously.
“Yeah, okay — whatever,” he says, and your heart leaps into spectacular acrobatics as you realize he didn’t deny it, “Anyway, now that I have you, I have a very important question to ask you,”
Inwardly, you begin to scream – a question? What kind of question? And what could possibly be so important that he had to wait to get you in person to ask.
You have the faintest suggestion of a thought. A mere notion, really, and it causes your insides to do a cartoon flip-flop.
Oh boy. Here comes everything you’ve ever wanted, all your hopes and dreams hurtling toward you at the speed of light.
“Do you wanna come out to Bloomington with me?”
Oh.
Your face instantly flushes with the hot embarrassment of assuming he would ask you anything else as Eddie goes on.
“There’s a record store out there I’ve been meaning to hit up and I think it’s time we spiced up that little collection of yours,” he says.
You have to swallow hard to keep your voice from shaking as you speak.
“I mean…yeah, I’d love to,” you say, “But I can’t. I’m grounded.”
His shoulders jump beneath the patchy denim of this new jacket of his that, by the looks of it, you think must actually be very old. It makes him look strangely soft, wrapped in the well-worn, faded blue material, and you can’t help but wonder if it’s a hand-me-down of Wayne’s.
It’s a painfully endearing thought, and still, you’re struck with a sudden pang of guilt over how selfishly you’ve been hoarding its leather counterpart.
Part of you is suddenly very sorry you didn’t think to bring it with you on the off chance you would run into him.
Though only the part of you that is totally cool and rational and not violently obsessed with him, of course. That other part has been hoping that you would never have to return the jacket and that it will by virtue of the lost and found become yours forever until the end of time, the end.
Of course, sitting beside him so close that your shoulders are nearly touching and watching him blink back at you is much better than swaddling yourself in some measly old jacket.
Eddie tilts a little further into your space, and you can’t help but mirror the motion.
“… but they let you out for school.” he posits, tapping out the beat of the sentence against your knee and waiting patiently for you to rise to the challenge.
You’re so busy trying not to get lost in his eyes — the deep and shining pools of umber calling you home and threatening to suck you down beneath the undertow — that it takes a very long moment for your brain to finish processing the information he’s just offered. Even once you’ve untangled the garbled string of foreign text, it takes you even longer to realize exactly what it is Eddie is suggesting.
When it finally hits, you actually recoil from the impact.
He wants you to skip school.
“… you mean go right now?” You splutter.
Eddie grins, as if the naivety of your reaction is equally hilarious as it is endearing.
“Sure, why not? You got somewhere better to be?”
As if waiting in the wings for its cue, the morning bell begins to ring, startling you enough to send you leaping in your seat. You’d momentarily forgotten where you were and what you were meant to be doing – biding your time and waiting for the brief window of opportunity to slip into class unnoticed.
You watch the mass exodus of the parking lot, hundreds of bodies falling in sync to file dutifully into the squat building in the distance — you’re running out of time to slip in unnoticed, and yet Eddie’s question is still hanging between you like the electric feedback of something that has just been plugged in.
Where are you supposed to be right now?
“Homeroom?” you try, and Eddie makes a harsh sound in the back of his throat.
“Homeroom is boring,” he says, rolling his eyes, “And I’m fun, so skip it and come hang out with me.”
It takes another one of those too-long moments to realize that, despite the teasing levity of his tone, he is totally and completely serious.
“You can’t just cut class because it's boring, Eddie.” you deadpan, and he gives you a very pointed, very droll look.
“Yeah, Sweetheart, you can.” He insists, “Look, it’s not like you’re gonna miss anything, all anyone has been talking about all week is stranger danger and Barbara Holland.”
And don’t you know it.
Word on the street is that she disappeared from the Harrington’s backyard, despite the official bullshit about her getting on a bus and skipping town for greener pastures.
Even you know that Barb is a goody-two-shoes who would never dream of doing something so adventurous, and was only at that get-together because you’re steadily being replaced in the pecking order by Nancy Wheeler. But Nancy won’t go anywhere without Barb, so now Barb is gone.
Your stomach heaves with the guilt of it and the knowledge that it’s just one more terrible thing that has somehow become all your fault.
If you hadn’t been so busy getting tangled up with Eddie, it would have been you fifth wheeling at that gathering at Steve’s house, and it might have been your face plastered all over those missing person posters and milk cartons.
Everyone would say you skipped down for greener pastures, and everyone would know better.
The thought is chilling enough to raise goosebumps on your arms, though they are banished with the simple act of Eddie laying his hand atop yours.
“It’ll be fine,” he says, almost as if anticipating the thought, and it is startling to hear your thoughts spoken aloud. “I promise nobody’s gonna know you’re even gone.”
If the reaction makes its way up to your face, Eddie doesn’t seem to notice as you stare back at him with wide, blinking eyes.
You narrow them to try and wipe away the shocked look you know you are bound to have plastered across your face.
“Nobody but all my teachers,” you press, and Eddie makes a flippant gesture.
“Minor details, easily overlooked.” He says, “Listen, there’s a cheeseburger in Bloomington with your name on it and I’m buying, so let’s go.”
You hesitate, watching the last of your classmates disappear into the gaping maw of the double doors, standing open, and for a brief yet terrifying moment, you’re almost sure you can see Carol standing there, tapping her foot and waiting for you to come slinking in.
“You’re not gonna make me beg, are you?” Eddie asks distantly, “I’ll do it, but it’s not gonna be pretty–”
Your mouth is moving before any rational thought about where you’re meant to be can spoil the giddy excitement building in your midsection.
“… okay, fine–” you say softly, staring past Eddie and watching through your window as a staff member appears to pull the doors shut on you.
No turning back now.
“Awesome–” Eddie starts, but you stop him short, curling your fingers to grip the hand he’s still got resting atop yours.
You squeeze.
“–but you have to promise we’ll be back before school gets out.”
Eddie nods fervently and places his free hand over his chest in a solemn vow.
“I swear on my life,”
“And we can’t take my car,” you don’t get the time to explain why exactly that is before Eddie shows you his key ring and jingles it at you in a way you imagine is meant to be tantalizing.
“No problemo,”
Good. So, you can just slip away unnoticed and be back in time before anyone realizes you’ve been missing. Right? Because it’s just that easy.
For someone like you, it might actually be, despite the scrutiny and the microscope. Who is really going to care if you’re gone? Who will even notice? And most importantly, what’s the worst that can happen?
“… okay,” you say, pulling the handle of your door and popping it open, “Let’s go,”
It takes a little over an hour in traffic to get to Bloomington, the duration of which you spend catching each other up on everything you’ve missed in the agony of your weeklong absence.
You almost don’t notice the time passing, because it feels devastatingly right to be sitting in Eddie’s passenger seat like this, like something you never knew you were missing out on.
Whereas you’d been hyper-aware of your every movement and the hawk-like way he’d watched as you drove, with Eddie behind the wheel you finally feel like you can relax (despite all the jerky movements and the fact that he goes everywhere a cool twenty miles over the speed limit).
Eddie talks the whole way, because if there is one thing he can do, it’s fill a silence, and you’re starting to love listening to him go on about all the things that randomly cross his mind.
You sit and watch with your knees pulled up and your seatbelt hugging you tight against the worn fabric seat, and you listen as he jumps seamlessly from one subject to another. There are no natural segues to the things he decides to talk about, and yet it still makes perfect sense, one thought to the next.
True to his word (and because he still owes you that midnight snack he’d promised you weeks ago at the Hideout) Eddie buys you a modest lunch with a fistful of crumpled dollars and all the change you can nickel and dime from the carpeted floor of the van and the bottom of your bag.
Then, you walk down the street together, safe in the knowledge that no one knows that you have no business standing shoulder to shoulder like that. If someone happened to be watching and witnessed your fingers brush, the odd flex of a hand, or a shared lingering look, they would have no reason to be scandalized, because, in Bloomington, nobody cares about who you are or what people think you've done.
You’re just two kids from nowhere special, quietly falling for each other on a gloomy November afternoon.
You’re safe in your anonymity.
You spend the better part of the afternoon drifting in and out of used bookstores and secondhand shops, RadioShack, and Family Video, and partake in all manner of window shopping until you finally find yourself a record store.
It all feels very happenstance. A lot less like it’s a store he’s been “meaning to check out” and much more spur of the moment than Eddie really let on, especially with how unimpressed he seems to be with the store’s selection.
Still, you follow him dutifully around the stands as he flips through tapes and records with a bored look on his face, each section more disappointing than the last, and with every passing minute, you do your best to fluff up the warm, happy feeling middling in your stomach beneath the weight of your ever-present cloud of guilt.
You smile and nod at the right moments, speak when spoken to, laugh at each flippant little comment, and in spite of all the fun you’re having, following Eddie around a store like a puppy on a leash, you feel guilty about it.
You feel so guilty about everything all the time these days, it’s starting to leave a thick and murky tang on the back of your tongue, one you’re half convinced you’d be able to see growing on your tonsils if you went to the mirror and stuck your tongue all the way out.
You’re so happy to be here. You wouldn’t change this day for the world, and yet you cannot stop thinking about how it is the last place you’re meant to be, even under normal circumstances.
But these are deeply un-normal circumstances, and as the day wears on and the sky grows darker, your subconscious grows less and less shy about reminding you of that every thirty seconds.
You’re not supposed to be here. You’re supposed to be grounded. You’re supposed to be walking around, solemn as the grave, quietly atoning for all your perceived crimes, and yet here you are again, off making eyes at the same boy who had so summarily distracted you the night everyone imagines you ruined everything.
It’s not fair, it’s spoiling your good time – worse, you’re terrified it’s leeching out of you to color the afternoon and spoil Eddie’s good time, and that’s just one more thing you have to feel guilty about.
He doesn’t end up buying anything, even the Megadeath tape he’d returned to on three separate occasions (because you’re fairly certain he spent all his cash on two cheeseburgers and the coke you ended up sharing).
Furthermore, he stridently refuses to let you buy it for him, even as you wander up to the cash register with it in hand and repeated assurances that you’re happy to do it.
When you finally emerge from the record store, the sky has turned the color of a fresh bruise. Angry storm clouds churn overhead with the threat of an oncoming deluge, and you make the walk back to the van in a strangely charged silence.
“So,” Eddie starts after a long, pensive moment, “Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t help feeling like the mood here has taken a nosedive…”
Yeah, that’s what you were afraid of. You cannot take one more burden on your trembling shoulders without crumbling into a pile of dust, and yet, you’re quick to take responsibility for it.
“I’m sorry,” you say quickly, “That’s on me – it’s been a rough week.”
He smirks.
“Rough beyond the regularly scheduled programming?”
Your shoulders jump in a way that your reflection in a passing window reads as deeply melancholy, and with the way you catch Eddie watching you, you know immediately that he clocked the motion.
You stop short beneath the awning of the nondescript business and heave a weighted sigh, distantly confident that, if the rain should happen to choose that moment to start, you would be shielded.
“D’you wanna talk about it?” Eddie asks, doubling back to meet you when he realizes you are no longer at his side.
You really don’t, and yet you’ve started to get the feeling that if you don’t it get out of you, it’s going to rot you from the inside. Because you can’t stop thinking about it.
About how you’d snatched up the phone on its second ring that previous Saturday and were hardly able to contain your outward presenting disappointment not to hear that familiar sleazy drawl oozing over the telephone line from the far end of town. Instead came a clipped and to-the-point greeting from the other social pariah in your social circle.
It wasn’t Eddie calling you that morning, it was Jonathan Byers.
You remember wanting so badly for it to be Eddie on the other end of the line, all the while forcing yourself to make polite and idle chatter with Jonathan. You’d even convinced yourself that the worst thing on your immediate horizon was having to break the news about the Oingo Boingo tape someone had so brazenly stolen from the party. Then, he posed that terrible question and asked if you’d seen his brother.
When Eddie says your name, it’s almost startling, and you realize too late that he’s been waiting for you to speak.
“What’s going on?” he asks.
“…Jonathan called me on Saturday,” you admit, and he rolls his eyes, shaking his head and muttering about Jonathan Jonathan Jonathan under his breath.
It might have almost been funny, under other circumstances. If you were feeling up to it, you might have teased Eddie about how blatantly jealous he is over nothing, but you can’t muster that kind of gaiety, considering it’s just one more thing you’d end up having to feel guilty about after.
“Let me guess,” he starts, “He wants to take you to the movies or a fancy dinner and buy you flowers and serenade you with all the latest new wave bullshit?”
Oh, how you wish it were only so simple as that.
“Actually… he was calling to ask about his brother.”
It stops the conversation — and Eddie — in its tracks.
You watch the light of wretched understanding flash across his features as he remembers exactly why that would be relevant in your life and feel the corner of your mouth twitch in a failed attempt at smiling.
“I had to tell him no,”
Eddie’s brows come down to shadow his eyes and suddenly you can’t tell whether he feels bad for you or sorry for you.
“Okay,” he says, drawing the word out in a blatant expression of his confusion, “That sucks, but what’s it got to do with you?”
Your shoulders jump.
“He disappeared the night of the party.” you say, “And everybody and their mother has decided it’s my fault that he’s missing—”
Eddie hardly lets you finish before a strange and sudden indignance flashes across his face.
“Somebody actually said that to you?” he demands, and the urgency of his tone would have been startling if it wasn’t ever so slightly flattering.
“Well, no,” you confess, “Nobody’s outright said it, but I feel it… the guilt.”
It’s a guarded thing, the look he has got on his face. Something deeply personal and kindly extended to you in your moment of inner turmoil. You’d worried that no one would understand the complexity of your guilt, and while that may continue to remain true with Eddie, you should have known that he would at least commiserate with the unfairness of it.
If there was anyone in this stupid, backwater town with an iota of understanding for what you were going through, it was Eddie Munson.
You feel foolish for not having realized that earlier and heave a weighted sigh.
“… I just can’t stop going around in my head wondering if there is something I’m missing and wondering why I wasn’t there to make sure he got home.” You say.
Eddie nods, but the motion is contradicted by the flat stretch of his mouth as he pulls a face.
“Why would you have been there?” he asks.
“Because I’m a babysitter.”
He watches you expectantly, waiting for you to finish the thought, but there is nothing else to say.
He looks at you, and you look right back at him. All around you, the world keeps on keeping on and amidst the distant traffic and conversations, the silence that has fallen over you is unbearably loud.
“And?” Eddie finally asks, and you hardly know what to say, “Were you supposed to be babysitting him that night or something?”
You shake your head, and Eddie throws up his hands like he cannot fathom what the issue is.
“Okay, great. So how is it your fault? Kids get lost all the time,”
Of course, that’s not the point.
“But if he was kidnapped—?” you begin, but he doesn’t let you finish.
“What could you have possibly done to stop that?” Eddie asks, though he’s not interested in whatever answer your guilty conscience has to drum up, “What would you do except get yourself kidnapped too?”
“I don’t know, maybe I could have called somebody, offered up some kind of lead people could follow.” You posit, ticking through the endless scenarios your subconscious has drummed up in the long hours you’ve spent thinking about it, “…maybe I could’ve chased the guy down and got him back myself—”
Eddie grabs you by the shoulders and shuts you up quick.
“Sweetheart, no, that’s insane,” he says, giving you a gentle shake for good measure, “There’s nothing anyone could have done. Okay? This isn’t your fault. I don’t care what anyone says, they can’t just force the blame on you because they don’t know where else to put it.”
“I know… but when you’re in my position, adults kind of just end up blaming you for the shit that happens to their kids.”
Eddie’s eyes turn dark as that guarded look comes back down to shadow his features, this time backed by something indiscernible.
He drops his hands from your shoulders and crams them into the front pockets of his jeans. You watch the muscles in his jaw flex and his throat bob as he swallows.
“That’s fucked up,” he says unevenly, and you instantly understand that he is speaking on his own behalf as much as yours.
Getting saddled with blame people are desperate to shift – getting condemned because people are scared of the things they don’t understand.
“That’s Hawkins,” you mumble, shoulders jumping, “I just need to do something to take my mind off of it. I thought coming out here was going to help. And don't get me wrong, I’m having a great time … but it’s still there, you know?… I just wanna forget about it and everything else for a while,”
He nods.
“I get it,” Eddie says. “So, how do we fix it?”
Beyond happening upon Will Byers and exonerating yourself from any and all blame by delivering him safely home? You glance up at him through your lashes and feel your tongue go fat and fibrous as the question burning your lips turns you shy.
“I dunno…” you start, pulling your shoulders up, “I thought – I mean… maybe we could… smoke? A little?”
He recoils like you’d reached out with the suggestion and slapped him across the face. It’s a highly dramatic response to something that didn’t seem all that outlandish in your head, but then again, you’re starting to realize that Eddie is just like that.
“You wanna smoke?” he chokes, “Really? You’re sure?”
It’s the last part that gets you all twisted up inside because you know what he’s thinking: last time you did this, it didn’t go so well for you. While that’s nothing but humiliatingly true, you’re as desperate to redeem yourself in his eyes as you are to put your mind at ease.
Anyway, you’ve had the time to put in a little practice with your former friends, and you’re more than a little eager to show that off, not that you would ever admit that.
“It’ll go better this time,” you assure him, “Because I’m with you.”
Eddie wrinkles his nose in the most endearing sort of way.
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
You shrug.
“…they say if you’re gonna do it, do it with someone you trust, right?”
The double entendre threatens to flood your face with color, and if he notices it, it is completely lost in the way his features soften with unmistakable fondness.
You feel your insides go squirmy.
“You trust me?” Eddie asks.
“Of course I do,” you say gently, “You’re my best friend.”
The goofy look it puts on his face is perhaps the most endearing thing you’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing.
It’s all the encouragement he needs to throw an arm over your shoulder and pull you tight.
“Say no more, Bestie – come on, step into my office.”
His “office” is the back of the van with the back doors flung open for ventilation – you don’t know what else you expected. By the time you crawl in and get settled, the skies have opened up to try and drown the pair of you and the world has emptied into a pastoral of streaky grays and blues.
Eddie produces a joint from the bottom of his beat-up metal lunchbox, and you catch yourself thinking that it’s seen better days – both the joint and the box.
You’re not surprised that it’s where he would keep something like that. Everyone knows (or at least everyone thinks they know) what Eddie totes around in that everyday staple of his belongings, and it isn’t pretzels and peanut butter.
He lights the roll of papers and herb with a flick of his Zippo, expertly takes the first few puffs to get it going, and then passes it to you with what feels like great reverence. You take it and try not to get caught on the ceremony of it all. You tell yourself you don’t have to impress anyone here (despite how badly you want to do just that), you’re just a couple of friends passing a blunt.
No big deal.
This time when you inhale, and you manage to hold it briefly in your lungs without coughing, it feels like an incredible victory. It burns just enough to make you forget about anything else but the way it feels. Then you pass it back.
“Look at you. You’ve been practicing.” Eddie says, and because you can’t think of anything cool or witty to say, you keep your mouth firmly shut and let the cycle go back and forth a few more times.
You get a little high, watch the weather, and feel yourself become enveloped in the warm and fuzzy blanket of the back cab. You don’t think about any of the shit stuffed up in your mind, you just think about Eddie and how glad you are he dragged you out here today.
After a while, the pitter-patter of the rain becomes a dull roar, and it begins to grate on you. You don’t know when Eddie flipped on the radio, but suddenly it is compounded with the heavy split-splatting of droplets exploding on the pavement and you clench your teeth until your ears begin to ring.
It’s so loud you’re half convinced that it’s the prelude to some terrible cataclysm that you cannot see. The world ending with a bang, just outside the walls of the van—
“How’re we doin’ over there?” Eddie asks, and the cacophony dies with a whimper. “You good?”
You inhale sharply, feel the gentle whine of your lungs burning, and sigh, pulling your knees up to your chest and feeling the bony cap dig into your cheekbone as you tilt forward and hum out your breath on the bed of a meditative, thoughtful sound.
“I like your voice,” you say dreamily, without really understanding what you just admitted to.
Beside you, you feel Eddie breathe out an airy chuckle more than you hear it. The sound of it skips over the air like a stone across a still pond.
“Oh-ho, you do, do you?” he drawls, and you can’t even manage to get embarrassed about it.
Your eyes slide shut as you nod a slow up and down and get a little lost in the motion.
“Say something else.”
“What d’you want me to say?” he asks.
The fabric of your jeans is scratchy in an oddly soothing way as you grind your cheekbone into your knee and breathe in – hold it – and breathe out.
“Anything…” everything, “Tell me something I don’t know about you.”
He sits with the request long enough for whatever song had been playing to end, and after a beat of measured silence, the next track begins to play with an uncharacteristically gentle guitar chord for something you would expect to hear from Eddie.
“Uh… hmmm. Well…” he says slowly, “Okay, something you might not know… is that I had a cast on my arm in Freshman year, before all that Iron Maiden, Satan shit.”
It’s perhaps the least interesting thing anyone has ever admitted to you, and yet you’re enthralled by the information all the same.
“You did?” you ask, blinking back at him with your eyes wide enough that you suddenly become paranoid that they’re going to fall out of your head and roll across the cabin floor.
Eddie nods.
“I had a cast… and nobody would sign it—” he says, “I mean, nobody … all I wanted was to make friends in a new school, to start over somewhere and fit in, so I asked people to sign it because that’s what you do when you have a cast, right? You ask people to sign it, and they’re supposed to sign it, like a yearbook. I asked everyone — even my goddamn teachers — and the only one who would sign it besides Jeff was my uncle Wayne,”
He’s laughing as he finishes the anecdote, but it’s not funny. It’s pathetically sad, and suddenly your heart is in your throat.
“I would have signed it.” You say immediately, desperate to somehow belatedly make it right, “You wouldn't have even had to ask me, I would have scribbled all over it.”
Eddie casts a sidelong look your way and you hold his gaze, feeling the thick prelude to emotion pressing at the back of your eyes. You hate that you never knew him before now, and you hate more that there is nothing you can do to fix that.
You should have been there for him, and you hope beyond hope that he doesn’t hold it against you.
“Yeah, I bet you would’ve, you saucy Minx,” he says with a grin, tossing the smoldering butt of the joint out into the deluge.
You watch it disappear behind the murky grey curtain and feel your lids drag across your eyes as you blink. Your lashes embrace like estranged lovers and become entangled, and it takes a concerted effort to pull them apart again, all the while your lips begin to move without your consent.
“What happened?”
“Nothing. I got it off a few weeks later—”
“No, I mean, how’d you break it?” you ask, “Did you fall off your bike?”
Eddie snorts out a burst of sardonic laughter at the suggestion, one that he keeps quietly to himself and shakes his head.
“Nope,” he says somewhere to your immediate left and very far away, “My, uh, my dad slammed it in a car door,”
The sentence is sobering in the worst way, and you feel your eyes threatening to take a dive out of your sockets once again.
You wait for him to assure you it was an accident. He doesn’t, and you’re suddenly and unceremoniously reminded of who his father is… Al Munson, more monster than man
“Why?” you gasp.
It takes him a moment to answer and a moment longer for you to turn to look at him. The air has grown suddenly and impossibly thick, and turning your head is suddenly like trying to run in a dream.
“…He was leavin’, and I didn’t want him to go…” Eddie confesses quietly, “Normally I didn’t care, he was always coming and going, but somehow, I knew this time was gonna be different. I knew he wasn’t coming back … after everything he put me through, I still didn’t want to lose him,”
You have to resist the urge to reach out and touch him, wondering when he got so far away from you when just a moment ago you were nearly hip to hip, but you can’t manage to make thoughts travel fast enough to send messages down to your limbs, and they remain firmly tucked in against your body.
Eddie clears his throat.
“Anyway,” he says, banishing whatever the memory of it had been attempted to muster in him with a quick shake of his head, “I put my arm in the door to stop him and he pulled it shut. End of story.”
Sad end to a sad, sad story you wish you’d never asked for in the first place.
Great job.
“…I’m sorry,” you say softly, and Eddie’s shoulders jump.
“Hey, it’s not your fault my old man’s a motherfucker.”
No, but it’s just one more blow you wish you could have been there to soften. The atmosphere has grown unbearably heavy, which was not your intention when you asked him to tell you something about himself.
Selfishly, you’d wanted a tasty little morsel you could save for later, and there you go ruining everything again.
Distantly, you know you ought to do your best to lift it, though that is easier said than done with the cotton-candy-like consistency your brain has suddenly taken on.
“My turn?”
Eddie nods.
“That’s the game.”
“Okay…” you say and begin the Herculean task of divulging something that feels as deeply weighted as what Eddie just told you, “…I, uh… kind of… sort of used to have a big crush on you.”
Eddie pulls a face, and your insides do a cartoon flip-flop, second guessing the confession too late as something indiscernible flashes across his features.
Annoyance? Disbelief? You can’t tell, your eyes feel too hot and cloudy to make out any sort of distinguishable emotion.
Eddie turns to gaze out across the near-empty parking lot. The horizon is muddled with the faintest suggestion of a storm roiling in the east.
“Used to?” He echoes.
He doesn’t look at you when he says it, and that makes you nervous.
You do your best to swallow down the cobwebs blooming in your throat to no avail.
“Uh-huh,” you say, touching your face and feeling it go hot beneath your fingers. “Big one,”
Some recessed, sober part of your brain is screaming at you from behind a locked door, banging it down and begging you to shut your goddamn mouth, but the words flow unfettered like the spitting rush of a broken faucet.
“Funny,” he says, “I had a cast, and you had a crush.”
You nod, not quite sure what’s funny about it, but now that you’ve started, you can’t stop yourself.
“My folks told me I wasn’t supposed to talk to you,” you continue, “So, obviously that’s all I wanted to do … talk to you.” when he doesn’t answer, you just keep going, “I wanted to know everything about you. Everything you liked, disliked, what you did when you weren’t at school, I wanted all your secrets to be my secrets … I was actually pretty obsessed with you for a while there,”
Beside you and a hundred miles away, Eddie makes a strange sound.
“Man, childhood hyper-fixations are a trip,” He hums, “Some people get obsessed with the Titanic or the Donner Party … and you get stuck with me.”
You nod again, getting stuck on the drunken up and down of the motion and the feeling of a cool breeze kissing your face. It’s a gently sobering relief, you hadn’t realized you were sweating until now.
It takes you what feels like far too long to turn when Eddie shifts back to look at you again, and when you do, he’s giving you the strangest look.
Brows furrowed over narrowed eyes, lips quirked ever so slightly.
“So, what made me so special?” He asks, “I mean, besides the fact that your Daddy told you I was no good…”
You blink sluggishly back at him and wonder with no small amount of alarm how he could possibly know that. You think of all the hundreds of times your father said those exact words and wonder just how many other parents in Hawkins have said the same thing about Eddie, your sweet friend — probably your only friend, now — the only person who looks at you and really sees you sitting there. The notion makes your heart swell.
You love love love… and you shrug.
“You’re the only guy who ever treated me so nice,”
The sentiment seems to hit him like a fist to the gut, and the corners of his mouth twitch where his sly smile begins to fail.
Eddie drops his gaze, immediately bashful, and takes a moment just to breathe, to sit with the notion and try it on for size. You like to think you know him well enough by now to understand that he has trouble with niceties, compliments are hard to take for sincerity. Y
ou hope someday he’ll get over that, that someday you can be as sweet to him as he is to you, as sweet as he deserves, and not immediately watch him wilt under the weight of it.
It takes a long time for him to recover, and when he does, he clears his throat and scratches bashfully at the back of his neck.
“Well,” Eddie begins, voice wavering ever so slightly. “Not that it’s any of my business, but if that’s your basis for attraction, then you gotta get better boyfriends, Honey,”
You clamp your teeth shut to try to stop the truth from jumping out of you and just miss it.
“Never had one.”
Those three words hang heavily on the air between you and your guts seize with a terror that immediately sobers you up.
Oh no.
“Never had one what?” Eddie asks.
“…boyfriend.” You force the word out from the edge of your mouth.
Eddie’s head whips around to gawp at you—
“You mean…?”
— and you brace yourself for impact as you watch him piece it all together.
“So, when you asked me to kiss you…?” he trails off, “Shit. That wasn’t your first kiss, was it?”
Your shoulders jump in a lopsided shrug, and your lack of an answer says everything he needs to hear.
Suddenly Eddie has got his face in his hands.
“Oh, God — if I’d known, I would’ve… I wouldn’t have— Jesus — that was such a bad kiss,”
“It was fine,” you tell him, though it’s not like you have any basis for such a statement.
You know how it made you feel, and that’s pretty much it.
Eddie shakes his head.
“No way, we need a do-over.” He says immediately, “Like, right now — ask me again,”
Your brows pinch and feel yourself growing hot all over.
“Don’t tease me—” you start to say, but Eddie just shakes his head.
“I’m not —hand to God, Sweetness, I would never—”
“You would.”
“Hey, I’ll kiss you right goddamn now if that’s what you want me to do. With tongue. I’ll get all kinds of sloppy with you.”
“Eddie, don’t tease me…”
“Okay, you’re right. I’m sorry … All I’m saying is the other boys don’t know what they’re missing,”
It’s sweet, the way he says it, made even more so as you realize he’d made the very pointed decision not to ask the question you know has got to be burning his tongue like a hot coal.
Of course, on top of all of that – the sordid little subject which you would most like to avoid with Eddie (for now at least) – you’re keenly aware that it’s your turn to ask a question, and while you have every intention of drumming up something cute and flirty, you suddenly can’t stop thinking about something that Eddie said back in your bedroom.
In the tenuous haze of all that heightened emotion, you’d almost forgotten it, and yet now that it’s reared its ugly head, you can’t help but get the sense that it has been there all week, lurking like a fog bank at the back of your mind.
It causes your insides to twist with a strange and misplaced anxiety that you didn’t know you’d been feeling ever since he said it, and now that you’re thinking about it, you can’t stop yourself from asking.
“…did you mean what you said before?” You say, and when Eddie gives you a curious look, you flatten your mouth into a thin line. “That you feel sorry for me?”
You watch the muscle in Eddie’s jaw flex when he clenches his teeth, and the corner of his mouth twitches upward in what you can only imagine is a weak attempt at smiling.
“…I don’t know how to answer that without sounding mean,” he says, tilting ever so slightly forward.
It does nothing to banish the mounting anxiety blooming in your guts, so you rephrase the question for clarity’s sake.
“Did you kiss me because you feel sorry for me or because you wanted to?” You ask, much more directly than is perhaps kind.
The question seems to stick him to the spot, and for a long moment, it is all Eddie can do but stare back at you.
When he finally opens his mouth to answer, you cut him off.
“Be honest,” you press, and watch his jaw clap shut.
It’s another long moment of pensive silence before he tries again, though not before taking a deep, measured breath, like he needs the extra beat of time to ready himself for some great confession he is about to make.
“…I kissed you…” Eddie begins slowly, cautiously, faltering ever so slightly on the word in a way that makes your face burn, “…because I wanted to thank you… for what you did.”
It’s an exceedingly vague thing to say, and you know you must be making a face, though only because of the way you feel the muscles in your brow relax when he moves to elaborate.
“Sneaking me out the back when the cops showed up.” he says, “That was… well, nobody does things like that for me, so I knew right away that I was gonna owe you big time…”
“…By kissing me?” you splutter.
Eddie pulls his mouth into a flat, horizontal slit. A cheap attempt at smiling.
“…seemed like the right way to pay you back at the time…”
Despite the blatant honesty of it, the notion is ever so slightly sickening. It hits you like a bolt to the chest and between your sudden abject humiliation for being so hung up on a kiss that was hardly anything to write home about and the intention to puke your guts out, you lose track of your filter.
Any attempt at being cute and flirty goes right out the back of the van to face plant on the wet pavement, and your face is burning as the words come tumbling out in a garbled rush.
“That’s all it was to you?” you gasp, and the whiny drone of how you say it is oddly enough to break any damning tension attempting to gain purchase between you. “Payback?”
“No, it was more than that.” Eddie says, shaking his head, “I did it ‘cause you asked me to,”
“That’s worse!”
“And because I wanted to!” Eddie tries, but you’re hardly listening to him anymore.
You feel like such a loser you have half a mind to abandon ship. Go running off into the deluge and disappear from sight. Who cares how you get home? Let the rain wash you down the gutter where you can wallow in the pathetic primordial muck that makes up your insides.
You’re so caught up in feeling sorry for yourself, that you almost don’t catch Eddie’s attempt to explain himself.
“Hey, come on, don’t get it twisted, Sweetheart, the way things were heating up back there, I probably woulda kissed you even if you hadn’t asked me to.”
“You’re just trying to make me feel better,” you moan, slumping forward to bury your face in your hands.
You feel him shrug more than you see him do it.
“Yeah, probably.” he says defiantly, and when you dare to steal a peek at him through your fingers, he tilts over to nudge your shoulder with his, “Listen… I don’t know if you know this, but the way things are between you and me? Shit, I’d do just about anything for you.”
You can feel a budding suspicion attempting to make purchase in you, and yet along the cliff-face of your affection for Eddie, it can find no purchase. You narrow your eyes at him and do your best to stifle the shy smile threatening to curl your lips.
“What do you mean the way things are between us?” you ask, straightening your spine and looking him dead in the eye. “What’s going on between us?”
He meets the sudden challenge of your gaze, and for a moment, neither of you is willing to back down.
“Not a goddamn thing.” he lies.
You couldn’t stop yourself from smiling at him if someone was holding a gun to your head.
“…what, are you sweet on me or something, Munson?”
He makes a soft, pensive noise that you think was meant to be somewhere halfway flippant but dropped off along the way. It’s entirely too endearing.
“Who told you that?” Eddie mumbles, reaching up to tug at a springy lock of his hair.
“Gareth,” you stress, feeling your insides begin to bloom with the fuzzy glow of nostalgia for that afternoon back in chemistry when the freshman dipped his curly mop of blonde hair and muttered the conspiratorial confession that would go on to change your life.
You watch as Eddie pulls a derisive face, one he immediately fails to commit to.
“Gareth has got a big mouth,” he says, then trails off, and you can’t help but hope that he’s as thankful for that fact as you are. Where would either of you be without Gareth and his big mouth? Certainly not here, huddled together watching the rain boil down from on high while you trade bashful affections.
“Thanks for not asking, by the way,” you say softly.
“‘Bout what?”
“About… I mean… when I said I’ve never had a boyfriend…”
It would have been the most natural thing in the world for him to ask if you were a virgin, and no matter what happens after this, Eddie Munson will go down in history as the only guy who ever resisted asking that question.
He’ll be forever perfect to you for that.
“I am nothing if not a gentleman.” he assures you, “…plus, I kinda sorta already knew that about you.”
Then again…
Your face goes bright red.
“Oh, my God—”
“Listen, Sweetness, it’s not a big deal—” Eddie starts, but no amount of gentlemanly padding is going to make this right. He knows.
“It is!” you yelp, fisting your hands in your hair.
“—anyway, it’s not exactly a state secret…”
“Who told you?” you ask, and he just clamps his mouth shut and smiles back at you.
It’s all the answer you need.
Tina Burton, of course. She made sure you knew all about their sordid little tryst out in the woods, but it never once occurred to you that she would turn right around and make sure Eddie knew all about you.
“Your secret’s safe with me.” Eddie promises, showing you his palms, “Even if everybody at school already knows.”
You grind out a harsh sound of indignation and brace your hands on your knees, feeling the muscles between your shoulder blades begin to burn from the stretch and breathing hard through your nose.
“I could kill her.” You say through your teeth.
“Yeah. Welcome to the club,” Eddie hums, “Anyway, since we’re talking about what everyone knows…” he says, “And since it’s already come up, you should probably know the real reason I wanted you to come out with me today is because… well, you’ve been lying low so you probably haven’t heard what people are saying…”
Oh, no.
You hadn’t been aware that there was a real reason behind this outing. You would have been content to go on assuming this was a spur-of-the-moment thing for the rest of your lives, but doesn’t it just make perfect sense that there would be an agenda behind today?
“About what?” You ask tentatively and when he doesn’t answer you feel a cold, sickening dread begin to roil in the pit of your stomach – you don’t need him to say it, you already know what everyone is talking about. “About me?”
He nods.
Oh, shit.
“What are they saying?”
He sighs and reaches up to pull at his neck – something you are quickly coming to recognize as one of his many nervous habits.
“I guess I just wanted to try and protect you from it … be all chivalrous or whatever, but I’m starting to think that it was a bad move, and this is just gonna make things worse,”
This being convincing you to skip school in a way which, with the way your luck is going these days, you are quite sure everyone and their mother is already talking about.
“What are they saying?” You tug the fraying cuff of his jacket, and when he fails to be immediately forthwith with the information, you tug harder, “Tell me, Eddie.”
He heaves out a weighty sigh.
“Basically, what’s going around is a lot of talk about what happened at your party,” he says, and you hate to hear him call it that — it wasn’t yours, despite the location and the way it has since gone on to summarily ruin your life.
“Nothing happened.” you press.
Eddie squeezes his eyes shut and scrubs his face with his hands.
“Yeah, it did.” he forces himself to say, and you know immediately what he means.
You sent him out the window when the Hawkins PD showed up, you were alone with him in your bedroom. He kissed you, and worst of all, you had a witness to it.
Nothing happened, and yet a titanic shift has effectively taken place in the social hierarchy of Hawkins High.
You can only imagine what everyone is saying, and yet you can’t stop yourself from playing dumb about it.
“…because we were together?” you ask, twisting your index finger to the point of pain.
“At a party. Behind a closed door–” Eddie says matter of factly, and your ears are ringing so loud that you don’t hear whatever it is he says to finish that sentence. You don’t have to. You get the picture, and your insides burn with the unfairness of it all.
The virgin and the freak walk into a room at a party, and when they come out again, everyone assumes she’s not a virgin anymore because the only one who actually saw what happened (what didn’t happen) was Carol Perkins.
What was it she’d said? He brings the weed, and you get laid, and everybody goes home happy? Everybody but Carol, who in fact went home from that party red-faced and squalling and has been on the warpath ever since.
“… oh…” is all you manage to vocalize in a tiny, failing voice, thankfully swallowing the follow-up “great” before it can escape.
It’s not fair. It’s not fair it’s not fair it’s not–
“It’s not fair,” Eddie sighs, “But that’s sort’ve just the way things go with me, and anyone associated with me…you know, I mean it. The way things are going – even if this is as far as they go – I’d still do just about anything for you… but I’d be a shitty friend if I didn’t warn you that it’s not easy, going forward like this… with me. People in my orbit tend to get spattered in all that shit… Gareth, the guys, even my Uncle…” his shoulders jump in a devastatingly halfhearted way.
When he speaks again, he sounds unbearably tired, like he cannot bear the weight of what this town has put on him for another moment.
“It comes with the territory,”
“…oh, Eddie–”
He raises his hands in a show of defeat.
“It’s okay if you’re not up for it. I get it. It’s not easy being on the outside in this town, especially when you’ve got bad friends trying to make things exponentially worse.”
You would correct him and let him know that you’ve got no friends now, nobody but him, but you’re too caught up on something he’d just said.
He’d tried to bury it in the rest of everything else, but it hit you word by word like rosy little shards of glass and embedded themselves in you.
Even if it doesn’t go any further than this, he’d said, and you realize with a start that this is a pivotal moment. He’s been thinking about you – your relationship, whatever that may currently look like – and imagining it deepening, growing, going further. Suddenly, everything is possible, because you’ve begun to realize that Eddie wants you as much as you want him.
It’s the oldest running joke in the Hawkins High book— Eddie Munson asks you to the prom, what do you do?
You’re already grounded and being shunned for the taint of something that never happened. Your reputation is in tatters with literally every person you know, so what else could possibly happen?
What’s the harm in leaning into it, and who would possibly notice if you did?
“I’m having fun with you today.” You say slowly. “I always have fun with you.”
“Yeah, I have fun with you too,”
“…and I wanna keep having fun with you. You’re cool.”
Eddie snorts out a snide laughter.
“Nobody’s ever accused me of that,”
You furrow your brow.
“Well, you are — super cool. I like you, Eds.”
It sounds silly and juvenile, especially with the way it causes him to roll his eyes – yeah, sure you like him, but do you like like him? You wish you had the capacity to express yourself more sincerely, but after the barrage of revelations you’ve just been beaten within an inch of your life with, your head feels fat and stuffed up with cotton.
You can hardly make yourself form a semi-coherent thought, let alone organize them enough to spin some kind of poetic yarn, but you can't imagine that after everything that's happened over these last few weeks, he still doesn't know how you feel.
You have half a mind to remind him how you’d only gone and spilled your guts about the great big crush you supposedly used to have on him, but somehow that feels insincere, and you can’t presently stomach anything of that ilk.
You wanna be sweet to him the way he’s sweet to you. You wanna treat him the way he deserves.
“I said I like you, Eddie.” You say again, louder for the people in the back, and reach across to lay your hand on his forearm, “I like you, and I don’t care what Carol or Tina or anyone else says. Fuck them.”
His mouth twitches with a humorless smile.
“You kiss your mother with that mouth?” he mumbles.
“No,” you stress, “Just my super cool friends when I ask them to…”
The air between you fills with a sharp sound as he sucks his teeth and shakes his head, clearly intending to tease you about that. The intention goes out of him immediately, giving over to something that looks almost halfway sad as he casts that inky dark gaze of his down to his fidgeting hands.
“Promises, promises…”
And how you love to prove him wrong.
You can’t help but surge forward and steal a kiss – it’s only a chaste peck to the cheek, but it stuns the both of you into silence all the same.
“Sorry,” You mumble, turning your gaze back to your sneakers crossed over one another as you settle back against the wall of the van, tucking your hands neatly in your lap as if you suddenly can’t be trusted to keep them to yourself, “That went better in my head,”
“S’okay,” Eddie hums, swallowing thickly, “You can keep it.”
A sticky, charged silence blooms heavily in the van and suddenly the very air seems to press down on you. You’ve finally sobered up enough to catch the reedy tones of Pink Floyd gently serenading you over the stereo, and the clouds begin to let up.
Thick sheets of rain give way to a smattering of fat, lazy drops, and the sky begins to shift in color again.
How I wish, how I wish you were here,
we’re just two lost souls swimmin’ in a fish bowl,
year after year,
runnin’ over the same ol’ ground,
and have we found the same old fears?
Wish you were here…
“I like this song,” You hum without really meaning to, and you watch Eddie nod from the corner of your vision.
“‘Course you do.” he says immediately, like stating a fact. “This is our song.” Then, as if he’d only just realized what it was he’d just said, he immediately grows bashful and begins to backpedal, “I mean, if two people were gonna have a song … if… if we had a song? I feel like this would be it.”
You almost hate to hear him take it back, despite how you understand the intention. You’re just friends after all. Just two lost souls swimmin’ in a fish bowl…
Overhead, the soft rattle of distant thunder groans as the storm begins to move on, and you try to picture Eddie listening to this song and thinking about you, commiserating with the lyrics, wishing you were here. You consider what it means that he would assign something like this to you, to be both of you.
I don’t know if you know this … the way things are going between you and me – even if this is as far as it goes…
Suddenly, your heart is throbbing against your battered ribs, and you understand too late just what Eddie has been trying to tell you all afternoon.
When you rest a gentle hand on his knee, his eyes snap open from where they’d fallen shut, and he gets caught staring at the point of contact.
“Hey…” you hum, drawing his owlish blinking attention back up to your face, “For what it’s worth, it wasn’t a bad first kiss, you know?”
It takes him a moment to answer, and when he does, his face splits up in a slow, wide grin.
“Yeah, it was okay, huh? Haven’t really been able to think about anything else all week…” he says,
“Me neither,” you hum, “But if you really want to, we could… I dunno… try it again?”
“You want to?”
You pull your shoulders up toward your ears and tilt your head ever so slightly over to the side.
“Guess I just wanna know what I’m missing…”
He stares back at you for what feels like a very long moment before moving.
“Yeah, but…” Eddie shifts onto his hands and knees and reaches out to take hold of the doors, swinging them shut with a hard clunk, first one, then the other, and suddenly you’re plunged into semi-darkness. It takes a moment for your eyes to adjust, one just long enough for Eddie to position himself so that he’s perched in front of you, back to the now-closed doors, shielding you from the prying eyes of the world, “Do you want me to kiss you?”
You don’t even have to think about it. You nod, a tentative, jerky up-and-down movement that you aren’t entirely sure he can see you make now that the doors are shut, and you clear your throat to cover the gasp that comes wrenching out of you to feel his hand come up to shadow the line of your jaw.
He follows the movement of your nodding, and as your vision finally becomes accustomed to the lack of light, you can see the faintest silhouette of him mirroring the movement.
“Will you say it for me?” He asks, “Out loud?”
You swallow hard in a futile attempt to keep your voice from quavering and feel it slide out of your throat with all the consistency of frozen molasses.
“I want you to…” you hum, “to, uh… to kiss me.”
“Are you nervous?”
You shake your head and feel the hold he has on your chin tighten ever so slightly.
“Then why don’t you ask me nicely?” he says in a gentle singsong.
You breathe a sigh out through your nose and roll your eyes, because he’s so annoying, and yet, you’re craziest for him when he’s teasing you like this.
“Eddie,” you sigh, “Will you please kiss me?”
You’d meant for the question to sound pressed and exasperated, playing along with his stupid little game, and yet the weighted, breathy measure of your voice as it forced itself out of the cloying confines of your throat was perhaps the sultriest, most desperately wanton thing you’ve ever heard anyone say.
It was near pornographic and you can hardly believe that it came out of you.
The soft sound that Eddie makes in response speaks volumes.
His grip widens to cradle your jaw, and before you’ve even registered him moving, you can feel the faintest brush of his lips against yours as he speaks.
“Good girl.” he grinds out with a timbre you feel all the way down in your panties, and tilts forward.
Before he can kiss you, however, a bolt of anxiety lances through your midsection – this is happening for real now, once you cross that threshold there will be no turning back.
You draw in a sharp, tentative breath and jerk back ever so slightly without really meaning to. The movement stops him short and cuts the atmosphere like a knife.
“What’s wrong?” Eddie asks, and you can see his eyes winking back at you in the semi-dark, shining with concern and the faintest tinge of rejection.
You shake your head, desperate to dissuade any fears he may have but suddenly too nervous to voice anything but your own anxiety.
“It’s just…” You start, choking on the wildly intrusive thought, unhelpfully bubbling up from somewhere inside of you, “You said – are you really gonna use your tongue?”
Eddie makes a harsh sound (one tinged ever so slightly with relief, you can’t help but notice) and even though you can’t really see him do it, you imagine him rolling his eyes.
“Seriously?” he deadpans.
“This is new for me, okay?” You stress indignantly, quickly to justify the hesitation, “I just wanna be prepared for whatever happens.”
“I’ll keep you posted.” He promises, brushing your hair back from your face, and before you can say anything else, he makes a seal over your lips with his, and he kisses you.
For real this time. Not just a chaste peck stolen from the corner of your mouth or a glancing blow off the highest point of his cheekbone. It’s a real, honest-to-God, lip-locking kiss, and for half a heartbeat, you forget how to breathe.
It is a moment that is somehow simultaneously impossibly long and devastatingly short, vacuum sealed together like that with your nose crushed into the side of his. Your fingers flex in the dirty carpet lining the floor of the van, and your arms strain under the threat of hyperextension as you lock your elbows to support your weight.
You aren't aware of when you leaned forward to meet Eddie in the kiss, and when you part, your lips click wetly in a sound that rings lewdly through the cavity of the van.
Even after, you can’t seem to open your eyes as you pass your tongue over your lips. You can taste the faintest tinge of the gum Eddie had been chewing earlier, and you pull your lower lip in past your teeth, trying to chase the lingering flavor of spearmint and nicotine. You realize with a start that your lips feel cold without the press of his to keep them warm, and you wonder how you never noticed that before.
The thought is gone the moment it arrives, and while you can’t seem to make any sort of coherent thought stick long enough to really process it, you are suddenly and keenly aware of the way you have begun to instantly grieve your separation from Eddie, for as brief as it lasts.
He's still very close to you, you can tell without opening your eyes, as your senses seem to have heightened exponentially here in the velvet dark of the van on this rainy day. You can feel the gentle puff of his breath on your face when he speaks, the intimate proximity of him, still so near.
“Good—” is all Eddie manages to say before you push forward again, curling your hands into the front of his jacket and seeking the sweet honey of his lips. You don’t need to see him to find him, you don’t even need to know if you were any good at all.
All other perceived needs have been superseded by the overwhelming and intense urge to kiss him again.
Eddie makes a startled sound, something tinged with the faintest hint of a laugh, and tilts back under your weight as you throw yourself at him.
You feel his hands curl around your biceps with a gentle, but firm hold and for half a terrifying moment, you expect him to push back and separate himself from you.
He did what you asked, after all. He kissed you, his end of the bargain has been fulfilled, no matter how devastating you might find it to have the moment end – but he doesn’t.
He grips you tighter and holds you firmly to the spot.
“Open your mouth,” he tells you, and you’re powerless to do anything but obey, lips parting ever so slightly this time when he dips back down.
You meet him halfway and make a soft sound when he slots your lower lip between his and begin to tenderly suck on the bruising flesh.
You breathe out a harsh, shaky sigh and fist your hands in the soft denim of his jacket and when you find the texture to be lacking, you grip the collar of his t-shirt. You try not to tug on it, distantly wary of pulling it out of shape, or worse, tearing it, but it’s all you can do just to try and keep yourself grounded as the world tilts on its axis and Eddie Munson kisses you.
Your lips interlock like links in a chain, breaking and coming together again in a slow rhythm that, once you start to get the hang of, you can feasibly see yourself getting lost in for hours — days even.
The rest of your life? No, that’s too much. One of you is going to have to come up for air eventually, and as far as you’re concerned, it’s going to have to be Eddie, because kissing him is the high you never knew you were addicted to chasing.
Still, the way he’s started pawing at you, pressing down until his nose is crushed into the side of yours, trying to pull you closer like if he could only just swallow you down he’d finally be satisfied, with all the little breathless sounds you can feel him trying not to make, you’re not sure you can trust him to be the practical one here.
You’re lightheaded and steadily going boneless, and you’re not certain when you began to tilt down, but suddenly you’re below Eddie, practically laying in his lap, and it’s almost peaceful, until the sudden adventurous probing of his tongue flicks into your mouth.
Your eyes finally snap open – you’re not sure how long ago they slipped shut – and you make a high startled sound, breaking the seal of your lips with a vulgar wet smack.
“Eddie!” you gasp, fingers coming up absently to press against your lips where they suddenly feel fuzzy and swollen. “You said you were gonna warn me!”
“I know.” he admits, gazing back at you with a sickly-sweet look on his face that has any and all righteous indignation you might have felt fizzling out before it can even catch. “I lied.”
You gaze up at him and feel some of that saccharine fondness dripping back into you and reach up to cage his face in your hands.
“Do it again,”
And how could you have forgotten how he’d just got finished telling you he’d do anything for you?
Strange how after a lifetime of longing, everything you ever wanted can fall so unceremoniously into your lap. And all it took was losing everything else you’d spent your life so carefully cultivating.
You’re surprised to find as the last vestiges of that old life you’d been clinging to so dearly slips away with every thrum of your heart beating in time with his, you don’t grieve the loss. You don’t care about the ruin of everything you know, not when you’re with Eddie, and you’re more than okay with that.
This is everything you’ve ever wanted, after all. Your wildest dreams coming true on a random Friday in November.
Life is so unbearably weird and wonderful.
Eventually, as is only the natural progression of things, as the kiss deepens and breath is traded back and forth with no signs of stopping, hands begin to wander as well. Before you know it, the whole thing has very quickly devolved into one of those full-blown make-out sessions you’ve spent your adolescence and teenage years hearing about – fantasizing about.
It’s all teeth and tongue and reverent, groping hands made that much more intense by the lingering haze of the fuzzy high you share. And you’re surprised to find that mostly it’s your hands scrambling for purchase wherever you can get it, over his shoulders, his back down the planes of his chest, the jut of his narrow hips, and even around to take an immodest palmful of his ass.
You didn’t know you had it in you.
Eddie has no complaints about your groping, as far as you can tell. He lays you down and props himself above you, and you, with all your newfound courage, cannot stand the distance it puts between you. You pull your knees up and grip him around the waist between your thighs, and it’s all the prompting he needs to drop and press his body flush to yours.
The feeling of him tucked so tightly against you sends a bloom of heat burning through your body and a soft mewling sound slipping from between your lips.
Like it were an electric shock, it sends a tangible shiver rocking through Eddie’s body.
“You like that, Sweet Girl?” he asks, voice having gone unbearably husky in ways you’ve only ever dreamed about, “You like me kissing you?”
You nod, despite the fact that he’s not actually kissing you anymore.
“Words, Baby. Wanna hear that sweet voice of yours.”
“I like you kissing me,” you gasp.
He makes a low, throaty sound of approval, and suddenly you can feel his teeth on the tender columns of your throat.
“What do you want?” he asks, and you wonder how in the world you’re supposed to answer him when your brain has so begun such a thorough metamorphic transition from solid matter to mush.
“More.” you hum, gasping as he sucks a sharp bruise into the side of your neck.
It makes a lewd, wet pop when he releases you and it shocks you through with chills.
“More what?”
“More.”
You feel his breath fanning the damp circle he has left on your neck as he laughs, turning to spot cold.
“Sweet girl, needy girl — you want me to touch you?”
You can’t imagine how to answer such a question, because as far as you are concerned, he’s already touching you, and yet you’re the one asking him for more, so obviously Eddie knows there are more ways he can be touching you, right?
You know that too, but you can’t imagine that things are about to take that turn. Certainly not.
And then he gently tugs your lower lip between his teeth in a way that makes you grow weak, and you can’t help but chase him – you need more more more as is evidenced by the way your hips involuntarily jump up in search of something, some kind of friction to ease the ache between your legs.
Right.
Eddie, always the gentleman, responds in kind, aggressively grinding you down into the worn blanket beneath you with a firm roll of his hips that has you gasping. Suddenly, you know exactly what it is you were just asking for, as you can feel so much more of him than you were ever expecting.
As it just so happens, things could very easily take that raunchy little turn, and there’s nothing stopping you from getting there but a few layers of fabric.
The thought makes you giddy, on the verge of panic, even and you can suddenly feel yourself coming apart at the seams as your body cries out, once again, for more more more… needy bitch, Goddamn.
But are you ready for that?
Are you ready to strip down to your skin and offer yourself up? Cosmopolitan Magazine says you aren’t wearing the right underwear for that.
Kissing him turned out to not be enough, but what about rutting up against each other like bunnies? What are you gonna do when your body decides heavy petting isn’t enough?
Are you gonna let him undress you? Spread you open? Split you open?
Are you really gonna go all the way in the back of his van in some empty parking lot an hour outside of town? It’s both terrifying and exhilarating, and you’re steadily leaning toward a yes when Eddie snakes his hand up under your sweater and takes a cheeky handful of your breast — you arch into his touch, and then his free hand scrabbles down to fumble with the button of your jeans.
It pops open, followed quickly by your zipper without much coaxing, and the next thing you know, you can feel his fingers pressing down over the thin, damp layer of cotton.
For some reason, this is when your body decides to hit the emergency stop, and you panic.
The answer is a resounding no, you’re not ready for this.
“Wait–wait a minute…” You say breathlessly, grabbing him by the wrist. “Eddie– wait,”
He immediately backs off, practically leaping away from you to press himself against the wall of the van like you’d spontaneously combusted under his touch.
“Shit, sorry – I’m sorry, that was too much… was it too much?”
You push up on your elbows and into a seated position, insides burning with the intense combination of fiery want and hot wanton shame.
“I’m just… I don’t know if I’m ready for that… not just yet.” you tell him, pulling your knees up and hugging them to your chest, “Sorry,”
“Oh, God, no, don’t be sorry! That’s – that’s totally fine.” He says, shaking his head, “I mean– of course it’s fine, it’s more than fine. This should be going at your speed, and I should have – I mean, I shouldn’t have – I’m sorry, I should’ve asked … sorry.”
“It’s okay,” you try to tell him, but he’s not listening to you anymore.
He’s too busy trying to patch things over, smooth over the imaginary wrinkles in the woven tapestry of whatever it is going on between you.
“I just,” Eddie says in a garbled rush, “I didn’t mean to… to make you uncomfortable or anything, and I would never want you to feel pressured to do something–”
You shake your head.”
“I don’t feel pressured,”
“–e-especially if you’re not ready, because you’re…” he stops just short of saying it, but he doesn’t have to say it for you know catch his drift – a virgin, “… and-and I’m…” not, “... it’s totally cool if you aren’t ready. I went too far, that’s on me–”
“Eddie – calm down.” You press, taking firm hold of his hands and forcing him to look at you, “Take a breath, we’re okay,”
He nods a fervent up and down that feels just a tad too close to manic.
“Okay…” he says, “Okay… sorry,”
“You don’t have to be sorry,” you insist, but he’s already shaking his head.
“I know, but I am.”
And you realize with a start that there’s going to be no arguing this one. He’s sorry, and you’re just going to have to let him be that way. If that’s what it takes to move past this hiccup, then you’re fine with it. He can be sorry, and it can still be okay.
“Okay,” you say gently, “I accept your apology … are you okay?”
It takes him a long, quiet moment to gather himself enough to answer.
“I’m okay.” Eddie says, and because you don’t expressly believe him, you squeeze his hands in yours.
“Good, so everybody’s okay.”
Only the moment has passed, and once again everything feels different. This time, as the looming sense of unshakable change settles over you, you can’t help but get the feeling that it’s not going to be the way you want things.
Eddie’s watch beeps twice, and he takes his hands back to tilt his wrist up. You watch him closely as he does it, watching his guard settle into place and feeling yourself crumple a little to realize that you have been shut out.
You drag your gaze down to your hands for the sake of self-preservation and mask the dejected air of the movement by checking your own watch.
It’s 4pm. School has been out for two hours, and you’re still half as far out of town. Double that if you take into account the rush hour traffic you’re bound to hit.
Whoops.
“We should probably head back…” The words are tumbling out of your mouth before you even realize you had the intention to speak. “It’s late.”
In your peripheral, Eddie’s head snaps up and when you force yourself to look at him, you catch the tail end of a devastated look vacating his features.
You offer a lopsided, melancholy shrug that feels so much more like an apology than you’d meant it to, and the pair of you slowly move to pull yourselves back into shape and climb over the console into your seats.
The drive back to Hawkins is long and all but silent, if not for the cassette playing gently in the background. You try to keep the conversation flowing because you’re nervous and embarrassed, but the mood is soured, and things are awkward now.
You lie to yourself that no, in fact, you did not just ruin whatever it was you had going with Eddie because you didn’t open your legs to him and everything is going to be fine.
You really, really hope that this time, you’ll be right for once.
It's well after dark by the time Eddie drops you at your car — you’re going to be in deep shit, of that you have no doubt, and yet you can’t manage to make yourself care.
Awkwardness and sexual rejection notwithstanding, you had a good day. Yards better than anything you could have expected from the rank and file of Hawkins High, at least.
You hop down from the van and shut the door behind you with a creaky whine and thump and turn to greet your little Toyota.
As you go fishing for your keys, you can only hope beyond hope that Dustin was too caught up in whatever reason he was so adamant about taking his bike today to remember to come and meet you for a pickup.
Eddie stops you before you can circle around to your driver’s side,
“Hey,” he says, reaching down to snag your hand, “Listen, I know we already covered this, but I really am sorry about earlier.”
“Eddie,” you sigh, “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Yeah, I did. I ruined a perfectly good afternoon,” he says, smiling weakly, and suddenly you know exactly what he’s thinking.
You’re just going to have to agree to disagree. Boy, you wish he would stop throwing himself under the bus for you all the time. You don’t want this sad, self-deprecating, pancaked version of Eddie, especially when he’s going through all this torture over something that is arguably your fault.
“You didn’t ruin anything,” you start, “If anything, I’m the one—”
“You? No sir, not you. You’re perfect.” Eddie tells you and you feel the sentiment stick you sharply in the gut.
The fondness you feel for him bleeds into your bloodstream, fizzing like pop rocks and lighting you up from head to toe. You’re so high on the feeling that you hardly hear what he is saying next.
“Anyway … I hope you won’t let me spoil a bright future of first kisses,” he makes a show of tapping your chin with the ridge of his knuckles, and the gentle touch brings you crashing back to Earth, “You got potential, Kid. Someday you’re gonna knock some lucky fella’s socks off,”
You flex your hand in his, so perfectly cradled there like you were made special to fit together, and feel a shock of warmth bloom across your midsection at the thought.
You don’t want to have potential, at least not for anyone else whose socks may be waiting to be knocked off, and you are utterly dismayed that the pair of you could have emerged from the shenanigans of the earlier afternoon and have Eddie not know that.
You put your free hand on his shoulder and push up on your toes, pressing something a little too long to be just a chaste peck to the center of his lips.
Your lips click when you drop back down, and you move your hand over to pat his chest fondly.
“I think I’m set on first kisses for a while. I might stick with this one and see where it goes,” you say.
His eyes widen in a way that is so boyishly hopeful, it causes your heart to throb almost painfully for how deeply your affection for him has grown over the course of one afternoon.
“Really?” Eddie asks, and you take his face in one hand.
Oh, what a sweet, sweet, unbearably dense boy, he is sometimes.
“This one suits me just fine,”
You push up on your toes to kiss him again, just because you want to, and just because you can. This time he snags you around the waist and hauls you up to hold crushed against him.
It feels an awful lot like going steady, like becoming officially official with someone (not that you would know anything about what that feels like), and yet the way Eddie’s arms feel around you knocks the word “boyfriend” around in your skull until it finds a snug little spot to stick into your brain.
You stand together just existing like that for what feels like a very long time, and when he finally releases you to touch back down to Earth again, he holds tightly to your hands. You’re glowing, of that you can be certain, if only because you can see if reflected right back in him, and suddenly everything is almost perfect.
Almost.
The sirens hit you before the first of the red and blue flashers peek their way through the haze of darkened trees. The cop car comes screaming out of the night and goes sailing down the road past you, followed by another, and another, and what you must imagine is the entirety of the Hawkins Police Department, hauling ass down Cornwallis, headed somewhere at the speed of light.
It’s startling at best, and distressing at worst considering the conspicuous absences suddenly cropping up in your community.
You can’t help but turn to watch them go, wondering idly if one of the panicked adults in your life noticed you weren't in school today and assumed you'd become the next of the missing kids.
“Whoa, shit, where’s the fire?” Eddie mutters, gaze fixed on the line of squad cars as they go howling down the road to disappear around the bend.
The black and whites disappear into a haze of taillights, leaving the pair of you standing dumbfounded. It’s not every day you see something like that in a boring little town like Hawkins.
“I hope nobody’s hurt,” you say absently, because it feels like the right thing to say, despite your indignance at being so rudely interrupted.
How dare someone exist in a state of emergency when you’re busy falling head over heels.
It takes Eddie a moment to respond, and when he does, he scoffs and shrugs in a way that is perhaps a tad too flippant for the obvious severity of what you’d just witnessed.
“Nah.” he says, “I’ll bet it’s nothing. Hey, they probably just found that Byers kid holed up somewhere,” he nudges you, “So you can stop worrying, Sweetness,”
You have half a mind to make a flippant comment about what you’d just witnessed being a whole lot of commotion for “probably nothing”, but the thought goes out of your mind when you catch Eddie giving you that sickly sweet look again.
You smile, casting your gaze bashfully down to your shoes and taking your hands back. You cross your arms over your chest and wrestle with the knowledge that you’ve been standing here far too long. The sirens were signal enough that it is time to go home, but like always, you just can’t seem to leave Eddie.
“You gotta go.” he says suddenly, drawing your attention back up to him.
It hadn’t been a question, but he’s still looking at you expectantly, like somehow it will leave things open enough for you to contradict the statement. You don’t have to get going. You can stay together like this forever.
Only forever is an awfully long time for someone who is grounded within an inch of their life and strictly forbidden from spending such an amount of time with the person sharing their space.
You pull your face into another one of those apologetic smiles and tilt your head over to press your ear to your shoulder.
“I gotta go,” you echo, and you give him your hand.
Eddie takes it without a moment’s hesitation, and nods. There is something ever so slightly sad about the gesture, despite the pleasant curl of his lips.
“Yeah… okay.” He says, “Get home safe, Babylove,”
You rock a step back, one Eddie mimics, followed by another, and a third, and you hold tight to your singular point of connection until distance demands you part. Even then, you don’t take your eyes off of each other, even as you open your respective doors and he steps up to the driver’s side of the van.
“Call me when you get there,” he says, and you nod so emphatically that the world briefly tilts on its axis.
“I will.”
Eddie’s face splits into that big, toothy grin.
“I’m gonna hold you to that,” he says, “If I have to call you first, you’re gonna be in trouble.”
You’re grinning so widely that your face has started to hurt – funny how he has that effect on you – and it occurs to you almost too late that you’re going to have a very hard time doing just that.
You shake your head as Eddie slides in behind the wheel and shuts his door. He’s cranking down the window before you can even think to take a step toward him.
“Oh, wait – I don’t have your number!” you call.
His grin turns wicked and wolfish, and even from this distance you can see his eyes go bright.
“You don’t?” he says, stretching the word lyrically, “Well, shoot, Honey, why didn’t you say so? It’s in the yellow pages … under Casanova–” he’s so annoying, “Sorry, Lothario–” and you’re so goddamn crazy about him you could scream. “No, wait a minute, that would be Adonis–”
“Goodnight, Loverboy.”
You can still hear him laughing at his own dumb joke when you slide into your driver’s side and shut the door. It’s hardly half a minute before the seal is broken once more and Eddie leans down into your open doorway to tilt your head up and kiss you again.
“Eddie–” you start, though any protest you may have at being kept longer in that parking lot is crushed between your lips and his
“I’m so serious,” he says, rocking forward to grind his forehead against yours, “You better call me when you get home.”
You brace your hand on his shoulder and curl your fingers into the soft denim of a jacket that, by all rights, he should not be wearing. You’d meant to make a show of pushing him away with no real conviction but you’d managed to get lost along the way and ended up hanging on to him instead.
Funny how that tends to happen to you when he’s around.
“I will,”
“You won’t.” He pouts, tilting down to kiss you again, muffling the sound of your laughter.
“I will!” you insist when you manage to pry yourself away from him.
Eddie gives you a long, tender look, and you can feel your heart beating in your throat. He reaches down and takes hold of your wrist, turning it over so that your palm is facing upward, and when he tears his gaze away from yours to look down, you feel instantly lesser for it.
You feel the sharp tickle of a cheap Bic pen pressing into your flesh as he jots his phone number into the meat of your palm.
“You promise?” he asks, and you nod dutifully.
Anything, you would tell him if you could, I’ll do anything you ask.
“I promise,”
Even after he shuts your door and you start the car, he remains standing in the parking lot, hamming it up and making joke after endless joke.
It takes ten minutes for you to drive the length of Cornwallis, and you spend every second of that time fighting the urge to turn right back around just to see if Eddie is still waiting for you in the school parking lot.
When you finally pull into your driveway, all the lights in your house are off and your parents are gone, because that’s just par for the course.
You fully expect to enter your living room to find a note indicating their departure and the state of leftovers in the fridge for you to sustain yourself, and you’re too giddy to even really care about the enduring state of your slow burn abandonment. You suppose that you ought to just count it as lucky because otherwise, you’d be planning your funeral.
You’re sliding out of your car, slamming the door, and fumbling with the lock, all while trying to keep from smudging the precariously scribbled numbers on your inner palm when Claudia Henderson comes trotting across the street.
Of course, you’re too stuffed up in your head to hear the first two times she calls your name.
You don’t hear her at first, because you’re on another plane of existence. You don’t have the mental capacity to realize what is about to happen, because all you can manage to think is how, while neither of you expressly said it, you’re fairly certain that Eddie Munson is your boyfriend now.
You can’t wait to scribble that blessed update all over the sordid little pages of your diary. By the time you come back down to earth, Mrs. Henderson is standing right in front of you like a red-faced, blubbering jump scare, blotting her nose with a well-used Kleenex and wailing your name for the third or fourth time.
“Holy shit—” The words come tumbling out of you before you can catch them, but thankfully they are steamrolled by your afterschool employer’s whiny, warbling voice.
“Where on Earth have you been?” she mewls.
Your heart leaps up into your throat, and all the giddy levity goes out of you.
Busted.
You brace for impact, remembering all too late how she’d threatened her only child’s life that very morning for the mere suggestion that he should exist for a singular moment outside of your supervision, and how you’d failed to drive him home from school that afternoon.
You can already imagine the tales of how Dustin waited and waited and waited for hours before finally being forced to walk all the way home, all the while you were acquainting yourself with the feel and texture of your boyfriend’s back teeth.
–Boyfriend boyfriend boyfriend–
How could you do such a thing? She would ask, How could you leave him stranded like that? How is she ever meant to trust you again?
“Mrs. Henderson,” you start with your hands raised in diplomatic defense, “I can explain,”
What it is you’re about to try and explain away, you’ve got no idea. What are you supposed to tell her? That you were in the next town over watching all your wildest dreams come to fruition? Rubbing up against the town pariah, asking him for more more more…?
Obviously, you can’t tell her that, but what then? You suppose you could lie, nobody expressly needs to know that you weren’t in school that day, but you have no idea how you would even begin to broach the subject of where you’ve been, why you’re three hours late coming home, and how you happen to have no idea where her son is.
You hope to God she doesn’t ask you that, and you find yourself frantically trying to look around her, to catch a glimpse of a little body pressed in against the front window across the street.
You watch as any attempt at outrage goes instantly out of her and her face crumples under the duress of a new wave of fresh emotion.
“Oh, honey–” she snivels, “You don’t have to explain anything… we already know.”
It is a deeply ominous statement to make, and for some reason it raises the hair on the back of your neck. You find yourself having to swallow hard just to keep your voice from quavering as you speak.
“Know what?” you ask slowly,
“They found him, Sweetheart,” she tells you, and you fail to suppress a flinch.
You hate to hear her – or anyone else for that matter – call you that. As far as you’re concerned, that name belongs on one pair of lips, and they do not belong to your across the street employer, staring at you with her face flushed and a steady stream of mucus running down from her nose.
Still, her words ring loudly in your ears, drowning out all the cotton candy that has been stuffing up your skull for the last few hours. They found him – him who?
Your stomach cramps under the duress of your inner turmoil. You hate to ask, but you can’t just stand there staring at Mrs. Henderson, no matter how badly you want this moment to end. It’s not fair. You have to call Eddie. You promised to call him as soon as you got home… and yet? Suddenly you can’t stop thinking about the rush of sirens that whipped past you on the road, and what he said after.
“Who did they find?” you force reluctantly through your teeth.
You don’t want the answer, and yet you already have a very clear sense of what she is going to say, and contrary to what Eddie previously assured you, it’s not going to be good.
hello! i hope you dont mind me asking, but i read an old post of yours that said you were preparing to publish a horror novel. i'd love to hear more about it, if you're willing to share, as i adore your writing. you're unbelievably talented!!!!
hi nonny! tragically, that specific situation fell through, but I haven't abandoned that story or any of the others that have followed! I may have fallen off of the fanfic wagon when I ejected myself from social media, but I certainly didn't stop writing! but oh my gosh how nice of you to say! thank you 💙💙💙💙💙
Hello! i absolutely adore your writing style. i was curious if you write for any other fandoms, or post your writing elsewhere. i would read anything that you write! have a great day <3
hi Nonny - great question. The short answer is no, I don't really write for any other fandoms, at least nowhere that I've readily posted.
I used to dabble writing Red Dead Redemption fics, and before that, I was neck deep in Dragon Age Inquisition fanfic, but neither of those were reader inserts and I was never brave enough to post them, but that's really sweet of you to say! Now I wish I had more of something to send your way!!
hi all! it's been a while (i know) - I just wanted to pop in and let you all know I'm alive
in case you're wondering what happened and why I dropped off the face of the earth, I had a serious mental health crisis back in August/September and as a result, had to quit all social media. I'm doing much better, but I'm still very much chronically offline.
I saw some people asking about Endless Summer, and while I've basically all but abandoned it since I last updated, I have several chapters that are basically written that I might be able to muster the gumption to polish and post, just 'cause I love ya <3 (maybe, I don't wanna make any firm promises in case I go and lose my mind again)
like I said, I just wanted to let you know I'm alive, I'm okay, and I still think about this little community all the time
Dude I swear, I check your profile weekly to see if Endless Summer has been updated. IMO, your portrayal of Eddie in all 3 fics are the most accurate I’ve read so far and it’s just so GOOD 😭
Aww bless you, Babe 🥺 I’m working on it, I promise — it’s taking a little longer between a bunch of other stuff, but I’m always happy to give a preview of what’s to come! 💙
dead man's party was sooo good! def my favorite chapter <333
Thank you Nonny! I would agree with you (because this chapter holds a very special place in my heart) but my favorite chapter is still incoming and I’m so excited to share it
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.