The Future is a Foreign Land @bizaar - Tumblr Blog

Endless Summer ✧

Part 4: Dead Man's Party

Cruel Summer Masterlist

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pairing: eddie munson x afab!reader

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

word count: 23k

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

Dreams are weird.

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

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

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

“Eddie!”

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

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

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

That’s normal.

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

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

And that’s still completely normal too.

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

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

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

“Sure,”

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

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

“Hop in and I’ll suck your cock,” —

THUMP THUMP THUMP.

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

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

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

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

“Get up, Ed!” Wayne calls.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, shit!”

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

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

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

“Come on you — fucker!”

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

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

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

“How’s that sound?” you asked.

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, shit! — shitshitshit!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thump thump thump.

…quoth the raven –

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

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

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

You’re here and he’s not dressed.

“Oh, my God!”

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

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

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

Eddie hears you greet his uncle from two rooms over.

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

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

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

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

Of course he had to say it like that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You giggle distantly, and Eddie slams his bedroom door.

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

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

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

Girls care.

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

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

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

Eddie doesn’t know what to do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whoops.

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

“Yep,”

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

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

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

Which means no baby pictures – Thank fucking Christ.

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

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

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

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

Oh my God oh my God oh my GOD.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ready to go?” you ask.

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

“Let’s hit it,” he says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Candygram.”

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

“A book,”

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

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

Eddie pulls his shoulders up defensively.

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

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

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

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

Go figure.

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

A mind’s eye for a mind’s eye.

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

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

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

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

“Everything okay?”

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

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

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

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

“Fair enough,”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes please, anything to distract from the way his heart is beating itself senseless against his ribs.

Eddie surges forward to fish a rectangular box out from where it’s been stashed beneath his seat and flips up the hard vinyl lid, revealing a collection of cassette tapes – your music.

“Ah ha!” he cries, unable to separate the total and abject weirdness bubbling up alongside his mounting excitement, “Avast ye, me hearties! Ex marks the spot – buried tray-sure!”

In the apparent inability to function normally, Eddie’s subconscious inexplicably turns pirate, which is utterly mortifying and something that – to his knowledge – has never happened before.

Maybe he’ll get lucky and it will be nothing more than the first signs of an inoperable brain tumor and not just his painful inability to be normal, but beside him, you do your best to swallow an undainty snort of laughter and fail miserably. Thankfully it is not a mean sound, then again Eddie is not entirely sure you’re capable of such a thing.

It helps to alleviate some of the humiliation of the previous moment as with hungry, waggling fingers, he peels back the curtain to take one more coveted peek into your secret world.

For a long few moments, neither of you speak, but he can feel you trying to split your attention between him and the road as he takes steady, focused inventory of your taste in music.

It’s all more or less what he would have expected – a lot of 70s rock, some pop, some disco. There are a few surprises in there, like the Alan Parsons Project and Supertramp, but Eddie sits pleased with the run-of-the-mill presence of Fleetwood Mac, Bowie, and Kate Bush.

For as much as you continue to surprise him every time you spend any amount of time together, there is a strange comfort in knowing that you’re not actually all that hard to pin down. You like exactly what he expects you to like, and somehow that makes it feel easier to know you.

When he sits in silent regard of your tapes for too long, you start to fidget, and when the silence persists even after that, he can sense a tangible nervousness leaching out of you, clouding the atmosphere like blood in water.

“Just… try not to judge me too hard, okay?” you finally say, “I’ve been told my taste is…hmm… eclectic?”

It comes tumbling out of your mouth like a dirty word you’re shy about using and Eddie bites the inside of his lip to try and temper the wicked little smile forming there.

“That’s not always a compliment,” he hums, imagining the fights you must have with your shitty friends over what to play and, more than likely, losing out over their preferences — it’s Belinda Carlisle over Pink Floyd, every day of the week, and how you must suffer for it.

“Believe me, I know.” You say, “I mean, try explaining to your PTA treasurer mother why you’re listening to a band called Judas Priest –”

“Judas Priest!” he shouts, a little too loud for such an enclosed space.

He didn’t mean to say it like that, but how else is he supposed to react when you hit him with such a ridiculous concept?

The reaction makes you jump, and suddenly you’re staring back at him in owlish surprise — he almost feels bad about that, even as he begins to laugh.

“What?” you ask.

“Please. Now you’re just trying to impress me,”

Your brows furrow over your pretty eyes, making a crease between them, and Eddie has to resist the urge to smooth it out with his thumb.

“No, I’m not,” you say.

He calls your bluff.

“You do not listen to Judas Priest,”

“Yes I do,”

“No, Sweetheart, you don’t, and that’s totally cool! But let’s just be honest with each other here.”

“How dare you.” You gasp, feigning complete and abject offense, “You don’t think I can rock out?”

Eddie snorts, because no, actually, he doesn’t. You, all sweetness and sugar (with a mother in the PTA – because that absolutely tracks, he bets you were a girl scout too) headbanging and growling out the chorus to Exciter like you think you’re Joan Jett or something?

Absolutely not, and your mouth falls open as you come to realize this fact.

“You don’t!” You gasp, “Well excuse me, Mr. Rockstar, but I thought I was supposed to be Corroded Coffin’s biggest fan! What happened to that, huh?”

“Listen,” Eddie starts with a diplomatic hand, “I’m sure you think you’re hard, listening to all that bubblegum shit they play on the radio — Twisted Sister and Def Leppard, am I right?”

You set your jaw and your face flushes with the faintest hint of pretty, indignant color.

“So what?” You press,

“So, I’m just saying, there’s metal and then there’s metal.” He continues, “Maybe you’ve got a little Zeppelin on your rotation, and I’ll even buy the occasional foray into AC/DC, but Judas Priest? Come on, Babe — don’t kid a kidder.”

He’s testing the waters with that sneaky little term of endearment, that’s for sure, and with the way you’re sitting there gawping at him, Eddie is almost sorry he tried it.

Maybe he’s read the room wrong and getting a little too familiar too fast, but maybe you’re trying a little too hard to convince him of something that is so blatantly untrue it’s laughable.

Your face twists into a mask of genuine annoyance then, and Eddie can’t help but fixate on how much attention you’re putting into glaring at him and not watching the road – it makes his insides squirm with repressed nerves and latent images of cars in ditches.

How he ever managed to let you start this car when neither of you is wearing your seatbelt is beyond him – he guesses he’s just that sick with the fever of you – and he’s suddenly kicking himself for so blatantly antagonizing you. It’s all fun and games until you’re upside down on the side of the road.

“Next…” Eddie starts, casually reaching over your head to snag the belt, pull it across your lap, and buckle it into place. “...you’re gonna tell me you listen to Iron Maiden,”

“I do listen to Iron Maiden!” You cry, head snapping back to the front and swatting his hand away.

Eddie snorts out a scoff.

“You’re such a liar,”

“And you, Eddie Munson,” you begin. “Are an unbelievable snob.”

It forces a startled bark of laughter out of him, once again too loud for the enclosed space – that’s a first. He’s been accused of a lot of things, but never of snobbery.

“Prove me wrong,” he says, grinning wickedly and leaning dangerously far into your space.

Your seatbelt doesn’t let you get far, but you rise to his challenge anyway, and suddenly you’re nose to nose.

“I will!” you insist, “Keep looking, Smart Guy, since you’re so damn sure – go on. All the way to the back.”

Ever eager to please, Eddie resumes his inventory with renewed interest, rapidly flipping through the likes of Elton John, the BeeGees, ABBA, John Denver, and half a dozen other bands, none of which are even remotely within the vicinity of what you so calumnously claim to listen to.

On and on, he is greeted with the top forty of this decade and the last: Tears for Fears, Loggins and Messina, Queen, The Clash, Dusty Springfield, The Go-Go’s, Jefferson Starship, Paul Simon, Duran Duran, ELO, KC and the Sunshine Band – the list is neverending.

The further he goes, the surer he gets, shaking his head and chuckling smugly to himself.

He’s so right, and you’re so busted.

“There’s no way you listen to–” and then, like happening on a unicorn, he finds it.

Stuck in at the far back between Mötley Crüe and (lo and behold) Iron Maiden, is the Screaming for Vengence album, on glorious cassette tape.

Buried treasure.

All further taunting immediately dies on his tongue as he suddenly gets a very good taste of his own foot.

“HA!” you shout, and it rings loudly in his ears, “I told you!”

You snatch the tape from his hand when he holds it up and immediately feed it into the player. After a moment of mechanical whirring, the car fills with the introductory riff of You Got Another Thing Coming, and Eddie is stunned – truly stunned.

Judas fucking Priest.

“Oh, my God,” he says, “How is this possible? How did I not know you were cool?”

“Because you’re a snob!” You punch him in the shoulder and it’s not half as startling as the way you bloom before his eyes, “And I’m a stunningly mysterious creature with many secrets to behold!”

While both of those facts are inarguably true, Eddie has never seen you so excited. Who knew riling you up was the key to opening the door to your life? It stirs a dangerously mischievous urge in him as he tucks that revelation into his back pocket for later.

Still, he’s never wanted to know more about someone than he does right now. Eddie is ravenous to know everything there is to know about you, and he’s trying so desperately to be cool about it.

“I’m serious — how’d you get into Judas Priest? Girls like you don’t listen to music like this.”

You grin.

“A snob and a chauvinist. You’re oh-for-two there, Buddy-Boy — but if you must know…?”

“I must,”

You cast a sultry sidelong glance at him and Eddie is instantly shot full of holes.

“I was exposed at a very young and impressionable age,”

Which means someone sat you down and picked out a song special for you, knowing you’d love them before you even knew you had the proclivity for metal in you. Eddie is suddenly so incredibly jealous, that he feels like he could burst. What a devastatingly intimate thing to have missed out on – how he wishes that could have been him, young and dumb and unlocking something so important in you as an entire genre of music.

It’s not fair that he’s had to wait this long to get to know you, and that he’s missed out on years of having a friend like you. He suddenly can’t believe he went so long not knowing what he was missing.

“Who did this to you? Tell me everything,” Eddie pleads, “The suspense is literally killing me.”

You bite back a grin and turn your attention to the road as you explain.

“You went to Hawkins Middle, right?” You ask, and he nods, electing to say nothing about what a hellish experience it was, smack dab in the middle of the single parent, Alan Munson days, “Remember how they used to do a talent show and everyone had to participate for good sportsmanship or whatever?”

And then, something begins to tickle the back of Eddie’s brain, something far too good to be true.

“Sure do.” He says, trying not to sound too excited about what he suddenly thinks he knows.

He tells himself he doesn’t know exactly what you’re about to say, (because he doesn’t want to get his hopes up) but suddenly he’s leaning into your space again, hanging on your every word, and despite his better judgment warning him to temper his expectations, he knows exactly what you’re about to say.

And it is too good to be true.

“So, most people would just pull some bogus thing together and call it talent, because they had to, right? But then, there was this group of kids who just woke up and decided they were gonna put together a fully functioning metal band for the show…”

Holy shit holy shit holy shit–

“...and they weren’t good, but it was crazy, because of all the things they could possibly play, they get up there and whip out Exciter like that’s a totally normal thing to happen at a middle school talent show–”

Eddie’s mouth falls open as he is bombarded with memories of the earliest days of Corroded Coffin, those first practices in the Hawkins Middle music room, back when the band was him, Jeff, Doug Teague, and Ronnie Ecker.

Talk about a blast from the past – what a fucking trip.

“You’re kidding,”

“I’m totally serious. Bunch of twelve year olds playing in a Judas Priest cover band,” you say, like it’s the funniest thing anyone has ever heard.

Eddie bites back the urge to correct you (Corroded Coffin is not a cover band, they are a band that happens to do covers) and he keeps waiting for the punchline, for the other shoe to drop, but you’re still just going on and on like you’re blissfully ignorant of what exactly you’re confessing to him, here on this random Friday at 7:40 in the morning.

You continue with a casual wave of your hands, daring to release the steering wheel just long enough to get your point across.

“Anyway, it’s like I said – young and impressionable. But it sort’ve blew my mind, and I’ve been listening to them ever since– in secret, of course, because, girls like me don’t listen to music like that,” You say, making a point to drop your voice in abject mockery of him.

For half a moment Eddie can’t tell if you’re joking, telling him all this as if he doesn’t know exactly what you’re talking about, and as if he wasn’t the one getting pulled off stage for playing Exciter at his middle school talent show.

And then it hits him. You don’t know.

Oh, my God. He can’t believe this. He cannot believe you don’t know. How can you not know?

“Dude… that was me.” he says, unable to keep it to himself for another second, “That was me!”

You give him a dubious, sidelong glance as you reach the intersection and roll to a stop.

For a moment, you don’t speak, you just stare, eyes narrowed, brows furrowed, jaw set in a quizzical press.

“...shut up,” you say slowly, and yet you don’t outright reject the notion, the way he had earlier with you.

Eddie doubles down, and he knows he’s talking too fast, too loud, but his blood is pounding with the revelation that you’ve been in each other’s orbit – affected each other – for much longer than twelve measly months.

“That was my band! That was Corroded Coffin! We got together and learned to play Exciter in like, two weeks, and we were awful and nobody clapped!”

Your eyes go wide as realization hits you like a brick, and then you gasp.

“Oh, my God, I remember that!” you shout, “Nobody clapped! Eddie! That was you!?”

There he goes grinning his face off again.

“That was me!” He shouts, “I made you cool!”

And then you scream. It is a loud, giddy thing that fills Eddie’s chest cavity with a bright, uproarious, infectious joy that wells so big so suddenly, his ribs crack open and it floods the car in a matter of moments.

For a second, you’re both insane with it, shouting and laughing and talking over one another as you slap and pull at each other’s jackets, capering and cajoling like you’re the oldest, closest, best of friends that ever were and ever will be.

It’s disgusting and it’s wonderful.

While you’re too busy playing to notice, the light changes, and two sharp beeps from the impatient driver idling behind your giddy shenanigans alerts you to the green. You don’t stop talking, even as you flip your indicator and take the turn that will begin the final stretch to school.

You’re still laughing and breathless when you pull into the parking lot, which is already flooded with cars and bodies and the everyday flurry of pre-bell action, none of which you notice because you’re both too busy battering each other in questions – do you remember this, did you see that, were you there when so and so did this that and the other.

Come to find out, you haven’t just been in orbit of one another. You’ve been right fucking there. All your lives, you’ve been each other’s unknowing shadow, and Eddie can’t stand knowing that you were so close and he was too stupid to notice you there until you were staring him in the face.

He’s completely out of his mind with the giddy atmosphere in this car – if he were thinking rationally, he might crack the window just so he can try to breathe, but you’ve got him full force now, completely unfiltered and unfettered.

It occurs to him distantly that most people never get to experience this much of him, he doesn’t often get the chance to be so unabashedly himself, and he might want to dial it back a bit, just to save a little face. But it’s intoxicating to be so completely seen and to have his energy matched, and now that he’s started, he can’t stop.

“Did you see us play at the winter show in ‘81?” He asks, pulling his knee up and twisting in his seat to face you as you shift your car into park and pull the break.

“No,” you say, almost apologetically. “I was tragically still sequestered to Hawkins Middle…”

And Eddie was a bright and shiny Freshman at Hawkins High, steeped in that happy little limbo between escaping his father and having his heart curb stomped into the pavement.

“...why, what happened in ‘81?”

“Aww, man!” He starts, “You missed out, it was awesome. We got pulled off stage and everyone got put on academic probation for Satanic Ideations,”

Finger quotes don’t even begin to cover all the drama that went along with that and the untoward allegations he has long since stopped trying to beat.

Your eyes go wide.

“Is that how all that Satan stuff started?” You wonder aloud, “I remember when people started saying that, but I never knew why. I always thought it was just too much Dateline or something,”

“Yeah, that coupled with all my Dad’s shit and a heavy dose of Iron Maiden in the ninth grade, and here you find me. Eddie Munson: Satanic Freak.”

He drops his voice to a theatrical cadence and gestures widely as he says it, fully intending to give himself a fix of your laughter, but your response is surprisingly muted.

Your brows pinch briefly before smoothing over again, and you hum thoughtfully, dropping your gaze to stare pensively into space as you settle back into your seat.

For a moment, the silence is unbearable, and when you finally speak, Eddie has to try and breathe out as quietly as he can so as not to be caught holding his breath.

“…well,” you begin, “For what it’s worth – I never bought in to all that,”

It might have been startling were he capable of being startled by anything you have to say about him anymore. After this morning’s onslaught, what’s one more little kindness to come tumbling from your lips?

“No?” Eddie asks, crossing his arms over his knee and dropping his chin down to rest there, “You’re not subscribed to the Hawkins Christian Coalition?”

You pull a face.

“You’re not scary enough to be a Satanist, even with all those tattoos and chains and everything you do to try and look tough.” Your gaze flits back to him, “You don’t scare me,”

Eddie’s heart crawls up into his throat and begins to throb there, threatening to strangle him with every solid beat. He’s been hoping you feel that way, but it’s been a long time since he learned not to hope for things.

“Not even a little?” He asks, voice dropping to a muted timber as the atmosphere suddenly becomes unbearably charged with intimacy.

You shake your head.

“How come?”

Then, you stick him to the spot with a shy quirk of your lips.

“Because I’ve seen you in your underwear,” you say innocently, and his guts seize.

What was that he was saying about not being shocked?

Eddie’s mind goes blank and his mouth falls open – and here he thought he was being so stealthy. You erupt into a fit of infectious laughter, and what is he if not powerless but to laugh right along with you?

It’s bizarre, sitting here like this, with his head buzzing and the muscles in his face and abdomen aching from laughing so hard. He can’t stop, every time he thinks he’s coming down, you break into another fit of giggles and pull him right back over that cliff again.

He’s never felt higher than he does right now, and it takes a long, long time to touch back down again.

“Man — where the hell did you come from?” Eddie asks when he finally manages to catch a breath, “How come I don’t remember you from back in middle school?”

“I don’t know,” you tease reaching out to tug at the frayed strings lining the hole in the knee of his jeans – he has to resist the urge to take your hand, “Maybe you were already too cool and famous to notice little ol’ me,"

Eddie can’t tell if you’re making fun of him, and with what you say next, he finds that he doesn't expressly care.

“I feel like we would’ve been friends if we knew each other back then,” you say, “Back in middle school? It could’ve just been this — you ‘n me — all the time, and none of that other bullshit. Us against the world… I think that would’ve been better…”

And have truer ever been spoken? You're right. It would have been better to live in that far-off universe where this was his reality and his days were filled with mornings like this one, laughing and shouting and loving instead of bracing for impact and dreaming for something better.

Eddie tries to imagine how your friendship would have softened a hundred different blows from a hundred different hurts, how different so many things would have been, and his heart throbs for what he didn’t realize he was missing.

Of course, then again, if you’d been his friend back in those days, it would have put you in the path of his father, and if only for that reason, Eddie is so incredibly glad he never knew you until now.

Wayne has got that wild penchant for embarrassing him, sure, but he’s harmless. The same can not be said for Al, who was always more of the “search and destroy” type than the “you wanna see some baby pictures?” kind of Dad.

He wouldn’t have been able to sit by and just let Eddie have you. He would have ruined it, and by extension, ruined you, and Eddie can’t even think about that. He won’t, so he focuses on you here and now, sitting so pretty with your face curled into that soft, wistful smile, saying all the right things to break his heart in the best possible way.

He has to clear his throat to keep his voice steady.

“Yeah,” he says unevenly, and if you notice the change, you don’t show it. “Me too… I've been thinking about that a lot actually…”

“You have?”

Eddie pulls his shoulders up in his best approximation of a casual shrug, even though nothing about this feels at all casual.

"Why? Is that weird or something?"

"No, it's not weird," you tell him, "...you're kind of a big softie, you know that? Under all that armor?"

You reach out to tug at the collar of his jacket and Eddie huffs out a breath, averting his gaze so that you won't see his eyes sparkle with the wonder of being seen.

"Yeah, but don't tell anybody," he says, "I've got a reputation to manage,"

You hum out a gentle laugh and shake your head, looking almost secretive, sitting there and smiling for no reason save the atmosphere and such a fond, shared sentiment.

Suddenly all Eddie wants to do is squish your face between his hands and tell you how much you matter to him, how important this all is, and how it’s gonna last forever in his heart of hearts.

In a hundred years, no one will remember that either of you existed, but he’ll always remember the way you dropped down to tie his shoe, and the ease with which you spoke when you offered a kindness you could not have possibly known would break him into a hundred thousand pieces. He imagines those pieces radiating out in a shockwave through time and space, embedding themselves in the fabric of the universe where they’ll live on indefinitely.

Fueled by that thought alone, Eddie can’t help himself. He’s starting to learn that he is greedy for your innermost thoughts, and he desperately wants to be let in.

He knocks your knee with his, and it feels so devastatingly intimate it threatens to make him blush.

“What’re you thinkin’ about?” He asks – the school bell will be ringing any minute now, but he’s going to use every second of that time, if it’s the last thing he does.

Your shoulders jump.

“All the fun I missed out on,” You hum, and it hits him like a fist to the gut, “...I mean, just imagine all the time I could’ve spent hanging out with Uncle Wayne,”

Eddie rolls his eyes, but even that is not enough to dampen his affection for you, not entirely.

“He’s a shithead, but he’s not so bad when you get to know him,” he says.

“I like him,” you say, “I think he’s nice.”

It’s another little kindness you have no idea he needs so badly. They're still a family, Eddie and Wayne, as odd a couple as they may be, and it is such a relief to hear that you like his little broken family.

Eddie blooms under the approval he didn't realize he was looking for.

"Oh," he says, "You do?"

“Yeah," You say, smiling sweetly, "He said he was gonna show me your baby pictures next time I come over,”

Eddie frowns.

You have a funny little way of undercutting sincerity like that – maybe because you’re scared to be too vulnerable for too long – and he can’t stand how endearing it is.

Maybe it’s because he feels the exact same way, and maybe it’s because of how his affection for you is growing faster than he can manage it.

Even just in the time it has taken to get from his driveway to this parking spot, his fondness for you has swelled exponentially. He'd offer you his heart if you asked for it, and the thought is terrifying, because of how easily (and how badly) you could hurt him if you chose to.

He doesn't think you will, because he likes to hope that you feel the same about him (you like his family, why would you want to hurt him after that?) Still, you will not be seeing those pictures, under pain of torture and death.

He’ll burn his house down before that happens.

“Congratulations,” Eddie says, grinning, “You’re officially banned from the house,”

You laugh out loud, and for half a second he thinks all that madness is about to kick up again, but then, your smile drops and all the levity goes out of you as your gaze shifts to the right, just over his shoulder.

The shift in mood is jarring enough to draw his attention, and when he turns to follow, he sees it too – Carol Perkins, making a beeline for the little green Toyota.

“Well, shit.” He says, insides squirming with anticipation of the sudden and violent death of this moment. His moment.

You sigh, and Eddie watches with no small amount of despair as you begin fumbling with your keys and your seatbelt and anything else you can get your hands on.

Show’s over, everybody out of the pool.

“… I guess she’s still pissed…” you say.

Still, because Carol had been your original passenger the previous afternoon before you deigned to swoop in and replace her with Eddie. She’d sat with her arms crossed and her lips curling as you traded greetings and the initial back and forth that led to the events of this morning, and she made no effort to hide how against the ride-giving she was.

Before Eddie could pull the handle (or try and navigate getting into your two-door car with Carol sitting so summarily opposed to such an action) she slapped the doorlock into position, like someone’s snotty brat kid throwing a public tantrum.

“I’m so fucking serious.” She hissed, “If you let him into this car, I will get out and walk.”

You leveled her with a dangerous look then, the likes of which Eddie had not yet seen grace your features, and it made his insides squirm.

“Then get out and walk.” You said through your teeth, and the silence that followed was unbearably weighted.

Presented with two options – get out or make room – Carol lost her shit (as seems to be her standard operating procedure.)

“— you fucking psycho! You’re gonna feel so bad for me when I get fucking murdered on some backroad—” she snarled, and then, like fate, the Harrington wagon whipped past, and in half a second, Tommy Hagan and Steve Harrington were there to bear witness to the first step to something Eddie can only hope for – that you would once again choose to swap your shitty friends for someone like him (not just someone like him, but him exactly).

He supposes you’re both going to hear all about it as soon as you break the vacuum seal of this car.

He is hit then with the sudden and desperate urge to beg you not to do it – maybe you don’t have to go to school today. Maybe you can just drive somewhere and keep talking and laughing and never let this moment end and forget the law of the land and which sides you both stand on.

Maybe you can just stay together like this forever.

Awful lot of maybes for a ten minute drive to school.

The rush of cold morning air is sobering in the worst way when Eddie pops his door handle and steps up out of your car and the perfect little biosphere of your aura.

You appear on the other side a moment later and shield your eyes against the sun.

“You want me to distract her so you can make a run for it?” he asks.

The corner of your mouth twitches in a humorless smile.

“Funny, I was about to ask you the same thing,”

He can already hear the beginning rattle of Carol’s tirade like poison daggers hurled at his back – undoubtedly meant for you. He might have done something to try and shield you from that, but he’s still loopy from the giddiness of everything that just happened in the car, so he snorts out a burst of laughter.

He’s still smiling stupidly when Carol arrives.

“What, is this just gonna be a thing now?” she says, “You’re suddenly a packaged deal?”

“Nice to see you too, Carol—” Eddie tries, mustering as much sleazy charm as he can manage.

“Shut up.” she snaps like a slap to the face, coming to a short stop at his side, “Are you coming tonight or what?”

Of all the questions someone like Carol has ever posed to someone like him, this one leaves him a little more than dumbfounded.

“ Come again?”

Carol’s features pinch with the prelude of a rage she quickly swallows.

“To the party, Dipshit.” She drawls.

Eddie looks to you, for assistance as much as in expectation of the same kind of droll, sarcastic response you’ve been giving all morning, and is almost shocked to watch when the color drains from your face instead.

He wants to laugh about it, he wants you to put him at ease by doing just such a thing, but with the low autumn sun reflecting the faded color of your car into your face, you suddenly look like you’re going to be sick, and Eddie can only respond in kind.

“What party?” He asks slowly, feeling the corners of his mouth begin to tremble with the prelude to some terrible revelation like he is about to realize this has all been some hideously mean joke.

“Nothing,” you say quickly, “Don’t worry about it,”

But he is. He’s violently worried about whatever it is he’s missing out on here, and it’s twisting him up bad enough to move him toward panic.

Eddie hates that Carol is the one to voice those exact concerns.

“What do you mean don’t worry about it?” She snarls, “We talked about this—”

“Carol—” you warn, slipping back into that dark and dangerous look you’d adopted the afternoon before, “Shut the fuck up.”

Her eyes go wide and she recoils – actually recoils – like you’d reached out with the words and slapped her across the face. Eddie wonders when you last spoke to her so directly, if ever, and the air begins to bubble with the impending row.

He has half a mind to excuse himself because in the wake of the ongoing conversation, he suddenly doesn’t feel so steady on his feet, but Eddie can’t resist the sense of duty he is saddled with to stick close by, in case you need him to pull you out of the fire.

“Did you even ask him?” Carol demands.

You set your jaw and breathe out hard through your nose, gaze flitting briefly over from where you are busy boring holes into your so-called best friend to regard Eddie with a strange, guilty look.

“Can we talk about this later?” You ask, and he doesn’t know why, but it hits him like a fist to the gut.

The first inkling of wretched rejection lays prickly fingers at the nape of his neck, and despite the roots he puts down, that sick sense of vertigo intensifies.

“You didn’t, did you?” Carol says.

When you remain silent she rolls her eyes and grinds out an aggravated snarl.

“Jesus Christ, I have to do everything around here.” She says, then turns over to regard him with a droll, uninterested look, and Eddie’s mouth goes dry, “She's having a party tonight, and she was supposed to invite you, but I guess she chickened out — anyway, you should be there,”

Hurt feelings are blood in the water to someone like Carol Perkins, and Eddie does his best to swallow them down as he struggles to pull his armor into place. He tells himself doesn’t care. He doesn’t care that you’re having a party and didn’t invite him, and he doesn’t care what that suggests.

“...Why should I be there?” He asks, trying his best to mimic Carol’s apathetic tone and feeling his voice quaver.

He doesn’t care. Really he doesn’t, so why does it hurt so bad to think you don’t want him around with all your other friends?

Overlooking the obvious reasons – your friends are terrible, he has no interest in socializing with them, they have no interest in socializing with him – he suddenly can’t stop his head from spinning with a hundred different ugly little suggestions.

“God, you’re really that stupid, aren’t you? You’ve been trying to get into her pants, right? That’s what this whole thing is about? So bring your stash tonight and see what happens,” Carol shrugs, “Who knows, maybe you’ll get lucky.”

The silence that follows is shockingly loud and Eddie feels it screaming in his ears, telling him that this is the other shoe dropping, this is what it’s been all about – all of it.

You’ve just been using him to pass the time while your friends are away, the minute they come back you’ll drop him – Stacey’s friends are back and their mean, cackling laughter is so loud, it draws everyone’s attention. Everyone is turning to stare, everyone is watching the Freak get his heart broken.

“We’re just friends…” he says flatly, trying not to look at you as he does and cringing under how hideously false it sounds.

It’s easier to lean on the lie and make it feel like truth in moments so vulnerable as this. He wishes you would say something, and yet he’s not sure he could stand to hear whatever it is you might have to say, because what if you agree?

After everything you’ve been through in the last few weeks, over the last half hour? He’s not sure he could endure that, it might break him.

Carol just rolls her eyes.

“So, what? You’ve never heard of friends with benefits?” She says, “And if you’re her friend, then you’re my friend too, and if we’re all gonna be friends now, I don’t see why we all shouldn’t benefit,”

She’s said the word too many times and it’s been whittled down to a blade that stabs Eddie in the chest with every violent utterance.

“What is your problem?” You demand a thousand miles away and to Eddie’s immediate left.

He doesn’t know when you came around to his side of the car, but suddenly you’re standing next to him, and he is busy grappling with the powerful urge to step away from you if only to try and protect himself.

Carol ignores you and holds him trapped in her gaze like a snake hypnotizing its prey.

“You come to the party and bring weed,” She says, “She’ll open those little legs for you, and at the end of the night, everybody will be happy. What’s the problem here?”

“Carol!” You cry, but with such a hideous truth hanging between you, it’s too little too late.

He’s never swung so hard from euphoria into unhappiness – it’s a violent startling sensation that leaves Eddie feeling like he’s swaying.

This is why he doesn’t let himself get his hopes up. This is why he stays in his own goddamn lane and minds his own goddamn business.

Eddie feels like he’s going to be sick.

I thought you said you loved me…

In the distance, the bell begins to ring and the parking lot steadily begins to empty. Carol gives you one last parting look before turning those viciously saccharine-sweet eyes on him, and Eddie feels something inside of him crumble.

“Bye Eddie, see you tonight,” She calls in a malicious sing-song, skipping away.

You linger where she leaves you, watching her disappear into the steadily thinning crowd.

For a long time, neither of you speak. The air feels very thin, and suddenly Eddie can’t catch his breath. Something deeply recessed in him urges him to run. Something small and vulnerable, familiar as childhood and in desperate need of protection, something he’s suddenly so sorry he ever considered offering to you.

“...Eddie, I’m so sorry.” You begin, “That was… I don’t know what that was–”

“You talked about it, huh?”

“No! No, not like that …” You insist, and then you pull a guilty face and drop your eyes to your sneakers, “I mean, technically we did. She brought it up, but it wasn’t like that, I swear. I don’t even want to have this stupid party.”

He’s heard enough. Never mind that his feelings are hurt you didn’t invite him in the first place, but to find out everything has been hurtling toward the inevitable way it always plays out? A sleazy hand on his thigh, bashful batting eyelashes, and a loaded confession of “...I don’t have any cash on me,”

Eddie Munson is easy. Eddie Munson trades weed for head.

No need to stand on ceremony and take the whole beating if he doesn’t have to. Eddie turns on stiff legs and starts back across the parking lot, headed for the safety of the trees and leaving you standing there as the late bell brings to chime.

“Eddie, don’t go–” You call, and he flexes his fingers against the buzzing static suddenly burning in his palms – his vision blurs and his chest fills with something black and angry, “I’m sorry!”

He doesn’t care, and he spends the rest of the morning in misery.

For lack of anywhere else to go – and because he refuses to slink home with tears on his lashes and his tail between his legs after the way he left, just to have Wayne utter the dreaded curse of “told you so,” – Eddie hoofs it out to where he left the van parked on the shoulder the afternoon before.

He shuts himself up in the back and lays curled on his side in the dark, counting down from a thousand and doing everything in his power not to think about how perfectly wonderful the morning had been until it wasn’t, and how perfectly wretched everything is now. It hurts so badly he can barely breathe, and he hates hates hates just so he doesn’t have to feel that hurt.

Eddie hates how tightly around your finger he’d let himself get coiled, he hates how vulnerable that’s left him feeling, and he hates how stupid he was – what was he thinking giving his heart over like that?

He should know better, but this time was supposed to be different.

That’s how it always works, though, isn’t it? The world lulls him into a false sense of security, and just when he’s let his walls drop, just when he deludes himself into thinking he’s finally getting something made special for him, it pulls the rug out and he cracks his head open on the pavement. He doesn’t know why he’s still so surprised every time it happens, except that you were supposed to be different.

Everyone told him you were different.

You weren’t supposed to hurt him like that, and yet he knew you had the capacity for it. He knew he needed to proceed with caution (isn’t that exactly what Wayne told him that night after he got home from the Hideout, brimming with butterflies and positively glowing in the aftermath of you?) – and still he let you do it anyway.

Eddie thumps his head against the floor of the van hard enough to send a burst of dull muted color flashing across his eyes, and when it still doesn’t banish the image of you from his mind, he does it again, and again, and again.

Stupid stupid stupid stupid…

He allows himself to wallow in that patent despair until the steadily rising sun makes it too hot to remain closed up any longer. And even then, all he does is shrug out of his jacket and resume his miserable solitude with his head in his hands.

Back to his regularly scheduled programming, whatever that means. He’s not going to that party, that’s for sure, and the next few weeks are going to be miserable because of it.

He’s going to have to avoid you and all your shitty little friends, and he’s also going to have to endure all the whispering and staring and snickering behind his back, ramped up to eleven because he dared to rise above his station and court somebody so hopelessly out of his league.

Worse of all is how he’s going to have to avoid his friends, who are all going to want to know with wide-eyed horror how this could have happened? How could it not? And why is everyone acting so surprised that it did?

It’s not like that, I swear, your voice pipes up from somewhere in the back of his mind, somewhere he’s going to have a very hard time extracting you from, I’m sorry! You call, I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry–

And despite his best efforts, Eddie believes you. Everything that happened this morning, the week before at the Hideout, and the week earlier at the picnic table not so far from here – all of that matters. He can’t discount that, no matter how hard he tries to shield himself from the hurt it makes him feel now.

People don’t just look at each other the way you look at him when it doesn’t matter, they don’t say each other’s names the way you say his or perform act upon endless act of necessary kindness as a means to justify a sticky little end. He has to believe it matters, and after everything you’ve done for him, he has to at least give you the benefit of the doubt, even if at the end of the day he’s reading the room wrong, and you only want to be his friend.

Somehow, the notion hurts worse than the idea that you’ve only been paying attention to him to hook your friends up with free weed, which he tells himself you’re not. That would be too outlandishly cruel, and even despite that nagging little call, begging him to defend himself from such a hideous possibility, Eddie has to believe you want to be his friend.

“Fuck!” he grinds out, scrubbing his hands over his face until his skin begins to burn, “God dammit,”

He doesn’t want to be your friend. He wants so badly to matter more to you than that, but Eddie never gets the things he wants, so he decides that he can swallow his pride and be your friend, even if it makes him miserable.

He’ll put himself on the back burner if that’s what it takes to be near you, and he’ll go to your stupid party tonight, even if he’s not actually invited.

——————————————————————————————————

When you told him his place was on your way to school, he didn’t expressly believe you, but Eddie never imagined you’d be coming all the way down from the top of Cornwallis and doubling back again just to pick him up. Awful long way to commute for just a hookup.

He’s busy trying to calculate how much gas money he owes you as he hops down from the van – back in action, two hundred dollars and a full afternoon spent under the hood later – and slams the door, stuffing a plastic bag of substance into his back pocket.

It’s a meager haul, he didn’t have time to hit up Rick on top of everything else he had to do just to work himself up to coming here tonight, but Eddie figures it’s not going to kill these assholes to share.

Anyway, he’s not here for them. He’s here, because he’s taking a chance that it’s worth trusting you, and trusting himself that it will in fact be worth his while to step out of his comfort zone.

Only this is very far out of that little green zone.

Eddie hates parties.

Your house is what would typically be an unassuming home built in the tract style of the 60s and 70s, similar enough to the one across the street to be from the same catalog, if not nearly identical. Tonight, however, it is a beacon of activity you can sense a mile away.

Eddie imagines it must look worlds different when it isn’t teeming with wildlife and thrumming with the base and drumline of the overloud music playing within.

As he crosses your front lawn, he tries not to get caught imagining the alternate universe where he’s coming to your house for the first time under entirely different circumstances — dinner with your parents.

He brings flowers and wears nice clothes and does all the right things to make that good impression which has always eluded him. In spite of the odds stacked against him, at the end of the night your father shakes his hand and your mother tells him he simply must come back for Christmas, and you walk him out to the van, wrapped in a conspiratorial huddle as you tell him how well he did, how your father doesn’t approve of anyone, and how he just got finished telling you what a fine young man he is.

It’s an outlandish flight of fancy, sure, but it’s all he’s got to bolster him as two meatheads come spilling out of your front door and down your steps, entangled in the throes of testosterone and budding alcoholism.

Eddie steps over them and pays no mind to the couple busy playing tonsil hockey on your front porch as he slips through the front door and into the house. Your house. Not the way he wants to be seeing it for the first time, but beggars can’t be choosers.

He’s barely over the threshold and already his skin has begun to buzz – this better be worth it, because he’s missing Hellfire Club for this, and Keith already tore him a new asshole for daring to bow out of the session. Eddie knows he can’t kick him out of the club for missing one game, but the consequences will be dire.

He’ll probably kill his character off in some deeply insignificant way and make him spectate through the rest of the campaign, and Eddie will sit there and take that disrespect because there are more important things happening tonight than fighting the Thessalhydra.

D&D will still be there for him next week, but if he doesn’t play his cards right tonight, you may not be, and that’s not a chance he’s willing to take.

Eddie makes his way through the party, through the violent, seething throng of co-eds actively making bad decisions, and tries to take in the place through the haze of teenage mayhem.

He wants to say your house is nice, but who could honestly tell through all the mess? He wonders idly who among this group of maniacs is going to have the presence of mind to stay after and help you clean this up, but the thought is quickly forced out of his head by wave after overstimulating wave of noise.

He can hardly think for how loud it is.

In an attempt to get his bearings, Eddie makes his way to the kitchen, which he learned very early on during nights and weekends like this, is always a good place to center oneself amid such chaos.

The kitchen is typically the center of a home and a safe space at a house party because it’s where the losers tend to congregate – the people who don’t know how they got invited and have no idea what they’re doing here. For some odd reason, Eddie hopes it's where you'll be too.

If he's lucky, maybe he can coax you out into a quieter space to try and smooth things over before he has to have any of your terrible friends inflicted upon him.

Color him wildly disappointed then to find Tina and Carol, standing over an electric red bowl of something into which they’re upending bottles of vodka and gin.

Jesus Christ, Eddie manages to make himself think with no small amount of effort (because the kitchen has provided no respite to the noise) They’re gonna kill somebody.

He is halfway through making a mental note to warn you to steer clear of the witch's brew of instant inebriation, wherever you may be, when your friends finally notice him.

“Omigod hi!” Carol screeches, too loud and over-friendly to be sober, it puts him immediately on edge, “I didn’t think you were coming after that stunning little tantrum you threw earlier.”

“Well, what did you expect?” Tina starts, leering at him and sending a shock of chills crawling up Eddie’s spine, “When stray dogs get a whiff of good pussy, they come running,”

It’s not the most intricately crafted insult he’s ever heard, though Eddie imagines that has something to do with the booze.

Still, his insides heave when the pair erupt into a fit of mean, tittering laughter. He breathes a deeply agitated sigh and waits for them to stop. He’s not going to leave, no matter how badly he wants to, because he’s here to make things right.

That’s all that matters to him.

When he doesn’t react, the humor very quickly goes out of them, and Carol sticks him to the spot with daggers in her eyes.

“Well? Did you bring your shit or what?” she slurs.

Or what is a good question, but Eddie’s long since learned that it’s better if he keeps his mouth shut in situations like this. Wordlessly, he reaches into his back pocket and produces the bag of contraband, and both girls react with immediate disappointment.

“That’s it?” Carol says, snatching the bag from his hand.

“It’s not like you gave me a lot of notice,” Eddie presses. “You’re lucky I even had that,”

Carol makes a phlegmy sound of disgust in the hollow of her throat and rolls her eyes. Then, Tina produces a crisp twenty-dollar bill and snaps it at him, like he should be wildly impressed by such an amount.

Never mind that what he just handed over is easily worth double that, he’s not going to argue — he can always count on getting robbed blind at these functions — now, he just wants to see you.

Eddie swallows any dirty feelings attempting to rise in him over what the transaction suggests – he brings weed and you get laid – and crumples the bill in his fist, focusing on the way it folds as he dares to ask where you are.

“Whatever – she’s probably in her room sulking,” Carol says with a dismissive gesture, saying something under her breath that sounds a little too close to “fucking loser” as she turns her attention back to the electric red caldron bubbling over with poison and the promise of bad decisions.

He can't tell if she's talking about him or you.

“Which one is her room?” Eddie asks, and Tina’s eyes flash with malignant glee.

“And wouldn’t you just love to know?” she says, grinning, and he doesn’t know why it feels like being lied to.

It’s not as if either of them were ever going to take him by the hand and lead him to you. In their eyes, he is only here for one reason, and now that the transaction is complete, he’s on his own.

He doesn’t know why he expected anything less.

As Eddie turns back toward the party and readies himself for what is promising to be an exhaustive search – the house is not that big, but good God if it isn’t filled beyond capacity – he gets stuck on the suggestion of faded lines etched into the door jamb.

Beside each tick in the wood, there are clearly written heights and age definitions by year. He can’t help but reach out and run a fond, reverent hand over the gentle care taken to keep track of your life and wishes someone would have thought to do the same for him.

“Why are you just standing there?” Tina snaps, “She’s waiting for you.”

Eddie fails to suppress a flinch as he takes his hand back. He gives her one last parting look, one which is met with sneering, smirking disdain, then steps down into the living room.

“Be gentle with her,” she calls as he starts back into the house, “It’s her first time!”

They erupt into more of that mean laughter, and Eddie has to bite the inside of his cheek until he tastes blood just to endure it.

Of course he’s heard that rumor, and talk of your inexperience has ramped up increasingly as people have begun to notice the pair of you dancing around each other, but he can’t help but think of how you would be mortified to know they’d just offered the secret to him. It was not theirs to tell.

Still, he takes hold of the knife of that last parting gift and carefully removes it from his back, tucking it away where it will remain safe with him, forever if need be.

It’s a lot of trial and error to finally happen upon the right door, and Eddie has the misfortune of walking in on not one, but two pairs of writhing bodies in various states of undress, going at each other like the world is ending – one in what he imagines is your parent's bedroom, and the other in the hall bath.

Sure, maybe he ought to have started with the door covered in plastic butterfly decals, but isn’t there a saying about judging books by their covers?

Anyway, how is he supposed to know which room is yours? He’s never been to your house before now, and the music is inordinately loud, too loud to think straight.

Usually, that’s not something that bothers him, usually he likes that, but Eddie doesn’t usually spend his Friday nights socked into a singular space with everybody who hates his guts, and it’s all come together to knock him woefully off kilter.

Then, as if the punctuate the thought, someone shouts something unintelligible and the room erupts into laughter – something about nerds or freaks or any of the other infinite hurled insults that batter Eddie daily, and he is reminded, once again, that he is missing Hellfire for this.

He knocks and presses his ear to the door to try and scan for any kind of life within, beneath the thrumming of the music – if somebody doesn’t turn the noise down, they’re going to blow the speakers.

“Go away!” Your voice comes shouting through layers of distance and solid core.

Bingo.

Normally, he might have done you the courtesy of heeding such a warning, but tonight he doesn’t dare.

All the things Eddie has to say to you are best not done through a wooden barrier, especially surrounded by so many intently listening ears, so he takes a chance – and a breath. He twists the knob and lets himself in.

The atmosphere in your room is instantly better than the rest of the house, and it is thankfully much quieter in here.

Like finally closing the lid on something, Eddie is relieved to find that he can finally hear himself think again as he shuts the door and braces his back against it.

You respond to the intrusion on your sanctuary by pushing up from where you’ve been lying on the bed with a pillow over your head and hurling it across the room

“This room is off —oh, Eddie!” you yelp, curling your lips inward and instantly losing steam the moment you clap your eyes on him.

The pillow strikes the wall beside him with middling force, and he watches it slide flaccidly to the floor.

“Hiya Sweetheart,” Eddie offers, forcing himself to try and sound casual as he says it, “Sorry I’m late,”

You don't respond, you just sit there staring back at him with wide-eyed wonder, and he is struck with a sudden bolt of unbearable shame for having ever doubted you.

He wants to tell you he missed you, but he swallows that intention because it's only been twelve hours, and he's not trying to look that pathetic in front of you, even if he still feels a little sore about the way you left things that morning.

Eddie clears his throat and reaches up to pull at his neck, making a show of looking around your room and trying to hide the rush of nerves he is suddenly feeling.

“So, this is where you’ve been hiding, huh?” He’s in your bedroom — oh, my God — he’s actually in your bedroom.

He is a visitor from Mars, taking his first look at the scenery of a brand-new world, and he’s not too shy to admit that it is thrilling.

It’s just as bad as it was back in your car, only dialed up to eleven, because this is the hub, the mothership, your den of secrets, and Eddie is desperate to take in as much of it as he can as quickly as possible, in case you really mean it and are about to kick him out.

Posters, pictures, books, stuffed animals, bed sheets, pillows, trinkets, clothes – you you you yOU YOU.

He has to make himself stop and breathe because if he keeps going like this, he’s in danger of keeling over right there on your bedroom floor. And wouldn’t that be the most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened to him?

In the distance, the party rages on, separated by layers of wood and plaster and paint, and Danny Elfman begins to wail “Oh I think you like it, like it, being told what to do…”

He can’t help but wonder who among that crowd would be so bold as to put on Oingo Boingo, and he almost says something about it, but when he notices how small and fragile you look, sitting there, tucked in among your pillows, the notion goes out of him.

He doesn’t want to tease you, but under the circumstances and the lingering miasma of his hurt feelings, he doesn’t know how else to interact with you.

“You know, I’ve been looking all over for you,” he starts slowly, venturing a step forward into your domain and watching you with careful, unblinking eyes as if you were a venomous snake, poised to bite.

“You have?” you gulp.

Eddie nods, moving closer.

“Yeah, weird move to invite someone to a party then disappear,” he says, then shrugs, “But what do I know? Maybe that’s what all the cool kids are doing these days.”

The attempt to stir something from you goes over like a lead balloon, and you remain where you are, watching him with wide, unblinking eyes.

“I can’t believe you’re here,” you say, and unlike Carol, you sound genuinely stunned about that.

Still, it puts the gentle fear of rejection in him and Eddie has to put down roots to keep himself from retreating a step.

“...should I not be?” He asks, and you surge forward.

“No! No, I’m so happy you’re here–” You start, scrambling toward the end of the bed as if you’re suddenly desperate to be near him before second-guessing the act. It sends another flurry of mixed feelings tearing through his body.

“ …I looked for you …” You say, dropping your eyes bashfully, “After school.”

Eddie makes a thoughtful sound and tries not to picture you sitting in the parking lot, long after it has emptied out, waiting for him to show up. Of course you would want to drive him home, even after the fight you’d had (if you could even call it that) because you’re just that nice.

He hates to have disappointed you like that, and it makes him feel all the worse about the way he reacted and all the nasty little thoughts he spent the day wallowing in.

Before he can even think to verbalize any of that, you explode.

“Eddie, I’m so sorry! All those things Carol said? I promise you, that’s not what I want out of this,”

“...out of what?” he asks after a moment of silence, because his feelings are still hurt and he can’t help but poke that bruise just a little.

“Out of this,” You stress, gesturing between you, “You and me. I wanna be your friend. I promise I’m not trying to use you for anything. I just want to be your friend,”

He feels the corner of his mouth twitch and contemplates how best to navigate the new waters of your relationship/friendship/whatever this thing is between you, especially now that he knows you’re a virgin. Frustratingly, it paints every one of your previous interactions in a new light, despite how he's been telling himself that it doesn't matter.

Eddie wishes that information could have made its way to him through you, just so that he could have been a little more cautious with his actions – his flirting – but he never gets the things he wants, he just rolls with the punches.

And the only way he knows how to roll with this situation is to poke fun at it.

“So, you mean you haven’t been waiting in here all night, consumed with lust and just dying to see if I’ll show up?”

Another swing and a miss.

It was supposed to make you laugh – a throwback to the good part of the morning – but all you do is sink forward to rest your head miserably in your hands. You make a terribly melancholy sound and your shoulders heave, and after a moment, Eddie realizes with a bright burst of panic that you are quietly trying not to cry.

Oh, shit.

It’s paralyzing in the worst way, and he feels instantly awful. He came here to make things right, and what does he do? Open his mouth and spit poison all over the room – that Munson Magic, funneled through his warped lens.

Eddie has to remind himself for the hundredth time since he decided to come tonight that he isn’t mad at you. He’s taking a chance that you were just as stunned by Carol’s behavior that morning as he was, and he’s sinking down on the end of your bed, exercising the utmost caution with every one of his glacial movements.

Your shoulders tremble with the effort of holding something in as you take a deep, watery breath and force it out through your fingers, and Eddie’s fingers twitch with the urge to put his hand on your back. He doesn’t dare, because with the lingering effects of the venom he hadn’t realized was still coursing through his veins, he’s afraid he doesn’t know how to be gentle with you.

A long and sticky silence blooms between you as you both wait for the other to speak – someone in the next room screams, the house erupts with muted laughter, and Oingo Boingo continues to push your speakers to their limit.

“… I’m sorry about the way I acted this morning,” Eddie finally says, taking yet another chance at being unflinchingly honest and quietly marveling at how brave he suddenly is, “I guess I got my hopes up for something, and got my feelings hurt, and instead of facing it I walked away. I do that… when the going gets tough, I get going … but I want you to know that I wish I’d stuck around…”

When he looks, you’ve sat up, and you’re blinking back at him with a look of utter horror.

“You’re sorry?” You yelp, eyes flooded with tears, “No, I’m the one who should be sorry! If I thought for one second something like that was going to happen…? I would’ve… I wouldn’t have… I don’t know. I would have done things differently.”

He pulls his shoulders up and can’t make himself tell you that the feeling is mutual. It would have been nice to have you stand up for him, but he understands what it’s like to be paralyzed by a moment, so he forgives you for that, even if he isn’t ready to verbalize it.

“I know,” he mutters, tracing a loose spiral into the rumpled fabric of your quilt.

“I’m so sorry, truly and deeply, from the depths of my soul. I’m sorry and I’m mortified, and I totally understand if you never want to see me again,”

Eddie sighs.

“Sweetheart, I wouldn’t be here if I felt that way,” he says, “I don’t make a habit of showing up for people I don’t want to see – I’ve usually got more self-respect than that…” Of course, that brings to mind all the times he’s done exactly that, and he feels himself pulling a face at the blatant contradiction, “…usually…”

Another one of those silences settles over you, and you sit together listening to the thrumming static of a sound system being pushed to its impending doom.

“Why are you being so nice to me?” You ask, looking miserable as you shift to pull your knees up and hug them to your chest.

He can hardly stand how small and sad you look – nothing like that should ever grace your features, and Eddie moves before he can stop himself, reaching out to pinch your cheek between his forefinger and thumb.

“’Cause you’re a freaky little weirdo with bad friends and I feel sorry for you,”

Funny how that’s the joke that finally lands.

You laugh, a soft, watery thing, which comes burbling out of you on a burst of breath as you jerk out of his touch. He is instantly lesser without the searing press of your flesh – even so innocently as that – but finally, Eddie feels some of the weight of the earlier day lift from his heart.

Even with the party raging on behind you, the atmosphere feels almost as good as it did that morning, with the pair of you socked into your car and losing your minds together.

Somehow, it makes everything that happened between then and now simultaneously worse and a little less significant, and Eddie is tired of thinking about it, so he puts the matter to bed.

“Look,” He starts, “Carol is a gaping asshole, alright? Everybody knows that, so let’s stop pretending this isn’t old news and move on with our goddamn lives. Let’s go back to the good part.” He’s moving again before he can stop himself and grips you by the shoulder, “We’re friends now, aren’t we?”

You nod, and he gives you a gentle shake for good measure – your secrets are safe with him. You’re important to him. You matter to him, and he hopes beyond desperate screaming hope that you feel the same.

“So, let’s just be friends,” Eddie says, and you surprise him by surging forward to throw your arms around his neck.

“Thank you,” you say into his jacket, hugging him tight, and he is woefully unprepared to accept such a sudden burst of affection.

He cannot be this starved for touch. He refuses to be that pathetic, and yet he’s fighting every screaming instinct he has to constrict you in his arms and bury his face in your hair, because Eddie doesn’t remember the last time someone hugged him.

He’d forgotten how good it feels to be held, to be wanted, and part of him isn’t sure he’s ever really known the feeling. It’s a frighteningly somber thought to have at a house party on a Friday night, and yet as you continue to hold him, his heart is suddenly in his throat and that insane urge to confess his feelings is sitting on his tongue like a hot burning coal.

The idea of opening his ribcage and giving you his heart is suddenly so tantalizing that Eddie can feel his resolve slipping – he doesn’t want to be your friend, he wants to matter to you, he wants it so bad sitting there on your bed wrapped up in your embrace, that he feels insane with it.

Thankfully before he goes doing anything too foolish, he can hear his uncle’s voice of reason warning him to “proceed with caution and leave room for Jesus” (the second part less serious than the first), so Eddie clears his throat and gives you a neighborly pat on the back, like something Wayne would have done.

It makes him feel stupid, he knows he should have just hugged you, but despite his best efforts, when you release him, he watches you rock back on your knees and feels you take his heart with you.

Just like this morning after you’d deigned to so charitably tie his shoelaces, Eddie is suddenly unbearably warm under all his denim and leather.

You scrub your hands across your face to try and banish any lingering wetness on your cheeks and offer him a weak smile, happily changing the subject as something immeasurably charged threatens to pass between you, and he shrugs out of his jacket as quickly and casually as he can, desperately hoping that you don’t notice if he’s blushing.

“How bad is it out there?” you ask, scrunching your features as if you’re afraid to ask.

Eddie sucks a breath in through his teeth and contemplates lying to you, just to spare you the hard truth – it’s a disaster, the house is a lost cause, there’s no hope in ever getting it clean again, you’re going to have to move.

“You’re gonna want to burn your parent’s sheets,” he says diplomatically, “Seriously.”

It takes you a moment to pick up what he’s putting down, but when you do, your eyes go wide and your shoulders drop.

Somebody is having sex in your parent’s bed (and in your hall bath, but that’s neither here nor there).

“Oh, my God—” you moan, “Who?”

He feels his face screw up as his subconscious unhelpfully drums up the image of the frenzied bunnyfucking he’d walked in on in your parents' bedroom, and he sucks his teeth.

“You know, I never quite mastered the art of identifying people by their bare asses…”

You scoff, but you’re clearly too pressed to see the humor in it – maybe in a few days, when the heat has died down. Then again, maybe in a few years when no one remembers they ever even went to a party up at your place.

Eddie will remember, if only because this moment and the press of your arms around his neck has been seared into the back of his mind, but nobody cares what the town Freak remembers, and there is a quiet comfort in that.

“You should also know that your speakers are this close to going the way of the dodo,” he says, jerking his thumb over his shoulder, “I mean, listen, I know you’re eclectic and all, but I’m guessing those are probably your Dad’s and if he’s anything like mine – which, for your sake, I hope to God he’s not – you’re gonna catch a whole lotta hell for killing a nice sound system like that with Oingo Boingo.”

Your lips quirk shyly.

“I can’t take credit for that,” you say, “It’s Jonathan Byers’s tape – he let me borrow it,”

Eddie can feel himself pulling a face, try as he might to remain neutral about the idea of you trading music with somebody else – with Jonathan Byers. And after that beautiful moment you had this morning?

Maybe he is reading the room wrong, and he’s just the next name on your roster as you make your charitable rounds with all the social misfits of Hawkins.

It’s a terrible feeling, one that wells up so suddenly that Eddie has to jump up from the end of your bed, just to try and get away from it and the image of you picking up Jonathan Byers for school and tying Jonathan Byers’s sneakers and laughing and playing and—

“Jonathan, huh…” he huffs, jealousy driving him three steps forward to knock haplessly into your dresser, where he immediately begins aimlessly picking up and putting down all the little trinkets he disturbed with such a frantic movement, “What’s that about?”

In the attached mirror, Eddie sees your shoulders jump innocently.

“Nothing. Sometimes we hang out,”

He plays at making a little porcelain horse canter across your dresser and tries not to feel the twinge of nausea those four words spike through his midsection.

Sometimes you hang out.

Boy Howdy, he sure hates hearing that, and he hopes to God he never comes up so casually in Jonathan’s presence.

“…and he just… gives you tapes?” he forces himself to say, not actually wanting to know what he’s really asking you.

This time, the subtext is not so murky that you don’t pick up on it.

“Yeah.” You say slowly, lips twitching, “So, what?”

Eddie pulls his shoulders up.

“So nothing, it’s just … if I’d known you were in the market for trade-sies, I woulda brought you something good to listen to… not this bizarro new wave shit.” He says, gesturing to the bowels of the house where Grey Matter is still inexplicably playing.

You narrow your eyes at him when he turns to face you.

“…Is that you being a vicious snob again, or are you seriously getting jealous right now?”

It’s a ridiculous notion, one which Eddie is offended to have thrust upon him.

“Me? Jealous? Not a chance,” He lies, like a lying liar, “Also, how dare you? I don’t get jealous,”

You bite your lip in a failed attempt to stifle the slow smile creeping up across your face, and for reasons he cannot explain, it makes him feel suddenly and painfully shy.

Okay, he’s jealous, so what? He’s jealous that you’re out here trading cassettes with someone else. Big deal. It’s not like he went out on a limb giving you that book or anything or that he imagined you were having a special moment when he was looking through all your music earlier.

It’s not like he’s so desperate for your approval and your attention that he came all the way out to this stupid party, even though he’s been suffering what felt very much like the prelude to heartbreak all afternoon.

It’s not like he’s missing Hellfire Club or that he spent the better part of an hour trying to get Garreth on the phone just so he could get your home address, and it’s not like he ransacked the emergency fund Wayne keeps to get the van working so he could be here, standing in your bedroom with you looking right through all his bullshit.

It’s not like he’s in love with you, or anything so mortifying as that. No, nothing like that at all.

“Quit lookin’ at me like that,” Eddie says, dropping his gaze in a desperate attempt at self-preservation – he immediately clocks the faintest suggestion of a teddy bear hidden beneath your bed, and his bloodstream fizzes with unbridled affection.

“Like what?” you ask softly and the sensation intensifies.

“Like you’re so smart and can read my thoughts.” Eddie hums, feeling hideously vulnerable as he snags a kinky lock of his hair and drags it across his face – hiding, “Anyway, what do I care about who you’re dating? Not my business – not my circus, not my monkeys,”

The next three seconds of silence are the longest anyone has ever experienced in the history of life on Earth, of that he is certain.

“…I’m not dating Jonathan Byers.”

When he finally musters the courage to drag his eyes up from the stuffed animal peering up at him from beneath your bed skirt, Eddie gives you a long, hard look and tries like hell to decide if he thinks there is a “but” coming swiftly down the line.

He waits and he looks at you, and you just keep looking right back at him until the standoff starts to feel something similar to “home free”.

“You’re not?” He finally asks.

The corners of your mouth begin to curl, and you continue to hold his gaze.

“No,” you say,

“Okay, good.”

“Why’s that good?”

“Don’t worry about that,” he says, flopping back down onto your bed with enough purposeful force to jostle you, “You lied to me, by the way.”

“When?” You ask.

“Yesterday, when you said my place was on your way to school.”

Your brows jump up toward your hairline and you adopt the guilty look of someone caught red-handed. You had said that, before you promised to come back and get him that morning – you said “it’s no trouble, I can swing by and get you – it’s on my way, any way,”, so who’s the lying liar now?

You take a deep breath in through your teeth, hold it, and force the words out on your exhale.

“Okay, so maybe it’s not exactly on the way…”

Eddie levels you with an unimpressed look.

“Sweetheart…”

It’s way out of the way – driving past and doubling back, adding fifteen minutes to your commute on top of how late he was already running out of the way.

Far enough out of the way that you can’t even pretend it isn’t.

Your lips curl sheepishly as you pull your shoulders up to your ears.

“I mean… can you blame mel?”

It makes him feel unbearably smug and paints the rose-tinted memories of that morning in a brand-new cherry-flavored haze.

Eddie’s heart thumps against his ribs and he hums thoughtfully, trying to play cool, despite feeling the exact opposite about how hard you campaigned just to come and get him this morning.

“So… I guess that means you kinda like me, huh?” He tries – you flush and quickly pull a pillow into your lap, averting your gaze.

“Who says?” you ask.

He could keep pushing it, if he were feeling mean. And he is, because he wants to see a little more of that pretty color bleed into your face, but doing that would mean putting himself further on the line than he already is, because what if you turn the question back on him?

No, he’s not that brave.

“You sure ask a lot of questions for a girl hiding out at her own party,” Eddie says, plucking at a string hanging from a seam in your comforter and trying with everything in his limited power not to get too hung up on the fact that he’s lying across your bed.

How many times has he imagined doing this in how many different ways? Even so platonically as this?

It’s just another one of those things that is oh-so-casual, suddenly second nature, like he’s been doing it every day of your lives.

First, he’s riding in your car and flipping through your cassettes, and now he’s in your room, lying on your bed, with his head propped up on one hand, and there you are, sitting close enough that he could reach out and touch you if he so dared – does he dare?

No, probably not. You’re not there yet, despite the hug and all the previous touching.

Somewhere to his left, he’s vaguely aware of hearing you groan in disgust.

“Please don’t call it that.” You say, heaving out an aggravated sigh and burying your face in your hands, “This is not my party,”

Eddie reaches down to snag the fluffy ear of your stuffed bear from where he can see it peeking out from under the bed.

He brings it back up for air and props it between you, half out of decency because he’s just realized that you’re wearing a skirt and he can see the faintest suggestion of your pink panties peeking back at him from where you’re sitting cross-legged.

“Go on, Sweetheart,” He says thickly, “Tell it to the bear.”

Self control, he tells himself, averting his eyes. Self preservation. Self destruction, as his eyes flit down to steal another peek, and when he gets home? Self care.

You shift forward to snatch the teddy up, unfolding your legs to stretch out demurely in front of you, and placing it reverently beside you in the pillows. Eddie is struck blind with a powerful sense of relief mixed with disappointment, and the faintest pang of jealousy, because that’s where he wants to be.

“It’s just not fair.”

Tell me about it. He thinks, trying not to frown at the bear from where it sits leaning against your hip and grinning back at him.

Bastard.

“They all decided they were allowed to come and hold me hostage in my own home just because my parents are out of town, and they can’t imagine not throwing one of these shitty house parties every week.” You say, “I don’t even know most of the people out there, and the ones I do don’t even like me. Nobody likes me, Eddie…”

He’s listening, he swears he is, but he’s also looking at your legs, stretched out and crossed so daintily alongside him. He traces a line in the comforter beside them because he’s not bold enough to do so along the expanse of your skin.

“Aww c’mon,” He says, “Somebody here likes you…”

The comment goes largely unnoticed, and the bear keeps grinning at his failed attempt at flirting with you.

Loser, it taunts.

You’re thankfully too distracted by the fires of your indignation to notice when Eddie drags it down by its foot and whips it back under the bed.

Stay down there, Fucker. He thinks as you continue, practically frothing at the mouth as you go, oblivious to all that is happening around you.

The genie is out of the bottle, and she is – evidently – fucking pissed.

“I don’t know why I even bothered. I told them I didn’t want them coming here, but nobody cares about what I want. This whole thing was some great big ploy to get Steve Harrington to come down from his throne but he’s not even here because he’s off playing pretend that he’s this nice guy so he can get into Nancy Wheeler’s pants and somehow that’s my fault, because everything is my fault, right? It’s my fault Steve didn’t come to this stupid party and it’s my fault that they’re all cannibalizing each other trying to get his attention. It’s so fucking pathetic.”

Of course it is, but the last thing Eddie expected from tonight was to receive such a titanic info dump on the current state of affairs of the inner circle, and it’s all he can do just to try and keep up.

“Hold on… who are we talking about – Carol or Tina?” Eddie asks, “Or Tommy?”

He needs to make sure he gets all the details right for when he tells the guys about this later – Adam is gonna love this, goddamn gossip hound that he is.

“Does it matter?” You deadpan, “They’re all the same – all they do is sit around fighting over whose turn it is to gargle Steve’s balls,”

Eddie’s brain lights up in a hundred different places with a hundred different images, most of which involve exactly what you just described (which he is trying not to picture). The rest involve you and himself recast in those leading roles and he feels his temperature steadily begin to increase.

“Wow.” he chokes and clears his throat in a futile attempt at banishing the image as he is unceremoniously reminded of the dream that had been so tragically cut short. Hop in and I’ll suck your cock– he has to shift to try and conceal the way all that thinking has started to affect him, “…You–uh– you really just said that.”

As the fires of your anger begin to dwindle and fade, the air of your tirade settles, and Eddie watches as you begin to realize everything you just said.

“...sorry, that was a lot.” You mumble, “I guess I’m upset,”

“You’re my goddamn hero is what you are — hey, you wanna do me a favor and go repeat all of that to the room? I’d love to see Carol’s head spin around.” Another swing and a miss, “So, all of that being said… let me ask you this – if you’re so miserable, why do you stay friends with them?”

“I mean… how would I even begin to make new friends? Who’s gonna wanna hang out with me after Carol’s finished with me.”

Eddie drums a muffled beat out over your comforter and after a moment of contemplative silence, volunteers himself for the task with a tantalizing wag of his fingers.

You huff out a watery sigh of laughter and shake your head, reaching out to crush his hand in your fist.

“You don’t count.” You say, and Eddie might have taken genuine offense to such a notion if he wasn’t so fixated on your sudden point of contact.

“Babygirl, I’m the only one who counts.” He presses, flexing his fingers to steeple them with yours.

Much to his patent dismay, you take your hand back, and he pushes up, folding his legs and sitting upright because what he has to say next has to be done with his chest.

“Hear me out, okay? Because this might sound a little crazy…” He starts, “What if you just … stopped hanging out with them?”

You glare back at him, but Eddie doesn’t really think your ire is meant for him.

“As if Carol’s gonna let me go quietly like that–”

“Fuck Carol–” He spits, he’s so sick of hearing about Carol fucking Perkins he could break something – he won’t, but he could, “You’re really gonna spend time sitting around thinking about her after all the shit she’s pulled? Just the shit she’s pulled today? Grow a little spine there, Sweetness, it’ll do you some good.”

“It’s not that easy—” You whine, and Eddie doubles down, rising up on his knees and snatching your desperate, flailing hands out of the air.

“Yes, it is,” He says, holding your wrists together, “It actually is.”

You heave a world-weary sigh that has no business coming off of you.

“Eddie–”

“What are you so scared of? She’s bad for you, Sweetheart – I know you know that. Cut her out before she kills you.”

You grind out a desperate sound and just like that, your head is in your hands again – you double over, leaning far into his space, and this time he’s powerless to stop from resting a hand on your back because he knows.

He knows life is hard enough with bad friends but with no friends…? He’s been there, and it’s a miserable existence he wouldn’t wish on anyone, especially not you, but he cannot stand by and watch you suffering at the hands of the worst people he knows. Not when there’s something that can be done about it.

Eddie might suggest that he’s got a whole group of friends who would be happy to have you (maybe) but things are starting to get a little too heavy for his liking.

The atmosphere is filling up and getting hard to breathe, so Eddie pivots and pulls your hands away from your face – because since you’re touching now, apparently he’s just going for it, every chance he gets.

Cool.

“Come on. Look at me.” He says gently, and slowly, you unfold yourself to meet his gaze, “How long have you been friends… ten years?”

You nod.

“And d’you really wanna waste another ten years feeling like that just because starting over is … is what? Scary?” Eddie doesn’t wait for you to answer, “Of course you don’t. Carol had her chance to be nice and fun, and she blew it, okay? She decided she’d rather be the wicked bitch of the mid-west, and now she can fuck off back to Oz, ‘cause — hey, look at me — I’m your best friend now, okay? I’m your best friend… and I’m gonna warn you now, Sweetheart, I’m not good at sharing.”

You give him a look, one that says ha-ha very funny, and Eddie almost takes genuine offense to it.

“It’s so funny how you think I’m kidding. Just wait, you’re gonna wake up tomorrow and it’s gonna say Property of Eddie Munson tattooed across your forehead,”

“Just make sure you spell it right this time,” you say, and this time, Eddie does not think that kind of irreverent undercutting is very funny.

“Gee, thanks,” he huffs, watching you settle back into your pillows, “I’m only tryin’ to save your life here.”

You giggle, but he can tell you’re not convinced, and it’s driving him a little crazier than he expected something like this might. Maybe that’s because it feels a little too much like he just asked you to choose him over Carol and you’re leaning steadily toward no.

“This is nuts,” Eddie says, shifting up to settle over you – he leans with one hand braced on the mattress over your hip and stares down at you, laying there nestled in among your pillows, “You’re really gonna make me beg?”

“I’m thinking about it,” you hum, and he feels that unpleasant skittery feeling threatening to return, so Eddie shifts away, preparing to vacate the spot on your bed, but you snag him before he can get very far.

“Alright, I’m just kidding… don’t go.” You say, taking a fist full of his shirt and holding him to the spot, “I’m done with Carol.”

He twists back to look at you, and when you don’t show any immediate signs of teasing, he shifts around to lean over you again, caging you in with both hands this time.

“For good?” he asks.

You nod.

“For good.”

“And you’re gonna come hang out with me instead, right?” Eddie stresses, “You’re gonna sit with me at lunch and trade tapes and books with me and not Jonathan Byers,”

“I knew it!” You gasp, pushing up into his chest and shoving him away – before he can protest, you slip off the side of your bed and plant yourself on the floor, “You are so goddamn jealous.”

“I’m just trying to make sure we’re on the same page here, Sweetheart.”

“No, you’re just trying to boss me around,” you huff, crossing your arms and sitting with your back to the mattress, tucked in between your bed and dresser with your knees pulled up.

And Eddie, unable to stomach such a separation, slides down to follow you.

He settles in beside you, hip to hip, and watches you with no small amount of amusement as you try to play mad at him.

“I told you I don’t like sharing.” Eddie says, nudging you with his shoulder, “Not with Carol, and not with Jonathan.”

You roll your eyes.

“...If you must know…?” you start, gaze sliding sideways as you wait for him to give you the expected follow-up.

“I must,”

“Those interactions begin and end with me babysitting his brother. Nothing more, nothing less.”

And isn’t that the tastiest little morsel of forbidden knowledge he’s ever had the pleasure of learning? Eddie knows he’s grinning at you, and he’s trying not to leer, but holy wow.

“You’re a babysitter?” He gasps, trying not to make it sound too sleazy as he stretches the word and holds it in his teeth. “Cool. Tell me everything.”

It makes sense in a wet-dream fantasy sort of way, like the version of you leaning out of the car and licking your lips on the other side of his raunchy little REM cycle.

You give him another one of those looks, and it opens up a path of clairvoyance between you. Eddie’s not blind to what other guys would say – what kind of fantasies that knowledge would set minds belonging to the likes of Tommy Hagan and his cadre of meatheads to spinning.

And he knows what you’re going to say – you’re getting ready to head him off at the pass. To assure him that it’s not nearly as sexy and glamorous as what trashy teenage slashers would lead him to believe, and Eddie would remind you that he’s not, and never has been, like the other guys – the seven seconds in heaven he just spent looking up your skirt not-withstanding.

“There’s nothing to tell,” you say. “It pays the bills,”

Eddie scoffs, trying and failing not to stack up the world of difference between your home and his. He bets your place is nice, when it’s not full of screaming hormonal assholes, a lot nicer than a rusty doublewide on the wrong side of town.

“What bills have you got living in a nice place like this, huh?”

You’re not rich, by any stretch of the word – Eddie can tell that just based on the car you drive and your Crate & Barrel catalogue of a living room – but you’re not struggling either. He doesn’t imagine your parents spending much time deciding whether it’s better to shop for groceries or pay that month's power bill, and you seem to know that as you twist over and give him a strange, pensive look.

“See that box over there?”

You turn his direction to a circular blue tin sitting on the far end of your dresser, tucked in between a music box and – Eddie is immensely pleased to see – his tattered copy of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

Even from here, he can see that there is already a bookmark tucked into its pages, and it makes him feel unbearably smug to have been right about that – he knows what you like.

Eddie lifts up and uses the motion as an excuse to put a cheeky hand on your knee, reaching over to fetch it for you and watching keenly as he settles back in against you.

Visions of loose sewing supplies dance in his head as you pop the lid, and you reveal a treasure of rolled, stacked, and waded-up bills, crammed into every nook and cranny of the Royal Danish cookie tin.

Money. A whole lotta money.

“Ho’mama!” He says, immediately reaching over to take his very own fistful of dollars, “— what’d you do, rob a bank?”

Eddie opens his hand and lets all the presidents rain back into their little tin hideaway, and you make a harsh sound in the back of your throat.

“More like stash every dollar I’ve made since I was thirteen.” you say matter of factly, “This is my George Bailey fund,”

It's startling to hear that name come tumbling out of your mouth, like the clanging of a bell. It sends him catapulting back into a sepia-toned memory, standing on a chair to peer into the top drawer of his mother’s dresser, and hearing her tell him the same thing about her own meager stash of bills, much smaller than yours.

“Someday,” she’d said, pulling him close – distantly, Eddie can still feel the vibrations of her gentle Tenessee drawl, moving through his body as she spoke the same words then that come slipping through your lips now.

“… I’m gettin’ out of this crummy town and I’m gonna see the world,” you say, affecting your best transatlantic accent, putting in all the right inflections at the right places and blowing Eddie’s brains clear out of his skull.

They’re plastered all over your bed and the back wall, that ooey-gooey grey matter, of that he is certain because you’re shrinking further and further into yourself with every moment of silence that passes between you.

What are the odds that you would have the same thought, the same intention – he is only vaguely aware of the look he must be giving you, if only because of how you grow suddenly sheepish under it.

“…Jimmy Stewart?” You try, “It’s a Wonderful Life?”

Eddie blinks hard to try and disperse the haze of his two lives colliding with such a violent cacophony, and when it lingers, he shakes his head – he knows. Of course he knows, how many times has he watched that movie with and without his mother? Enough to know that he’d throw a lasso around the moon for you if you asked.

He’d pull it down so you could swallow it, and the moonbeams would shoot out of your fingers and toes, and the ends of your hair. Even if not that, he’s seen it certainly enough times not to have to have the concept of George Bailey and Bedford Falls explained to him.

“No,” He says too late, “I mean – yes. Yeah, I’ve seen the movie, I’ve just…” he doesn’t know what to say, he’s literally speechless, so he takes a page out of your book and cuts that vulnerability off at the knees before it can settle, “…I’ve never seen such a terrible impression,”

You snort, and the money disappears as you slap the cover of the tin back into place.

“That’s mean.” You say, setting your life savings on the floor beside you.

Eddie crosses his arms over his knees and after a breath of sullen silence, shifts over to lean against you.

“You started it,”

For a long moment, neither of you speaks as the atmosphere grows once again heavy and super-charged with that high Eddie’s been chasing since the morning.

You reach out to trace the burnished ridges of his rings, and before he realizes what’s happening, you tentatively lace your fingers with his.

He holds his breath and lets you take his hand, still sitting so close to you, and a pensive silence falls over the room. You sit side by side, holding hands, and Eddie wonders if he could have even imagined something like this happening this morning when he slid into your passenger seat, so blissfully happy that you’d deigned to stoop so low to even tie his shoes.

And now you’re holding his hand.

The music is still playing in the other room loud enough to rattle the walls of your bedroom with each thrum of the bass, but neither of you seems to notice anymore.

It might as well have been your own individual heartbeats for all you know.

“Eddie…?” you say thickly.

“Hmm,”

“…Can I ask you something?”

He can feel you looking at him, and when he turns, your eyes flit down to his lips.

Oh boy.

Behind his teeth, his tongue grows restless, and he can’t stop it from darting out to swipe across his lower lip. He watches the faintest tinge of a blush spread across your cheeks as he does it and sees just how hard you have to work to drag your eyes back up.

You like him. He doesn’t know why he keeps convincing himself that you don’t when you’re sitting here like this staring at him like that.

Eddie nods, and you get caught on a shallow, stuttering breath as you try to inhale.

“Promise you won’t laugh?” you ask.

“I won’t.”

Your brows come together over your eyes, and you suddenly look so sincere, he can’t help but feel a pang of violent remorse for every time he’s ever even thought about teasing you.

“You have to promise.”

“I promise.” Eddie makes the sign of an x across the left side of his chest. “Hope to die.”

You breathe out, long and slow, and flex your jaw as you hold him in your gaze.

“I don’t want you to die, I just wanted to know if…” you trail off, take a deep breath, “Would you kiss me?”

It hits him like a brick to the face and for half a second, Eddie forgets how to breathe. He swallows hard against the way his throat has gone so suddenly dry and feels his life flashing before his eyes rather than really seeing it. He’s too blind to see it – his vision has gone spotty with a headrush, and it takes every single ounce of his self-control not to sway under the force of it.

“You want…” he starts, and finds that when his voice fails him, he has to start again, “You want me to kiss you?”

You nod.

Oh.

That’s what he was hoping you’d say, but Eddie spends a lot of time hoping for a lot of things that never end up happening, so it’s not what he expected you to say. And despite all the time he’s spent sitting around fantasizing about this exact moment – about the way you’d bat your lashes and lick your lips before giving him a soft, slow smile – he doesn’t know what to say.

His functionality for speech has abandoned him entirely, so he just hums out this weird, pensive noise that is caught halfway between a giddy laugh and a desperately wanting whine.

For half a blinding second, he’s afraid it’s going to scare you off – because what the fuck was that?! – but your brows come down, and your lips twist up, and the next thing he knows, you’re laughing.

He’s laughing too. Because you want him to kiss you.

You haven’t even been Amigos Oficial for twelve hours and here you are blowing past those barriers at the speed of light.

Life is so wonderful and weird sometimes.

You want him to kiss you. You, want him. Genuinely and truly.

Eddie’s mind is clawing at the planes of his skull, screaming desperately for release, and his heart…? Well, that fucker’s stopped beating all together. It’s dead on arrival.

You’re suddenly so close, closer than you’ve been all day, closer enough that he’s suffocating in the sweet, cloying scent of your perfume and your shampoo and your skin.

You smell so good that it kickstarts his salivary glands, and he has to swallow down the sudden excess of spit in his mouth.

“Eddie…?”

“Okay.” he says unevenly, “I mean — yes. I’ll… I’ll kiss you … uh…” he clears his throat, “When?”

You suck in a sharp breath and hold it and pull your shoulders up to your ears as you scrunch your features in that specific little way Eddie so desperately loves.

“I’m free now?” you offer, and – CLEAR – Eddie’s heart leaps back to life, bruising itself on his ribs and punching a breath out of him.

It’s violent, and it hurts a little in all the best ways, and it takes him a moment to learn how to work his brain again.

“Oh – right – um … o-okay.” He says.

And then, he watches something indiscernible flash across your eyes in the wake of such a hesitation and you immediately begin to backpedal.

“I’m sorry, you don’t have to,” You say quickly, and isn’t that the worst thing anyone has ever said? “If that was totally off base…? If you don’t want to–”

“No! No, I do – I want to.”

“Do you?” you ask, so painfully hopeful it makes his insides throb with an unabashed wanting he is powerless to ignore.

“Yeah… actually… I really do.” He says, growing shy again and swallowing it for his own sake, “…been thinkin about it for a while now.”

“Oh – you have, have you?” You giggle, grinning as you tilt your head sideways to press your shoulder to your ear. “...okay, good.”

Eddie shifts further into your space and braces a hand on the floor at your hip.

“Great.”

Your gaze flits down, and you bite your lower lip to try and get control of the smile that is steadily growing wider and threatening to split your face in half. Like always, you fail miserably, and nose to nose, you can’t stop yourself from looking. Eyes up, then down again.

“Excellent.” You purr.

Eddie takes your face in hand and watches your eyes flutter shut as he tilts forward. He can feel your breath fanning his face in gentle, anxious puffs, and he savors this moment. The anticipation of the next step – the deep breath before the plunge.

“Fan-tastic,” he whispers, gently knocking foreheads with you and breathing in your sigh as the tension reaches a boiling point.

For over a year, this is all he’s wanted, all he’s thought about, and now that it’s here, he’s almost afraid to go forward with it. Not because he’s worried it won’t be everything he’s imagined and more, but only because, somehow, Eddie knows once he does this, there’s no going back.

There is a tangible fear that comes with that, despite the urgency he feels, imploring him to hurry up and kiss you already. He wants nothing more than to do exactly that, but he can’t help but linger in these final moments before his life changes forever.

He wants you to look at him when he does it, and bear witness to that change because after you, he’s never going to be the same again. He hopes you like the person you make out of him because people have been careless enough to mold him before and they haven’t always liked the results.

Eddie thumbs the hollow beneath your eye, as if to banish an imaginary teardrop, and gently nudges your head back. He watches you, and he waits, hearing the way your breathing hitches as your lips part. After a moment, your eyes flit open curiously, bathing him in the warm glow of your attention, and only then is he ready to kiss you.

BOOM.

Your bedroom door bangs loudly against the wall as it comes flying open, and Eddie has never been on his feet faster.

Shot full of adrenaline, his fingers twitch at his sides in anticipation of being told to “put his hands up”. But instead of the cops and your parents and a whole host of other authority figures ready to crucify him for deigning to drag you down to his depths, it’s just Carol standing there, leaning against your doorway, looking far too pleased and much more sober than she was the last time he saw her.

“Hands to yourselves, Perverts,” She drawls, “There are underaged people in the audience.”

Eddie’s got no idea what the hell that is supposed to mean, he only knows that if he doesn’t manage to regulate his heartbeat, he’s actually going to keel over and pass out.

And then, a high, squeaky voice cries your name, and suddenly you’re shouting right back.

“—Dustin!” You squawk, twisting around to peer across your bed at the smaller body that has appeared in your doorway, “What are you doing here?!”

The boy, who cannot be any older than twelve, has no front teeth and stands there furiously lisping back at you.

“What are you doing?!” he fires back, “What the hell is going on here? And who the hell is that?”

You ignore all three of his high-pitched questions in favor of one of your own.

“How many times have I told you – you have to knock!” you stress, and Eddie is half convinced that no one has ever spoken with such authority, even he feels chagrined about it.

Sometime, in the last few minutes, the party ended with a fizzle, rather than a bang, but neither of you has seemed to notice this with everything else currently going on.

“Yeah Kiddo, you almost got an eyeful of something you could never unsee,” Carol stresses, leering across the room at Eddie, who suddenly has no idea what to do with his hands.

“Is that your little brother?” He asks.

It feels like a stupid question to be asking, considering he’s fairly sure you don’t have any siblings, but then again, what does he know except that he's panicking and he doesn’t think he’s ever been so embarrassed in his life.

“No,” You huff, “That’s just the kid I babysit.”

“Just?!” the kid – Dustin, evidently – shouts.

Eddie looks at you, then at him, then back at you, and while he’s no expert on people’s younger siblings, he’s fairly certain he’s missing something.

“I thought you said you babysat Jonathan’s brother.” He says, offering you his hand as you begin to stand.

“I do,” you huff, putting your fingers in his and letting him pull you up, “But mostly I babysit this little shit.”

“LITTLE SHIT?!” He’s gone so red he’s almost purple now. “That’s it, this is over – right now!”

He turns on his heel and storms back into the hall.

“Dustin—” you call, to no avail.

“Right! Now!” He reiterates and disappears into the house.

“What’s that mean?” Eddie asks.

Beside him, you breathe out hard through your nose and your shoulders drop.

“He’s gonna tell on me.”

It’s almost funny, in a wholly bizarre, completely bewildering sort of way.

If either of you were paying better attention to the rest of the house, and the sudden and conspicuous lack of music, or overall chatter, you might have noticed that something is suddenly very different about the front room.

“Oh, by the way,” Carol starts once the kid is gone, eyeing her manicure and still looking far too much like a cat in cream for Eddie’s comfort, “You should know, somebody called the cops.”

“What?!” You yelp.

“Yeah, I don’t know – something about somebody bringing drugs? You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you, Eddie?” she purrs, and behind her, he gets the first glimpse of flashing red and blue lights, painting the room through your front windows. “Anyway, they’re looking for you.”

His stomach bottoms out, and just like that, there goes the other shoe. That’s what this was all about, the real reason Carol wanted him here so badly tonight.

He doesn’t know if she called them or if it was one of your neighbors, but here is the Hawkins PD, coming to break up a party and cart him off to jail if he doesn’t get out of here right now.

Before he can even begin to form a plan of escape, you seize Eddie by the front of his shirt and drag him around to your bedroom window. “You have to go!”

“Oh, brother,” Carol sighs, “What kind of chivalrous bullshit–”

You force the window up in its frame with a deafening shriek, and the cool autumn air comes rushing in, clearing the air and Eddie’s mind of everything that just happened in the last two minutes.

“Go now!”

He doesn’t need to be told twice. He’s out your window and gone the second his feet his the grass, and suddenly this all feels a lot more familiar than he’s happy with. Leaving a party out some side window and hitting the breeze while the Hawkins PD descends is pretty much par for the course for these little get togethers.

Except this time, there is the added bonus of being able to hear you distantly arguing with Carol – you accusing her of putting in the call, and her stridently defending herself against such a hideous (and likely true) accusation.

Beyond all of that he sees Jim Hopper, marching up your front lawn and into your house while his deputies try in vain to catch all the stray fishies pouring out of your home in droves. If Carol is telling the truth – which, to be fair, it is highly plausible that she is not – the chief of police is entering your house with the sole intention of rooting him out, and when he doesn’t find him, when he hears the talk about where Eddie’s been all evening, it’s going to be pretty easy to surmise what happened.

You’re gonna take a lot of heat for what you just did for him, and he doesn’t know if you realize that.

How many little selfless acts can you perform for him without a second thought? And how can Eddie stand here and take it without doing something to repay you?

He has to do something, but what can he do?

Well, it occurs to him that he can do exactly what you just asked him to do, as would only be right.

But that’s crazy, right? He doesn’t have time for that kind of ooey-gooey “lasso the moon” nonsense when he ought to be long gone by now. The last thing he needs is to get caught and spend the night in jail, waiting for Wayne to get off shift and bail him out.

He doesn’t need to be running from the cops, either – he’s got a pair of handcuffs nailed to his bedroom wall to remind him of exactly that – but it occurs to Eddie that he can’t just leave, not without thanking you. Not without saying goodbye.

What kind of friend would he be if he did that? Certainly not your best friend, and certainly not more.

He’s stupid, he’s foolish, he’s taking his life into his hands — he’s skirting back across the grass and hitting your windowsill with a muted thump.

When Eddie pops up, you’re still standing there, too preoccupied with fending off Carol to notice him looking in. The coast is clear, for now, so if he’s gonna do this, he better do it fast.

He reaches up to tug at the hem of your sleeve, and your name is out of his mouth before he has time to think better of it. You turn, and brace your hands on the windowsill to lean out and look down at him with wide, confused eyes.

“Eddie,” You gasp, “What are you still doing here? You gotta—”

He lifts up on his toes and kisses you. It’s only a quick, chaste brush of the lips to the corner of your mouth – he calculated wrong and misaimed – but it’s enough to send an electric shock ripping through both of your bodies. You freeze and go rigid, and behind you, Carol snorts out her disgust.

“Oh, fucking gross—” she gags.

When Eddie drops back down his face is on fire, but he doesn’t wait to see what happens next.

He turns and runs, leaving you standing there, hanging halfway out your bedroom window as the first inkling of the police chief’s voice comes booming through the house.

“Okay – party’s over!” Jim Hopper shouts as Eddie escapes into the night, grinning wildly and laughing because, despite his better judgment, he’s pretty goddamn sure he's in love love love, and he’s home free.

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