If someone had told Richie he’d end his Tuesday night like this, balancing on the palms of his sweaty hands, his wobbling elbows, with the small frame of Eddie Kaspbrak beneath him, he would have laughed. He would have laughed, and then maybe he would have sulked. But here he was.
And there Eddie was, in an equally compromising position, looking up at Richie with raised eyebrows.
He sounded more amused than annoyed, the edges of his lips turning up slightly.
Richie huffed. "Relax, Eddie," he said, voice strained. "You've got nowhere to be tomorrow."
"No, but I do have somewhere to be, like, next week," Eddie retorted. His voice was sweet, even when he was teasing, and for a moment Richie completely forgot what he was doing.
"Green, Rich. Right hand green."
Right. He peeked beside Eddie at the mat beneath their tangled bodies. Someone audibly laughed from the sidelines.
"We sh-sh-should have played strip twister."
It was Bill. God, of course it was Bill. Richie snapped his head in the direction of his friends, all having freed themselves from the game earlier in the evening. They were now huddled around the spinner, which, Richie noticed, was facing outward in his direction and not theirs. Because of course it was.
"Shut up, Bill," he said through gritted teeth, which was only met with more laughter.
Eddie just grinned, nearly oblivious to the joke—or at least to its catastrophic potential. Because he was drunk. Too drunk to discourage the walk down memory lane when Mike had pulled the old party game out from storage, too drunk to notice the way the rest of he and Richie's friends had all very quickly and very clumsily lost, and too drunk to care that they had, since then, all but sandwiched the two of them together on the mat.
Richie liked drunk Eddie. Really, he did. He was fun; easy on the rules, and free of concerns that weren't strictly his own. But he really needed sober, sensible Eddie right now, before something went horribly wrong.
"Any day now," Eddie murmured, and Richie sighed, finally lifting his right hand off the mat.
In slow motion, it might have looked like this—Richie losing his balance, Eddie realizing Richie was losing his balance and, in a moment of panic, reaching up to catch his fall, forgetting that his hands were already occupied keeping himself up.
In real time, it just looked like two idiots crashing into each other. Eddie's back hit the mat, and Richie hit...well, Eddie, who groaned in pain between small fits of laughter. Richie could feel the tremors of it against his body and fought the urge to turn his face into the crook of Eddie's neck.
"I guess we call that a tie?" Bev said, unsure.
"Yeah," Eddie answered, fingers making their way to Richie's hair as Richie pushed his weight up and off of Eddie. He smiled up at him from his spot on the floor, seeming content to just lay there, and laughed again. "A tie sounds...about right."
