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but everyone had this patina of
slightly bruised longing, this shimmer of
i think i knew you when we were children,
this look of i think i’ve loved you ever since you were born,
and probably longer than that
Paul Hostovsky, from “Everyone was Beautiful”, Dear Truth, (Main Street Rag, 2009)
It begins as a conversation at the bar of the Derry townhouse, a gash in Eddie’s cheek and whiskey burning it. Richie’s knee is bouncing frantically up and down, his nervous energy seeping through the hole in Eddie’s cheek and the pores of his skin and the part of his chest that had once upon a time been a sponge for all of Richie Tozier’s emotions, nestled comfortably somewhere in his ribs between the spaces where his own neuroses live.
Eddie doesn’t tell him to be still, just feels the uncomfortable lump in his back pocket where his inhaler sits wedged between his ass and the barstool. He thinks me too, and he thinks we’re probably going to die, and his heartbeat echoes in his ears, just slightly.
Richie knocks back his whisky like it’s water. Eddie sips at his slowly, savouring the medicinal burn of it and thinking, only slightly guiltily, of the fact that he hadn’t had a single drink in maybe a decade before coming back to Derry.
Myra drinks red wine sometimes, when she has her friends from book club around. Only ever one glass, and it always makes her more tipsy than he thinks it probably should. She comes over all giggly and loose-lipped, and Eddie always feels like she is trying too hard to be funny, but mostly he thinks he should really get over himself and stop thinking such nasty thoughts about his wife. He shouldn’t find it irritating but he does.
He’d gotten drunk a handful of times in college, and before Mike’s phone call he hadn’t been able to remember ever getting drunk as a teenager. And anyway, alcohol has only ever left him with a dull pounding headache and a dry mouth the next morning, and he hates not being in control of his thoughts.
Eddie knows there is something hidden deep down inside of him, something he’d slammed a lid on a long time ago, and he can’t remember what it is but if he loosens up just slightly he’s sure the lid will fly off and whatever it is that is hidden will come spilling out, and he’ll never be able to put it back in.
Plus, he doesn’t want liver failure or heart problems or his nose to go all knobbly and swollen and red, which is what happens to people who drink a lot, so.
Richie doesn’t seem to have much of a problem with drinking. Or maybe he has a different kind of problem. He’d been knocking back shots at the Jade of the Orient at a pace none of the others except maybe Bev had been able to keep up with, and right now at the bar in the townhouse he’s several whiskies in and he doesn’t even seem tipsy, to Eddie. He just seems wired, and trapped, and like he’s fighting the urge to get out of here, leave Eddie and the other Losers in the dust.
His shoulders are broad in that leather jacket, and he smells like something Eddie can’t place anymore but it’s familiar. It is the strangest sensation, he thinks, to be back here with these people whose company he’d once worn like a warm sweater. All these years he’s lived without them, with no idea they were out there waiting for him.
There is a part of him, a tiny cowardly part that lives somewhere in the back of his throat, that wishes he had never been forced to remember them. Wishes he was back in New York, in his cold lonely bed, knocked out in a blank and barren pill-induced sleep, Myra snoring on the other side of his bedroom wall.
There is a bigger part of him, threaded into his lungs and around his ribs and deep in his chest, that wants to cling to his old friends and never let go. To turn his back on Myra and his boring job the way he’d once, he remembers now, turned his back on his mother and go with his friends anywhere they want to take him. These people who once, so long ago, he had loved more than he had ever loved anyone else, and who had loved him the same way.
Richie ducks his head and his hair falls into his eyes.
“We could get out of here,” he says into his whiskey glass, and it sounds like a joke when he says it, but his face is still and serious, and he isn’t looking at Eddie. Eddie thinks god we really could and he doesn’t know if Richie means it in the way of a stupid sitcom, a bar and two strangers and the implication of a hotel room or a dingy apartment. Somewhere with a bed.
Or if he means it like running away, like the two of them warm and safe in Richie’s obnoxious flashy red hire car, headed to god knows where. Either way, the thought makes his cheeks redden and he rolls his eyes.
“Where?”
Richie shrugs. “Anywhere we want. Fuck Derry. We don’t owe this shit-hole jack shit.”
Of course Richie had meant the second way, the two of them sailing past the Derry exit sign and away from the clown, back to New York or out west to LA or maybe somewhere else entirely. There’s a pink tinge to Richie’s cheeks and it matches his watery bloodshot eyes behind his glasses, and Eddie thinks with a flicker of something, maybe hope or maybe dread, that perhaps Richie meant the first way too. He looks so tired.
Eddie wants to smooth his hair back from his forehead, and he doesn’t think he’s ever wanted to do that for someone before. His fingers itch to touch him, but he just grips his almost empty glass and says, “Yeah fuck it, let’s go.”
He thinks briefly of Mike, that awful phone call that had made him crash his car. His voice so apologetic on the phone, his small cluttered apartment above the library. Of Ben, and Bev, and Bill, and Stanley, all of them asleep upstairs. He doesn’t want to leave them, not really. But looking at Richie, who is grinning at him (drunkenly, Eddie realises now, he is so drunk), the whole world narrows down to just the two of them sitting at this bar, and a smaller version of them seventeen years old plotting to skip town before Eddie’s mom packed him up and moved him to Bangor to be closer to her sisters.
Smaller versions of them still - fifteen years old and watching videos on the sofa bed in Richie’s basement, too old for sleepovers probably but neither of them wanting to accept it - or caring.
Or the two of them thirteen years old and terrified, clinging to each other in the abandoned house on Neibolt Street, and god he doesn’t want to end up back there tomorrow.
He and Richie eleven years old, sat together in the attic space above Eddie’s garage, reading comics and chatting shit. Richie telling Eddie everything he wanted to do with his future and Eddie thinking of course he would do it, because Eddie only ever wanted to look at Richie and one day so would the whole world, it was inevitable.
***
Of course, it had begun, really, thirty something years ago, in the front row of Mrs. Brown’s second grade classroom, when the loudest kid in the class was moved into the seat beside Eddie’s so that she could keep a better eye on him, and so that he could see the blackboard better through his coke-bottle glasses, and so that maybe Eddie could keep him in line. Of course, Eddie couldn’t. Eddie had been seven years old, and he’d tried half-heartedly to shush Richie when he tapped his pencil or bounced his knee or burped the alphabet under his breath, or when he slipped little scraps of paper onto Eddie’s desk with pictures he’d drawn, like comics.
But Eddie was seven years old, and his best and only friend was Big Bill Denbrough. He thought Bill was basically the greatest but really they needed more people for the games they played at lunch time - it was hard to play Star Wars with just the two of them - and Richie was loud and obnoxious and kind of annoying but he was also really funny and the silly voices he liked to do made Eddie laugh even though they weren’t very good, and Eddie couldn’t help but to like him.
The first time he’d drawn onto Richie’s little comics, a swirly moustache scribbled onto Richie’s stick figure drawing and a monobrow, Richie had laughed so hard he’d sprayed spit all over his desk and Eddie’s arm, which was so disgusting it made Eddie squeal, and they’d both gotten in trouble with Mrs Brown.
They’d been friends, after that, and Mrs Brown probably regretted sitting the two of them next to each other because Eddie had wanted to talk to Richie all the time, and even when Mrs Brown grew frustrated and moved Eddie to sit in the row behind Richie, he still spent a lot of his time doodling comics to slip across the aisle to Richie. He’d stare out the window thinking up games to play with Richie and Bill and Richie’s best friend Stanley Uris at lunch time.
And in PE when Eddie had to sit with his knees drawn up in the shade of a tree outside while everyone else played T-ball because his mom had phoned to say that Eddie couldn’t join in or his asthma would flare up, Richie sometimes purposefully played extra badly or messed up the game for everyone else so that grumpy Mr Edgeways would make him sit out of the game, and he could join Eddie making patterns with sticks in the dusty sports field and laughing his braying hyena laugh.
They’d fallen into place beside each other like shadows and remained that way, until one day Eddie had left Derry in the backseat of his mother’s car, with a mixtape from Richie placed carefully into the front pocket of his backpack and the awful knowledge in the pit of his stomach that with every mile his mother drove his memories of Richie and his other friends would inevitably shrink smaller and smaller until he forgot he ever had any friends at all, let alone a friend as strange and lovely as Richie.
***
They don’t run away, in the end.
Not that first night at the bar. They wind up following Bill into the house on Neibolt Street, all of them distraught and terrified at the thought of setting foot inside of it again, but none of them willing to risk Bill dying. They’d swapped blood 27 years ago and now it is inside all of them, and it loops through all of their circulatory systems, and it isn’t poisonous like Eddie was led to believe when he was a kid. He is more terrified than he can ever remember being in his life but there is something inside of him that keeps him inside that house and down in the sewers with all of his friends. A distant memory of their hands, smaller then but somehow still their own, grasped together in an ancient promise.
In the bowels of Derry, after a failed ritual, Eddie throws the fence post like a javelin and Richie falls to earth like rain, and Eddie thinks it’s over. He drops on top of Richie and thinks that surely, from that height, he must have smashed his tailbone or broken his back, but he looks at Richie’s face, shocked and searching but unmistakably alive, and he thinks I did it and he thinks run away with me and he thinks oh god I love you.
And then Stan’s voice, cutting across the thoughts in his head and the frantic yelling of the others, screaming “Eddie, MOVE,” and Eddie doesn’t think, only grips tight to Richie’s shoulders and rolls them sideways down a rocky embankment in the horrible dark cave, barely even sees when the clown’s awful claw pierces the rocks where the two of them had been lying only seconds ago.
Somehow, they kill the clown. It’s a blur to Eddie, clinging to Richie’s sleeve and Mike’s wrist and screaming FUCK YOU and I’M NOT SICK I NEVER WAS I DON’T EVEN HAVE ASTHMA and THEY HAVE CURES FOR LEPROSY NOW YOU FUCKWIT at the clown until his throat is raw and they watch the clown shrivel pathetically. The cave starts falling down around them and Eddie clasps Richie’s hand and runs out of there. He runs faster than any of the others, leading the way back through the dark snaking tunnels and up out of the house like it’s mapped into his brain or behind his eyelids, and the seven of them come stumbling out of the old house on Neibolt Street as it collapses behind them and sinks back into the ground like an empty grave.
***
They walk to the old quarry in the dim light of early morning and Bev jumps in first, red hair flickering briefly like a match as she jumps fully clothed, and none of them, not even Eddie, hesitate to jump in after her. The cliffs above the water are as high as he remembers them, but his adult body crashes into the water and sinks beneath the surface with a heaviness that shocks him for some reason. As though at 40 years old he could possibly weigh the same as he did at thirteen, scrappy pre-teen body bobbing back up effortlessly. Eddie’s dark hair billows out around his face like weeds, and through the murky water he sees the others floating to the surface, dark shapes all around him.
When his face breaks the surface his lungs swallow down air effortlessly. He brings his left hand to his forehead to brush his wet hair from his eyes and realises there is no hard glint of wedding ring against his skin. He glances down beneath the water, imagines he can see it, small and plain as it is, slowly drifting to the bottom of the quarry. The water is just murky brown and he can’t see much of anything beneath it, but he turns and wades toward where his friends are gathered a little way away, pushing his hair out of his face with naked hands that are not empty.
Mike cries, in the dirty water. Relief wracks his body and the six of them circle him, hold him tight. Eddie clings to Mike’s left shoulder, rests his head there gently and doesn’t think twice about the implications of whatever is lurking in the dirty quarry water infiltrating the wound in his cheek, just holds close to Mike and cries alongside him because it is over. Bill is draped over Mike’s forearm, and Eddie watches as he presses his mouth gently to Mike’s wrist. Ben and Bev are huddled on Mike’s other side, and Stan at his back behind them. Richie is behind Eddie, his face pressed to the crown of Mike’s head, and Eddie can’t remember ever feeling safer.
Mike tells them all thank you, for coming home.
“I wouldn’t have blamed any of you for hanging up on me and staying the hell away,” he says, and Eddie thinks of the relative safety of his bland house back in New York, and is struck by the thought I would have rather died down in that sewer than go back there. When he looks at Bev he sees the blood streaked through her hair and the mottled bruises that pepper her arms, and he knows that some of them weren’t put there in Derry, and when she meets his eyes he wonders if she is thinking the same thing.
***
Eddie does start to panic about his cheek wound, after a little while.
Bev splashes water at him and he yelps, splashes her back. His bandage is soaked and he tries not to think of septic shock or those brain eating amoebas he read about that live in some lakes.
“Careful you don’t get one of those brain eating parasites from the quarry water, Eds,” says Richie teasingly, like he’s read Eddie’s mind, and maybe he has. He looks kind of manic from where he’s stood a foot away from Eddie in the water. His glasses are pushed back in his hair, and he’s been crying. Eddie knows that they all have, but something in his chest pangs when he looks at the red rims of Richie’s eyes.
“You’re a brain eating parasite,” he says, and he reaches out and gently tugs Richie’s glasses back onto his face. One of the lenses is smashed, a crack splintering out from the middle and splitting the glass into tiny fragile shards. If Eddie touched it the lens would shatter and the little fragments of glass would spill into the water.
“Can you see?”
Richie squints his eye and answers, “There are like, five of you now.”
“I don’t think that’s how it works,” Eddie says, but he takes Richie’s arm, gently, and leads him out of the water and onto the bank of the quarry.
“I can actually see,” Richie says, and Eddie is hit with a memory of Richie in childhood, twelve years old with giant bottle glasses and blue eyes magnified behind them, the size of the moon. He’d been taller than Eddie, taller than most of them except maybe Mike, who they hadn’t met yet at that point anyway. Gangly. All of his limbs too long, too fast, gesticulating wildly. Bright shirt like the head-achey pattern of the seats on the bus that snaked through Derry, the one Eddie’s mom never let him ride on.
Richie’s glasses had smashed when Henry Bowers or Patrick Hockstetter or someone had punched Richie’s lights out for some reason or another, probably just generally looking like a nerd in giant glasses, which was so unreasonable it had made Eddie want to scream in frustration at the time. Richie had sworn and taken his glasses off and his giant moon eyes had shrunk back down to their normal size and Eddie had tried to tape them together and Bill had insisted on riding Richie shotgun on his bike back home, in case Richie bumped into something or got hit by a car.
Eddie knows Richie’s shattered glasses aren’t going to cause him to get lost and drown in the quarry, realistically. But he’s struck with the same feeling he’d felt as a kid, trying to tape Richie’s glasses back together and begging him to ride home with Bill. Like he wants to take care of Richie, wants to gather him up in his arms and push a glass of water toward him and still his jittery hands with one of his own.
***
On the bank of the quarry Eddie sits beside Richie, his clothes soaked through and stinking of dirty water. Richie has his long legs drawn up to his chest, his chin digging into his knees, and Eddie stretches his legs out before him, feels the tendons in his calves stretch painfully and basks in it.
In the water, Bev is sat on Ben’s shoulders and Bill is sat on Mike’s, splashing water at each other like children. Somewhere behind them Stan is phoning his wife, and Eddie and Richie steadfastly pretend they can’t hear him crying.
Stan keeps repeating, “I’m so sorry,” over and over, and Eddie thinks maybe they should move to give him more privacy.There is a painful awkwardness that has lived somewhere inside Eddie for all of his adult life, despite his ability to mask it with meticulously practised corporate pleasantries - a professionalism that he has mastered over the years which compels him to grab Richie and join the others in the water, regardless of his determination to keep parasites and germs away from his cheek wound. He doesn’t move though.
Richie is staring determinedly at his own knees, the denim of his jeans torn and frayed.
“Your ass okay?” Eddie asks, thinking of his fall from the deadlights onto the hard stone floor of the cave and hoping that maybe his abrupt wording will make him laugh. It does. Richie snaps his head up and looks at Eddie, and his laugh as an adult is kind of weirdly squeaky. His tongue sticks out of his crooked teeth just slightly, and his eyes crinkle behind his smashed glasses, and Eddie wants to squeeze him, but he doesn’t.
“My ass is fine, why the fuck are you asking?” He’s still laughing when he says it, and it’s not that funny but Eddie feels kind of hysterical, after everything that’s happened, so he reckons Richie probably does too.
“You fell from really high up, man, straight on your ass.” He feels a sympathetic ghost twinge in his own coccyx, remembers once slipping on snow and falling on his ass as a kid and the dull pain that lingered for days afterwards.
“I’m fine, Eds,” Richie says, and he doesn’t look fine but he always looks good, to Eddie. His curls are matted and swept back from his face, soaked through with sweat and quarry water and probably sewerage from down beneath Derry. His skin is grey and pallid, and he needs to shave, patchy stubble spreading unevenly across his chin and jawline. But his eyes, blinking away the glare of mid morning sunlight that shelters the seven of them, are so blue behind his broken glasses, creased in the corners and Eddie wonders who put those lines there. He wants to press his thumb to Richie’s temple and smooth away the lines in his skin, make him laugh and watch them reappear there. He feels unhinged.
On the phone behind them Stanley is saying to his wife in Georgia, “I really love you”, and Eddie doesn’t look to the empty space on his left ring finger, only keeps his eyes trained on Richie’s big hands, clasped over his knees.
***
They go back to the townhouse, eventually. Bev finally washes the blood from her hair and Bill calls his wife back in England. Ben and Mike and a very pale faced Richie go to the library to deal with the body of Henry Bowers who presumably lies prone on the floor with an axe buried in the back of his head, stuck there by Richie. Eddie offers to go with them, but winds up staying back to keep Stan company while they wait for his wife Patty’s flight to arrive from Atlanta.
They sit in the parlour downstairs, side by side, Eddie still in his damp clothes from the quarry because the thought of being alone in his room with the ripped down shower curtain and that treacherous mirror makes bile rise in his throat.
“What about your wife, Eddie?” Stan asks, and Eddie slips his hands into the pockets of his damp jacket and stares at the ugly stained carpet of the parlour.
“I’m gonna call her,” he says defensively, because he thinks Stan wants to hear it.
“You don’t have to wait here with me, you can go and call her.” Stan keeps clicking his phone on and glancing at the time.
His lock-screen is a photo of his wife Patty sat beside him on what looks like an outdoor swing chair. There’s a rose bush behind her blooming sweet and pink, and she is laughing at whatever Stanley said behind the camera, her cheeks flushed and her eyes closed against the afternoon sun.
Eddie thinks of Myra back home in New York, probably distraught at his sudden disappearance. She’d called him a few times, and he’d answered her just the once. He doesn’t want to call her, so he says, “She’ll be at work right now, I’ll wait a bit.” Stanley doesn’t say anything, just nods slowly and clicks his phone back on, looks at the photo of Patty in their garden.
“You lost your ring in the sewers?” Stanley looks up at him, tugs the sleeves of his cardigan down over his wrists.
Eddie wonders if he can see right through Eddie’s sodden jacket pockets to where Eddie’s empty hands lie curled, fingers picking restlessly at the skin around his blunt nails. Stanley always could see through them all, through all of their bullshit.
“In the quarry, I think,” he says. Stanley doesn’t reply for a moment, just tilts his head back against the lumpy sofa they’re sitting on and closes his eyes.
“What’s she like?” It’s quiet for a moment, and then Eddie speaks around the horrible stopper in his throat. He doesn’t remember the last time he cried before today.
“She’s fine,” he says. “I don’t really want to talk about it.” He blinks tears from his eyes and hopes that Stanley will think he is sad about the lost ring, but Stanley gives him a look like nothing has ever been able to fool him, and it hasn’t.
The corner of his mouth turns up in something like sympathy, and he asks, “Are you happy with her?” and Eddie doesn’t say anything but he supposes that probably says it all.
***
Mike and Ben and Richie get back before Patty’s flight does. They file in through the front door of the townhouse and Richie stands with his hands balled in the pockets of his leather jacket, somehow the shortest of the three of them. He trails behind Mike and Ben, and he looks like he hasn’t slept in weeks. He sits on the sofa beside Eddie and doesn’t say anything, for once. Eddie feels the warmth of him all along his side, and wants desperately to lean into it.
“You okay?” he asks quietly, his face turned to Richie’s.
“Mmhm,” Richie smiles tightly, and nods. “Peachy.”
It takes everything in Eddie not to reach out and grip Richie’s knee, or thread his fingers through Richie’s, or rest his head on his shoulder. He looks up at Ben and Mike, standing above them, and his own questions are mirrored in Stanley’s eyes beside him.
“It’s all been dealt with,” Ben says, and he looks green when he says it. He nods his head toward the stairs out in the hallway and murmurs, “I’m gonna-”, before leaving them. Eddie presumes he will go to Bev’s room, and something bites behind his ribs at how easy it might be for him. Ben, who loved Beverly always, in a way that none of the other boys in Derry did. Loved her as she is and never wanted to temper her.
Beverly is married, he knows, to a man who doesn’t love her, not properly. He doesn’t think she has called her husband to tell him where she is, or that she’ll be coming home soon. He knows that she won’t, because she isn’t a coward like he is. Eddie’s heart hammers and his breath constricts in his chest, and he stands up and follows the others upstairs.
Eddie hovers outside the door to his room, and Richie hovers there too, a warm and uncertain presence at his back.
“I’m gonna go,” Richie says, and he ducks his head like he’s trying to make himself smaller. Eddie wants to say don’t, wants to grab onto his wrist and cling to him, pull him into the room with him.
What comes out is just, “My shower curtain,” and when he looks up at Richie he expects to see his face confused at the non-sequitur, but his eyes are big and concerned in his head like he gets it.
“Do you wanna-?” he nods with his head toward his own room. “Shower’s in one piece, I promise.”
“Yeah, okay,” Eddie says, like it doesn’t matter to him either way, and he waits as Richie struggles with his room key and then pushes his way in behind him. He quickly realises that his suitcase and all of his belongings are in his own room, but the thought of going back for them and having to face the ghost of Henry Bowers lurking behind the shower curtain makes him want to spew, so he just tells Richie he’ll borrow something of his.
Richie says, “Yeah, sure man, of course,” and tosses him a white t-shirt with H.R. Pufnstuf on it that’s definitely going to be too big for him and a pair of grey boxer briefs (“Clean,” he clarifies, to Eddie’s relief).
Eddie insists that Richie showers first, since it’s his room and Eddie is invading it, and sits on the edge of Richie’s bed with his finger hovering over Myra’s name in his contacts, never calling her.
Richie doesn’t take that long, surprisingly. He comes out of the shower wearing a grey t-shirt and sweatpants with little lint balls all over them, and he’s wrapped his hair in a towel with an oddly delicate tuck, and his smashed glasses are folded over the neck of his t-shirt. He’s still so quiet, and it feels off balance but Eddie can’t think of a way to bring up what Richie and Mike and Ben did at the library that doesn’t make him want to throw up so he keeps quiet, just gathers the clean clothes Richie gave him and slips into the bathroom.
***
Eddie covers the mirror with his dirty jacket before he gets in the shower, and he stands under the weak spray, watches dirt and blood flow down the drain and imagines it winding up down in the sewers beneath Derry, washing over the shrivelled corpse of the clown somewhere miles below him. The thought makes him have to close his eyes and try and breathe deeply, staving off an asthma attack (panic attack a voice in his head that sounds oddly like Richie says. He doesn’t have asthma). He peels the bandage off his cheek and lets the water flow over his wound, imagining it filtering out all the dirt and tiny germs and quarry parasites until it’s just his own flesh and blood again, clean as it always was.
When he shuts off the water he stands shivering in his towel and gingerly swipes his jacket from where it hangs over the mirror. There is no one there beside himself. He looks clean, if a little pasty. His eyes are dark and too big for his face, he thinks, shadowed like he hasn’t been sleeping properly. Which he hasn’t. His cheekbones jut out in his drawn face. He’s always thought he had a pinched face, mousey and gaunt.
The cut looks surprisingly clean where it’s engraved across his cheek, just an angry red line splitting his face open. The skin around it doesn’t look particularly pink or inflamed, which is a good sign. It isn’t bleeding anymore. Eddie doesn’t have any bandages with him in Richie’s room, and he’s not going into his own room to get the first aid kit he’d brought with him, so he just does his best to dab the skin around the cut dry.
He dresses, and the H.R. Pufnstuf t-shirt hangs loosely around his torso, dangling halfway down his thighs. The sleeves come almost to his elbows.
“This fucking t-shirt is massive! Does it even fit you properly?” he calls out to Richie in the bedroom. His responding, “Yeah,” sounds distant and hollow.
Eddie slips back into the bedroom. Richie is sitting on the floor at the foot of his bed, legs criss cross apple sauce but his knees are pulled up, feet planted flat on the floor. He looks really small.
“Rich.” Eddie feels impossibly awkward as he goes toward him, unsure of what to do. His natural instinct is to say something stupid, or funny, to make him laugh or say something outrageous that will spark a silly lighthearted argument that’ll go on for ages. That’s the dynamic he remembers them having as kids, most of the time.
But he also remembers Richie crying, as kids, sat on his bed or in Eddie’s attic or down in the clubhouse, pushed to the brink by the kids at school and the terrible words they scrawled on the bathroom walls, or drunk and teetering on the verge of saying something so important that he was scared to let Eddie hear. Or that last time, when they were seventeen, when Eddie told him he was leaving Derry with his mom. He isn’t sure what he did to comfort him, all of those far away times.
Richie looks up at Eddie, towering above him for once.
“Looks cute on you,” he says, eyes flickering up to the oversized t-shirt, H.R. Pufnstuf’s dopey grin, and tears spill down his face. Eddie folds himself up beside him on the floor, knees creaking painfully. He can’t think of a single thing to say.
“Sorry man, this is all just really fucked up,” Richie whispers, voice hoarse and raw. It sounds like it hurts him to talk. He pushes the heels of his palms up under his glasses and rubs at his eyes.
“I killed someone and we just-” he’s crying too hard to keep talking. Eddie places a tentative hand on his shoulder, rubs gently with his thumb.
“It wasn’t just anyone though,” he points out. “He deserved it.”
Richie looks up at him, and Eddie points at the cut on his own cheek.
“That fucker tried to kill me! And Mike!” He hopes it’ll make Richie laugh. He just cries harder and reaches out, brushes his knuckles softly against Eddie’s cheek.
“If he had I don’t know what I would have done.” He looks so desperately sad and distressed Eddie can’t stand it.
“It’s okay, Rich,” he says. “You did what you had to do. No one’s gonna hold it against you.”
“I just keep seeing it,” Richie closes his eyes. “In my head. And the feeling of the axe…” He trails off. Eddie feels sick.
“What did you do?” he asks, voice quiet. “With the body.”
“Quarry,” Richie says, and he has to take big heaving breaths to keep from throwing up. Eddie keeps rubbing his thumb over Richie’s shoulder, squeezing gently.
“Do you want a puff of my ventolin?” he jokes, and Richie huffs a tiny laugh, and Eddie wants so badly to kiss his forehead. He settles for unwinding the towel from Richie’s head.
“You look ridiculous,” he says, and he can hear the sunshine spilling out of his voice when he says it, when he tries to make Richie laugh. He thinks we could make each other so happy, he thinks I want to make you happy, and he watches as Richie’s wet curls spring from the damp towel and fall back around his face. Eddie reaches out and fluffs them up, smooths them back off his face. Richie’s breathing is still ragged, and Eddie swipes the tears from his cheeks with the back of his hands.
He stands up and reaches toward Richie.
“Up you get,” he says, and Richie clings to his hands and lets Eddie pull him up off the ground. He pushes down on Richie’s shoulders until he’s sitting on the bed, and then he walks around to the other side. It’s not the side he ever sleeps in at home.
He slips in under the covers, and he knows they’re not clean because Richie slept in them last night, presumably, but he doesn’t care. It’s still light outside the window, and somewhere in the sky above them Stanley’s wife is in a plane that’s getting ever closer. He hopes the others are all in bed too, resting. He’s so tired, his bones heavy and aching. He throws the covers over Richie beside him and settles on his side, facing Richie.
“You’ve still got your glasses on,” Eddie says. “Dumbass.” He reaches over and gently slides them away from Richie’s face, folding them and placing them on his own bedside table. “We should get you new ones tomorrow.”
“Where from? We’re still in Derry.” His eyes squint slightly, adjusting without his glasses.
“There’s an optometrist in Derry, Rich.”
He narrows his eyes at Eddie. “You sure?”
“Yeah man, where the fuck did you get your glasses when we were kids?”
“Oh yeah,” Richie laughs, just slightly. It sounds like he’s laughing at himself. “I forget Derry’s a real place with like, optometrists and doctors and… McDonalds. Normal, real things.”
Eddie smiles, fond. He gets it. It’s difficult to imagine Derry existing as an ordinary town, separate from all of the terrible things that happen here.
“We’ll go tomorrow,” he says, and he shifts closer to Richie. His body is so warm in the bed beside him, and Eddie can feel his breath puffing softly onto the exposed skin of his arm, curled up on the pillow. Eddie feels his eyes drift closed, and he thinks distantly of his phone, silenced on the bedside table. He really should call Myra.
Richie’s body is large and warm in the bed beside Eddie. He can barely remember what it feels like to share a bed with another person. He and Myra gave up on that almost three years ago, when Eddie came to accept that he would never be able to tune out her snores and his restless leg syndrome woke her up multiple times throughout the night.
“Hey Eds.” Richie’s voice is scratchy from crying, and he sounds young again; like he’s from a time Eddie had known him better than anyone, before his voice broke.
“Mm.” Eddie blinks his eyes open. Richie is looking at him from the other pillow.
“So fucking strange,” he says, and he closes his eyes and shuffles closer to Eddie, just slightly. “You still look so much like you.”
Eddie turns so that his back is facing Richie’s chest, and he imagines Richie reaching out, draping an arm over his waist and keeping it there. Imagines Richie’s breath against his shoulder, Richie’s long legs tucked between his own. He doesn’t dare move any further back toward him.
The heat of both their bodies under the covers warms him quickly, and Eddie drifts off to the sound of Richie’s breathing, heavy in sleep and far more effective than the white noise app he uses back home.
***
Eddie wakes to Richie’s hand on his shoulder, his voice close by.
“Dude, your phone’s ringing.” He sounds gravelly and half asleep, and when Eddie squints in the dark bedroom he can just make out the crease in Richie’s cheek from the folds in his pillowcase. His hair is rucked up on one side, and his eyes are open wide as though to let in as much light as he can. It’s still dark outside.
Eddie twists and reaches for his phone where he’d left it on his bedside table, next to Richie’s glasses. It buzzes obnoxiously, vibrating against the digital clock on the table, flashing red ‘2:43’ cutting into the darkness of the early morning. When he picks up the phone it falls silent, and he realises blearily that he’s missed the call.
He knows it was Myra even before he reads her name on the screen (‘Myra - I.C.E’). He feels momentarily bad that she is awake so early in the morning calling him, wonders whether she’s even slept at all. He clicks the phone off and the room goes black, places it back on the bedside table.
“Time is it?” Richie has laid back down beside him, face pillowed on his arm and facing away from Eddie.
“Nearly three,” he says. “Quarter to.” His throat is dry.
“I don’t know what that means, man,” says Richie. “Say the numbers.”
It makes Eddie laugh, even if it probably wasn’t meant to be funny. He feels delirious with the early hour, like he’s a kid again on a sleepover.
“2:45, dumbass,” he says, turning to face Richie’s back. “Go back to sleep.”
It’s silent for a moment, and Eddie watches the faint outline of Richie’s shoulders in the dark, rising slowly up and down. He thinks he must have fallen asleep, but then Richie says, voice too loud for the quiet room, “You’re not gonna call her back?”
Eddie feels his heart speed up a little bit somewhere in his chest. He knows he should.
“Nah,” he says, and he closes his eyes and shifts imperceptibly closer to Richie. “Not just yet.”
***
When he wakes up again the room is light beyond his eyelids, a pale water-paint blue when he blinks his eyes open. Someone is knocking on the door.
“Hey Rich, it’s just me.” A woman’s voice. Must be Bev. She still sounds a lot like he remembers her sounding when she was a kid. “Richie?”
Beside him, Richie sits up and calls out, “Yeah, here!” It comes out silent at first and he has to clear his throat.
“Me and Ben were talking about breakfast, you wanna come with?”
Richie looks down and catches Eddie’s eye, his eyebrow quirking up questioningly, and Eddie knows he’s silently asking Eddie if he’s down. Eddie nods. He’s fucking starving.
“Uh yeah, sounds good,” he yells out to Bev. “I’m hungry as fuck.”
“God, same,” she calls through the door. “Hey can I come in?”
Richie meets Eddie’s eyes again, and Eddie can see his own panic reflected in Richie’s eyes.
“I’m like… very naked, dude,” Richie says to Bev. “So unless you’re into that…”
It makes Eddie’s cheeks flush, even though it’s not true - Richie is still wearing the t-shirt and sweatpants he went to bed in.
He hears Bev laugh from the hallway, loud and kind of squawky. She always had the loudest laugh of any of them.
“I’ve seen it all before Rich, but yeah no, I’m good.” Eddie wants to crawl under the bed and hide, for some reason. “I’m gonna go see who else is down, meet you downstairs when you’re ready!”
They listen as Bev’s footsteps retreat down the hall, and they can just make out her voice calling out, “Bill, you up?”
Next to him, Richie stretches his arms out and groans. Eddie can’t look at him. He doesn’t know why he feels so mortified all of the sudden - it’s not like he and Richie even did anything last night. He doesn’t know if there is even anything for them to do, potentially.
He’d only slept in Richie’s room because his own room is in shambles, and the thought of spending the night in close proximity to the bathroom in which he’d been confronted by a literal murderer who had once been his childhood bully and had wound up shoving a knife through Eddie’s cheek makes him feel like his lungs have shrunk down to the size of a pea.
Plus, Richie had been so upset after everything that had happened yesterday, and Eddie wouldn’t have felt right leaving him on his own in such a state. It had been a mutually beneficial situation. Besides, Eddie thinks, we’re friends.
Once, Richie had been Eddie’s best friend in the whole world. He doesn’t think he’s ever had a friend like him. And they’d been apart for twenty something years, it makes sense that they would want to spend so much time together now that they’ve been reunited.
It doesn’t change the fact that Eddie feels strangely guilty, like Bev walking in and seeing he and Richie side by side in bed would be incriminating in some way. And wouldn’t it be? It isn’t normal, Eddie thinks, for two grown men who are just friends to share a bed. Eddie doesn’t even share a bed with his literal wife anymore!
“You good?” Richie places a tentative hand on Eddie’s shoulder, and Eddie realises he’s been staring up at the ugly waterlogged ceiling of Richie’s room in silence, his panicked thoughts swirling around his head entirely unbeknownst to Richie.
“Mm, yeah,” he says, and sits up. Richie doesn’t move his hand from Eddie’s shoulder. Eddie wants to slide his arm under Richie’s, press his head into Richie’s neck, breathe him in. Eddie wishes he was allowed.
“We should get ready,” he says, “if we’re going for breakfast.”
“I could keep sleeping.” Richie pushes a hand through his curls, dislodges them from where they’re pressed flat against one side of his head. “It’s warm in here.”
Eddie smiles at him, and reaches for Richie’s glasses, folded up on his own bedside table.
“Don’t forget your eyes,” he says, unfolding the arms of the glasses and sliding them onto Richie’s face, careful not to poke his eyes out. Richie holds still as he does it, and he blinks up at Eddie, adjusting to the glasses.
“Oh that’s what you look like,” he says, and he’s smiling. Eddie thinks of last night, Richie’s desperate sobs, and he pokes Richie gently in the cheek, where a dimple might be.
***
Eddie remembers on his way to the bathroom that his clean clothes are back in his own room, and has a bit of a panic about it. The thought of crossing paths with someone out in the hallway, leaving Richie’s room and wearing Richie’s pyjamas, freaks him the fuck out. He doesn’t know how he can possibly explain it away.
Fleetingly, he considers wearing something of Richie’s to breakfast and then decides that would ultimately be even more incriminating, and anyway he doubts Richie has anything Eddie would deem acceptable. The H.R. Pufnstuf shirt is bad enough.
So he decides to square up and sneak back to his room, get changed there and then meet everyone downstairs in the parlour as fast as he can. Richie offers to accompany him there, and it takes everything in him to refuse, but it feels like this is something Eddie has to do alone.
He knows, rationally, that there is no one waiting to kill him in his room. Henry Bowers is dead - Richie made sure of that. So he says bye to Richie, who gives him an awkward little salute and tells him to keep the Pufnstuf shirt, and slips out of his room.
Mercifully, he doesn’t bump into anyone in the hallway. He turns the key in his door and slips inside, and there’s his room laid out before him. The bed is still made neatly, and his suitcases are zipped and placed squarely by the door. The clock on the bedside table reads 8:37.
He glances quickly at the door to the bathroom, which sits ajar. He can easily make out the collapsed shower curtain, and it makes his heart pick up.
He bolts back into the hallway, and feels like an idiot. His lungs constrict in his chest, and god, he thinks, it’s just a shower curtain. He wants so desperately to walk in there and shove it back onto its rails, wipe down any drops of blood and flush them down the toilet. Be done with it.
Across the hallway, a door opens and Eddie flinches, embarrassingly.
It’s Ben. His hair is wet, and he’s dressed in a brown jumper that sits snugly against his body and dark jeans. Eddie thinks he looks really nice, if a little sheepish.
“Oh hey Eddie,” he says, and his cheeks flush faintly pink as he shuts the door behind him, like Eddie’s sprung him doing something he shouldn’t.
Eddie shoots him what he means to be a smile but feels more like a tight-lipped twitch of the mouth. “Morning.”
“You coming to breakfast with us?” He slips his room key into his pocket. “Bev’s already downstairs, I think.” Or it might be Bev’s room key, technically.
"Yeah,” he says. “Absolutely!”
“Everything okay?” Ben’s mouth turns down slightly in concern. His eyes are so warm and kind. It makes Eddie want to cry for some reason. Frustration, or something. He feels dumb and pathetic.
“Yeah I’m good,” he says, “I’m just.” He gestures back at his room with a nod of his head. “My shower curtain.” He tries for a laugh. It sounds fairly convincing, he thinks. Hopes, at least.
“Oh no, yeah!” He gives Eddie a sympathetic little smile. “Still wrecked?”
Eddie nods grimly and says, “Still on the floor, yeah,” trying for jokey and lighthearted.
“Must have been so scary,” Ben says, and then he gestures at the cut in Eddie’s cheek. “Cheek’s looking pretty good though!”
“Yeah,” says Eddie. “It feels okay, I think. Pretty sure I’ll survive.”
“Phew!” Ben mimes wiping sweat off his forehead. “Hey, you want me to help you fix it?”
Eddie reaches up and touches his cheek. “My cut?” he clarifies, confused.
“No, sorry, I meant your shower curtain,” says Ben. “I don’t have any like, magical healing powers or anything, as far as I know.”
Eddie laughs. “You don’t have to, man,” he says, feeling touched but also kind of embarrassed. “I could probably get it myself.”
Grown men should probably be able to reattach shower curtains on their own, he thinks. It makes his stomach squirm to think that Ben is probably judging him for not being able to.
“No yeah, of course,” says Ben. “Might be faster if we both do it though.” He’s smiling easily, and Eddie thinks of how badly he doesn’t want to go into that bathroom on his own, and he thinks of the spare inhaler in his first aid kit and how desperately he doesn’t want to have to use it, and he looks up and sees Ben (his friend, he reminds himself, one of his oldest and best friends) and this is probably what friends do. Help each other out.
Eddie nods, and says “Okay, yeah, great, thanks.” Ben stands up straight and propels himself off from where he’s leaning against the wall, and Eddie lets him into his room. He can feel Ben taking in the perfectly made bed, and the zipped up suitcases, and the too-big pyjamas that Eddie’s wearing, but he doesn’t say anything. Just follows Eddie into the little bathroom.
It’s not so bad looking at the slashed shower curtain with Ben there. It’s just the two of them in the mirror in the bathroom sink. Eddie’s reflection looks ridiculous, drowning in Richie’s massive t-shirt - surely it’s too big even for Richie.
“H.R. Pufnstuf!” Ben remarks, nodding at Eddie’s t-shirt in the mirror. “That show was so trippy.”
“Yeah,” Eddie says, and he shrugs his shoulders. “This is Richie’s.”
He wishes he could take the words back instantly. They’re too revealing. Of what, he doesn’t know. He and Richie aren’t sleeping together. They haven’t even kissed. He can feel his ears burning but Ben just says, “Oh my god, I should have known, it’s such a Richie t-shirt,” and gets to work reattaching the shower curtain to the hooks on the railing.
Eddie manages to get dressed, once the shower curtain is back up and Ben leaves. It had only taken them about five minutes, and they’d spent most of that time reminiscing about H.R. Pufnstuf, of all things. Eddie manages to coax Ben into doing a surprisingly good Witchy Poo impression, and it’s so good it startles Eddie into laughter, which makes Ben go red.
Before he leaves he asks Eddie, “You all good now?” and Eddie feels like his answering yes must be pretty convincing because Ben just says, “Okay, well I’ll just be downstairs, I’ll let the others know you’re on your way,” and then he leaves.
***
When Eddie gets downstairs, in his only remaining clean polo shirt and jeans, everyone else has already arrived. Richie is perched on Bev’s lap, and he keeps saying, “Am I crushing you yet?”, to which she just responds, “No bitch, I can take you,” and Ben is watching them with an amused if mildly baffled look on his face.
Mike and Bill are stood over by the bar with Stan and, presumably, Patty. She’s slightly taller than Stan, and she has thick dark curls, and she’s pressed up against Stan’s side like they’re holding each other up. Mike catches Eddie’s eyes when he reaches the bottom of the stairs and flags him over to introduce them.
“How’d you sleep Eddie?” he asks, and he hugs him, which takes Eddie by surprise but he squeezes him back.
Eddie tries his hardest not to let his eyes flicker over to Richie when he responds, lest he give anything away.
“Yeah, not too bad,” he says, and he hates that he sounds like Corporate Eddie, making small talk in the elevator with the boring assholes he works with. Mike is his friend, and he just hugged him warmly, and Eddie wants desperately to loosen up.
“You sleep okay?” he asks, and Mike says, “Yeah, so well.” He grins over at Bill, stood beside him.
“I crashed with Bill, you know, probably gonna stay away from my place for a little bit.”
Bill flushes, and Eddie’s heart stops in his throat, but then he remembers that Mike probably just doesn’t want to stay at his own place because a guy got murdered in the library below it. Which, fair.
Stan clears his throat, then, and says, “Patty, this is Eddie. Eddie, my wife Patty.”
“It’s nice to meet you!” she says, and she holds her hand out for him to shake. She has a very firm handshake.
“Stan told us so much about you,” Eddie says, and he hopes he’s verging more on normal human Eddie who has real actual friends rather than lonely Corporate Robot Eddie. She smiles at that, and Stan rolls his eyes but he’s smiling too.
“Can we go now? I’m so hungry, I’m gonna die.”
Eddie looks over at where Bev is still sat under Richie. She has her hair in plaits and she’s not wearing any makeup, and she has on a baggy black hoody. He thinks she looks really cool.
“Bev’s gonna eat Eddie if we don’t go soon,” Richie says.
“Rude,” Eddie objects.
“Why would I eat Eddie? There’s no meat on his bones.” Bev shoves Richie out of her lap and winks at Ben, who blushes and gives her a small smile, soft and shy and sweet.
***
They walk to a coffee shop that Mike knows, in the centre of town. Eddie hadn’t known they had coffee shops in Derry, remembers a few shitty diners from when he was a kid but nothing so nice as this. The place Mike takes them to is all indoor plants and reclaimed wood and soft velvet booths.
“Damn,” Richie says as they filter inside, “rest in peace Derry, another victim of gentrification.”
This sets Bill and Richie off into a genuine discussion about the merits and drawbacks of gentrification (Richie, although joking about Derry, says that gentrification is always harmful and serves only to drive poor people out of their neighbourhoods, and Bill says he just can’t see what’s so bad about more nice coffeeshops opening up, and then Richie concludes somewhat jokingly that Ben is the problem, with his fancy building designs. Eddie tells them to leave Ben alone, although he secretly thinks that Richie is probably right, and Mike interrupts them all to order something before the waiters get shitty at them for taking so long. Patty looks amused and mildly concerned).
The waiter knows Mike, so he insists on giving them half price off their food.
“Oh they can afford it, trust me,” Mike says, and Patty looks a bit taken aback but Stan is the first to burst out laughing.
Discussion turns quickly to what they’re all going to do now that everything is over.
“I need to get back to England,” says Bill, and everyone nods in understanding. “The shoot’s still ongoing.” He doesn’t mention his wife, but Eddie knows he’s called her. He’s probably missing her.
“Yeah, we’re gonna head back to Atlanta tomorrow, I think,” says Stan, and he turns to Patty.
“I don’t have many sick days left,” she says apologetically.
“Ooh, what do you do?” asks Bev. She took the seat on the other side of Patty, and she seems delighted to have another woman in their midst.
“I teach high school theatre!” she says, and her eyes light up when she says it, like she really cares. “We’re putting on Annie in a few weeks, so it’s been pretty hectic.”
“What about you, Bev?” she asks politely. “Where are you headed to?”
Bev doesn’t say anything for a moment, and Eddie can sense Richie next to him itching for something to say to fill the silence.
“I don’t really know what I’m gonna do,” she says. “I’m not going home though.”
“Oh?” Patty looks confused, and Eddie supposes Stan hasn’t gotten around to filling her in about everyone’s backstories yet.
“I have a really shit husband, Patty,” Bev says, and she laughs. Eddie wants to hold her hand across the table, but then he thinks maybe that would be too much. He doesn’t want to make her uncomfortable - he’s sure she’s had enough of that with men.
Patty must be thinking the same thing though, because she reaches out and takes Bev’s hand where it’s sitting beside her short black, and rests her hand on top of it.
“I am so sorry to hear that, Beverly,” she says. Her voice is soft and gentle, but there’s a sharpness to her dark eyes. “He doesn’t deserve you.”
“Thanks.” Bev grins, and rests her head against Patty’s cheek, briefly. “Stan, I really like your wife!”
“I really like her too,” he says, fondly.
“I might hang with Ben for a bit,” Bev says after a while, turning to look at him in the seat beside her. “Not sure what our plans are.”
“Yeah, we’re not in any rush.” Ben’s hand twitches like he wants to put his arm around her or something, but he second guesses himself and places his hands in his lap.
“I’m gonna divorce him at some point, obviously,” says Bev. “My husband.” She never says his name, Eddie’s noticed.
“I hope he dies,” says Richie, and Beverly laughs so loud Eddie thinks everyone else in the coffee shop must surely be looking over at them.
“Fuck dude,” she says, and she reaches across and pinches Richie’s cheek affectionately. “I hope so too”. Eddie has to sit on his hands to keep from reaching out and doing the same. He likes Richie so much.
Ben asks Mike what he plans on doing, now that there’s nothing tying him to Derry anymore.
“Oh, I’m getting out of here,” he says, “for sure.” His grin is big in his face, his eyes crinkling up in the corners warmly.
“You deserve it, man,” says Eddie, making eye contact with him. “You really do.”
There’s silence for a moment. Eddie thinks about Mike, all alone in Derry for more than twenty years, loving his best friends despite knowing they had forgotten him. He had their phone numbers and contact details all that time, steadfastly keeping track of their lives without them knowing, and all those years he chose not to call them, deliberately keeping them safe in their naivety.
“Must have been lonely as fuck,” says Richie, and Mike chuckles.
“I did have friends, you know,” he laughs. “No one like you guys, but I had friends.”
“Well hey,” Richie lifts his coffee cup in salute. “Let’s cheers to that! That’s more than I can say for myself.”
Eddie lifts his cup to clink against all the others, and Richie says, “To Mike’s friends!” and Eddie echoes him, and he thinks he doesn’t want to leave any of them ever again.
“Well, what about you Richie?” Mike asks. “Back to the tour?”
Patty looks intrigued, and Stan whispers close to her ear but loud enough that they can all hear him, “He’s a comedian, believe it or not.”
Richie studiously ignores him, and says “Uh well, if they’ll have me back I guess.”
“Why wouldn’t they?”
Richie’s fiddling with a napkin on the table, steadily ripping it to shreds. He keeps shaking his head minutely, as though to flick some non-existent strand of hair out of his eyes.
“Oh I like, completely fucked it,” he says on a forced laugh. “When you called, Mike… full mental breakdown.”
“Fuck,” says Mike. “Sorry, man.”
Richie laughs again. “Don’t apologise, it was headed that way anyway.” He’s arranging the scraps of napkin into little worms on the table. “I’m sure I would have had a breakdown sooner or later, whether you called or not.”
“I haven’t seen your comedy before, Richie,” says Patty from down the table. “What sort of stuff do you do? Is it stand-up?”
“Oh.” Richie looks surprised at the question, and Eddie thinks it’s probably less that she’s never heard of him and more that she cares to ask.
“Uh yeah, standup,” he says. “But like, don’t bother with it Pats, it’s all bullshit.”
No one says anything for a moment, just the coffee shop speakers spilling out some kind of soft rhythmic jazz. Eddie feels like he’s gonna burst.
“Well that’s what I’ve been saying, I could have told you that,” he says, and when he looks at Richie sat beside him out of the corner of his eye he feels like they’re looking straight through each other, somehow.
“Harsh,” says Bev, but she’s laughing, and so is Richie.
Patty says, “I’m sure it’s not that bad!” to which Stan quirks an eyebrow and says, “Richie’s funny but you’d never know that from his standup.”
“He doesn’t write his own stuff,” Eddie explains to Patty, and Richie just digs serenely into his pancakes like no one is saying anything about him at all.
“So yeah,” he says after a minute, mouth full of pancakes. “I guess I’ll go back to LA or something. Don’t know.”
“You could take a break,” says Ben, and then suddenly Eddie’s phone buzzes to life next to his plate and everyone turns to him.
It’s Myra’s name on the screen, and he knows that this time he can’t get away with ignoring it. Richie shifts slightly beside him, scraping his fork unpleasantly against his plate.
“I should get this,” Eddie says, and he stands up and shuffles over everyone’s legs and out of the booth, into the street outside. It doesn’t look that different to how he remembers it from when he was a kid. That same dusty sheen, odd desaturated colours of the storefronts.
He slides his finger across the screen of his phone and presses it tentatively to his ear.
“Hello? Eddie?”
He doesn’t know what to say.
“Yeah, hi Myra.” He tries to take a deep breath. “How are you?”
She doesn’t say anything for a second. It’s probably a stupid question..
“Oh I’m just great, Edward,” she says, voice low and sardonic. “Not stressed at all.”
“Sorry I’ve been gone, I just-”
She cuts him off. “I have been so worried about you! I didn’t know if you were even alive! You couldn’t even have just told me where you are, at least? Don’t I deserve that?”
He thinks she probably does deserve that. It feels like the sort of thing you’re supposed to tell your wife. Men who leave their wives with no real warning at all aren’t good men, surely. And isn’t that what he’s done, really? Has he left her? Is he coming back?
“Are you still there?” Myra’s voice cuts through the tangle of anxieties wrapped around his brain.
“Yeah,” he says. “Still here, sorry.”
“Eddie, where are you? I can come and get you.” She speaks on a sigh, like Eddie’s a misbehaving toddler and this is the last straw. She sounds so tired.
He almost tells her. It would be so easy, he thinks, to just tell her that he’s here in Derry, and wait for her to come and pick him up. To go back with her to their boring house in New York, the his-and-hers sink in the ensuite bathroom and the fake marble countertops, and return to life as it was before Mike’s phone call.
It is comfortable, he supposes, the life he has with her. Wake up early in a cold lonely bed, jerk off in the shower, go for a run, skip breakfast. Drive through nightmare traffic to his high rise office and take the elevator up 14 floors, continue to fuck up his back from sitting in front of a computer for nine hours, drive home to Myra. There is never anything to say with her, dinners marked by clinking forks and Eddie scrubbing the dishes until his hands turn pink from the scalding water. Watching Greys Anatomy or This Is Us or god forbid Chicago fucking Fire until Myra falls asleep on the couch and Eddie can turn off the TV and sneak off to bed. Do it all again the next day. Isn’t it comfortable?
He says, “I’m sorry Myra, I’m not going to tell you where I am.”
“What are you talking about Eddie? What has gotten into you?” Her voice is sharp in his ear and he wants so badly to hang up but he feels too guilty. “Are you okay? Have you gotten into something bad Eddie? At work?”
“No, I’m fine,” he says, pushing a hand through his hair. He hadn’t put any gel in it this morning and it’s still all loose and fluffy from when he’d washed it last night. “I’m safe, don’t worry.” Then he adds, “I’m with friends.”
“Which friends?” It’s decent of her, he thinks, not to point out that he doesn’t really have any friends.
It’s certainly true, back in New York. He hangs out with the husbands of her friends at various dinners, but has always found those events extremely painful. He can never think of anything to talk about, and he kind of hates all of them. He’s never been able to pinpoint why.
“Friends from when I was a kid,” he says. “You don’t know them.”
“Eddie, this just really doesn’t feel right to me.” He can hear the couch cushions rustle behind her as she readjusts. “I feel like I should call the police, or something. What do these friends want with you? You need to come home.”
“Don’t call the police,” he says, panicked now. “I’m not in danger, I promise.”
He doesn’t think he could ever begin to explain the reason he came here to her. He thinks of Stan and Patty, squashed up next to each other in the coffee shop. He’s never known that kind of trust and understanding, not with Myra.
“Myra.” He doesn’t know what he’s going to say, just that he needs to say it. “I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean to panic you.” It’s true, he thinks, he doesn’t like that she’s worried.
“Well, I don’t know how you thought I’d react, running off like that-”
“- and um,” he cuts her off. “I know this isn’t ideal. I just. I don’t think we’re happy.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I forgot that I used to be happy,” he says. On the other end of the phone it sounds like she’s crying.
“You are happy,” she says, and she sounds so sure. “I’m happy, with you.”
“I don’t think so,” he whispers. “Myra, I’m sorry. But I don’t think I want to come home.”
“What, you’re leaving me?” She’s definitely crying now, but she sounds kind of angry too, and it just makes him feel pissed off. He’s not sure he’s allowed to feel pissed off, given that he’s the one leaving her, but it can’t be helped.
“I think I am, yeah.”
“You think so? Or you are? Make a god damn decision for once.”
“I am, Myra.”
“This is unbelievable!” She’s properly yelling now, and it only makes him want to yell back. Which he thinks is probably further evidence he’s not a good person. You’re not supposed to yell at your wife. “You’ve never had a problem before now.”
“Myra, come on.” He wants to take her shoulders and shake her, make her see that this isn’t coming from nowhere. Wants to scream at her that they don’t act like married couples are supposed to, they never have.
Does she really think he’s been happy with her? They barely even speak to each other. They’ve slept in separate beds for three years now. Has she been happy? Surely not! But when he tries to speak an angry lump rises in his throat, and he knows that if he opens his mouth he’ll start crying, anger and frustration moving him to tears as they always do, and then only serving to make him yet more angry and frustrated.
“I can’t talk to you about this right now,” he manages to say. “We can talk later.”
“Are you having an affair?” she says, and it catches him off guard. She doesn’t even sound accusatory, really, just scared.
“No,” he says, and it’s not a lie but he takes too long to answer her and he hears her outraged scoff on the other end of the phone.
“I’m fucking not Myra, I promise.” He doesn’t know why he feels so defensive. He’s not having an affair, technically. He and Richie haven’t done anything more than wipe each other’s tears, sleep side by side in a bed because to sleep alone after coming so close to losing each other was unthinkable.
Something squirms in his stomach uncomfortably when he thinks about it, like whatever is trapped under that lid he closed so many years ago is threatening to come spilling out, finally.
He looks up, and through the window of the coffee shop he can see Richie stood at the till, paying for everyone’s meals. He has to look away, over at the wrecked shell of the old cinema across the road.
“I have to go,” he says, and she only sighs, hangs up on him first.
***
He tries to plaster on a smile when he goes back into the coffee shop, but when he catches his reflection in the front window there’s a manic glint in his eyes and he feels like a ventriloquist dummy or something. Like someone’s got a hand gripping the back of his neck, mouth cut blankly into a permanent grin.
Everyone’s finished eating by the time he joins them, plates stacked in the centre of the table, and Richie’s shoving his wallet back into his pocket.
“What do I owe?” Eddie asks. No one else is talking, and Eddie hopes desperately that his face isn’t giving away the horrible fact that he just left his wife over the phone.
“Nothin’,” Richie says. “My shout.”
“I’ll get dinner,” Ben promises, and Mike says, “I’m not paying for shit, you guys owe me for staying behind all these years.” He’s joking but it still catches Eddie off guard. Mike shoots him a grin and a wink. He has a really nice smile, warm and comforting.
No one asks about the phone call, but when they’re filing out of the coffee shop Richie matches his pace to Eddie’s and walks alongside him.
“You good?” he asks, and when Eddie looks up at him he gets a weird urge to clean the smudges off Richie’s one good glasses lens, which is dumb, he thinks.
“Yeah,” he says, and shrugs. “Just Myra.”
Richie nods and doesn’t say anything, and Eddie feels the silence deep in his chest and in his stomach and in the whorls of his fingers.
***
Bev makes a group chat, and adds them all to it. Bill has a flight to New York, and then on to London, tonight and no one says anything but Eddie knows they’re all as paranoid as he is that Bill will begin to forget them the second he drives his hire care out of Derry.
She names the group chat ‘losers club’, which Richie says isn’t very inventive but no one can think of anything better. Eddie’s never been in a group chat before. He didn’t know they were even a thing that people his age were a part of, but then he’s never really had a solid group of friends in his adulthood so maybe it’s actually really common.
Myra has a WhatsApp group, he’s pretty sure, for her book club. He doesn’t want to think about Myra.
He feels so guilty, which makes him feel annoyed with himself for feeling guilty, and then he gets annoyed with her for not being on the same page as him despite their objectively miserable marriage, and he really just wants to be present with his friends who he hasn’t seen in twenty something years (and, his brain keeps reminding him, who he came very close to losing tragically just yesterday), so he puts his phone on silent and sticks close to Richie and tries his very hardest not to think about the fact that he effectively just ended his marriage of eight years.
Up until a few days ago, he’d been proud of that marriage. It felt like a symbol of his success, like he’d ticked off a milestone that he needed to achieve in order to be considered a thriving adult. It seems so silly now, looking at his friends sprawled around him in a circle at Bassey Park.
“Rem-m-member Twin P-Peaks?” says Bill, and it snaps Eddie out of his thoughts.
“Do we remember it? Like the David Lynch show? It’s like, formative 90’s media, Bill.” Richie is leaning on the heels of his hands, long legs stretched out before him. He looks relaxed and calm, and it makes something in Eddie go warm. He deserves to be calm, he thinks, and god what the fuck has happened to him? He’s never felt this sappy in his life. Richie is just so tall, sprawled in the grass beside him.
Bill rolls his eyes and says, “N-No, r-remember when we all watched it t-together? When it c-came out?”
And god, Eddie does remember, suddenly. They’d only been fourteen or fifteen when it aired, probably too young for it. But every week they’d gathered in Bill’s basement, because his parents didn’t care what they watched, and huddled on the couch or laid on their stomachs on the floor, and watched Twin Peaks. They’d been so into it, and Eddie remembers sneaking in and out of his bedroom window, Richie waiting for him by his neighbours front fence, walking to Bill’s place together. There’d been one time, he’s pretty sure, when he hadn’t been able to sneak away because his mother was especially upset with him, and Richie had swung by after the episode finished and snuck into Eddie’s room to fill him in. There’s so much they’d all forgotten. He feels a flicker of anger, for all the years they lost.
He looks up at Richie, who’s picking clumps of grass and sprinkling them over Eddie’s knees.
“Do you fucking mind?”
“No not really, I don’t mind.” He has a serene smile on his face, and he’s looking down at Eddie’s knees.
Eddie picks up the blades of grass and sprinkles them into Richie’s hair.
“Sweet, my rapidly depleting hair follicles could use all the help they can get,”he says. Somewhere in the background Mike and Bill are talking about rewatching Twin Peaks together, all seven of them (eight, with Patty, who fits right in), and Eddie gently brushes the blades of grass from the crown of Richie’s head.
One falls under the lens of Richie’s glasses, and he has to blink rapidly to stop it from getting in his eye.
“Your glasses!” Eddie exclaims, remembering suddenly his promise to take Richie to the optometrist today.
“What about them, Velma?” Richie looks amused when he says it, and god, their faces are so close.
“They’re still smashed, dumbass, we should go and get you new ones.” He sits back a bit, and christ his knees are sore from sitting in the grass. He doesn’t know when he got so fucking old. “And I’m not Velma, I don’t wear glasses. You’re Velma.”
“You’re Daphne for sure,” Richie says, and shifts onto his knees like he’s getting ready to go.
“You wanna go now, or?” His eyes flick toward the main street of town. “The place I used to get my glasses from as a kid was like, a few doors down from the pharmacist I think.”
He glances over at the others, Stan lying with his head in Patty’s lap and all of them sitting so close, like it would pain them to move any further away from each other. “We don’t have to go right now, I can see you just fine, I swear.”
“No, let’s go now,” Eddie says. He loves his friends, loves all of them more than he’s ever loved anyone, he thinks. He hadn’t known he’d ever been so loved until he came back to Derry, saw them all sat around him at that table in the Jade. He hadn’t known he was capable of loving anyone so much.
And yet, he doesn’t know why but more than anything he just wants to be alone with Richie. They’d always been closest, as kids. but this is insane. He feels insane.
He gets to his feet and Richie follows him instantly, and no one asks questions when Eddie tells the others they’re off to buy new glasses for Richie (there would be no reason for them to ask questions, Eddie has to remind himself. Absolutely nothing weird is going on, this is normal and fine), and Eddie can’t explain it but their pace as they walk through the park back to the main street matches perfectly, like they’re shadows.
***
They spend ages in the optometrist. Eddie doesn’t want to leave.
It’s oddly fun, wandering around the little shop and picking out increasingly ridiculous pairs of glasses for Richie to try on. The woman behind the desk (the optometrist, Eddie guesses, presumably) offers to give them a hand but something in Eddie takes charge, insists they’re fine, thanks.
It would probably be quicker if they’d accepted the help, but Eddie just wants it to be him and Richie. He remembers now, how it was when they were kids. That particular pull he’d felt toward Richie, that he never felt for any of the others. Richie as a kid had driven him up the wall a lot of the time, pushed and pushed until Eddie snapped, but it never felt bad with him. No one else had ever got him the way Richie did. With Richie, he never ran out of things to say and he was never bored. Richie made things fun, and Eddie wasn’t always allowed to have fun. His mom had made sure of that, preferring to keep Eddie close by where he couldn’t get hurt or sick or dirty.
He remembers coming home from playing with Richie, dirt burrowed under his nails, his mom scrubbing at his fingers with a nail brush until his fingers glowed pink and raw, and they’d stung the next day. The thought of it makes him want to throw up, but he just swallows it down and pulls a pair of glasses off the rack, slips them onto Richie’s face. They’re small and rectangular, with a clear frame, and they make Richie’s face look massive in a way that’s kind of unflattering but lands closer to endearing to Eddie, for some godforsaken reason.
Richie peers into the mirror and narrows his eyes. “I can’t see shit right now but I can tell these are not good.”
“Oh no this is definitely the one for you, trust me,” says Eddie, and he hears the laughter in his voice, and it makes him want to cringe away into the corner of the room. It doesn’t sound like him. At least, not the version of him he has known throughout his adulthood. He thinks maybe a long time ago, he had laughed like this.
Eddie takes a photo of Richie in each pair of glasses he tries on, and sends them to the group chat. Patty says that Richie looks “spiffy” in a pair of square tortoiseshells that Richie is genuinely considering, and Eddie finds that so weirdly charming that the word ‘spiffy’ gets stuck in his head on a loop and he feels a little thrill of something like genuine excitement at the thought that Patty could be his friend.
“Pour toi,” says Richie out of nowhere, and he slips a giant pair of blocky glasses with an opaque frame onto Eddie’s face. Eddie tries to duck away but Richie has a hand on his shoulders, and he spins Eddie in front of the mirror. Their reflections are stood side by side, and Richie is grinning so wide his eyes have disappeared into his face.
The glasses swamp Eddie’s face and make his head look tiny. The cut on his cheek is a thin line of dark red, dried and hopefully healing. There is colour in both of their cheeks, and Eddie isn’t thinking at all of the horror they faced in the sewers just yesterday. There is a dimple in Eddie’s cheek that he’s never noticed before, and Richie turns and moves his hand as though he wants to poke it, but he retracts his hand and moves it over to adjust the glasses on Eddie’s face.
“This is a great look for you, Eds,” he says, and he whips his phone out, grins manically and takes a picture of their reflections in the mirror. Eddie feels his phone vibrate in his pocket, which means Richie’s sent it to the group chat. Patty sends “double spiffy!!!!!”, which Richie says sounds like a euphemism, which earns them a glare from the lady behind the counter.
In the end, Richie chooses a pair that aren’t all that different from his old ones, and they have to wait half an hour for the optometrist to fill the glasses with Richie’s prescription. They loiter outside while they wait, and Richie buys them ice-cream from a shop down the street, and Eddie tries not to focus on the way Richie’s long fingers brush against his own when he passes Eddie the cone.
***
Bill leaves for the airport at 5:30 that night. They gather in the parlour of the town house to see him off, and it feels kind of weirdly stilted and awkward. Mike offers to give him a lift, and Bill says yes too quickly and busies himself with zipping and re-zipping his suitcase. No one says anything, and Eddie feels grateful that he isn’t the first to leave. What if they never hear from him again? Even if he remembers, which Mike seems fairly certain he will, what if he decides he wants to return to his life as it was before he remembered Derry? What if he doesn’t keep in touch?
But he promises to let them know the moment he lands in England, and they take it in turns to hug him goodbye. Bill is shorter than all of them, smaller even than Eddie (thank christ, Eddie thinks), and it feels strange to hug him. As kids Bill had been tall and lean, older brother of a ghost and older brother in nature, always. Eddie had looked up to him, as a kid. He’d wanted to do what Bill Denbrough was doing, no matter what.
As a kid he knew he would die for Bill, if he’d asked him. And just yesterday he’d followed Bill back into the house on Neibolt Street, despite every instinct inside of him wanting nothing more than to grab Richie’s hand and run for the hills, knowing somehow that he was probably going to die and following Bill anyway. He doesn’t know what he’ll do if Bill forgets. But Bill follows Mike out the front doors of the townhouse and waves with his hand full of suitcase, and later Eddie hears all of their phones buzz at the same time with Bill’s stream of updates in the group chat.
They order pizza from a place nearby and eat it on Stan and Patty’s bed while they wait for Mike to come back. Richie picks the olives off his pizza and dumps them on Eddie’s.
“You still don’t like olives?” Eddie’s legs are crossed on the bed and his knee is digging into Richie’s thigh beside him. He looks up at Richie and his eyes are tired behind his new glasses. There’s a tiny bit of sauce smeared on his bottom lip, and Eddie wants nothing more than to press his lips to Richie’s and lick it off. His heart picks up at the thought and he busies himself with his own pizza.
“Too salty, man,” Richie says, mouth full of food, and there’s a glint in his eye like he wants to say something more but he backs down, weirdly. Eddie knows he’d probably be disgusted at whatever it was but he just thinks I want to crawl inside his brain and sleep there, which is so deranged he has to tear into the crust of his slice of pizza particularly viciously.
When Mike arrives back he is in one piece but his eyes are red-rimmed, just slightly, so they fold him into their midst on the bed like they’re kids again, cramped into the clubhouse, shoulders touching.
***
The crickets outside blur the sound of Eddie’s feet on the threadbare carpet as he pads to his own room, townhouse still and quiet in the lateness of the night. The shower curtain, newly reinstated to its correct position above the bathtub, isn’t as unsettling as it had been the night before, but something in Eddie aches at the thought of spending the night alone. He changes into a pair of his own pyjama pants, navy blue and part of a matching set that he’s sure Richie would tease him for owning, and then shrugs on the H.R Pufnstuf t-shirt. He doesn’t care anymore, really, if anyone sees him slip out of his room, clutching his toiletry bag, and down the hall to Richie’s.
Richie opens the door seconds after Eddie knocks, tall and soft in the same grey t-shirt and lint-bally sweatpants he’d worn to bed last night. His feet are bare on the dirty townhouse carpet, which kind of makes Eddie want to die a bit, but he smiles down at Eddie and it sets off those creases at the corners of his eyes.
“So Pufnstuf shirt was a hit then?” He steps back to let Eddie into the room and Eddie slides past him, feels the warmth of their bodies standing so close together and tries not to lean too far into it.
“Shut the fuck up,” Eddie snaps, but he can’t hear any real heat in his voice. “It’s comfy.”
“Nah, I told you. It looks cute on you!” There’s no waver when Richie says it this time. He isn’t close to tears. Eddie thinks he should probably hate Richie calling him that but he absolutely doesn’t. He crosses his arms across his chest and pretends at rolling his eyes, like he’s bothered.
“I can kind of see the resemblance,” he says, glancing up at Richie. He points at Richie’s face. “You’ve got the same bags under your eyes.”
“You’re such a bitch!” Richie says, but he’s laughing, and it’s the nicest sound Eddie’s ever heard in his life, warm and bursting in the dull little room.
“Next Halloween costume,” Eddie says, and he can feel the stupid grin on his face tugging at the gash in his cheek, and it’s painful but it feels good. Eddie’s going to know Richie this Halloween. He isn’t used to having things to look forward to.
He’s so happy, just to be standing here with Richie again.
“You can be Jimmy then. We just need to get you a magical talking flute.” Richie lifts his hands up by his face and mimes playing a flute, and Eddie raises his eyebrows because it looks kind of suggestive. Richie knows what he’s doing, and he doesn’t break eye contact until Eddie has to look away.
“That was such a weird show,” says Eddie, sitting down on the bed. Richie must have made it this morning after Eddie left, albeit messily. He sits down beside him, long legs crossed almost daintily at the ankle.
There’s music playing, Eddie realises belatedly. He glances back to Richie’s bedside table, the side of the bed he’d slept on last night. Richie’s phone is spilling tinny music into the room, soft and quiet and knitting itself together with the warm lamplight and the curtains drawn against the night to assemble something almost cosy, here in Derry of all places. Comfortable. Eddie glances over at Richie, who answers his unspoken question.
“Daniel Johnston,” he says. “I just put a playlist on shuffle.” The name sparks something in Eddie, the muffled voice and bare piano chords. Richie had loved music, as a kid. He’d made them all mixtapes on his mom’s tape recorder.
Eddie has a sudden flashback to being very little, maybe seven or eight. Dancing with Richie and his mom, who he tried to call Mrs Tozier like his own mom said he should but who insisted he call her Mags, to her vinyl. Something dancey, maybe Blondie. Maggie Tozier taking Richie and Eddie both by the hand, all of them jumping up and down manically to the music, Eddie trying desperately to keep up with the Toziers’ energy and finding that he matched them easily, he wasn’t tired and his lungs didn’t hurt and he could go on jumping with Richie and Maggie Tozier forever, it felt like.
Richie’s hair swirling around his head, his big glasses sliding up and down his face with each jump, Richie’s small hand clinging to his, and Maggie singing along, her voice quite beautiful. Eddie had thought that Richie’s mom was kind of a strange mom - she wasn’t anything like his own, but her laugh burst bright into the room and she didn’t get upset if Richie got too worked up dancing, and she let them have sugary lemonade when they got tired, and Eddie had wanted to cry when his own mom came to pick him up and take him home to their quiet house without any locks on the doors, where there was never any music.
Daniel Johnston sings time comes and goes, but all the while I still think of you and Eddie wants to bury his face in Richie’s shoulder, feel their pulses steady and in sync. He sings the things we did I can’t forget, some things last a lifetime and Eddie wants to cry. He wants to kiss him. He wants to take Richie’s hand and bounce around the room like they’re seven years old again, but the song is too slow and Eddie’s too old and he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to be doing.
“Did you uh,” Richie pauses, scratching at the stubble on his chin. Eddie reaches across and gently moves his hand away, and Richie flushes at the touch. His hand is warmer than Eddie had expected it to be. “Did you want to stay here again tonight?”
“I want to, yeah.” Eddie’s staring down at Richie’s crossed legs against the carpet, the sharp jut of Richie’s ankle bone poking out from beneath the hem of his sweatpants. “I’m assuming that’s okay with you, obviously,” he adds out of some forced politeness, or something. He doesn’t think Richie will object.
Out of the corner of his eyes he can see Richie nodding.
“Yeah sure, man,” he says, voice forcibly cool and composed. Eddie wants so badly to hug him. “No problem.”
Eddie picks up his toiletry bag from where it sits on the floor at his feet.
“Gonna brush my teeth,” he says, “my mouth tastes like olives,” and he slips into the bathroom.
From the bed he hears Richie say “Disgusting,” and then a creak as he stands up.
As Eddie squeezes toothpaste onto his electric toothbrush (he’d switched to an electric toothbrush a few years ago when he came to terms with the fact that his aggressive brushing was wearing his toothbrushes down to a frayed mess every few weeks) Richie appears in the bathroom mirror, a tall and utterly non-threatening shape beside him. The smudges on the mirror blur his edges just slightly, and he glows warm in the dim light of the bathroom. Eddie steps closer to him, feels the weight of him against his side. Richie makes a face in the mirror, big eyes and crooked grin, and squeezes too much toothpaste onto his brush.
He feels oddly competitive, brushing his teeth next to Richie, like he’s a kid again and whoever stops first loses the game. Richie breaks first, surprisingly, spraying spit all down his chin and making a big show of bending down to rinse his mouth out straight from the tap. His t-shirt rides up at the back when he bends over, exposing a pale strip of skin and the fine dark hairs that line the centre of his back, and freckles. He doesn’t remember Richie having freckles when they were kids. Eddie shoves him out of the way to keep from doing something stupid like pressing a thumb to one of the sprays of freckles along his spine, and Richie just laughs and pretends at tripping over, hopping dramatically on one foot.
***
In the bedroom, Daniel Johnston has switched over to something else, a woman’s voice and quiet guitar.
“Joni!” Richie exclaims like she’s an old friend, following Eddie out of the bathroom. He sits on the floor at the foot of the bed and Joni Mitchell sings you are in my blood you’re my holy wine and Eddie thinks of Richie’s small hand clasped in his own, even smaller, jagged palms pressed together and their mingled blood passing through one another’s veins. He sits down beside Richie, draws his knees up to his chest. Richie does the same, and no one says anything but it isn’t uncomfortable, the way that his living room back in New York is always uncomfortable. Him and Myra and an unseeing television the only noise in the room.
The lamplight spills its friendly orange glow around them and sets Richie’s curls alight, framing his gentle face and casting soft shadows across his cheeks. Eddie wants to reach through and brush the shadows from his cheekbones, live in the space where the light hits his temple. He has to make a concerted effort not to lean his head on Richie’s shoulder.
Joni Mitchell turns into something more discordant and ethereal, that Eddie vaguely recognises. “Cocteau Twins,” Richie says. “You got Spotify?”
“No, I just use iTunes or whatever. I don’t really get Spotify.” One of his younger coworkers has been on at him to download Spotify but he honestly doesn’t really have time for music, and anyway he and Myra still have a collection of CDs that they listen to on their sound system at home from time to time. He briefly imagines admitting to Richie that he and Myra own every CD that Barry Manilow has ever released and then promptly decides he would rather have died down in the sewers.
“Lame, Eds,” says Richie, and his hand on his drawn knees is curled as though he’s holding a glass. “You gotta get with the times.”
“Fuck off.” Eddie thinks to suggest they go downstairs to the bar and grab a drink, but he doesn’t want to move from where he’s sat, almost tucked into Richie’s side.
“You used to be so into music when we were kids. I remember you boppin’ to like, The Ramones or some shit,” Richie tells him.
Eddie thinks of those mixtapes Richie made him again, of one time when Slowdive were playing in Portland and Richie had saved up his pay checks from his job sweeping popcorn and mopping up sticky spilled drinks at the cinema for months to buy them tickets, only for Eddie’s mom to refuse to let him go. Richie had wound up taking Bill instead.
“I like music still!” Eddie insists. He hasn’t listened to any of the music they’d listened to back then in as long as he can remember.
“What are you listening to these days?”
“I don’t know.” Eddie’s mind goes blank, and he stares down at Richie’s knobby knees and says, “I like k.d lang.
“k.d lang??” Richie’s face in Eddie’s peripheral vision lights up. He’s grinning and there’s a shadow of unshed laughter in his eyes, like he’s trying and failing to hold it inside.
“Fuck off.”
“Aw Eds, you little lesbian!” Richie’s grin doesn’t look mean, but something in Eddie’s stomach swoops at his words.
“Don’t be fucking homophobic!” he says.
“I-I’m not!” Richie stammers indignantly. “I’m not homophobic.” His eyes are so big in his face, and his smile drops uncertainly.
“What’s wrong with k.d lang?” Eddie doesn’t know why he keeps pushing it, but Richie makes him feel so defensive sometimes. Like he has to prove himself. Or maybe it’s just being back in Derry.
“Nothing! I think it’s cute that you like her.”
“She’s fucking talented!” Eddie insists. “I went to her concert a few years ago actually.” He’d gone with Myra, right around the time they’d gotten married. Must have been 2008. Eddie had been mortified when he’d cried during Hallelujah, and he’d kept his eyes trained dutifully forward and desperately hoped Myra wouldn’t notice. She hadn’t.
“Seriously?” says Richie. “Definitely didn’t peg you as a concert guy, these days.” He laughs softly to himself. “Peg. Speaking of lesbians.” Eddie flicks his shoulder hard and Richie just laughs again.
“Well, we weren’t like raging out or anything,” he says. “It was a k.d lang concert.”
“Constant Craving was a classic Eds, I’ll give you that.”
“Fucking thank you.” Richie’s quiet again for a moment. Eddie’s pretty sure another Cocteau Twins song is playing on Richie’s phone. He and Richie had used to sit in Richie’s room and attempt futilely to decipher what Elizabeth Frazer was saying, he remembers suddenly. They had a notebook dedicated to the task and everything. God.
Richie’s stretched his legs out in front of him, and Eddie moves closer beside him, presses their sides neatly against each other. Richie leans his arm up against the bed behind them to make room, so Eddie’s shoulder is tucked right up into Richie’s armpit.
“I think I left Myra today.” The words spill from Eddie’s lips without much thought and they sit there in the air between them for a moment, mixing with the sharp mint of their mingled breath and the dreamy music playing from the bedside table. Richie just nods.
“Shit.” He raises his eyebrows a little, and his glasses slip down his nose just slightly. Eddie reaches out and pushes them back up his face. “You almost got clawed to death by a murderous alien clown and it made you reevaluate all your life choices?” His voice sounds a bit trembly.
Eddie laughs. “Yeah, pretty much.”
“Was she that bad?” Richie turns away, eyes on the bathroom door. Behind them, the song switches over to The Jesus and Mary Chain, he’s pretty sure.
“She’s not like, a bad person.” And she’s not, he doesn’t think. Not like Bev’s husband is a bad person, at least. Right? She’s never laid a hand on him. Eddie can’t explain the uncomfortable knot in his stomach
“She’s bad for me though, I think. Probably we’re bad for each other.”
Richie nods, his head bopping up and down like a puppet. It’s cute.
“That sucks, man.” He doesn’t sound that upset about it. Eddie waits to see if he’s going to say anything else but he doesn’t. Eddie’s kind of glad. He doesn’t want Richie’s sympathy.
He doesn’t feel all that cut up about it, honestly. He’s pretty sure he should be feeling more distressed about leaving his wife than he currently is, but then again maybe it just needs to take some time to sink in and he’ll have a proper Eddie Kaspbrak standard freak out about it tomorrow.
“I don’t know what you want me to say.” Eddie looks up and Richie’s chewing at the skin around his thumbnail, a sharp bead of blood swelling at the surface of his skin. “Why are you telling me this?”
Eddie feels a spark of irritation flare behind his eyebrows. “Because you’re my best friend?” he says. “We just nearly died and I ended my marriage, and I thought you should know about that.”
He’d expected Richie to pick up the argument but he doesn’t, just stays slumped against the end of the bed with his arm hovering so close behind Eddie’s back.
“Okay. Sorry.”
“I want to stick to it this time,” Eddie says.
“To leaving your wife?”
“Yeah.” Richie’s fingers brush imperceptibly against Eddie’s left shoulder. “I left her once before. Or I tried to.”
“Oh yeah?”
“I booked myself into a hotel for a night right after work and I was going to go back to our place the next day and get my stuff but I panicked and told her I was away for a conference, and we never talked about it again.”
“When was that?”
“Four years ago, I think?” Eddie thinks then, unfortunately, of his mother. Of the three times he had tried, and failed, to leave her. Only her death had freed him.
It’s quiet again for a moment, and the song on Richie’s phone switches to something Eddie can’t place but he knows he’s heard it before, long ago. One of Richie’s mixtapes, maybe. No I’ve never met anyone quite like you before.
“If I died yesterday,” Eddie begins to say, and Richie is pale beside him. His hand in the bedsheets behind them grips tighter, knuckles big and taut. “What a shit life.” He feels the words right down in the depths of his stomach. He can’t remember the last time he really felt happy.
“Eds,” Richie says, and his arm comes down, finally, around Eddie’s shoulders. “Fuckin’ tell me about it.” He rests his arm there like they’re teenagers in a cinema. Once, that’s just what they were, sat side by side watching Wayne’s World. Eddie had never really cared that Richie’s fingers in their shared popcorn box were covered in spit, even if he’d pretended that he did.
Eddie presses his head against Richie’s broad shoulder and laughs, shakily. It feels something like relief. He doesn’t know how he never saw it before, how cold and empty his life had been. He’d gone through the motions every day, ticking off the things that, on paper, said to the world that Eddie Kaspbrak’s life was a good one. A respectable job, a wife, both their names on the deed of their house. All these years and he’s never had a single real friend, nobody who really knew him. God, he’s so lonely.
He expects Richie to point out all those objectively good things, the house and the job and maybe even the wife, but he doesn’t. He just rests his cheek on Eddie’s head and says, “If you died yesterday I don’t even… I don’t know what I would have done.” His voice sounds quiet and raw, and it reverberates strangely through Eddie’s skull.
Eddie reaches a hand out and grips Richie’s knee. “You would have been okay,” he says. “You lived without me for what? Twenty two, twenty three years?”
“Fuck off with that shit.” There’s laughter in Richie’s voice but he sounds so sad it makes Eddie want to fold him up in his arms and keep him there, safe.
“If I’d known you were out there, I would have-” Richie starts, and then he stops himself. Eddie thinks of Richie, alone in LA, putting on a face that was never his own to try and make people laugh - the sort of people who would have beat Richie up as a kid. He pictures him sat at a bar, or on his couch, or on somebody’s bed, trying to wrangle the approval of strangers and all that time nobody ever saw through him the way the Losers did. The way Eddie did. He wants to cry at the thought of Richie going through the motions like Eddie had in New York, none of it ever feeling right somehow.
“Fuckin’ sucks that I forgot you.” He sounds like he’s going to cry again. “I never thought I could, as a kid.”
“Wasn’t our fault,” says Eddie. “I don’t think we’ll forget this time. Mike doesn’t think so.”
“I love Mike so much but he’s uh, not got the greatest track record.”
Eddie feels a weird surge of defensiveness toward Mike.
“Hey,” he says, and he shoves Richie’s knee gently. “No Mike slander allowed.”
“I know, I know, I’m kidding. I can’t even imagine what the state of my brain would look like if I’d stayed in Derry all these years.”
“Mm.” Eddie strokes his thumb gently over Richie’s knee. The music changes again. Richie murmurs “Mazzy Star,” which Eddie is sure is a name he remembers from Richie’s mixtapes.
“Anyway,” Eddie says. “Bill remembers, so.” He wants so badly to turn his head and kiss Richie’s cheek where it rests against Eddie’s hair. “I wouldn’t let us forget. Regardless.”
Richie laughs softly. “I believe you.” They’re quiet for a moment, Richie’s breath warm and close.
When Richie speaks his voice is quiet and low. “Stan and Patty are leaving tomorrow.”
“Yeah.”
“She seems pretty nice.”
“Yeah I like her. She suits Stan.” Eddie is met with silence, like Richie wants to say something but is too afraid, so he speaks again. “When are you going back? To LA?”
“I don’t know, man. I only booked a one way ticket, so. Whenever everyone else leaves I guess.”
Eddie rubs his sweaty palm against the fabric of his pants and tries to focus on the steady thrum of Richie’s blood passing through his veins, his quick pulse playing softly in Eddie’s ear. He’s never liked being able to hear his own pulse, finds it a repulsive sensation and an uncomfortable reminder of his fragile mortality. But it’s nice to be reminded that Richie is here, living and breathing and right back in Eddie’s life again, the way he always should have been.
“I don’t really want to go back,” he says into the odd warmth of the hotel room. Hope Sandoval sings I think it’s strange you never knew, over and over again and Richie’s breath hitches imperceptibly in his throat. Somewhere outside a car horn beeps, and the crickets go on with their chirping.
“You want to stay here in Derry forever? This shit-hole?” Richie says. His minty breath ghosts over Eddie’s temple.
“Christ no, Derry’s fucking awful. I don’t know how Mike stood it all these years.”
Richie hums into Eddie’s hair but he doesn’t say anything else.
“I just don’t want-” He doesn’t know how exactly he was going to end that sentence. He’s not sure he’s had a clear idea of what it is he wants or doesn’t want for maybe the entirety of his adult life. He’s just done all the things he’d thought he should be doing, and hasn’t put much consideration into whether or not those things give his life any real meaning.
“I just want to stay with you,” he says, and his voice sounds young and vulnerable when it chips its way out of his lungs, as though some past version of himself is speaking through him - a long-forgotten teenaged Eddie with grass stains on his knees and fingernails scrubbed red raw and Richie’s laughter always echoing somewhere in his ears.
Richie doesn’t speak, not immediately. His playlist comes to an end and the room is bathed in gentle silence, and Eddie can’t look at anything but his own socked feet against the faded carpet.
And then Richie moves beside him, imperceptibly, and for a tiny moment Eddie feels a buzzing panic that Richie is going to get up and leave, but he only presses his lips to the crown of Eddie’s head and kisses him there so gently, and Eddie feels only calmness.
“Eds,” Richie says into Eddie’s hair, and Eddie turns his head so that they’re facing each other properly. Richie’s arm is still warm around his shoulders. “I really fucking missed you.” Richie’s breath is hot against Eddie’s lips and he thinks frantically that he wants to swallow it, hold Richie’s breath deep in his own lungs like cigarette smoke, like water and camphor oil.
He isn’t sure who moves forward first, but Eddie murmurs “Come here” and then Richie’s lips are crushing against his own and Eddie closes his eyes. Richie moves his arm from around Eddie’s shoulders and brings his hands up to cradle Eddie’s face.
His hands are so big, and he strokes his thumbs gently across Eddie’s cheekbones, careful to skate lightly over the cut on Eddie’s cheek. Richie’s palm cradles Eddie’s chin so perfectly. No one has ever held his face before.
He grips Richie’s shoulders. Their knees are pressed together on the floor, and Richie tastes faintly like mint toothpaste but mostly just like spit, and Eddie can’t quite get his breathing right but he doesn’t feel scared at all really, just safe. Richie makes him feel safe.
They break apart for the tiniest moment, and then Richie parts his lips and Eddie slips his tongue into his mouth and they’re kissing properly. Eddie can’t remember the last time he was kissed like this, doesn’t know if he ever has been. Richie big hands are still cradling Eddie’s face, and Eddie moves his hands to cup the back of Richie’s head and thread his fingers through his hair, shuffles so that he’s in Richie’s lap. When they stop Eddie’s chest is heaving and his skin is buzzing and when he looks at Richie, whose face is so close and warm, his eyes are wet behind his new glasses like he might cry.
“Rich.” He brushes his thumbs against the skin under Richie’s eyes, reaching under his glasses, but Richie is smiling. Hysterical laughter bubbles up from somewhere behind Eddie’s ribs and then Richie’s laughing too, and crying, and still cradling Eddie’s head in his hands like Eddie is something precious to him.
“What the fuck,” Richie says on a laugh, voice breathy and hushed in the quiet room. “Are you real? Is this real life?”
Eddie reaches out and pinches Richie’s cheek, not hard but enough to sting just a bit, and Richie yelps and twists his neck to shake Eddie off.
“It’s real life bitch,” Eddie says, and then he leans back in and kisses Richie again.
***
Somehow, they make it onto the bed. Richie sprawls out on his back and Eddie hovers above him, and he has no idea what to do next. He feels suddenly stupid and awkward and it hits him that he’s a technically-married middle aged man who has never so much as blown a kiss at another man before this day, and he looks at Richie and wonders what he could possibly see in him. But Richie just brings his hands to Eddie’s waist and holds him there, warm and steady.
Eddie settles with his knees either side of Richie’s hips on the bed. Richie’s hair is a mess and his lips are shiny with spit. He looks strangely young, for a moment, when his eyes crease up at the corners. He looks happy and it makes Eddie want to kiss him again, so he does.
“I can’t keep looking at Pufnstuf,” Richie says when they break apart, fiddling with the hem of Eddie’s t-shirt. “We gotta get rid of him.” And then Richie’s sitting up and he tugs the Pufnstuf t-shirt up and over Eddie’s shoulders, tosses it on the floor. Eddie feels momentarily vulnerable, sure his chest is so pale and pasty it must glow in the warm light of the room but Richie’s big hands brush warm and firm along Eddie’s shoulder blades. He brings them down to skate his thumbs over Eddie’s nipples gently and Eddie kisses him again. Richie sucks at Eddie’s bottom lip, and Eddie hears a moan escape from his own chest and feels kind of mortified but Richie only kisses him harder.
Richie strips free of his t-shirt too, and Eddie runs a hand through the hair on his chest and presses his mouth to one of Richie’s nipples, sucks it into his mouth. Richie moans and it goes straight to Eddie’s dick and god, he feels feral. He’s never felt this desperate before, like if he doesn’t touch Richie he’ll simply pass the fuck away.
“Eds oh my god,” Richie says in a rush, and he grinds up against Eddie’s thigh sprawled on top of him. Eddie feels the press of their hard dicks against each other, and oh god he’s hard and Richie’s hard and he is here in a motel in his hometown with his childhood best friend who maybe, he thinks, it turns out might be the love of his life, and yesterday they killed a fucking clown and Richie killed a real human man and Eddie feels sort of like his head is filled with bees. But then Richie grinds up against him again and brings his hands up to Eddie’s face, and suddenly Eddie is just in a room with the best person he ever knew, and there’s no space for anything else in his brain. Nothing in the world has ever been this important.
Richie strokes a thumb across the cut on Eddie’s cheek, so gently.
“You’re really pretty,” he says, voice hoarse, and Eddie thinks he’s going to cry. No one’s ever called him that before, and if anyone else had tried he thinks he might have chewed them out or punched them in the face, but this is different. He wants to swallow down everything Richie says. It feels good, to be called pretty by Richie Tozier. It feels right.
In the light that spills from the bedside lamp Richie’s face is flushed, and his hair is soft when Eddie takes a curl into his hands and holds it, strokes a strand back from Richie’s sweaty forehead. Richie presses his mouth to a spot on Eddie’s neck and he feels his heart pick up, is sure that Richie must feel his pulse flutter where his lips meet Eddie’s skin.
“God Richie,” he says, and he doesn’t know if he’ll ever again be able to string together anything more coherent than that. Those two words say it all, he supposes.
“Can I touch you?” Eddie asks, Richie’s thumb stroking Eddie’s forearm where it rests on his chest, and Richie says “please” and kisses him again, sucks Eddie’s tongue into his mouth. Eddie pulls away for a moment to spit into his hand, and then he slips it beneath Richie’s sweatpants. He envelopes Richie’s dick in the palm of his hand, and nothing has ever felt this good or right in Eddie’s life.
Richie bucks up into the circle of Eddie’s fingers, and then he stills and Eddie worries that he’s done something wrong or off-putting, but Richie just nudges Eddie to shift over so that Eddie’s lying next to him on the bed and they’re facing one another. Eddie gets Richie’s pyjama pants down over his ass and then takes his dick into his hand again, and Richie says Eddie’s name over and over again like he’s trying to memorise it, like it’s something he never wants to forget, and he’s still saying it when he comes over Eddie’s hand. The fact that it was so quick makes it mildly less humiliating when Eddie follows him seconds later, wet and grinding against Richie’s thigh, spilling into his own pants like he’s a teenager.
Richie shucks his pants off the rest of the way, and Eddie follows suit, shifting so that he’s lying comfortably next to Richie. He brings his hand up and lets it hover above them awkwardly, unsure of what to do with Richie’s come, which is suddenly kind of gross now that it’s cooling off on his skin. Richie just laughs kind of breathlessly and circles his fingers around Eddie’s wrist, wipes Eddie’s hand on his own bundled up pair of sweatpants and then tosses them onto the floor.
“That’s so disgusting,” Eddie says, but Richie doesn’t let go of his hand, holds it pressed up against his bare chest. Eddie slips his leg between Richie’s and relishes in the feeling of the hairs on their legs brushing up against each other. It’s a weird and unfamiliar sensation, and it makes Eddie think of boyhood again, lying in a hammock with his feet in Richie’s face, closer to anyone than he’d ever been before, that feeling in the pit of his stomach like he was doing something wrong. Richie reaches across the bed and smooths the hair out of Eddie’s face where it’s fallen over his eyes, and that feeling in his stomach starts to shrink away.
Richie’s lips are pursed like he’s trying not to laugh.
“What?” Eddie tries to sound indignant but he drops his hand to cup Richie’s waist as he says it, so he doubts he sounds particularly menacing.
“That was quick. I didn’t even touch you.”
“Shut the fuck up! It was quick for you too, asshole.”
“I’m only teasing dude, we’re just old.”
“Not that old.”
“You should have fucked me in my twenties man, whole different story.” It’s a joke, but it makes Eddie kind of sad. He wishes he could have known Richie back then. Richie looks like he regrets saying it, so Eddie strokes his thumb back and forth across Richie’s hip in a way he hopes is comforting.
“Wish I could have,” he says, and Richie ducks his head to kiss Eddie’s temple.
He shuffles around a bit, reaches out and pulls the sheet up the bed so that it covers them. Eddie is quietly relieved, the mortifying thought of one of their friends walking in on the two of them ass naked on top of the bed filling him with dread. As though the two of them lying naked under the covers is any less incriminating. Eddie shifts onto his back, and Richie brings his head to rest on Eddie’s chest.
“Take your glasses off, they’re digging into my chest.”
“Shit, sorry man. Gotta protect your tits.” Richie places his glasses on the bedside table and settles again on Eddie’s chest like he belongs there, and his head is kind of heavy but Eddie’s chest feels full, like there was a ragged hole cut straight through his torso where something was missing and now it’s been sealed up. He wants to say as much to Richie but he’s pretty sure Richie will just make a dirty joke. He’s predictable like that. It makes Eddie feel warm to think that he still knows Richie’s mind so well, even after all these years.
One of Richie’s hands is curled over Eddie’s ribcage, and his breath is warm against Eddie’s skin, cheek pressed over Eddie’s heart. Eddie holds him around the waist. The room is quiet, just the sound of Richie’s breathing and the hum of the cicadas outside.
“I think it was just quick because, like, I don’t know.” He presses a kiss to Eddie’s chest. “I feel like I was waiting that whole time, you know? To find you again. It’s kind of overwhelming, I guess.” Richie’s voice is quieter and more reverent than Eddie has heard it in the past few days being back here. “I missed you. I had no idea how fucking empty my life was, without you.”
Eddie strokes a hand through Richie’s hair, leans down and presses a kiss to his forehead.
“What are we gonna do?” he asks.
“What do you mean?” Richie tilts his head up to meet Eddie’s eyes. He’s squinting without his glasses. Eddie thinks it’s cute.
“Well I mean, you live in LA. I live in New York. I’m married, technically.”
“Yeah, that’s a bit of a shit.” Richie’s eyes look so sad when he says that.
“I’m going to leave her, Richie, I swear,” he says, and he strokes his thumb along the sharp cut of Richie’s jaw. “We’ll get a divorce.”
“You think she’ll go for that?”
“I don’t care, she’ll just have to. I don’t want to be married to her. I don’t love her.”
“Ruthless, Eds,” Richie says, but he’s smiling. He reaches up and strokes Eddie’s hair again, like he just wants an excuse to touch him. It makes something inside Eddie’s stomach squirm, but not unpleasantly. He remembers with a jarring flash that they’re both naked still beneath the covers, and his face starts to burn. God, his life is so strange. Richie lies back down, and Eddie goes back to carding his hand through his hair.
“I could come to New York,” Richie murmurs into Eddie’s chest. “With you. If you wanted that.”
“What about your shows?”
“Well, like I said, I doubt Steve’ll want me back anyway so, may as well hide out with you.”
“Who’s Steve?”
“My manager,” he says, and then he continues. “But like, all good if not, I mean. No pressure obviously. I don’t want you to like, blow your whole life up for me, you know?”
“Rich, you blowing my life up would be a fucking godsend. My life is not… good. As it is.”
Richie laughs, self-satisfied and sweet. “Oh I’ll blow your life up baby, just you wait.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Eddie admonishes, but he’s laughing too. “You can come with me to New York, sweetheart. I’d like that,” he says, and Richie squeezes him tighter around the waist. He has no idea where the pet name comes from, and it makes him blush a bit. But the thought that Richie could come home with him, that they could have a life together, is just so nice.
He pictures their shoes neatly lined up beside each other on a shoe rack, Richie’s high tops and Eddie’s work shoes. He pictures Richie’s shampoo next to his in a shower caddy, some book Richie’s reading on a bedside table. Richie’s bright shirts colour-coordinated on one side of a walk in wardrobe, Eddie’s shirts and work suits on the other. Mismatched mugs in varying gaudy patterns on a shelf above the kitchen counter (Richie seems to Eddie like the sort of guy who would have novelty mugs). They can get a Roomba and Richie can give it a dumb name, and maybe in the evenings they can sit together on a comfortable sofa and watch dumb movies and talk over them the whole time like they did when they were kids.
“Might have to get Sandy to keep the cats for a bit longer, but I’m sure I can get them flown up to New York if I have to, that shouldn’t be a problem,” Richie says, interrupting Eddie’s thoughts.
“Do you actually have cats?”
“I haven’t shown you yet?” he sounds scandalised. “Gerald and Barbara! My beautiful children.”
“Oh my god.”
“Is this going to be a dealbreaker? Because I’m not abandoning my kids, I’m not that kind of guy.”
Eddie laughs despite himself. “It’s not a dealbreaker. Nothing could be a dealbreaker, for you.” He can feel himself grinning, and he feels stupid but he’s just so happy. “I’m not picking up their shit though.”
“Oh baby, for you? They’re fully toilet trained.”
“What does that even mean?” Richie just laughs against Eddie’s chest. It’s the best sound Eddie’s ever heard.
***
They leave Derry three days later, Eddie’s suitcases neatly zipped and packed into the back of Richie’s flashy red rental car. Patty and Stan had flown back to Atlanta two days ago, and Eddie is relieved when he and Richie’s phones light up at the same time, on opposite bedside tables, with a text informing the group chat of their safe arrival. Bill has been in contact also, all the way from England.
The thought of the seven of them forgetting again, after everything, is almost too painful to bear thinking about. Eddie wants to talk to these people all the time. He wants to know everything about the lives they lived in the time before he remembered them all, wants to sit with them and hold their hands and drink in everything, every song they recommend and every long forgotten photo of bad mid-20s haircuts Eddie never got to see. He wants to know every sad thing that ever happened to them, even if it makes him want to cry thinking of his friends out there depressed and all alone in the world.
He’d forgotten that once upon a time, he was a friend, and he had friends, and he’s filled with a weird sort of unfamiliar tenderness every time he remembers that he never again has to live without them. He hadn’t known he was capable of being so tender. It’s a strange feeling.
Ben and Bev decide to stay in Derry a little longer to help Mike sort through his belongings - he still hasn’t decided where to go first on his travels but he knows he wants to leave Derry, and he can now. Eddie feels relieved for him, but also hates the thought of Mike being alone again. But Mike assures him that he’ll visit them all on his travels, and when Bill’s film finishes shooting in a month’s time he’s thinking of joining Mike on his road trip, which makes Eddie feel a bit better.
On the last morning in Derry, Eddie wakes up in Richie’s bed again and they jerk each other off in the shower, and then Richie scrubs shampoo into Eddie’s hair with impossibly gentle fingers and together they watch the soap suds as they swirl down the drain and into the sewers - the last trace of them to ever remain in Derry. Eddie double checks their flight time (they’d booked flights lying in bed together two nights ago, Richie’s head on Eddie’s shoulder, two one way tickets from Bangor to La Guardia) and checks them in on his phone, and they pack Richie’s rental car, and then the five of them that are left in Derry stand in the parking lot of the townhouse and they say goodbye.
The morning air is frosty despite that it’s still late summer, and Eddie’s breath puffs in warm clouds when he speaks.
“Have fun!” Bev says when she pulls Eddie into a hug, and when they pull apart she winks at him knowingly. He and Richie haven’t told the others that they’re… whatever they are, but Eddie’s sure it’s written on his skin. When he looks in the mirror now there’s a warm glint in his eyes, and there are bruises on his neck that were put there by Richie’s mouth.He keeps catching himself fading away from conversations, his attention always on Richie.
Ben’s talking quietly to Richie about something over by the car, the slope of their shoulders angled toward each other companionably, when Mike pulls him into the tightest hug Eddie thinks he’s ever had in his life.
“I’m really glad you came back, Eddie,” he says into Eddie’s hair, and Eddie tries to hug him back just as tight. Mike deserves to feel held, he thinks.
“Glad I came back, man, it was worth it. It really fucking was.”
“Alright, ciao bellas!” Richie exclaims, blowing them all kisses. He lifts Bev off her feet when he hugs her, and kisses Mike on the cheek, and Ben opens the car doors for them with an exaggerated curtsey. And then they’re off.
***
In Richie’s car, Eddie insists on driving. He loves driving, always has. His hands fit comfortably on the wheel like it’s an extension of his limbs, moving somehow independently of his brain. Richie plugs his phone into the aux cord, and he picks The Ramones to play them out of Derry.
Eddie doesn’t even have to close his eyes for it to feel like he’s young again. They are seventeen in Mike’s borrowed truck and Eddie is driving, and Richie’s turned the volume up as loud as it will go, and Eddie’s throat is raw from singing along. If he’d just turn his head for one second he’d see how Richie is looking at him. The warmth in his eyes. Back then, he’d thought if he could just keep driving forever then maybe everything would be okay. He could drive Mike’s truck all the way out of Derry and on to Bangor, and he could just go on being stupid with Richie forever.
As it is, they are forty in Richie’s ridiculous hire car and they’re leaving Derry for good this time, together. Richie’s taken his shoes off and he sits with his long legs stretched up onto the dashboard, seat pushed back as far as it will go. In Eddie’s peripheral vision he looks calm and still and relaxed. He’s stuck his fingers through a crack in the window and his face is turned toward Eddie, and when they pass the sign that tells Eddie they’ve left Derry behind Richie’s eyes are shut.
“We’re out of Derry,” Eddie informs him.
“Thank fuck!” Richie says. “Finally.”
"We were barely there a week,” Eddie says, though their days spent in Derry had felt out of time, somehow.
“Felt longer,” Richie says. “Felt like forty years.”
“Well, we never have to go back.” Outside the car the trees rush by in a late summer blur and it feels for a moment like flying.
“Yeah, if it turns out the clown’s not really dead and it comes back in another 27 years, Derry’s on it’s own. No fucking way I’m coming back at what, 67?” He shifts in his seat, brings his long legs back down to rest on the floor of the car. “That piece of shit town can choke. Never gave me anything good.” Gave me you, Eddie thinks, and then Richie says, “You were the only good thing it ever gave me.”
Eddie reaches across the car and squeezes Richie’s arm where it’s folded over his stomach. He’d kiss him if it wouldn’t mean risking a car crash. There will be time for that later, he’s sure, when they land back in New York and check into the airbnb that Eddie booked last night, an apartment in the city where they’ll stay until they can find a place to rent while Eddie starts the process of divorcing his wife.
His tentative living arrangements might once have made him anxious but leaving with Richie fills him with an adrenaline that can only be good for him, it has to be. He feels like something he has always known has finally slotted into place in the back of his mind, like whatever was threatening to spill out of him all these years was never anything bad after all.
Richie’s singing along to The Ramones now, his voice oddly clear and nice even though he’s sending himself up, lifting his arm and tilting his head to mime playing a violin in time with the strings, and when he sings “Oh I’m so glad I found you” Eddie is so happy and so relieved he could cry. He doesn’t remember the last time he felt this way, hadn’t known it was possible to feel so safe.
Derry grows smaller and smaller behind them, just an un-noteworthy speck on a map, and Eddie threads his fingers with Richie’s and drives on with purpose, one-handed and so confident in the direction he’s going. It’s as though he’s been wandering aimlessly for upwards of two decades, and now he’s finally found his way home.