Chapter Text
When Richie opens the door to his apartment well past midnight after a long day of rehearsal, he expects it to be dark inside but for the oven light.
He expects to have to pick his way across the floor, hoping but failing to avoid catching the stools at the breakfast bar with his backpack strap. He expects Eddie to be asleep but to still somehow get a scolding from a barefoot, mussy-haired version of his roommate while he’s trying to brush his teeth about being too loud when grown-ups are trying to sleep, Richie.
What he doesn’t expect is to see said roommate getting absolutely railed on his Barcalounger by a strange man with a goatee.
“R-Richie!!” Eddie exclaims, his eyes flying wide. He starts to scramble to right himself, his bare, glistening torso twisting against the damp leather, shiny with sweat.
“Aw, hell!” the stranger exclaims.
“Oh, no!” Richie exclaims, to complete the trifecta of idiotic exclamations, and slams the door shut.
For a few, heart-pounding seconds, he sags against it. He draws a hand down his slack jaw, trying to dispel the image of a goatee’d stranger holding up one of Eddie’s legs by the ankle so he can split him open. Apparently with great skill, if the moans Eddie’d been letting out were anything to go by.
And then he hears the obvious sounds of movement on the other side, voices talking quietly, urgently. Eddie is kicking the dude out. He’s kicking the dude out.
Oh god, Richie ruined a date for Eddie.
The thought occurs with a small, sadistic lick of self-satisfaction… followed almost immediately by a squash of cold realism.
“He’s probably not kicking him out, idiot. They’re probably just moving to the bedroom,” Richie tells himself with a grim sigh. “You don’t get plowed like a field and tell the farmer to leave halfway through.”
Then he hears what sounds like footsteps approaching on the other side of the door, and his heart leaps back into his throat.
“Fuck, I gotta get the hell out of here.”
He shoves himself off the door and scrambles across the hall to Stan and Mike’s, not even bothering to knock before he fumbles the knob open and falls into the apartment.
It’s dark. Utterly quiet. Nary a goatee’d stranger in sight.
“See, this is what I was talking about,” Richie says under his breath.
Then, through the door, he hears the sound of a latch, and then hushed voices in the hall. Unable to stop himself, he plasters his chest to the back of the door so he can stare creepily through the peephole.
“The creephole is what I call it,” he mutters, his glasses smushed against his face.
As expected, it’s Eddie and Goatee McFucksalot. Eddie is looking up and down the hallway, muttering something to the guy, who is just standing there, running his hands through his hair.
“—sure?” the guy’s asking. “I don’t even think he’s here anymore.”
“’Course I’m sure,” Eddie hisses. He glances toward Stan and Mike’s door, and Richie very carefully reaches for the lock on the doorknob. “That was— I didn’t know he’d be coming back so soon, all right? Otherwise I would never—”
“Thought you said he didn’t care.”
“Yeah, well, there’s a difference between supporting your gay best friend and seeing him getting fucked in the goddamn living room, isn’t there, Charles?”
“Oh, so ya do know my name,” ‘Charles’ quips with an unperturbed grin that makes Richie wanna punch him. Instead, he glares through the creephole as ‘Charles’ shrugs, giving an easy smile as he fixes his tie. “’Swhy I live alone. Freedom’s great, don’t have to worry about gay-hating roommates…”
“He doesn’t hate gays, all right?” Eddie’s tone is hard, direct, before his head starts to list to the side. “He’s just… a little weird about it…”
That pangs right in Richie’s chest, steals the breath from his lungs. Ugh, he knew Eddie had picked up on that, on how Richie clams up every time Eddie talks about having a date.
“Silver lining, Richard,” he whispers to himself, still creeping. “At least he has no clue how much you wanna be the one fucking him in said living room…”
“Whatever you say,” Charles replies agreeably. “Maybe next time I see you— Oh, come on, sweetheart,” he chides, and Richie can’t see Eddie’s expression but he assumes Eddie gave him one of his usual severe looks. “Don’t look at me like that when I know you were just on the verge of number three for the night. You’re so easy, you know that…”
And Eddie shoves at him, says something, but Richie can’t hear it over the roaring in his ears, the swoop in his stomach, the loudness of the image of Eddie draped over the Barcalounger, one leg hoisted in the air so Charles can ream him just oh-so-right.
Richie can no longer creep. He falls away from the door and rubs at his eyes behind his glasses, letting his backpack fall to the floor where Stan will certainly threaten to set it on fire in the morning.
He can’t bear to go back to his and Eddie’s. Not when he knows Eddie’s still awake, still mortified, still…
...God, probably still open, still wet…
Richie clenches his eyes shut. He shivers.
In a few swift motions, he shucks off his jacket, kicks off his shoes, and throws himself on Stan and Mike’s couch. He doesn’t bother with the rest of his clothes, barely remembers to toss his glasses on the coffee table before burying his face in the throw pillow.
Eddie…
Eddie was really fucking enjoying it, huh...
His stomach twists, a sickly combination of embarrassment, shame, and arousal. He tries to ignore how he’s half-hard in his ratty jeans, pressed hard into the couch cushions. Tries even harder to ignore how this is far from the first time he’s gotten hard thinking about Eddie like that.
Now that he’s seen Eddie like that, though—flushed down to his chest, a sheen of sweat sparkling on his skin, dick shiny and hard bouncing against his abdomen…
Oh god, Eddie’s dick. He’s seen Eddie’s dick—
Tap, tap.
He freezes. Listens. His pulse is racing.
Tap, tap. It’s the ghost of a knock on the door, followed by the barest whisper of Eddie’s voice: “Richie…?”
Richie stays completely still. Silent. He waits, his heart in his throat.
After several long, frozen moments, he thinks he hears a sigh, followed by footsteps and the sound of the door closing across the hall.
He breathes a sigh of relief and rolls over onto his back, staring up at the black ceiling. Even in the blank darkness, he can still see the outline of Eddie’s thighs held open in the living room, their living room. He doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to look Eddie in the eyes sitting in that chair ever again. How are they supposed to ironically watch Baywatch together now?
And worst of all, his dick hasn’t gotten any softer.
“Maybe Charles McFucksalot was onto something with that whole ‘living alone’ thing,” he grumbles, and flings an arm over his eyes to try to sleep.
Richie wakes up to the sensation of Stan flicking him hard in the shell of his ear. He yelps, swats at him, and then blinks blearily up at his worst friend.
“The hell are you doing?” he grumbles.
“Exercising my right to defend my home,” Stan replies dryly. “You want coffee?”
“Time is it?”
“Around six.”
Richie lets his eyelids slam back shut. “Ughh… but that’s, like, the worst possible time for it to be, Stanley…”
“And why is that.”
The fact that Stanley does not know this is only further evidence that he’s a servobot in human skin. “Too early for me to wanna wake up,” Richie groans, turning his face back into the pillow, “too late for me to go back to sleep…”
“Oh.”
The sound of Stanley’s (infinitely) better half padding out from their shared bedroom is somewhat of a relief to Richie’s roughshod brain. “What’s this?”
“A foundling left on our couch,” Stan says, straightening and abandoning Richie to the couch and the rapidly growing realization that he actually will not be going back to sleep right away. “We need to start locking our door. Maybe then at least it’ll only be left on the doorstep.”
When Richie finally makes it back across the hall, he opens the door tentatively. The light is on in the kitchen, and the clink of spoon on porcelain stops as Richie slides inside.
Eddie is sitting at the breakfast bar eating his traditional, flavorless oatmeal with bananas and no brown sugar. His eyes go wide and caught when Richie sheepishly appears.
“Uh, hey,” Richie tries with a halfhearted smile, closing the door behind him.
“Hey…”
Skin prickling, Richie passes him to drop his backpack onto the living room couch. He can’t stop his eyes being drawn to Eddie’s recliner, sitting innocuously next to Richie’s. From the sheen of the beige leather and the vague, sharp scent of cleaner, it looks like it’s been rubbed down with a disinfecting wipe or something, though that’s nothing unusual for Eddie. He does that at least once a week.
Oh, god, does that mean—
“So, uh.”
Eddie’s voice nearly makes Richie jump. Richie’s eyes snap to him, but Eddie hasn’t turned; he’s still hunched over his bowl.
“Sorry,” he says, “about, uh…”
“Oh, yeah,” Richie says, like he’s only just remembering. He kicks himself. What a fucking stupid defense mechanism, playing dumb when he clearly just slept at Stan and Mike’s last night because of...
Eddie’s eyebrows twitch, as if he wants to yell at Richie already. It’s fair; Richie wants to yell at Richie already, too. “Yeah,” he says, glaring at his oatmeal now, his cheeks red. “I just… I didn’t know you’d be home so early last night.”
Richie frowns briefly. One in the morning ain’t early, in his book. Sure, he’s often out that late on Thursdays, but…
Whatever, it’s not worth arguing about. Not if he can make sure they never speak of this again.
“Got done everything we needed to get done,” he says breezily, sweeping past Eddie to grab his open box of Frosted Flakes from the top of the fridge. They’ve been going stale for about a week by now, just the way Richie likes ’em.
He can feel Eddie’s eyes on him as he pours himself a bowl and douses it with the merest splash of milk. He can feel Eddie’s frustration with his eating habits—with his living habits—the same way he’s felt it every day since Eddie moved in.
But unlike every other day since Eddie moved in, today it just makes Richie feel exhausted.
“Don’t drown ’em,” Eddie grumbles sarcastically.
And Richie knows it’s supposed to be a joke. It’s supposed to be a joke building on an entire foundation of jokes since they’ve become roommates. But today it doesn’t sit right. Today it sends cracks spiderwebbing through that foundation. Today it threatens to topple over the whole thing.
It’s not supposed to be stale, Richie. A serving size is only one cup, not a whole popcorn bowl, Richie. The milk is the only almost healthy thing about eating that shit, Richie, so of course it’s the one thing you don’t overdo, Richie.
It’s like everything Richie does is wrong. Eating, sleeping, even coming home from work when all he wants is to sleep in his own damn bed. But who was the one who opened his doors when Eddie left his wife? Who was the one who skipped work to help Eddie move his shit, set up his stupidly ancient twin bed from childhood? Who was the one who nearly bit his own tongue off when Eddie told all of them that he was seeing someone new, a man, because he could barely stop himself from screaming in shock, in joy, in horror at the realization that even though Eddie was gay he clearly didn’t want Richie?
“You know,” Richie says, leaning against the countertop and bringing the bowl to his chin, “I’m not sure in what world coming home at one A.M. is early.”
He doesn’t look at Eddie as he chews, but he knows Eddie is staring at him still. Is he just shocked that Richie’s finally standing up for himself?
“I mean, you have a bedroom, right?” he goes on, chuckling a little more bitterly than he means to. “Or doesn’t Charles van Goatee-Face live alone? Why don’t you go—”
Richie realizes his mistake. His breath catches. He cuts himself off with a spoonful of sugar to the face but the damage is done. The medicine is not gonna go down smooth.
“Why the fuck do you know that.”
Richie closes his eyes, his heart pounding. He shovels in more Frosted Flakes but they turn to ash in his mouth.
“Richie,” Eddie says, his voice sharp, “why the fuck do you know Charles lives alone? Why the fuck do you know his name is Charles?”
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
“Good guess?” he tries weakly.
Eddie’s hand slams down on the tile countertop, his eyes flashing. “Were you spying on us!?”
“O-oh, please!” Richie returns, heat creeping up his neck. “I’d hardly call it spying, when you were— in the living room, a-and then the hallway—”
“I didn’t know you were gonna be home so early!” Eddie shouts again.
“I wasn’t home early. What do you call one in the morning, Eds? Fucking teatime?”
“I call it normal for you!” Eddie returns, gritting his teeth. “Average! And you said you’d be home late. I think I can be excused for assuming when you said ‘late’ you meant relatively late rather than absolutely late.”
Richie can’t— Fuck, he can barely think. He lets his bowl fall to the counter with a clatter, spoon still sticking out of his mouth.
“You know, I live here, too,” Eddie goes on, clearly building up a head of steam. His hand is starting to slice through the air. “I can have someone over if I want. That’s what most twenty-somethings do, Richie, that’s normal, just because you—”
“Oh, great, so we’re gonna attack my dating record, too, huh?” Richie cuts in, nodding sharply as he twirls the spoon in the air. “Cool, I was hoping we would. You know, I haven’t brought anyone back because I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable, Eds, and even if I did, I wouldn’t fuck them in the living room. Call me crazy, but—”
“I didn’t know you were gonna be home so early!”
“I – wasn’t – home – early.”
Unable to continue to glare at Eddie, Richie jerks his head to the side, shoving the spoon in his mouth to suck it clean. Still avoiding Eddie’s gaze, he reaches for the silverware drawer and shoves the spoon back inside.
“Ahh-ahh!?”
The noise Eddie wrings out of his throat is more strangled and horrified than Richie has heard in a long time. He cocks an eyebrow in his direction, defiant. “What?”
“You—” Eddie’s face is red, nearly purpling with uncomprehending rage. “You licked—” He gestures to Richie’s face. “—and you put—” And to the drawer. “You licked and you put!” he finishes, hands flying in the air.
Richie crosses his arms and looks stubbornly back at him. “Yeah, so what?”
Eddie’s expression contorts even further. “So it’s disgusting, that’s what,” he answers through gritted teeth. “You can’t just—”
“I’m gonna use that spoon later, anyway,” Richie says with a shrug. He takes his bowl from the counter and briefly considers licking it like a dog and putting it back in the cupboard, but he figures that would be a bridge too far. He sets it in the sink and steps away, knowing that just the fact that he didn’t immediately wash it is enough to irk Eddie further.
“How?” Eddie demands, his hands splayed on the countertop, tendons taut. “How will you know what spoon you licked, Richie? All our spoons look the same!”
“Yeah, thanks to you,” Richie retorts. “My system worked perfectly before you came along, with your matching silverware…” He waggles his fingers sarcastically.
“Oh, yes, what a hardship,” Eddie says, rolling his eyes. “Having forks that actually stack, knives that aren’t rusty…”
“Right, thank you sooo much, Henry Higgins, for plucking me from poverty. Oi’m a propah English lady now, ain’t I?”
Unable to continue glaring at Eddie, Richie whirls to the fridge. He jerks the door open, condiments rattling, and pulls out the carton of Tropicana.
No pulp. Because that’s how Eddie likes it. And everything has to be how Eddie likes it. Even the way a stranger holds his ankle in the air to hit him just right—
Heat licks up his spine. He wants it to be rage.
He’s gonna make it rage.
“This juice fucking sucks,” Richie announces, slamming it down on the counter. A drop slops out and hits him on the cheek; his face feels so hot he wouldn’t be surprised if it evaporated off with a sizzle.
“No, it doesn’t,” Eddie bites back immediately, because of course he does. Eddie doesn’t cow in the face of anger; he matches it. He always has. It’s just one more of the many reasons Richie—
“It does. Where’s the pulp? Where’s the fuckin’ pulp? When’s the last time you ate an orange without—”
“It doesn’t need pulp; it’s fortified with vitamin D, you fuck!”
“Yeah, well, you were being fortified with vitamin D last night!”
It’s not Richie’s finest hour, for sure, and Eddie’s face goes so red that Richie’s surprised he doesn’t just combust on the spot. His eyes are practically flaming embers as Richie grabs the juice box and throws it back into the fridge.
“In the living room!” he cries again, slamming the door so hard their trashy Atlantic City bottle opener magnet topples to the linoleum floor. “My living room!”
“Hey, I pay rent. It’s my living room, too!”
“Yeah, well— maybe it shouldn’t be!”
The words hang in the air. They both freeze, wide-eyed; neither wants to follow that thread.
But follow it they must.
“What the hell does that mean,” Eddie asks, and his voice is thick. He’s offended. No, worse than that: he’s hurt.
Richie swallows hard. His heart is truly pounding now. He and Eddie can rail at each other all day long—and they often do—but when Eddie sounds like that, when Eddie looks like that, Richie’s throat wants to close up like he’s allergic to hurting him.
“What does that mean, Richie?” Eddie asks again, an edge creeping in. The lines of his face are hard. “You want me to move out?”
“No!” Richie bursts, shaking his head vehemently. “No, no, I—” He sighs, bowing his head. His glasses fall down his nose and he pushes them back up. “I… I think I meant me.”
There’s a heavy thud, and when Richie looks up, Eddie’s sat bodily back down on the stool. He’s staring at Richie, lips parted, eyes wide and uncomprehending. “You’re moving out?” he asks, voice going creaky.
Richie rubs at his arm. “I dunno, maybe. It kinda— My castmate’s got a new place and needs to sublet, and I—”
“That’s bullshit.”
Richie jerks his head back and frowns. “It’s not bullshit, she really does need to—”
“Whatever. I just wish you wouldn’t fucking lie to me, Richie.”
“I’m not lying, she’s moving closer to work, and—”
Eddie’s hand slices down through the air like a guillotine. “All right, I have to know,” he says decisively. “Is this because of the gay thing?”
“Oh my god,” Richie groans helplessly. He spins his torso away from Eddie, letting his arms flail in exasperation.
“Because if it’s because of the gay thing, I hope you know that I—”
“It’s not,” Richie cuts in angrily. “Eds, you know I don’t give a shit about that. I’m— I’m happy that you’re gay—”
“Oh, shut the hell up, don’t fucking patronize me—”
“I’m not, I really am happy about it, believe me—”
“If this is some half-assed joke about how ‘gay’ really means ‘happy,’ you can fucking save it, Richie. I’ve heard it before, I knew you in middle school—”
“It’s—! No, all right!?”
Richie’s voice booms in the apartment, exploding from his chest with far more force than he intended. It clearly takes Eddie aback, his teeth clicking shut.
They stare at each other, both clearly a little shocked.
And Richie doesn’t know how to cover it, how to explain why that was his final straw. If there was ever a time to fully explain himself, to confess, it would be here. It would be now.
“It’s… That’s not what it is,” Richie mutters, looking down. He shoves his glasses up his nose, kicking his foot against the shitty, stained linoleum. The spot that Eddie scrubbed endlessly when he first moved in but only succeeded in scratching off the smooth top layer.
“...Okay,” he hears Eddie say warily.
Richie takes a deep breath.
Now or never. Probably.
“I’m…”
He swallows. Shoves his fingers into his clenched-shut eyelids. Sighs.
“...gonna go for a walk, I think.”
Never it is.
Eddie doesn’t say anything as Richie gathers his jacket, his keys. He just stands there, in the living room, arms crossed and shoulders hunched like he’s protecting himself. Richie hates that he looks like that right now. Hates that he could ever think that Richie would want him to look like that. Defensive. Defiant. Scared.
Hates more than anything else that he could so easily fix it.
But he can’t bring himself to say the words.
“Just need some time,” he says instead. “I’ll be back later.”
“Absolutely or relatively?” Eddie returns tentatively.
The joke is weak, but still Richie chuckles. He fiddles with the chain lock for a moment, feeling the tug in his heart, the thread knotted around it that Eddie holds the other end of. He could turn around, could put on a big grin and challenge Eddie to a round of Street Fighter II Turbo on the SNES that is their most prized possession so they could settle this disagreement the way they have every other one: like men. Like boys.
Instead he draws his jacket around him, gives Eddie a half-wave over his shoulder, and closes the door behind him.
***
As soon as Richie closes the door, Eddie makes a beeline for the bathroom. He’s fucking rage-sweating through his fucking Louis Vuitton dress shirt, and Richie’s gonna pay for his goddamn dry-cleaning after all of this blows over.
Fuck.
The worst part is that Eddie really did feel bad about… it. He felt even worse when he thought Richie had heard what he’d accidentally called Charles van Goa— Charles only minutes before Richie had come in the door, but that’s neither here nor there.
“Motherfucking, spoon-licking,” Eddie growls, unbuttoning his shirt as he glares at himself in the mirror, “pulp-drinking sonofabitch—”
Once he’s done shouting in the mirror and changing his shirt, he leaves the scene of the roommate crime for work. It was already going to be an unpleasant day, what with the late night and the pile of work he has stacked on his desk, but now it’s going to fucking blow.
And it does. It does because Eddie can’t shake the feeling that he still needs to apologize to Richie, even though Richie was the one who said all that stupid-ass shit.
(Though that’s nothing new; Richie’s always saying stupid-ass shit, especially when he thinks he’s in trouble. A holdover from their childhood of countless detentions made even worse by Richie trying to talk his way out of them.)
Yet Eddie still has that itch in the back of his neck, the one that was probably planted there by his mom, the instinct to blame himself and the urge to apologize to make it better. Normally that itch makes him want to tear his skin off, makes him rage even harder, but…
But…
Richie Tozier is the best thing to ever happen to him. And Eddie’s not so stupid as not to know it.
Richie has taken him in not once but twice now, when he was suffocating in his own home and had nowhere else to go. The first time was when his mother died when he was in high school and left him in that awful, rundown dust trap of a house all by himself, and the Toziers took him in with nary a thought. And the second was last year, when Eddie finally looked at his marriage and called it what it was—a sham—and Richie, still thoughtlessly unselfish, offered up his guest bedroom, his kitchen, his bathroom, his—
—living room…
Guilt itches at his nape again, made all the worse by the knowledge that curdles shamefully in his gut that… that…
…that doing it in the living room was part of it.
It’s the reason he’d made so sure to only bring someone back on a night when Richie had—he had—specifically said he would be back late. Because he’d wanted the familiarity, the homeyness, the… fuck, it’s gross, but the scents of his and Richie’s shared apartment. He wanted to get fucked on the recliner where he sits and drinks beer and shits on Baywatch with Richie while secretly wishing Richie would be the one fucking him in said recliner.
Pathetic.
Eddie is home and has already worked out, eaten, showered, and spent long, jittery hours alternating between angry and anxious by the time Richie finally gets back. He’s late as usual, though not as late as last night, which Eddie counts with gritted teeth as another strike against himself.
Richie enters the apartment slowly, hesitantly, the door creaking on its hinges, and Eddie wants to scream tunelessly along with it when Richie’s eyes tentatively meet his.
He stands up from the Barcalounger, drawing a breath. “Hey,” he says.
“Hey…”
“Uh… how was your day? You didn’t take a walk for twelve hours, did you?” Eddie’s chuckle is as gentle as he can make it without starting to whisper.
“Ha, no, no,” Richie answers with a laugh, just as gently. He offers a wry smile. “But I did get shat on by, presumably, two separate pigeons, so. I think I got the whole ‘outdoors’ experience.”
Eddie wrinkles his nose, stepping closer. “Fuckin’ gross, dude.”
“Yeah, talk about a shitty day.” Richie’s grin expands at Eddie’s answering eye-roll. It turns abruptly tentative, however, an eye squinting. “Hey, though, uh… no hard feelings about earlier?”
Eddie’s chest lightens. “Yeah, man, o’course,” he says quickly. “Uh, unless you had any…”
“No, I—” Richie huffs a laugh, running a hand through his hair. “I worked out my feelings about orange juice on my first walk of the day.”
“Oh, good.”
Slowly, one step at a time, they’ve both come to stand on either side of the kitchen peninsula. They’re both avoiding each other’s eyes, Eddie notices, as he scratches at a spot on the tile with a thumbnail. Richie is fiddling with his glasses, cleaning them on the hem of his shirt.
Maybe Eddie should just… come clean. Tell Richie everything, about his feelings. Richie won’t return them, obviously, but at least then Eddie can have some closure. The word sounds good even in his head: cah-lo-zhur. His heart beats in time with the syllables.
They’re only inches apart. Eddie could easily just… just reach across…
“Well,” Richie says with a quick, noisy drum of his fingertips against the counter, “not to be redundant, but I’m pooped. Think I’m gonna hit the hay.”
And he slouches past Eddie towards his room.
“Hey, wait!”
Eddie’s heart has no right being in his throat the way it is as Richie turns to him. Pulse pounding in his temples, Eddie whips around to grab the bag he’d stashed behind the microwave and tosses it.
“Got these for you.”
Richie catches the bag in midair, hefting it in his hand so he can get a look at the label. He barks a laugh. “Plastic spoons,” he chuckles, glancing to Eddie. “So I can lick to my heart’s content?”
“Since apparently you must,” Eddie answers with a wry grin, crossing his arms over his thundering chest. “I even made sure to get the more biodegradable ones.”
“Al Gore would be proud.” Richie gives a lopsided smile before he makes for his bedroom, calling over his shoulder as he dips out of sight, “Thanks, man, these’ll be great in my new place.”
New—
In his new—
Eddie’s heart sinks into the floor.
“B-but I thought you—” he starts, his words trailing off as he realizes Richie probably can’t hear him, messing around in his room. His feet carry him to Richie’s doorway before he even realizes.
Richie’s room is full of cardboard boxes. They’re all clearly secondhand, fished from dumpsters and alleyways, the majority of them covered in logos for the brand of coffee that Central Perk carries, and they’re all open, the flaps flopping outward.
He did this all in one day…?
His heart in his throat, Eddie mutely watches Richie gingerly maneuver through his bedroom. The box flaps snag on his pants and hinder his progress, making him curse under his breath. Clothing, books, CDs—Eddie spies all of them in various boxes, packed with no rhyme or reason, surely without thought for weight distribution. Richie’s going to throw his back out trying to pick up the barrel-sized box full of his old textbooks, the idiot.
There’s all of that, but Eddie can’t even bring himself to be annoyed because—
“You’re still moving?” he asks. His voice sounds small in his ears.
Richie flinches, as though he didn’t expect Eddie to follow him. Even though their apartment is creaky as shit, the carpet is threadbare, wearing through in places, because every time Mr. Treeger, the super, comes up to inspect something, Richie ends up talking his ear off for hours and he never gets anything done.
“Uh, yeah,” Richie says with an aborted shrug. He tosses the bag of spoons on top of an unfolded mess of winter coats. “I mean, everything we talked about is still true. And you’ve never really lived on your own, and clearly you’ve been wanting more freedom, and, like, our hours are totally incompatible…”
“Yeah, but…”
Eddie doesn’t know how to finish that sentence other than, but it’s us.
“But it’s your apartment,” is what he settles on.
Richie huffs a laugh at that. “I’m pretty sure it belongs to Northern Management Properties, LLC, but I like to believe I made it my own.”
Eddie rolls his eyes. “You know what I mean,” he grumbles.
Richie purses his lips. “Yeah,” he sighs, pushing his glasses back up his nose. “Yeah, I guess I do.”
They stand in awkward silence. Eddie wishes they were fighting instead of… instead of this. This uncomfortable melancholy.
He doesn’t know how to say the idea of living without Richie feels like a step back. Or, just as bad, a step forward in the wrong direction. The direction away from Richie.
He left Myra for many reasons. The fact that he was gay, for one. The realization that he had essentially married his mother, for another. Not to mention the whole host of casual emotional abuse and gaslighting that they heaped upon each other—Eddie could cop to that, to his great shame. They were bad for each other, no question about it.
But in spite of all of that—in spite of the clear and undeniable fact that he should not be with Myra—the one thought that consistently, no matter what, got Eddie to put one foot in front of the other and follow through with his request for a separation was the knowledge that Richie had offered his spare room. The knowledge that, if he got through it all, through the tunnel, Richie was on the other side.
He hollowly watches as Richie haphazardly slings some winter wear into a box with his Diskman, some Van Halen CDs, and an Etch-a-Sketch.
“Where are you even moving to?” he asks, trying to ignore how sourly he says it.
“Oh,” Richie says over his shoulder, like Eddie’s surprised him by still being there. “Well, like I said, my castmate needs someone to sublet, so I’ll be— Hey, actually.” He sits back on his heels, looking at Eddie with a painted-on smile. “I think you’ve been there. Remember that party I took you to?”
Eddie scoffs. “The bathroom with all the fuckin’ mirrors? It was like peeing with the Rockettes.”
“Hey, that’s the dream,” Richie quips, balling up an AC/DC shirt and tossing it somewhere. It’s enough to make a muscle in Eddie’s eyebrow spasm.
If Eddie weren’t feeling quite so… so much about the entire concept of moving, he would force Richie to sit down and develop a goddamn system. Heavy things in small boxes, Richie; otherwise you’ll never be able to carry it. Fucking duh, how do you get to be twenty-eight years old and not know this?
But Eddie is feeling so much about this.
So all he does is watch.