Archive of Our Own ^beta

Four days. That’s how long it takes.

Ninety-six hours. Five thousand, seven hundred and sixty minutes. Three hundred and forty-five thousand, six hundred seconds. Probably a million milliseconds or more, if he could count that high. 

He’s spent the past twelve years ignoring it, fighting against it, doing the mental gymnastics it takes to find ways to prove it’s not real, and he breaks in less than a week.

What’s worse is Richie doesn’t even act any different. It’s all Eddie. 

Four days. There’s gotta be some kind of award for that, right? 

“Yes, Ma,” Eddie says, balancing the phone on his shoulder. “We have enough toilet paper, and I got your package—do you really think we need that much pasta? Okay, yes, but I’m allergic to peanut—n-no, no, I don’t need to come back home. I’ll be fi—“

Richie snatches the phone from him, says, “Hi, Mrs K, thanks for the Goldfish. I’ll make sure Eddie doesn’t die.”

“He has asthma, Richard,” Sonia snips, and her voice is so loud Eddie can hear it even as Richie walks around the back of the couch and away from him. 

“No, he doesn’t, Sonia,” Richie retorts.

“You didn’t go to all those doctors appointments,” his mother says with an aggravated sigh. “He should really be using his inhaler, not trying to… to impress you by ignoring what his body needs.”

“If anything,” Richie starts, almost coyly, slyly. His tone rises into a sing-song, endlessly amused as always. Eddie shoots up, already knowing what he’s going to say, what he’s going to do, and he doesn’t need his mother calling him back, calling him more, because of Richie’s big mouth. But Richie is taller than Eddie by… by a significant amount, one that does not matter in the long run, nor one that he is acutely aware of (it’s four inches)—and what was he—oh, right. Richie is taller than him, that is a fact, and he lives for that, pressing his palm to Eddie’s forehead, keeping him at bay. Keeping him away. He grins at him, twists the front of Eddie’s hair, and says, “His body is impressive enough to me as it is.”

There’s a beat of irritated silence, tangible and spreading from Maine to New York, tendrils of distaste and dislike attempting to curl around Eddie’s limbs, his brain, his heart. Whenever he’s on the phone with his mother, it feels like he’s twelve again, not twenty-five, and she’s trying to forbid him from hanging out with his friends. Doesn’t help that Richie likes to revert back to that annoying-ass kid he’d been back then, going toe to toe with her for as long as she’d allow.

And she allowed a lot, for someone who hated him. He made her laugh, if only begrudgingly, but she didn’t want him near her tiny, perfect, precious, fragile son. 

“EDDIE,” she shrieks, and he kicks Richie at the ankle, grabbing his phone back and escaping to his bedroom. “Eddie, what does that—“ 

“—don’t you dare say what I think you’re going to—“

“—why is your body… I told you not to leave, not to move in with him, he’s no good—“

Eddie swallows his scoff, spinning himself around in his computer chair. “He’s my best friend, Ma,” he says. 

“You have other friends!” she insists, like she always does. They have this argument maybe once a week. She’s mad he didn’t go to community college in Maine, that he quote-unquote followed Richie to New York, where Richie couldn’t be bothered with half his classes and ultimately dropped out when he turned into a Big Fucking Deal at comedy clubs and got tapped for SNL and Eddie threw himself into financial despair by attending NYU. “You could’ve lived with any of them.”

“You don’t like Mike because he’s black,” Eddie replies, ignoring her outraged denial of the truth, “and Bev went to California, which you thought was too far”—and you like her even less than Richie—“and Stan’s already married, so I can’t live—“

“—why aren’t you married, Eddie-bear?” The conversation turns as it always does, and Eddie spins his chair a little faster. His head whirls; that could be from his conversation, but it could also be the speed he’s moving. Maybe both. Probably both. “What happened to that sweet girl… what’s her name… Myra?”

I wasn’t interested in her in the slightest, Eddie thinks. “Didn’t work out,” he says. That’s what she wants to hear, not that he had no desire to even kiss her, or that they never went on an actual date. She just kept eating lunch with him and that was fine, it was; she was good company and had the best gossip—and then everyone kept reading into it. The office. His mother. “I don't have to be married right now.”

“And you’ll never be if you continue to live with that vagrant.” Sonia sniffs. “Eddie, you could do…”

“Don’t finish that sentence,” Eddie warns. “I’m fine here. I’m happy. I don’t need you trying to take me away or coming here. Enjoy your book club and your garden and all of that. I’ll call you again next week.”

“Eddie, don’t you dare hang up on me,” she warns, voice warbling with unshed tears now. From so far away, Eddie rolls his eyes; she’s probably not even about to cry. Probably sitting in front of her TV, or scrolling aimlessly through the Internet, believing every little thing she reads. She’s an excellent actress and he hates that she managed to pull one over on him time and time again for years. “You have weak lungs! You always get bronchitis. That boy doesn’t even look like he showers. I’m sending you soap, and shampoo, and I think I have a comb here, see if you can get that horrendous boy to brush his hair. If you have to live with him, the least he can do is look presentable. I told you couponing is beneficial—” 

“—not when you’re just hoarding everything you buy,” Eddie says swiftly, and then hangs up. 

His phone vibrates again as she calls back, and again, and again, and again. He lets each ring into voicemail, leaves it sitting there on his desk, and goes back to the living room. 

Richie’s sprawled out on the couch, eating ice cream straight from the container, big whopping spoonfuls that all but drip from the metal. He catches it before he can ruin his shirt, smacks his lips, and grins at Eddie when he sees him. He’s got chocolate smeared across his two front teeth and at the corner of his mouth. 

Eddie stares a moment too long, furrows his brow, and says, “My mom thinks you’re dirty.”

“She’s always thought that,” Richie replies. 

“She’s sending you soap.”

“To wash my mouth out, no doubt.”

“Probably your hair.” Eddie leans over and tugs on his messy curls, long and thick and honestly incredibly distracting. He needs a haircut. “Disgusting,” he quips, and ignores the way Richie’s eyes glitter up at him. “Your glasses are dirty and you look stupid.” 

“You really put Shakespeare’s sonnets to shame, Eds,” Richie replies. “My heart is all aflutter.”

Nope, Eddie thinks, that’s mine, and he says, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” He makes a big show of holding his hand out, like he’s ticking off reasons, and then closes it immediately into a fist. “Done.”

“Ooh,” Richie replies. “How many ways do you love me?” 

“Zero,” says Eddie. “You’re tacky and I hate you.”

Richie hums. “Whoever said romance is dead has certainly never met you.”

“I thought it was chivalry that died.”

“Romance, chivalry—same thing,” Richie decides. He smiles at him, the one where his nose scrunches up just a little, and his cheeks puff out, red and squishy. Eddie refrains from touching them. “You, my friend, are single-handedly bringing them back to life.”

“I do what I can,” Eddie says. 

He averts his gaze when Richie’s pink tongue finally manages to swipe the chocolate from his lip. Coughs when Richie sucks on the spoon, lavishing it a way that—in a way Eddie doesn’t need to focus on, and he thinks about reorganizing their cabinets. 

They have a lot of time, after all. 

“Want some?” Richie asks, holding a glob up to his face. His chin, specifically, since Eddie is still standing and Richie’s arms are only so long, despite being remarkably gangly. 

Eddie stares at the ice cream, at Richie’s wet mouth, at his forearm and the line of muscle and veins there that aren’t—that’s not—it’s just an arm. A pasty, freckled arm. “What kind is it?” he asks, hoping his voice doesn’t crack, or waver, or in any way imply he’s not done going through puberty. 

Because he is. 

He’s old. 

He shouldn’t be—he’s past the uncomfortable parts of growing up. He’s done waking up sticky and aching and confused. He’s not supposed to shift as casually and carefully as possible in front of his best fucking friend, his dick all twitching at the mere image of that stupid arm—an arm—and the fingers that hold the spoon, so firm, so loose, so fucking long. 

“Mint chocolate chip,” Richie answers. “It’s gonna melt all over me if you keep staring at it like that.” He pauses, squints at him. “Do you want to get another spoon? Is that what it is? I swear I’m not sick.” 

It starts to drip down the length of the utensil to his dumb, bony wrist, and Eddie’s hand snaps forward, thumb brushing over it before it can get too far. He seems to have lost all connection between his body and mind, and he licks at the pad of his finger, tastes the sweet explosion of sugar and milk and the unmistakable, indescribable musk that is Richie. Kind of spicy, kind of sweaty, and Eddie shouldn’t like it as much as he does, but that’s always been the case with Eddie and Richie anyway. 

He’s always liked him more than he should. More than is allowed. More than his mother, back when she was able to control every aspect of him, deemed acceptable. But Richie was there, Richie and the other Losers, to remind him his brain was his own, and his heart was his own, and his mother may have opinions but she wasn’t always right. She could be wrong. Being his mother did not make her infallible.

And she’s wrong. Then, now, tomorrow. 

There is no such thing as liking Richie more than he should, more than is allowed, more than is acceptable. The only way to do it is fully, completely, all-encompassing. He’s not the type of person you love in bits, in halves, in pieces. He’s an all or nothing kind of guy. Eddie’s known that since he was eight. 

So. 

Eddie curls his fingers around that very wrist, feels the calm, comforting beat of Richie’s pulse, and brings his arm up and his head down. “Your spoon is fine,” he says. 

He makes the mistake—is it a mistake, though, Eddie, is it?—of glancing up at Richie as he does it, as he licks the curve of the metal clean. 

Richie’s cheeks are pink. 

Eddie takes the spoon, which all but falls out of Richie’s hand, and digs another hefty helping on to it. He eats it normally this time, actually gets some of the chips, which he chomps down on, grinding between his teeth. He sticks the spoon back in the container, wipes his hands on his pants, and says, “I think I’m gonna make mac ‘n cheese. You want?”

“Like,” Richie starts, voice a little pitchy, “like homemade? With breadcrumbs?”

“Yeah, we’re not using those for anything else, so might as well.”

“Uh.” Richie clears his throat. “Sure. Let me know if you need help.” 

“You can grate the cheese if you want,” Eddie offers, sorting through their collection of pots and pans to find the right one. They make a cacophony of noise as they rattle together, almost masking the sound of Richie entering the kitchen, socks slipping and sliding on the linoleum, but Eddie has always been very finely tuned to all Richie is and does. 

He feels Richie ruffle the hair at the back of his head, hears him open the fridge. Eddie runs the pan under the water, cleaning it. There’s grime in the corners, probably from the last time they used it. He grimaces. 

“What kind of cheese do you want?”

“What do we have?” Eddie digs his fingernail into something particularly gross, but doesn’t think about what it could be. It loosens, dissolves under the spray of the water. 

Richie lets out a long, staggering breath, pulling chunk after chunk of cheese out of the fridge. “Pepper jack, sharp cheddar, mild cheddar, baby swiss, another sharp—no, I’m sorry, marbled sharp cheddar, asi…asia—“

“Asiago,” Eddie tells him, running a cloth over the pan. He puts it to the side, preheats the oven, and presses on to his tiptoes to get the elbows in the cabinet. 

“Oh, I got that,” Richie says, able to reach the top shelf without a thought. Without straining. Eddie envies that; his gaze follows the length of that arm again, the movement of the muscle as he grabs the boxes, placing them on the counter. “We also have gouda. Why do we have so many cheeses?”

Eddie shrugs. “I like cheese plates,” he says. “You know, with, like, prosciutto and salami and sopressata. Olives. Fruits.” 

“Those are charcuterie boards, not cheese plates, and I have literally never seen you make one of those,” Richie replies. 

“Maybe you’re not home when I make them.” Richie raises an eyebrow, says nothing. “Fine,” Eddie says, “I like to think I’ll make them but in reality I just eat the cheese right off the block sometimes. So.” He clears his throat, ignoring the amused way Richie looks at him. “Pick whichever ones you want.”

Richie shakes his head and laughs. “So cute,” he says. It’s almost thoughtless, the way it comes out of his mouth, kind of like a throwaway line. “Obviously we’re gonna go pepper jack, no question about that, and this one seems like it’d be good for your fancy, little, imaginary cheese board…”

He throws his rejections back into the fridge without a care, which has Eddie snapping at him to keep it neat, which Richie ignores, as he always does. 

But he does get started on the cheese grating, sitting on the counter and balancing a cutting board in his lap. He’s got a chocolate stain on the collar of his shirt and his tongue sticking out of his mouth, caught between his teeth. Eddie gets distracted for maybe a millisecond, not that long, watching him. 

Richie meets his gaze and smiles. Eddie feels like maybe he should be embarrassed that he’s been caught in the act, but can’t find it in himself to feel the usual way. He’s got to get used to it anyway, right? They’ll be spending an undetermined amount of time together. Just the two of them. Existing peacefully. Living. Doing what they always do. 

Eddie doesn’t remember the last time they spent each and every waking moment together, but he thinks it was spring break of seventh grade, and Eddie survived that. He really did. It’s not like he came out of it with a life-long crush or anything.

“C’mere,” Richie says. 

Eddie leaves the elbows to continue boiling and shifts over, raising a brow. “Yes?”

“Open wide,” Richie instructs, and Eddie’s mouth moves on its own accord, acting like it doesn’t need Eddie’s permission to do shit. 

Richie sprinkles shredded cheese in his mouth, giggling when some of it sticks to Eddie’s upper lip. He brushes at it, his touch soft, and pinches his cheek, like he always used to when they were younger. 

Eddie makes a disparaging noise and chews, slapping his hand away. “Be helpful, not annoying.”

“Who says I can’t be both?” Richie poses, dropping his gaze to continue his task. 

“Me,” Eddie says. “You’ve never been able to multitask.” He turns back to the pasta, boiling away, and wets his lips, still able to taste Richie amongst the tang of cheese. 

This is fine. 

He’ll be fine. 

He’s been fine. 

(It is not fine. 

He’s not fine. 

He has never been fine.) 

Eddie doesn’t have to set an alarm that gets him up before the goddamn sun, doesn’t have to shovel food in his mouth and call it breakfast, and, remarkably, his stress levels are the lowest they’ve ever been. Probably because he doesn’t have to drive an hour, stuck in traffic for another forty-five. He doesn’t even have to get fully dressed. 

Sweatpants are amazing. Sweatpants rock. He can answer this email, and discover the probability of this one guy’s business fucking tanking—which it will, according to these numbers—and he can answer his boss’s phone call, all in his sweatpants! 

This is God’s gift to the planet, not having to wear itchy, tight dress pants or chinos or even those dark-wash jeans he can sometimes get away with. Sweatpants.

He ignores the blinking icon of an instant message from Myra, not really wanting to deal with whatever she’s got to complain about yet, and jumps when his coffee cup is lifted from his side. 

Richie drinks it, clicks his tongue, and says, “This is cold. Want me to turn it into iced coffee for you?”

“Yeah, that’d be great,” Eddie answers, looking away from his computer screen. “What are you up to toda…”

The last syllable gets caught somewhere between his voice box and his mouth, lodged in his throat. Luckily Richie is already headed towards the kitchen, whistling some obnoxious tune, and unable to see the sickening way Eddie stares. He accidentally sends an ugly keysmash to Myra who promptly types back LOL even though it’s not funny and he doesn’t know what she was talking about. 

He’s more focused on… the shit she has to say about their group video chat is… he can’t even begin to fathom… 

Sweatpants, Eddie decides, are not, in fact, God’s gift to this planet. They are Satan’s. Somewhere in the fiery pits of hell, that horned demon is laughing at him. 

His gaze is stuck, is glued to the dip of Richie’s lower back, where his pants sit almost… almost precariously. Extremely loosely. Like if he were to bend down or—or—nope, nope, nope, NOPE. 

Eddie clears his throat and does, like. He does math. 

Is that what he does? What’s his job? 

He starts to reply to Myra, then remembers it’s Myra, and she doesn’t know this about him, and pulls up his iMessages with Bill. SOS, he sends. He’ll get it. He lives with Mike, who he is obsessed with. 

And then Eddie looks back up, watches Richie rifle through the kitchen. The cabinets. The fridge. Leaning over. Bending. Stretching. His back is so long, and his spine is so bony, and there are these little freckles all over, dotting his skin like he’s the night sky and they need to make a constellation. 

Eddie makes one, connecting the dots, and then looks away immediately when Richie turns back. He stares at his computer screen, at the spreadsheet, at the blinking from the little tab that says Myra’s name, at the email he had started composing to his supervisor but stopped halfway through. 

Richie places a taller glass of coffee by his left hand, ice cubes clinking together. Eddie makes the mistake of looking from his email, where the cursor hovers over the word to, and even as he skims it over now, the whole sentence and a half he wrote, he has no idea what he meant by it. What he was trying to say. 

“Thanks,” he says, and he thinks he stumbles over it, the whole seven letters, the syllable, the word. Thanks. It’s so fucking easy to say and yet Eddie sounds like Bill did back in first grade, before he had his speech therapist, tripping over the fucking thing. 

He clicks his tongue, ignores the message Bill sent back—what’d he do now? blink at you?—and snarks, “It’s, like, thirty degrees. Why aren’t you wearing a shirt?” 

“It’s warm in my room,” Richie says, “and I run hot, you know that.” 

He says to Bill, he says he runs hot what the fuuuuuuuuck, and Bill’s answering mhm i bet you agree is so quick and so rude Eddie exits out of the app. 

“It’s freezing in here,” Eddie replies, which is stupid and true. He takes a large gulp of his drink, made just the way he likes it because Richie’s been fixing his coffees for him since they were like, fifteen, and Eddie realized how productive he could be at six in the morning if he just had more energy. 

“Oh, are you cold?” Richie asks. “Should we snuggle instead of you… I dunno, destroying a man’s will to live?” 

“I am not destroying a man’s—“

“Whoever invented risk analysising—“

“—analysis—“

Richie waves a hand at him, unbothered. “Whoever invented it,” he continues on, sticking his tongue out at Eddie when he huffs, “clearly had no idea what fun was.” He leans forward, squinting. “I think you have a gray hair, Eds. Right there.”

And he takes his whole palm, and it is a large palm, almost as big as Eddie’s face, and ruffles Eddie’s entire head of hair.

“Oh my god, stop,” Eddie bleats, jutting his chin and stretching his neck, snapping at Richie’s hand with his teeth. He gets nothing, not even a little bit of skin, and Richie laughs. 

“You’re like a tiny dog,” he decides. “All bark. You’re not really going to bite me, but if I pick you up, you’ll sit on my lap.”

“I will no—Richie!” 

Their dining room table is small as shit, right, like the chairs don’t all fit under it, and it’s a circle that could be made bigger if they cared, and Richie is definitely either going to A) spill Eddie’s coffee all over his laptop or B) break the damn thing. He doesn’t seem to care about any of that, but when has he cared about repercussions or consequences when it comes to a good laugh? 

It’s not like—

It’s not…

Eddie doesn’t exactly fight back.

Because, you know, he’d knock his coffee onto his computer—which is from work—and he’d probably kick out and break the table. It has a wonky leg. They haven’t gotten around to having Ben see if he can fix it, the architect he is, and so there’s, like, an old newspaper and one of Richie’s bank statements, unopened because he doesn’t look at them, propping it up. 

It’d be awful if it all just. 

Collapsed. 

You know? 

So.

So Eddie lets Richie’s hands come beneath his knees, hoisting him up like he weighs approximately ten pounds even though he goes to the gym in their apartment three times a week. He kind of likes… he enjoys… 

Uh-uh. Nope. No. 

He settles on Richie’s thighs, bony and annoying and remarkably comfortable actually, and forces himself to actively frown. “I am working,” he says. 

“Mhm,” Richie replies, leaning his chin on Eddie’s shoulder. “That spreadsheet truly requires all of your attention.” 

“It does,” Eddie insists. “Don’t you have things to do? You pay the rent somehow.”

Richie shrugs, hands creeping and crawling to slide under Eddie’s shirt. He’s incredibly ticklish; he squirms, biting his lip, feeling the heat travel from his chest to his neck to his ears. “I was gonna eat lunch with Bev,” he tells him. “Or I was going to eat lunch and she was going to eat breakfast and we were going to stare at each other.”

“Wow,” Eddie says. “Didn’t know Bev paid you to stare at her.”

“What an easy job that would be,” Richie murmurs wistfully. He digs his fingers against Eddie’s rib cage. He is warm, like he said, and Eddie is cold, so he cuddles back into him, settling into the heat he provides. 

There is a ding! from his computer, an email, no doubt, but Eddie ignores it. He’s more focused on keeping his heartbeat steady, what with Richie’s hands so close to it. 

“Yes, Bev is beautiful,” Eddie agrees. 

“Not as cute as you, though,” Richie says. He noses the back of Eddie’s neck. “Then I guess I’ll work on stuff for the Netflix thing, or I could call Mike and Bill and see how they want to work on our podcast since we physically can’t see each other—“

“Oh, no, please,” Eddie all but begs. “Let the podcast die. I hate the podcast.” 

“Liar,” Richie says. “You love listening to me talk.”

“Yes, the incessant buzzing in my ears really gets me going,” Eddie retorts. 

“I guess I’m just not saying the right words then,” Richie muses. He reaches out for Eddie’s coffee, slurps at it, and says grandly, with an awful British accent to boot, “Statistics.”

“No.”

“Excel spreadsheet formula.”

“Which one?”

“Bankruptcy.”

Eddie wrinkles his nose. Says nothing. 

“Calculus.”

“I don’t do calculus.”

“Alge—“

Eddie slaps his hand against his mouth. “Shut up,” he snaps. “You’re so annoying.” Richie licks his palm, which is gross. “I hate the podcast because it’s stupid, Rich, that’s why. Talk all you want and I’ll listen but not about how you three think all the shit Stephen King writes books about actually happened in our hometown.”

“The clown, Eds,” Richie insists. “Do you remember the clown?”

“His name was Robert and he was a literal fucking pedophile with an undiagnosed mental illness, not some sort of space evil,” Eddie says. “Drop it, for fuck’s sake.”

Richie sniffs. “I think you’ll believe us after the next episode.” 

“Doubtful,” Eddie replies. “Let go of me, please, I need to finish this and you’re distracting.” 

“I’m distracting?” Richie repeats gleefully. Eddie can see his reflection in the darkened screen of his laptop; his face is split in two with the size of his grin, and Eddie stares at it, at his overbite and his two front teeth that are a little too big. At his nose, and his eyes, magnified by his glasses. 

Yes, Eddie wants to say, but he keeps his mouth shut and forcibly taps on his space bar. The spreadsheet returns. 

“You must not be looking at yourself too much, then, Eds,” Richie says, sliding out from beneath him. He places his coffee, half-full at this point, by his side again, and stretches his arms up and over his head. 

Eddie does not look. 

Eddie does not look. 

Eddie does not—

Eddie looks.

There’s just something about Richie that has always captured Eddie’s attention. The way he moves, still kind of graceless, like a baby deer getting used to its legs. The line of his shoulders. His bony wrists. His long fingers. Eddie’s been staring since they were kids, playing beneath the blue of a cloudless summer day, where Eddie would fret and try to coat him in sunscreen only for Eddie to be the one with red, red cheeks and a sunburnt nose.

He’s big, and he’s tall, and he loves to remind Eddie that Eddie stopped growing in ninth grade, but Richie hit his last growth spurt going into junior year, and—and—

And he hasn’t met anyone who can outshine him. 

Richie’s hands can almost touch the ceiling. He presses down on his toes so he can, fingertips against the ugly white paint, and drops back down to flat feet. Eddie is staring, and Richie is staring back, lashes fluttering behind his glasses at a speed a hummingbird would envy. 

Eddie doesn’t think he knows how to blink. In comparison to that. 

“Whatcha lookin’ at?” Richie asks. His arms fall to his sides. 

“Your knobby elbows,” Eddie says immediately. “You need to put lotion on them. They look dry.” 

Richie smiles and Eddie diverts his attention back to the computer, to the formulas and the math and whatever else risk analysts do. To the three messages from Myra, who probably actually has something interesting to say about the drama with Kim in HR. To the laughing emoji Bill sent him and the did you die for real this time? He clicks on it all, accidentally deleting half the work he did an hour ago. Finds out Kim from HR slept with Karen from Accounting’s husband back when Eddie skipped that company retreat because it was Stan’s birthday. Meticulously types in and misspells and retypes middle finger so the corresponding emoticon shows up for him to send to Bill. He does all this and more, just to ignore the soft, sincere way Richie’s mouth moves, feeling like he may have done or said something he shouldn’t have. 

It’s weird. They’ve lived together for years. Almost a decade. Eddie knows who he is and what he does and how to cope with it, but there is something about being forced to stay inside with no one but him that makes him… that suddenly has him looking at Richie differently. 

He’s never had to deal with Monday morning Richie before. Maybe that’s it. 

Or maybe it’s the lack of coffee. 

Either way, it’ll pass. It always does.

When it doesn’t, Eddie breaks his alcohol-on-weekends-only rule and spikes his orange juice. 

It only seems to make matters worse. 

There is a knock on Eddie’s door, tentative and soft.

Eddie grunts, leaning over his computer, and the knob twists, pushes open, and Richie is standing there in the doorway. He looks cozy in his sweater, his striped plaid pajama pants. He’s holding two mugs, heat emitting from them in swirls of steam. 

“It’s eleven,” Richie says. “Wanted to make sure you were up.” He clears his throat. “Made you coffee.”

“Yeah, I’m…” Eddie glances back down at his screen, at the report he’s typing up that’s boring him to goddamn tears. “I’m up,” he says. “Thanks.” 

Richie shuffles in, hair still matted to the side of his head like he’s the one who just got up, and that’s probably the case. He leaves Eddie’s cup on the table by his bed and hovers before he decides to sit on the edge of the mattress.

“What are you doing?” 

“Fixing this stupid write-up Tony fucked up,” Eddie replies, deleting and typing and deleting and typing. He holds his hand out; Richie gives him his own coffee cup. “If he weren’t such a fucking idiot, I would have less to do today, but.”

“But he’s a fucking idiot,” Richie surmises. Leans back. Stretches out and takes up the end of Eddie’s bed, bringing his arms up and around a giraffe Pillow Pet Eddie got from Bev when he was, like, seventeen. He named it Damon. They were on a Vampire Diaries kick back then. 

Eddie glances up, watches Richie somehow contort his stupid, long body into a ball, holding the giraffe to his chest. “Yeah. He’s lucky he told me about it and not, like, anyone else or they’d definitely fire him.” 

“Not ideal,” Richie says. “You’re too nice for your own good, you know.”

“Mm, not really,” says Eddie. “I’m using this to blackmail him. There’s a thing I don’t wanna do that I’m going to have him do… once… I’m… done.” He presses the enter key for emphasis, though it does nothing but fuck with the formatting of the document. He backspaces quickly.

Richie watches him through heavy-lidded eyes, taking up most of the space on the bed despite trying not to. “You’re so devious,” he murmurs, soft and slow and terribly fond. 

“That’s why you’ve kept me around,” Eddie replies, sending the email, both with the fixed report and the task he’s freeing himself of. He’ll check it later, obviously, before it gets submitted, but having the rest of the day free for one simple thing… that’s priceless. 

“Not the only reason,” Richie says.

Eddie avoids looking at him, drinks the coffee instead. His stomach roils, due to the caffeine, no doubt. He hasn’t eaten yet today, but he woke up late, stressed as always—and not about work, which is… not entirely unusual—and had to do this shit, so eating wasn’t a priority at the time. 

“Why else?” he asks, though he’s not sure he wants to know. 

Richie smiles, neck craned to look up at him. What a different point of view this is. Eddie does not let himself dwell on that, but rather what Richie says next. “I like you.”

“Mm.” Eddie’s heart thuds. He ignores it. You can like people without liking them. “That wasn’t always the case, I don’t think.” 

“Says who?” asks Richie. “I’ve liked you since I met you.”

“Since third grade?” Eddie snorts. “I distinctly remember you hating me in third grade.”

Richie laughs, squeezes the giraffe tighter. “I really liked you in the third grade.”

“You shoved my face in a paint palette,” Eddie says dryly. “I don’t think that’s what you do when you like someone.”

“But that’s how we figured out yellow was your color,” Richie shoots back. “We wouldn’t have ever known that unless I painted you.”

“You didn’t paint me,” Eddie retorts. “You took my palette and smeared my face in it. If you decided to paint me yellow maybe I wouldn’t have been so annoyed by it. My mom got so mad at me and I had to sit out of art class for a whole week.”

“You didn’t do it though,” Richie says.

Eddie scoffs. “What was I supposed to say? Sorry, Ma, please let me continue making a shitty recreation of Starry Night, I only got paint all over me because I let the boy I have a crush on smear it all over my face? She’d send me straight to, I don’t know, the school they have out of the church on Neibolt.”

“You had a crush on me?”

“Like,” Eddie says, suddenly realizing he’s said too much. He flounders. He tries. Where is his sense of self-preservation? “A friend crush. I really wanted to be your friend.”

“I’ve always wanted to be your friend,” Richie says, making grabby hands at him. 

Normally Eddie would resist. 

Normally Eddie would pretend he didn’t see it. Act like none of this was happening. 

Normally he’d open his laptop back up and Richie would go somewhere else and he’d have time to tell his stupid heart to calm the fuck down. 

He does it a little differently today. 

He shoves his laptop under his pillow and crawls over, letting Richie wrap him up in his arms, warm and comforted and safe. Eddie presses his face to his neck, and the rest of his body does whatever it wants to. Hooks a leg around his. Latches on. Holds and holds and holds. Richie’s fingers end up at the back of Eddie’s hair, digging and scratching and twisting, and Eddie surges closer, wanting more, wanting a closeness, wanting—

He feels Richie’s mouth against the top of his head, hair he didn’t bother brushing. The telltale pressure of a kiss, right there at the crown. It spreads from his head down his spine to his toes, and he swallows the urge to kiss him back, right there at his neck. He wants to, though, wants to stop being so afraid to kiss him, as easy as he makes it. 

Richie kisses him all the time: His cheek, his forehead, the top of his head. It’s what he does. He expresses affection and Eddie takes it and hides it and doesn’t read into it. 

Except today. 

He thinks about it, how a touch is deliberate, is thought out. Richie doesn’t accidentally do it. He feels his body tense, feels the decision, feels him choose. 

Eddie shudders, grips Richie’s hips, and tugs him close. Close enough that they could be one. That if anyone saw them they wouldn’t be able to tell who was who. He snuffles, Eddie does, right into Richie’s neck. He smells like sleep, and mint, and smoke, a dizzying combination that has always calmed Eddie down. He likes it, even though he gives him a hard time about it, and his one foot, covered in a pink fuzzy sock, shoves itself up Richie’s pajama leg. 

“Eddie,” Richie starts, tentative, slow, unsure. While Eddie’s foot caresses his leg, Richie’s hand slides up his back, feels his spine. “I would, like, die for Stan, but I’d burn down the entire world for you. You know that, right?” 

Eddie shakes his head, says, “That’s dramatic,” and in the same breath, adds, “Do you wanna watch a movie?”

Richie seems to deflate, but his fingers count the knobs of Eddie’s spine. “Which one?”

“Whatever you want,” Eddie proposes. He cranes his neck, opens his face up for Richie, and his heart beats loud and hard in his chest. He’s certain he can hear it. That everyone in China, all the way across the world, can hear it, too. 

It says something like this: I’d burn the world down for you, too. If anything ever happened to you, there’d be nothing left. He wonders if Richie can make that out, or if it’s in a language that is entirely Eddie’s own. 

Richie presses his mouth to his temple, wet and gross and awful, and Eddie wraps his fingers around his wrist. Holds it. Counts the beats of his heart. 

He feels the thud there, the way it skips, and he’s got Richie kissing his cheek now, lower than before. He feels the scrape of his teeth, like Richie wants to bite him, like he’s a snack or something. 

Eddie pinches him, afraid of what could happen next, and Richie shifts, but not too far. “Space Jam,” he says. “It’s on Netflix.”

“Mm,” Eddie says. “We can agree Lola Bunny is the backbone of the Tune Squad, right?”

“Oh, absolutely.” 

They put the movie on, then watch four more. Eddie’s dinner is a bowl full of Doritos, and he doesn’t get around to checking his email again until around midnight, when he wakes up with Richie’s head on his stomach, his hand holding his knee. 

Eddie blinks, slides Richie’s glasses off his nose, and puts them as far away as he can reach, which ends up being atop his pillow. Richie sniffs, hums, and exhales, turning his face into the material of Eddie’s shirt. He looks softer as he sleeps, relaxed in a way he never is when he’s awake, and the easy way in which he just… lets go around Eddie tugs and tugs and tugs at Eddie’s heartstrings until they’re knotted in the pit of his stomach. 

It’s fine. 

He’s fine. 

It’s—it’s whatever. 

Eddie curls up around him, neck bent at an awkward angle so he can press his head to his, and goes back to bed.

Eddie wakes with a start and isn’t quite sure why. 

His dream was nice enough as it was, a bit of a memory and a bit of something else. They were at the Barrens, all of them, even Bev, when a noise startled them. It ripped the foundation of the quarry, sent them tumbling, down, down, down, and dream-Eddie tried to grab onto dream-Richie’s hand, but kept slipping. 

Eddie gasps back to reality, certain something terrible has happened to them, but he’s just in his bed in New York. He’s in one piece, if not a little messy from tossing and turning. His palm is sweaty. 

It was nothing. Just a dream. Probably the result of some outside noise. His window is open. 

But then he hears it again: a deep, loud sound that reverberates through his entire body. His bones tingle, and his heart jumps, and something in the back of his mind says calm down, calm down and listen. 

And he does. He listens. 

It is piano chords, he thinks. 

No. He knows, and it’s coming from the other side of the wall. 

Richie hasn’t played any instrument he’s ever been interested in in… in years, probably. Not in front of Eddie, at least, since they graduated college, but he lugged that piano into this apartment. Made dumbass jingles, put his jokes to music, created an entire theme song for his stupid true crime horror documentary podcast. 

He just.

He never played an actual song. 

Eddie rolls over, knee to the wall, and listens. It’s a sad sort of song, low, soft notes that Eddie’s heard before. He hums along, still half-asleep, and doesn’t realize he knows the words until— 

Richie used to play this song all the time in high school. He performed it at the Derry High Cabaret, where he had to fucking audition for a spot, and he knew exactly where Eddie was sitting in the audience, and he stared at him the whole fucking time. He didn’t even need to look at his fingers to play it. 

And just like back then, Eddie’s mouth feels like it is full of cotton. His limbs feel heavy. They also feel noodly. His mind is racing.

The song crashes over him like a wave. And I feel that when I’m with you, it’s alright. I know it’s right. 

He’s having a hard time figuring out if this is, like, a super sad song or just like… a regular sad one? 

(And the songbirds are singing like they know the score)

Is it sad, at its core?

(And I love you, I love you, I love you like never before)

Well, whatever it is, it’s making Eddie fucking buzz. 

He kicks his blankets off, glances at the clock. It’s tomorrow, basically, but the sun isn’t up and he doesn’t have to get dressed or do anything so it doesn’t matter. He’s full of this bursting energy, one that consumes him. He can’t shake it off. He’ll go to the kitchen. Drink some water. Go to the bathroom. Wash his face. Maybe eat a snack because he’s already fucked up his schedule, if he ever had one to begin with. And if he eats a snack, he’ll brush his teeth again. 

Naturally he does none of that. 

He hovers in the hall in front of Richie’s room, where that song fades into something else Eddie can’t identify. Doesn’t have the patience to. He listens, places his palm on the door, and when his mind tells him the rational thing to do is turn back around and go to sleep, his heart tugs at his arm, makes him knock.

Well. He slaps it. The door. With his hand. Like he’s high-fiving it. 

Richie stops instantly. Cuts off like he’s been caught doing something wrong, and yeah, if this were any other week, where Eddie had to be up in two hours, he would be. But Eddie is home indefinitely and he’s spent the past three days losing his ever-loving mind, unsure how he managed to live with him this long without accidentally telling him every embarrassing feeling he’s ever had. 

(Like he thinks it’s remarkably endearing that Richie sings about vegetables when he cuts them up, and he really likes when he mutes cartoons—because obviously Richie watches cartoons like he’s five years old—and gives them different voices and plot lines, and he thinks it’s cute he still cuts crusts off his sandwiches.)

But back to the matter at hand:

Technically Richie still has done something wrong. Who plays the piano at three in the morning? Why isn’t he asleep? Why did he have to do that?

They stand in silence for a moment before Richie opens the door, sheepish and scruffy. He has the long sleeves of Mike’s old football sweatshirt pulled up and over his fists, hiding his hands from view. “Hi,” he says, “top of the mornin’ to ya.”

Eddie has literally no words. He’s never seen anything not fit Richie before because it was too big. Mike’s a… Mike’s a big dude, and Richie is swimming—swimming—in his hoodie. Eddie could probably fit under it with him. 

“Did I wake you?” Richie asks, mistaking Eddie’s silence for irritation, and, well, he is staring. Frowning. Contemplating. 

You ever realize how many things you can think at one time? How cluttered your mind can be? How full it is one second and how empty it can be the next? 

The answer to Richie’s question is easy. It’s there. He sees his response, each one of his thoughts tangible and whole, like it can be picked up and presented to him. Like Eddie can pluck it out of the lineup and hand it over, all yes, Richie, you woke me. It’s three in the morning.

Instead, he chooses to say, “Can you still play that Vanessa Carlton song?” 

Richie looks confused for a second, then hums the opening bars to A Thousand Miles. “Yeah, probably,” he decides. “You requesting songs no—” 

Yes, Eddie is requesting something, and it’s this. 

He surges forward, cups Richie’s cheeks in his hands, makes his stupid, long, spindly body bend, and kisses him straight on the mouth. 

For the span of a second—actually for the span of a millisecond—this seems like the worst idea in the world, like maybe all the fighting, and the pretending, and the mental gymnastics he was doing for years was for nothing. Was wrong. Maybe Eddie has spent his whole entire fucking life thinking there was something when in reality there was nothing, and now he’s done this and he thinks maybe he has to die now, and his mind is whirling, and his head is spinning, and Richie lets out this little gasp, or it is a hiccup, or it is a sob, and… and… 

And.

It hurts when he’s shoved backwards, pushed through the hall and against the opposing wall. The closet door knob digs into the small of his back. Eddie shimmies, shifts, and whines—Jesus Christ, he whines, it’s so embarrassing—when Richie kisses him back, that stupid mouth of his so soft, and nice, and good at something other than just talking, even though Eddie loves when Richie talks. He’ll listen forever. He’d have all of his attention even if he were reading the dictionary out loud.

But now he’s too focused on the way he completely falls apart under him, pressed against a fucking door. The snacks are behind him, for fuck’s sake. The bathroom is right there. The timed air freshener goes off, spritzing some sort of—it’s called, like, fresh linen or some shit. It makes him want to sneeze, just a little. 

He forgets all of that when Richie sucks his lower lip between his teeth and tugs on his hair, insistent pulls that bring him somehow further into his mouth. The sensation goes all the way down his back to his stomach, his groin, and Richie hisses with each twist of Eddie’s fingers, pressing his knee between Eddie’s legs. He is all but pinned in place now, only able to move if and when Richie decides he can. He shivers, bites into his mouth, feels Richie’s large hands curl around his shoulders. 

He is so tall.

He is so much bigger than him. 

Eddie is going to die, and Eddie wants to die like this. Put it on his tombstone: Here lies Eddie Kaspbrak, obliterated by Richie Tozier’s huge-ass hands. 

Richie pulls away from him, chest heaving, and Eddie strains almost every part of his body to follow after him. “Eddie,” Richie says, soft and husky and perfect, perfect, perfect, “you have to give me the chance to breathe.”

Eddie blinks up at him: the glasses sitting crooked on his nose, the pink cheeks, the swollen mouth. His own heart skips several beats in his chest, or it turns off completely, or it packs up its bags and flees, and Eddie drops his forehead to his collarbone. “Oh my god,” he blurts, sense returning to him. “Oh my god.”

Richie’s hand is hot against his back, burning through his shirt, branding him, and Eddie kind of wants to shift out of his touch, to fall back into his room and lock the door, to go back in time to when he was still asleep. He fists the sweatshirt against him, sighs, and jumps when Richie’s fingers make it to the skin of his neck. 

“Three days,” he mumbles. “Three days.”

“What was?” 

“We’ve lived together for, what, like, seven years,” Eddie continues, almost like he hasn’t heard Richie. He has. He feels him, too. Has always felt him. “And I fuckin’... I just break after three fucking days.” 

There are fingers on his cheeks, a gentle prodding at his jaw, lifting his head up. Eddie meets Richie’s gaze. Looks away. Looks back. Looks away. Looks. Sees. Is seen. 

“What’s the matter?” asks Richie. 

“I’ve lost my mind,” Eddie says quickly. “You’ve made me lose my entire mind in seventy-two fucking hours.” He takes hold of Richie’s wrists as gently as he can and extracts himself from his hold, backing up. “I have to… I’m going back to bed.” He wipes his hand over his face, presses his thumb to his throbbing lower lip. “I swear I’m not this crazy. I’m not, like, someone who just… throws themselves at—I am just really stressed, I guess. I have cabin fever. I am restless. I don’t know. I need to sleep.”

And he finds himself tripping over his own feet, groping behind him for his doorknob. He all but falls into his room, heart pounding in his chest so hard he thinks it breaks several ribs. “Please don’t play Fleetwood Mac again. I’m begging.”

He leaves Richie in the hall, closing his door clumsily behind him, and searches his room for his phone, not bothering to turn his light on. He finds it beneath his pillow, screen brightening as soon as he turns it over; he squints, unlocks it, and dials Bill’s number. 

It rings, and it rings, and it rings. 

Eddie isn’t expecting him to answer. It’s nearing four now; he kissed Richie for, like, a half hour, it seems, right there in that hallway he can never walk through ever again. 

“Yo,” Bill says. He sounds like he’s eating something. 

“Why are you up?” 

“Why are you up?” 

“I’m dying,” Eddie whispers, sliding into his bed and pulling the covers over his head. “Like, I can physically feel my soul leaving my body. I need to move.” 

“Not an ideal time for that duh-duh-cision,” Bill says. “Why? Is there a water luhhhhh-leak in your bathroom again?” 

“Actually, yes, I should call the landlord about that,” Eddie says. “My upstairs neighbors are horrendous. I don’t think they know what a shower curtain is.”

Bill chews. “What makes you say that?” 

“If they had a shower curtain, the water would stay where it’s supposed to and not ruin my ceiling,” Eddie replies. He hears Richie’s door close with a quiet click, then the strain of the mattress springs as he sits. There is tension between them despite the wall separating them. He wonders if Richie feels it too or if it’s all in Eddie’s head. 

“You should buy them one,” Bill offers. “As a puh-puh-present.” 

Eddie flops onto his back, suffocating underneath his heavy comforter, and idly thinks about washing his sheets tomorrow. “Is that petty of me? Too passive-aggressive?” 

“Absolutely,” Bill responds. “Forget passive. It’s totally aggressive. Do it.” 

“Maybe,” says Eddie. “I could just buy one at Bed, Bath, and Beyond and send it to them. Maybe a nice blue one, or, like, one of the ones that makes you think you’re underwat—but wait, no, I didn’t call you at four in the morning to talk about home decor.”

“You d-d-didn’t?” Bill asks, and he sounds genuinely confused. “That’s pretty on brand for you.” 

“No, Bill, I don’t normally have crises about… wait, do I?” 

“Mm, sometimes,” Bill answers. “Seventy-five percent of the time.” 

“And the other twenty-five?” 

“Depends,” says Bill. “Something to do with Richie normally.” 

Eddie groans, contorting his body into a very weird, uncomfortable shape. One of his feet hits the wall. “I have to move,” he repeats. “Is there room with you? I need to get away from him.” 

“It’s been four days,” Bill replies. “What could he possibly have done already?” 

“Technically,” Eddie begins, “it’s been three. Day four hasn’t actually started.” 

“Okay, sure,” Bill says. “Three days. What’d he do? I haven’t heard anything interesting in a while.” 

Eddie lets out a huff of a whine, wraps himself up in his blanket, rolling into a burrito. “It’s not what he did, it’s what I did.” 

“Even better.” 

“No, it’s not, Bill!” Eddie complains. He bites down on his comforter. Spits it out. “I am a lunatic, I am crazy, I woke up to him playing Fleetwood Mac on the fucking piano—” 

“—I think he learned how to play that one album out of sheer boredom—” 

“—and I knock on his fucking door, and I should have been like shut the fuck up maybe it’s three in the goddamn morning, but no, I kissed him on the fucking face—”

There is a thoughtful pause on the other end, like Bill is processing this, the words, the meaning. Kind of like Eddie, who is in his bed, thinking about how twelve years of restraint and willpower and—and—perseverance went straight down the drain because of social distancing, a piano, and a crush he once spent an entire semester of college trying to kill by kissing any boy who expressed even the slightest bit of interest in him. 

You can probably guess how well that went. 

And then Bill shrieks. “OHHHHH MY GOOOOOOOOOD, MUH-MUH-MIKE, OH MY GOD.”

“It is four in the goddamn morning, William—“

“—Mike, you don’t understand, Eddie kissed Richie—“

“—Eddie kissed Richie? Where?”

“On the face!”

“Like his cheek, or his nose, or… what part of the face we talkin’ about?”

“You meant his mouth when you said his face, right?” Bill asks. “I’m not screaming because you kissed his fucking forehead, am I?”

Glumly, Eddie says, “Yes, it was his mouth.”

“His mouth, Mike, he kissed him on the mouth—“

“Fuck, I owe Stan like fifty bucks,” Mike says. “I gotta call him.”

“I’m having a crisis here,” Eddie reminds them. He thinks he’s on speaker now. He also may be talking too loud. Richie can definitely hear all of this. 

“The mouth!” Bill says. “On his mouth!”

“It’s too early to call Stan,” Mike says. “I’ll do it later. He’s going to be so smug about it, you know. He said it would happen now, do you remember?”

“Yeah, but did he say it would be Eh-Eh-Eddie or Richie?”

“I don’t know,” Mike replies. “You couldn’t have waited until next month?”

Eddie kicks his leg out. “Sorry the quarantine happened at an inconvenient time for you, Michael,” he replies snootily. “Call me when you want to be helpful.”

He hangs up, gropes for his pillow, and shoves it over his face. There are too many layers and he’s getting incredibly warm now, but he doesn’t care. He grits his teeth and screams. 

He does not go back to sleep, scrolling through animal videos on his Instagram. He finds a funny one of a goat, starts to send it to Richie, and then stops. 

Maybe he shouldn’t. He definitely shouldn’t. Probably. 

He does anyway. 

He hears Richie laugh on the other side of the wall. 

(7:46 am) ru up?

(8:45 am) ok you should be up now or else you’re not doing “work”

(8:47 am) i can hear you you know 

(8:50 am) the quieter you type the more obvious you are about it 

(8:55 am) eddie 

(9:27 am) i’m making banana pancakes

(9:27 am) u want?

(9:40 am) i made you some and left them in the microwave

(9:40 am) also there is coffee in the thing already it’s caramel flavored

(10:07 am) do you think my masturbation joke is funny

(10:07 am) like ppl laugh at it when i do it live but like 

(10:07 am) it depends on the environment 

(10:07 am) Stan hates it so maybe i should cut it

(10:15 am) i'm gonna cut it

(10:45 am) smart move it’s shitty

(10:45 am) dick jokes were only funny when we were 13 

(10:46 am) eddie!!!!!! 

(10:46 am) i’m only texting because you’re being loud and i’m on a conference call 

(10:47 am) you are 

(10:47 am) literally not???

(10:47 am) you’re talking to ben i hear him 

(10:48 am) yes i need his help with this particular issue 

(10:48 am) a risk analysis issue?

(10:48 am) he’s an architect 

(10:48 am) and i need his advice on if this person’s building will 

(10:48 am) collapse if there are any natural disasters

(10:49 am) even i can tell you the probability of that one 

(10:50 am) and that’s such bullshit i hear you talking about me 

(10:50 am) unless there’s another richie you live with that works at your lame office 

(10:52 am) whispering doesn’t change the fact that you’re talking about me

(10:52 am) it just makes it more apparent!!!! 

(10:53 am) i am a fake celebrity i know all about this

(10:59 am) stop bothering me and work on your act before Netflix decides they don’t want anything to do with you 

(12:01 pm) wanna know what i’m gonna do

(12:01 pm) i’m gonna cut the dick joke

(12:01 pm) and replace it with 

(12:01 pm) a joke about how my roommate who has also been my best friend since I was EIGHT

(12:01 pm) kissed me in the middle of the fucking night

(12:01 pm) and won’t come out of his room to even like 

(12:02 pm) eat

(12:02 pm) ru eating?

(12:02 pm) we don’t have to talk about it 

(12:02 pm) i swear we don’t 

(12:02 pm) it’s forgotten if you want it to be

(12:02 pm) just tell me you’re eating 

(12:02 pm) i swear if you are not eating i will come in there and force feed you and it will not be pretty 

(12:41 pm) i ate

(12:41 pm) the pancakes were good 

(12:41 pm) thanks rich

(1:01 pm) do you want to forget about it?

(1:30 pm) whatever you want 

(1:30 pm) do you?

(1:53 pm) no

(1:53 pm) but if like 

(1:53 pm) if it’s an issue i think i can go live in ben’s closet 

(2:00 pm) you are not moving out because you kissed me

(2:00 pm) and especially not into BENS CLOSET

(2:00 pm) sounds like regression to me

(2:01 pm) and if you recall 

(2:01 pm) i kissed you back 

(2:01 pm) takes two to tango 😎 

(2:02 pm) just being polite 

(2:02 pm) it was like 

(2:02 pm) i do not pity kiss anyone

(2:02 pm) more specifically

(2:02 pm) i do not pity kiss you

(2:02 pm) it was like 4am who knows what anyone does at 4am

(2:02 pm) you know what i change my mind let’s forget about it 

(2:03 pm) wasn’t me 

(2:03 pm) i was possessed 

(2:11 pm) i wasn’t 

(2:23 pm) i have a conference call for real this time at 230 so can you do whatever you’re doing in the living room 

(3:12 pm) i made a fruit salad 

(3:12 pm) did you know we had grapes???

(3:12 pm) i didn’t it was a pleasant surprise

(3:44 pm) ok i figured out the joke 

(3:44 pm) it’s not about you i know those upset you 

(3:44 pm) Stan likes it so it’s a winner 

(3:59 pm) don’t tell Stan i told you this but he likes everything you do he just doesn’t want to give you a big head about it 

(4:00 pm) 😱

(4:00 pm) god what an asshole i love him 

(4:01 pm) he’s gotta balance us out since i think you’re the funniest person on the planet and i tell you constantly 

(4:01 pm) like i am right now apparently

(4:03 pm) aw eds i am BLUSHING 

(4:03 pm) president of my fan club!!!! 

(4:03 pm) yeah we meet every thursday at 230 

(4:03 pm) that was my conference call 

(4:04 pm) you are the funniest person i know 

(4:44 pm) ru done with work 

(4:44 pm) ru gonna spend the whole day physically ignoring me or can we play a game 

(5:00 pm) work day is over eddie leave the bedroom 

(5:00 pm) eddie pleeeease 

(5:04 pm) can i get out of my stupid dress shirt before you start being annoying 

(5:05 pm) noooo stay in it you look so cute when you’re all business casual 

(5:05 pm) literally shut the fuck up im itchy and you get to wear stupid ass shirts to “work” 

(5:05 pm) i had to wear something normal to the Netflix meeting 

(5:05 pm) i am not constantly a fashion don’t 

(5:08 pm) mm can’t say i agree 

(5:08 pm) ok fair im wearing a shirt with watermelons on it

(5:08 pm) come out i wanna play Mario kart 

(5:10 pm) i came out 10 years ago 

(5:10 pm) lol ok

(5:10 pm) proud of u always my tiny cumquat 

(5:12 pm) im gonna beat ur ass at rainbow road

(5:12 pm) i’ve already set it up and i am picking princess peach 

(5:12 pm) don’t you fucking DARE

(10:55 pm) are you up 

(10:55 pm) it’s not even eleven of course i’m up

(10:55 pm) it’s 5 to

(10:55 pm) yes not eleven 

(10:55 pm) are you going to bed at eleven or something

(10:56 pm) lmao no i am a cool kid i don’t have a bedtime

(10:56 pm) ok 

(10:56 pm) so

(10:56 pm) may i 

(10:56 pm) don’t make this weirder than it has to be Eduardo 

(10:56 pm) come hop in 

Eddie leaves his phone in his room—why would he even need it anyway—and shuffles into Richie’s, where he’s stretching one leg out and watching—

“Is this Frozen?”

“I am a really big fan of sisterly love,” Richie replies. He can lean his entire body straight along his leg and touch his toes.

Eddie stares at the line of his back, says, “You haven’t spoken to your sister in three years.”

“Doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy a family film,” Richie says. “Perhaps I miss her. Perhaps she is no longer the worst person in my family.” 

“Uh, sure,” agrees Eddie, who still doesn’t know why Richie stopped talking to his sister, “but why are you really watching this?” He’s halfway through it. 

Richie twists his head and smiles at him. Eddie thinks he should turn back around immediately. Mario Kart and dinner were one thing. Normal things. He was distracted and hungry and could look at anything and everything but Richie’s long neck, and the mouth he kept chewing on. His fingers still hurt from holding onto the controller as hard as he did. But look, look: Asking to get in his bed with him is something completely different. It's not unusual, right, like they’ve been friends since grade school, and they’ve had more sleepovers than Eddie can count, and lived together for so long, but this… 

This seems deliberate. Heated. Like there was a reason for Eddie to ask, and he’s never asked before. Just knocked on the wall between them as a warning and burrowed under Richie’s blankets, using him as his personal heater. He feels kind of like an idiot right now, not sure why he’s so—why he’s like this. Richie clearly managed to move past it, even if the texts were kind of confusing and Eddie reread them a bunch instead of paying attention to his team on their video call. 

I do not pity kiss you.

What does that mean?

“I have a very large crush on Kristoff,” Richie says, and that’s when Eddie remembers he asked him a question. He couldn’t tell you what it was. “But I can change it if you don’t wanna watch it.”

“No, no,” Eddie replies. “It’s fine. It’s a good movie. I can—I can definitely watch it.”

“You gonna do it in the doorway? Pretty sure there’s, like, forty-five minutes left,” Richie poses. He pats the space next to him, a bunched up pile of gray and green sheets. There may be a sock there. Richie is only wearing one. “I think an Eddie can fit right here.”

Eddie moves sort of stiffly, feels like a robot, and climbs onto the bed. Richie continues to stretch out, apparently incredibly limber, and Elsa and Anna have a traumatic reunion in Elsa’s ice palace. 

Richie hums along, and Eddie wraps his arms around his legs, pulling his knees close and taking up as little space as possible. He’s not that interested in the movie, but he watches it though he doesn’t really retain anything. 

“Can’t sleep?” Richie asks. 

“No,” Eddie says. Like he even bothered trying. He changed into his pajamas and just laid there, staring at his ceiling and listening to the honking of cars, the racing of the subway. He heard Richie moving around his bedroom, never hated that they shared a wall more, and just… didn’t want to be alone.

Now he feels like maybe… maybe he shouldn’t have—

Richie sits up, stares at the space between them, says, “Why are you so far away? Why are you so small?” 

“I’ve always been small,” Eddie replies. “You like to remind me.” 

“When I say that, I mean that you’re, like, tiny,” Richie says. “In a cute way. Small. Bite-sized. But now you’re, like, all…” He presses his hands together, tight, without any room between the palms. “Compact. It’s like you don’t want to—” 

“I’m sorry,” Eddie blurts, chin to his knees. “About last night. I didn’t… no, it’s not that I didn’t… it’s just—” 

“Hey,” Richie says, crawling over, closing the space. Eddie shirks back, shrinks even more, and he can tell when Richie notices. He frowns, stops, and keeps at a reasonable distance, even though it’s a bed and they’re basically already all over each other anyway. “You don’t have to apologize.” 

“But I do,” Eddie insists. “I can’t just… I can’t—”

“But you,” Richie starts, “you… Eddie, look at me.” 

“Olaf is melting,” Eddie says blankly.  

Richie’s fingers twitch. “Spoiler alert, Eds: he lives.” He slides his hand across the mattress, flips it over, leaves Eddie with the choice. 

Eddie blinks, swallows, and pries his own from around his calf. Picks at his knuckle, and then slides his fingers between Richie’s. He’s always liked how Richie engulfs him, his hand bigger than his, always holding him so securely, so comfortingly, so nicely. Even now, when he wants to jump out of his skin.

He pulls his gaze away from the television, and meets Richie’s eyes, pretty and deep and dark, and remembers every single moment in which he realized he loved him. From the time in art class when they were eight, to the moment in middle school that really defined their friendship, to high school and beyond, to paying and sending in his application to NYU when his mother refused. To five days ago. Four days ago. Three. Two. Yesterday. Today.

This very second. 

Eddie has not known a single day in his life where he has not loved him, even when there was paint in his face, or blood in his mouth, or a heart cracking in his chest, or someone constantly telling him no, no, no.

(Richie has always said yes.)

“Don’t apologize for that,” Richie says. “You didn’t do anything you need to be sorry for.” 

He doesn’t know what possesses him to ask it. What makes him brave enough to even pull the thought from his mind. Maybe it’s been Richie this whole time. Maybe the bravery is only there because Richie knows where to find it, where to coax it out from. Maybe Eddie’s bravery is the kind that appears when he knows whatever he does and no matter the outcome, he’s got somebody in his corner.

Or maybe it’s not as deep as that. 

Maybe he’s just listening now. Really, really listening. 

So he curls his toes, watches Anna freeze and almost die, if not for the love of her sister. He looks back at Richie, kind of pale and eyes wider than usual, and asks, “So I could do it again?” He is amazed his voice doesn’t waver. 

Richie physically flinches. No, he doesn’t; that implies something’s hurt him, upset him. He jumps, maybe, a startled little thing that shakes him out. But he does not say something negative like Eddie thinks. He says, holy shit, he says, “Yeah. You could.”

And he continues speaking, like word vomit, pink on his cheeks and hand growing warmer and sweatier in Eddie’s. “As many times as you want to. I am here for the taking.” He coughs. “Spaghetti.”

The nickname sounds so fucking stupid and stilted and unnecessary, but Eddie ignores it. 

“Don’t say it like that,” he tells him. “I’m not. Not taking, the fuck that… I’m. It’s more than. I’m just. It’s not. I’m not. You get that, right?”

“No, I do not,” Richie replies. “None of that made any sense. I’m not sure we’re speaking the same language.”

“It’s—it’s English.”

“Is it?”

“Yes,” Eddie insists. “It’s English. You didn’t hear anything I said?” 

“You didn’t say anything,” Richie tells him, mouth quirking. “It was just words you put together.” 

“That’s what speaking is,” Eddie retorts. “Some words in a certain order that mean whatever some old dudes decided they meant a million years ago.”

“I imagine they had something more in mind than it’s more than, I’m just, it’s not, I’m not.”

“I’m not taking,” Eddie says, pinching the skin between Richie’s thumb and index finger. “I would never take anything from you, not when I’ve been in love with you since I was twelve.” He pulls his hand away and stands, the credits for the movie long since ended. “I didn’t come in here to do this.” 

Richie grapples to take his hand again, but Eddie keeps it out of reach, fisting the leg of his pajama pants. “Then why’d you come in here?” he asks instead.

Eddie says, “I don’t know. I just… do I need a reason now?”

“No, of course not, but it looks like you’re trying to find one.” 

Eddie remains quiet, digging his nails into his palm, trying to figure out why he said what he said, and what it is about this fucking week that has him going fucking insane. Richie is fucking everywhere, it feels like—in person, in his thoughts, in his… his veins. 

But he’s always been there, hasn’t he?

Everywhere.

Nowhere.

Here.

There.

Why does it matter so much now?

Because there isn’t much else to focus on. Even the mindless drone of work isn’t cutting it, with all its ups and downs and confusions and irregularities. Not when he can hear Richie in the kitchen, down the hall, in his room. When he hears him fucking sing in the shower, or laugh at his own jokes, or talk himself through something that isn’t quite hitting right but Eddie thinks is funny regardless. 

He suddenly feels itchy.

No, he’s actually feeling Richie’s hands on his, pulling his fingers apart, easing the tension from his wrists. He’s moved in the time it took Eddie to have that thought process, and he’s not sure how long it’s been, how long it took him.

Four days. 

How’d he fucking manage longer than this when Richie is Richie, and he looks like he does, and he’s his best friend, and he’s maybe the greatest person Eddie’s ever known? 

It comes as a very startlingly, sober thought: Maybe he hasn’t.

Maybe he stopped trying a long time ago. Maybe he’s only been trying to convince himself.

“Okay, next question,” Richie says softly, nervously. “Why haven’t you told me, if it’s been that long?” 

Eddie shakes him off, which is easy. Richie doesn’t have a very strong grip on him and he’d never keep him in a place he doesn’t want to be. 

But he doesn’t go far. He doesn’t even move. 

Eddie stares at the bow of his lip, at the collection of freckles on his jawline. He remembers looking at him all the time—now, then, always—wanting to touch but too afraid to because he could never be so easily affectionate. Not like Richie is, who kisses, and kisses, and kisses him, and koala clings to Stan, and hangs off of Ben, and proclaims his love to Bev every time he sees her. 

Eddie’d touch him and he’d know, so he let Richie do it all and reacted to it. He learned early on that acting so abrasive, so against it was exhausting, so he just… 

“I didn’t want to ruin our friendship,” Eddie says. “I could deal with the… the loving you from a distance thing, but I couldn’t deal with that.”

“We live in the same apartment,” Richie replies. “We share a wall. I don’t think there’s much distance between us.”

Eddie wrinkles his nose. “You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t think I do,” Richie says. “I don’t think you know what you mean either.” 

“I think I know what I mean,” Eddie returns. “They’re my feelings.”

“No,” Richie says. “There isn’t any distance between us is what I’m saying. Your feelings are valid, and you’re allowed to have them, but they’re stupid.”

Eddie scoffs. “You’re stupid, Richie, what the fuck.”

“Eddie.” Richie shows him his hands, palms up, giving him a decision. An out, if he wants one, and there have been many since he came in the room. He’s taken none of them, not even when his heart beat so hard and loud in his throat. Not even when he said I’ve been in love with you. He’s still here. He’ll always still be here. 

There’s nowhere else he wants to go. 

“Eddie,” Richie repeats, and he puts those hands on the backs of his thighs, tugs him close. Curls his fingers around his legs. “I spend all my time with you, I talk about you to anyone who will listen, and at this point, it’s no one, and I haven’t dated a single person since maybe junior year of college or been remotely interested in anyone I did see for even longer.” His hands slide up, over the curve of Eddie’s ass and to the bones of his hips. He squeezes Eddie there. 

Eddie’s knees hit the side of the bed right at the frame, between Richie’s legs, which fell open to accommodate his standing up.

Richie looks up at him, expression open and soft and so fucking earnest that Eddie huddles in closer, all but leaning on his kneecaps. He hovers over him almost, understands the appeal of being bigger than someone. It’s enthralling, actually, but Eddie likes being the small one, the one getting boxed in. 

He’s so present, so there, looking at him like that, eyes wide and swirling with… with…

Eddie clears his throat, flushing from the neck up, but never looks away. Caught. Lost. He’s always like this, but this time he lets himself fall, lets himself become who he has always wanted to be. Who Richie sees.

Eddie holds his hands in his fists, tiny balls of pent-up energy.

Richie tells him something with his gaze alone and says, “Ruin it.” 

He feels a twinge in his gut, a roaring of adrenaline, and his body moves without him telling it to. That disconnect returns, listens to his heart and his—it’s also his dick that speaks to him. The rest of him, the logical thinking, his entire brain… They turn the open signs to closed, and leave him without any sense, any reason.

Eddie slides into his lap, hands on his shoulders, heavy and certain and sure. He stares at his mouth, commits it to memory, remembers the way it felt. How it tasted. How soft and demanding and reciprocal it was. 

“Ruin what?” he asks. He wants to hear him say it. To tell him he wants this too, that it’s not a thing made up from time spent crammed together in the same, small space. From wanting it so badly he created something from nothing. That it’s real, and he can have it, and he’s insane but it’s okay because Richie is insane too.

“The friendship, Eds,” Richie replies. “Ruin the friendship.” 

Eddie leans forward and moves his hands from shoulders to cheeks. His touch is a ghost of its former self, scared to feel and shaking. “Are you sure?” he asks. “There’s no coming back from this. Not now.”

Richie turns his head and kisses the skin of Eddie’s palm, right by his wrist. His pulse jumps. “There’s never been any coming back for me,” he admits. “I’ve been so far gone for you that I don’t know what it’s like not to be.”

“What?” 

Eddie’s nose is so close to Richie’s face now, the light from his lamp making a glare on his glasses. Eddie can’t see him, and he wants to, if he’s about to hear what he’s about to hear. He pushes them into his hair, looks and looks and looks, and yet he still hesitates. 

“Eddie,” Richie says. “I’ve been obsessed with you since I was eight. I carved our fucking initials in the Kissing Bridge and then Bowers broke my nose when I didn’t deny it was you the E stood for.” He inhales, exhales; his touch is clumsy on Eddie, like he isn’t sure what to do. “Ruin it, Eddie. Please.” 

Maybe it’s the fact that Richie sounds like he’s begging. Maybe it’s the fact that each beat of Eddie’s heart sounds like that whenever Richie is looking at him. Maybe it’s the fact that he’s wanted this for so long that it’s become a part of him, that he’s thought about it somewhat desperately time and time again (please please please let me have what I want). Maybe it’s the fact that today the universe is like sure, here it is, Eddie. Take it. Have it. It wants you too. Or maybe it’s the fact that he could’ve had it this entire time, he was just too afraid to ask for it. 

This time, when he kisses him, it’s slower. Less crazed. He still feels a buzzing in his veins, a jumpiness that can’t be contained, and an insistent need to rid himself of his skin. Richie’s touch is fire, burning through his shirt, his muscle, the very cells that make him up. 

What’s interesting about Richie is how careful and considerate and unhurried his kisses are, compared with the rest of him. He has always been all boundless energy, and sentences he’s never thought all the way through, and bouncing knees, and tapping fingers, and a constant need to move, get up, go, go, go.

But with Eddie, he moves at the speed of a fucking glacier, like he’s going to disappear, like he’s trying to touch him everywhere—each dip, curve, patch of skin—and it’s more torturous than Eddie can bear. His mouth is wet, and his teeth are an unhurried drag against his lower lip, and the way he sucks on it has the sensation rumbling through Eddie’s body like a creeping, devastating earthquake. 

Eddie keens, and he’s not sure what keening even is, but he fucking does it, and pulls Richie’s hair tight in a fist. 

“If you do that, this isn’t going to be fun for either of us,” Richie pants out. He latches on to Eddie again, tongue a hot weight against his jaw. 

Eddie inhales, guides Richie’s face to a spot on his neck that is all but throbbing, and buries both hands in the matted curls at the back of his head. “I am already not having fun,” he mumbles. 

Richie bites down, huffs a laugh against the goosebumps running down the side of Eddie’s throat, and palms his ass again, pulling him forward. Eddie’s body feels loose and light but also wired and knotted, like he needs to be untangled. Plucked apart. “Sure feels like you’re having fun, Spaghetti,” he replies, and Eddie groans, because what the fuck, why, and also because what the fuck, why did his dick just fucking twitch?

Richie’s mouth is on his again, and he can feel him grinning, that stupid imbecile, and Eddie kisses him hard and fast. Their teeth clash and Richie pulls just a breath away, lips grazing his as he says, “Can’t say you don’t like the nicknames now, huh?” 

“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” Eddie replies. He used to have dignity before this. He used to be an upstanding member of society. He used to stare at Richie, dead in the face, while he called him Eds, and Spaghetti, and Eduardo, and all other different variations of his name, which were all fucking stupid. Didn’t mean he didn’t like them, just meant Richie never had to know how much he did. 

“You know I don’t know how,” Richie says.

Eddie shoves him against the mattress and shows him. 

Eddie wakes to a finger pressing against his cheek over and over again. He bats it away and turns onto his side, pulling the sheet up to cover his head. His alarm has not gone off. He does not need to get up. 

The sheet is tugged away from him, replaced with a different kind of warmth, smooth and heavy and real. 

He gets poked again. 

“Stop,” he mumbles, moving his face and arching his neck. 

“I just want to know if you have to work,” says Richie. 

“What day is it?”

“Friday. I think. Hold on.” Richie gets off him, twisting in the other direction. He comes back, rests his chin on Eddie’s shoulder. “I was right. It’s Friday.”

Eddie elbows him, but Richie sticks to him like a leech. “Then I hafta work,” he answers. “You know I work weekdays.”

“Okay, yes, but do you have to work right now?”

“What time is it?”

“A little after six.”

“In the morning?”

“Yes,” Richie says. “Six-oh-three, to be precise. Oh, wait. Oh-four now.”

Eddie turns over, blinking blearily, and tries his best to frown at Richie, who is all aglow in the early morning. “No, Richie, I do not have to work at six-oh-four in the morning.”

“Oh-five,” Richie corrects. 

“Fine, I don’t have to work before eight-thirty,” Eddie retorts. “Why are you so awake?”

“Because I remembered you were here,” Richie answers. 

“I live here.”

“In my bed.”

“I wake up in your bed a lot, actually.”

“But you looooove me,” Richie says. “You’ve been in love with me since you were twelve.”

“True,” says Eddie. His eyes close. He thinks he can chase the dream he was having if he tries hard enough. 

Richie pokes him again. “Eddie,” he whines. 

“Oh my god, what,” Eddie says. His dream is gone. 

“Do you have to work?”

“I mean, yes, it’s my job—“

“—but does anyone really monitor you?” Richie asks. “All you did the other day was check your email every hour.”

“Not really,” Eddie replies. “I just have to check in once and awhile.”

Richie smiles at him. 

Eddie tries to act annoyed, but Richie’s smile is, like, one of the top three things that can get him out of any bad mood, so he fails there. With a great heaving sigh, he asks, “What do you want to do today?”

Richie smushes his cheeks together, leans forward, and kisses him. 

“You wanna do that all day?” 

“We can take a break for lunch,” Richie decides. 

Eddie rolls his eyes. “You’re supposed to eat three meals a day.” 

“I can make you breakfast right now,” Richie says. “How do you want it?” He tugs on the strings of Eddie’s pajama pants, presses his thumbs to the jut of Eddie’s hip bones. “I can make eggs. You want them over easy? Over medium? Over hard?”

“Are you trying to seduce me with eggs?” 

“No.” Richie slides his hands beneath Eddie’s shirt, curls his fingers around his shoulders. “Is it working?”

Eddie raises his arms over his head and wriggles out of his shirt. Richie pulls him down and kisses him again. 

“No,” Eddie says. “It’s not.”

“That was my one trick.” Richie sighs. “Whatever should I do now?”

Eddie balances on his elbow, his nose against Richie’s. “You could tell me you love me, maybe. That always seems to work in the movies.”

“I love you,” Richie says dutifully. His eyes sparkle with sincerity. 

“Mm,” Eddie mumbles. “We’re half there, I think.” He tucks a curl behind Richie’s ear, brushes his finger along the apple of Richie’s cheek. “I want waffles.” 

“Your wish is my command,” Richie says grandly. He stretches out, wiggling his toes and pressing his hands against the wall, before rolling out of bed. 

Eddie watches him go, halfway out of the room, and then gets up to follow him. 

He’s somehow already made a mess by the time Eddie gets there, even though he was thirty seconds behind him. Bowls are scattered all over the counter, he’s already got flour everywhere, and half his body is in the cabinet under the sink. 

“What are you doing?”

“Looking for the waffle iron,” Richie answers, voice muffled. 

Eddie gives himself until the count of four to look at Richie’s ass and then says, “It’s on top of the fridge.”

“Oh.” Richie wriggles out of the cabinet, bangs his head, and grins at him. “When did it get there?”

“I don’t know,” Eddie says. “I think it may have always been there.”

“Absolutely not,” Richie disagrees, pulling it down. “I made waffles two weeks ago.”

Eddie shrugs. “Maybe that’s where you put it when you were done.”

“I don’t remember that at all,” Richie says, but he plugs it in anyway, lets it heat up. “Can you grab the eggs for me?”

“You’re making them from scratch?”

“Yeah, how else would I?” Richie asks. 

“I don’t know.” Eddie pulls the carton out of the fridge. “With a box? Do you need milk?”

“Yes. Also how dare you. A box? Really? The audacity. Get out of my kitchen.”

Eddie leans against the far counter, arms crossed over his chest. “It’s my kitchen too.”

“It’s half your kitchen, and since you think waffles from a box are superior—“

“—I didn’t say superior—“

“—so you can stay over there and I’ll be here, just slaving away over waffles that you wanted—“

“—you’re so dramatic, it was just a thought—“

“—an incorrect thought—“

“—there’s no such thing as an incorrect thought, there are just thoughts—“

“—yeah, that’s what they teach you in first grade, but they’re wrong—“

Eddie snorts. “I thought that was about stupid questions.”

“No, there is such a thing as a stupid question,” Richie says. “They were wrong about that. Like remember when you said with a box? That was a stupid question.”

“Oh my god, I’m leaving,” Eddie says.

“No, don’t, I need help. Come here.”

“Oh, you want me to touch your perfect waffle mix after what I said? What could I possibly help you wit—did you just splatter—stop!”

Richie laughs, fingers covered in the same waffle mix that drips from Eddie’s cheeks, his nose, his chin. Eddie narrows his eyes at him, runs a hand over his face, and then wipes his palm all over Richie’s mouth. Richie nips at him, giggling, and grabs more batter, which he runs through Eddie’s hair, much to his chagrin. 

In mere seconds the kitchen is a mess and there’s no way any waffles will be made, the batter covering their bodies. 

“I wanted to eat waffles,” Eddie says, smacking his lips, “not wear them.”

“You shoulda been more specific, Eds,” Richie replies. “How was I supposed to know?”

“When someone says they want waffles, it’s just universally known that they… what? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“You missed a spot,” Richie says. “Right here.” He brushes his thumb over Eddie’s mouth, right in the corner. Eddie puts his hand over his and leans forward. He kisses him, all sweet and slimy with a hint of chocolate, and he does not care even a little bit about the uncomfortable way the batter is sticking to him. 

“We’re acting like we’re in the climax of some rom-com,” Eddie mumbles. 

“I was interested in a different kind of climax twenty minutes ago, but you wanted waffles,” Richie replies. 

Eddie wipes a glob of wet flour from Richie’s glasses. “You’re so stupid,” he says fondly. “I love you.”

“Sorry I got batter in your hair,” Richie says. “It’s all crusty.”

“You can make it up to me in the shower,” Eddie proposes. 

Richie hums contentedly. “Is our shower big enough for that?”

“I don’t know. Probably not. But we can make it work.”

“You’re my favorite person,” Richie replies, making a face as he rubs a drying curl between his fingers. “God, I love you. I can’t believe I get to say that.”

Eddie smiles softly, a tingling warmth spreading through his body. “Why didn’t you say it before?”

“I was waiting on you,” Richie answers. 

“Sorry I made you wait so long,” Eddie says. 

Richie wraps his arms around Eddie, pulls him tight to his chest, and rests his chin on Eddie’s head, crusty hair and all. “Wasn’t that long,” he replies. “I’d wait longer if I had to. As long as you needed me to.”