Archive of Our Own ^beta

Eddie would later maintain that it was ultimately the fault of the rental car agency.

*

Eddie agreed with the school of thought that it was better to rent a car for a road trip. Why add the miles, the road damage, to a commuter car? He traveled not infrequently for work and so had elite status with both of the firm's preferred agencies. He had considered a number of factors including the anticipated number of passengers, the season and potential for inclement weather, and likely luggage situation. He had ultimately selected a 2015 Range Rover with under sixty thousand miles on it. Ben would undoubtedly make mention of the poor gas mileage but not everyone would be driving in from the airport forty minutes away, were they, and not everyone was comfortable banking on the availability of electric charging stations. Were they. 

He clicked yes to indicate that yes, he, Edward Kaskbrak, agreed to the above listed terms and conditions, and approved the use of his accrued points. It had been several weeks since he had seen Richie, and perhaps thirty years since they had driven so far together. 

*

It had been Bill's idea, this time. Richie had been the most insistent, at the beginning, that they meet at least every few months. Mike had been renting a small place in Somerville, several months after Derry, and so out of a deep and abiding well of affection and years of trust Eddie had intentionally gone to Massachusetts in the thick of winter. He reminded Mike about this at length as they walked around the Tufts campus, letting Mike play tour guide and point out the buildings where he spent time.

Mike had been exchanging emails with several professors for years, cold calling anyone publishing anything he thought might be relevant to his own personal quest. He'd evidently become something of a local legend in himself, not least because he'd spent twenty years refusing any and all offers for lectures or campus visits only to emerge, with a newly sculpted beard and a wardrobe half filled with Bev Marsh's new solo collection. Under different circumstances Eddie himself probably would have had a few questions.

"Fuck, that's so Mulder of you. You've got an occult nerd in every port, I can't believe this," Richie had groused.

Mike had thrown back his head at that and laughed, one arm slung around Richie's shoulders. "God, that reminds me, I keep forgetting to tell you."

For Richie's sixteenth birthday, his father had given him a camcorder. It was secondhand, but in good condition, with the manual included. Eddie read the manual cover to cover and had been the one to fix it when the lens came out of alignment. This had been largely the only preparation they'd undertaken before he and Mike had started recording a loosely organized investigation into local mythology that even Eddie could tell was an obvious rip off of Richie's favorite episodes of The X-Files. Bill and Bev had both moved away that summer, and Stan the previous, and Eddie had been hard at work building up a savings account to cover the college tuition he no longer believed his mother would give him. He was largely anticipating his own birthday when he would no longer have to forge her signatures on his work authorization forms. After Mike's time at the farm increased for the fall harvest and Ben found work at the hardware store that continued into the fall, Richie managed to get a part time job at their local cable station. From Richie's telling of it, he spent most of his time sorting and labeling the old radio archives, but it did give him unprecedented access to the people in charge of programming the public access stations, and so this was how Richie got his first taste of celebrity.

"Oh, you think I didn't ensure that got digitized and archived in the library?" Mike had said, his big smile wrinkling his eyes in evident pleasure as Richie attempted to smother himself in his own hand. "Small town librarians have very few strings they can pull but you better believe I pulled that one."

Bill had been strange and jumpy during that first trip, something Eddie had chalked up to a fellow feeling of guilt and anxiety related to his unfinalized divorce paperwork, amidst everything else. Certainly the ongoing process of sifting through thirty years of unburied and recontextualized memories hadn't been easy. Ben had recommended keeping a journal, as he did, and Eddie had tried. He had tried in previous years, too, on the recommendation of various therapists and marriage counselors and had always found himself leaving things out of what he wrote, creating code words that he later forgot. Keeping the journal in his briefcase so that it was always on his person. Understanding as he did now the source his tendency for extreme secrecy had done surprisingly little to alleviate his desire to maintain it. 

*

Eddie had set his phone to charge on the dresser on the opposite side of the room from his side of the bed the night before. Knowing himself, having to get out of bed to silence the alarm would almost certainly guarantee that he wouldn't be able to fall back asleep and miss the pick up time for the rental, no matter how underslept he was.

It was still dark when he stepped out of the apartment building. Early hours still. He shoved his hands into his coat pockets and turned his head to look for an available cab. He'd pick up the car at their pick up spot on the FDR and then head north to pick up Richie, then head down toward the Holland Tunnel and out of the city. Not the most direct route, but he hadn't had enough confidence in Richie's willingness to get up so early to bank on him coming along on the first leg of the trip.

He didn't have to wait long for a cab, this early, and the driver wasn't particularly chatty either. Eddie closed his eyes for the few minutes it took to cross the city and found himself almost surprised by how quickly they arrived. He gave the driver the standard tip along with his fare and stepped back out into the chill predawn light.

There was just one attendant slumped over the desk as Eddie walked up, gloved hands wrapped around a thermos. He nodded without looking up as Eddie cleared his throat and said, "Reservation for Kaspbrak."

The attendant opened a drawer and pulled out a set of keys. These he handed to Eddie while jerking a thumb back at the rows of parked cars behind him. "First two rows are compact. You're space 12."

*

Earlier that spring, in Georgia, Eddie had found himself catching up with Bill late one warm night, long after the others had gone to bed. They'd spent the intervening months with phone calls and text messages, and Eddie was still adjusting to himself as a man with so many friends to catch up with, so many loose threads to remember. What was going on with that neighbor of Stan and Patty's? Was Mike's article going to be published or were they sending it back for further revisions? And Eddie himself: did he still hate his job, or had he talked himself into staying?

After a few drinks, he had found himself wanting to ask Bill about his writing and unable to remember with any great precision what Bill had told him about it, previously. It hadn't been entirely clear to Eddie whether it was even fiction. He'd stumbled through asking a vague and meandering question about how it was to be writing with Mike.

Bill had let his head drop to the back of the wicker garden chairs Patty had pulled out of their shed earlier that night. "Not that different," he'd said. "He's more polite than my agent about what we need to follow up. But, uh, less polite about my ideas."

Eddie himself was still coming to terms with his friends' fame and couldn't imagine what it would have been like to watch from afar. How nice, and how overwhelming, to finally have a place to put all of that.

"It started off about how some of the stories can be metaphors," Bill went on. "The, you know. Regional folklore."

"Didn't feel that metaphorical," Eddie muttered.

"God, no," Bill said quickly. "Not - I, we wouldn't write about that, not without talking to you first. All of you." 

"Oh," Eddie said. "That's -"

"This is more of a collection of things Mike was researching. It's more his than mine, honestly. Maybe that's what makes it different, knowing that I can trust him, you know?" Bill glanced at Eddie and took his silence as an invitation to continue. "It's not that I wouldn't have, uh, talking about it with Audra, you know, but I couldn't, obviously, and then by the time I could, it was kind of too late, you know?"

Eddie made a noncommittal noise. 

"Right, obviously it's different. Did I tell you we ran into her at the publisher's?"

"No!"

"Oh, Christ. It was so awkward. You can't - who am I kidding. Go ahead and tell Richie."

Eddie had in fact been planning how to tell Richie, who had taken to giving him unending grief for how poorly he read social subtext. When Eddie had told him the story of how he'd mistaken a coworker's daughter for his girlfriend and thus blown up his affair, Richie had laughed for so long that Eddie hung up on him. "Good thing you're not in that insurance specialty where you have to be able to tell when people are hiding things from you," he had said after calling back. "Wait, you're not, are you?" Eddie was pleased to know something first, now, and tried not to let this show too obviously on his face.

"So," Bill said, an air of professorial seriousness about him now. "Are you talking to anyone about, uh, it? All of it?"

Eddie must have been making an incredulous face, because Bill made a gesture as if to knock on his own skull. "No, I know, but uh, other than us. Other than Richie. I know that's different. Obviously that's different."

Different how, Eddie had not asked. He'd made a vague response and changed the subject again, which wasn't fair to Bill, but Eddie was less in the habit of cutting himself open and leaving it out for public interpretation. Thinking about Bill this way was probably also not fair to Bill, Eddie had thought, before he had smothered his own ability to have thoughts in the form of two separate guided sleep meditation videos. In the morning, a still-drowsy Richie had appeared before Eddie on the sofa and placed two cups of coffee before sitting and immediately taking up all remaining space. He'd waited until Eddie was in the process of picking up the darker brew in the mug closest to him to begin worming a foot under Eddie's legs, and in the ensuing scuffle Eddie had managed to forget to mention it at all.

*

And so they had made it through the year, meandering across the country. Licking their wounds and building bridges. Eddie had found himself with reasons to use his vast reserves of rolled over PTO, accrued travel miles, to visit the large unknown swathes of the country in which he'd lived his entire life. 

It was early July when they had all been invited to the first stop of Bill's new book tour, now introducing one Michael Hanlon. The early reviews had been positive, if skeptical about the collaboration with an amateur folklorist. The publicist had arranged to rent out an entire bed and breakfast in Salem, which Eddie had privately suggested was incredibly kitsch, and which Richie had suggested back made it deeply fitting as a reception place for Bill Denbrough. 

*

Eddie was able to make the bags fit eventually, on account of Richie having packed only the same beat up duffle bag as always. The car itself amounted to a glorified motorcycle sidecar in Eddie's opinion, which he had shared first with the attendant and now with Richie.

"You're really making me regret not going with you. How old was the kid working the desk? You make him quit? Cry?"

"Yeah, laugh it up. I did a lot of research on that car, you know." Compact cars were unreliable in any kind of weather, and while snow was obviously out of the season any kind of heavy rain on these interstate highways could be a real nightmare of standing water. Eddie kept this line of thinking to himself as he made one last set of adjustments to their bags.

"I don't buy for a second that you wouldn't have done that anyway. I know you've got the back issues of Car and Driver under your mattress," Richie said, still leaning against the car. The car was short enough for him to rest his arms on the roof of the car, and he was doing so now, elbows stacked up together to form a rest for his head. It was infuriating, the way he just stood there. Eddie couldn't look at him or he was going to lose it. "Are you finished achieving nirvana back there, man? It's like 95% humidity already and I'd love to get that air conditioning going before I actually sweat my balls off."

The attendant had not been apologetic over the mixup. He had a printout that said Eddie had specifically requested this green 2009 Yaris, and had been largely unconcerned with the email confirmation Eddie had received stating otherwise. Ultimately thirty minutes after his original departure goal, he had admitted defeat and accepted the keys. Now he watched as Richie hauled himself into the passenger seat, knocking an elbow into Eddie's side and the window in turn. 

"Well, I can't say it's exactly roomy, but it's certainly zippy," Richie said, looking out as Eddie pulled away from the curb and darted out to join traffic. He tapped out a small, continuous rhythm against the window with the knuckles of one hand. "Very honeymoon in the south of France," Richie said, and the smooth line of his drumming faltered. "Anyway. Where's the bluetooth hook up in this joint?"

*

The drive itself was unremarkable. Eddie had budgeted for moderate traffic and one brief stop, figuring it would take them five hours. 

After around two hours, Richie dropped his phone into the cupholder under the dashboard and slid his seat all the way back and began twisting around in his seat, pulling first one knee up toward his chest then stretching out. Eddie endured a few renditions of this until Richie's elbow had caught his arm for the third time, and he snapped. 

"You know, it's usually considered safe driving etiquette not to keep shoving the driver," he said.

Richie had already pulled his arm back with an apologetic noise. "Sorry, I know, you should have gotten a kennel for me in the back, and whatever. It's just my knees."

"This is why I keep telling you to stretch, there's no way you should already be that sore after a couple hours, man," Eddie began.

"Then I guess you must have skipped a couple classes, Dr. K, because that's not what my doctor tells me!"

"Okay, smart guy, what does he tell you, then?" Eddie asked. He'd fallen back into a number of routines from his youth of late, not the least of which was always seeing a second too late how Richie would produce an obscene joke from where Eddie had not anticipated it. Despite everything, he still felt like Richie was going to have to do an awful lot of work for this one.

Richie cleared his throat theatrically. "It is normal to expect decreased periods of sedentary comfort after the meniscus is damaged, even in patients as virile as yourself, Mr. Tozier," he said, in a surprisingly thick Boston accent.

"Fuck you, they never said virile," Eddie said automatically. "What happened to your meniscus?"

"It was the, uh, you know," and Richie held two fingers up by the top of his head and made a falling slide whistle as he brought the two fingers down, culminating in a little cartoon explosion, as if from a fist bump. "In the cavern. My little Wile E. Coyote. They did it in the hospital in Bangor. You don't remember?"

Eddie did not remember. He had been prescribed heavy painkillers in the hospital following the surgery to his shoulder. When he'd woken up, Ben and Richie had been in his room, and Eddie had asked who they were. He was still hoping it would be forgiven, under the circumstances. Ben had reassured him that it would.

"Well, it was a pretty minor surgery in comparison to everything else going on." 

"Knee surgery is still major surgery! Is your physical therapist in New York or Chicago? It must be New York, you haven't been in Chicago enough for that to make sense." 

"God. Yes, my many therapists are in New York, thank you for your inquiry. She's pleased with my progress, all things considered."

"What things?"

"Advanced age and laziness, mostly." Eddie's face must have been doing something terrible, because he went on: "Hey, it's not all bad. Now if I don't get up every couple hours they lock up like crazy, so I've been like. Going on walks. Ben made me add him on that nerdy running app you guys use."

"You didn't tell me that, what hell!" Eddie bit back. Richie was already laughing and pulling his phone back out of the cupholder as Eddie continued, "You had better be taking that out to add me as well."

*

Richie was still tapping lightly on the screen of his phone after they had finished negotiations surrounding lunch and gave a bland, atonal hum in response to the end of an anecdote Eddie had been saving, wanting to see his reaction in person. "Hey," he said, mostly terse. Not wanting to reveal that he was a little hurt and so not being able to play along with it. It was almost impossible to predict whether he had gotten engrossed in one of the dozens of acquaintanceships he kept up long distance and many by text or playing one of the dozens of games he kept downloading. Eddie had been subjected to a half dozen talks about the loss of the full kinesthetic experience represented by mobile translations. "If you don't like them, stop buying them. It's a waste of your data."

"What? No, I keep forgetting to text Ben this documentary. You reminded me of it and I already had my phone out. I'd tell you about it but you'd hate it."

Eddie frowned. "I like documentaries."

"About, like, baseball. You like multiple documentaries about baseball."

"Now that's flattering. You make me sound like a fucking mathlete."

"Eds, I hate to break it to you but you went to a special school just for mathletes. Two of them!" Richie paused, then went on. "Not like the rest of us in the car, who did special school for low achievers. Which is to say no school."

"Okay, so tell me about your cool guy documentary that you saved for Ben."

"Well, to start off with, it's about an architect, see if you can guess why I was recommending it to him and not you," Richie said. "Oh, fuck, what exit was that? I think you were supposed to turn back there."

"No, we still have a little ways."

"Alright. Shit, maybe you should have been the architect."

"Why? No one gets lost in houses." Myra had not trusted Eddie's sense of direction, preferring to rely on GPS navigators or her phone. Neither had she been especially soothed by the times these systems failed her and Eddie had been able to finish navigating anyway. Stan had been unfazed to have Eddie suggesting alternate routes to his own home while they waited for the rental car to be brought around at the airport in Georgia. Bill had adopted a kind of thousand yard stare that Eddie had not appreciated, but hadn't made any questions, either. In the end Eddie took his car holding Richie, Bev, and Ben on his suggested route, and Stan took Bill, Mike, and Patty back along his own and lost by about twenty minutes. It seemed unfair to judge her against these standards and Eddie found himself doing it constantly. 

Richie reached for the radio dial, turning with an inquisitive set to his eyebrows to look at Eddie. "Yeah?" He asked.

"Yeah, go ahead," Eddie said. "Just flip it to FM first, it's still - yeah." There wasn't much point in the traffic report at this point, when they were about to get off the highway, other than spending most of lunch thinking about whether that accident had cleared up. He was trying to find these little moments before they could gather momentum, to replace them with something else. It was largely thankless work, and had improved only marginally in all the months since he'd begun. In this moment it didn't feel like a particular sacrifice to watch Richie quickly skim through the stations, making dismissive noises every few seconds before moving on to the next. He settled on a song just as Eddie began navigating from the highway to Richie's chosen roadside diner. The intro took them all the way from the exit to the small parking lot, where Eddie reached out to switch the radio off.

"You can't turn it off now, this is just when it gets going!"

"What are you fucking talking about, this is the Moody Blues, there's at least another ten goddamn minutes left, and half of it is going to be muttering," Eddie said furiously. 

Richie had closed his eyes and was shaking his head as if angry, but he couldn't hide the smile that crept up. "You can't rush art, baby!"

As Richie unfolded one long arm towards the volume knob, Eddie realized his intention. He snapped forward to slap his hand away, but was pulled up short as the seat belt retractor locked, throwing him back into his seat. Richie laughed his too loud laugh, the snorting sound of it bouncing off the windows as Eddie pulled furiously on the shoulder strap, turning in the seat, until he felt something shift from his pocket and land with a thud onto the floor. He tried to shift sideways to reach it, but the seatbelt held fast. 

Still laughing to himself,  Richie leaned down and stretched an arm under the seat. He screwed up his face and muttered some nonsense as he began searching blindly. "I think I've got - ahh, motherfuck, almost," he said, and then braced one hand against the driver's seat. His long fingers brushed the outer seam of Eddie's jeans. There was a divot in Richie's hair where he kept pushing his glasses up to read a stream of trivia and nonsense from his phone. Richie's knuckles went white as he gripped the seat, and Eddie knew without looking up that his own hands must match where his hands still held the steering wheel.

Finally, Richie yelped triumphantly and turned his face up to Eddie. He slid his arm out from under the seat, now holding Eddie's phone. As he pushed himself back up, Richie slid the hand grasping the seat along the edge of it, coming to rest on the seatbelt. "Oh, hey," Richie said, and pressed his thumb against the release button. With his free hand Richie held onto the buckle itself and held both phone and buckle up to Eddie, smiling. In the honeyed drawl he'd perfected at some point while Eddie wasn't around, Richie said, "Don't say I never gave you nothing."

*

This was perhaps the final straw.

*

Richie had managed to navigate them to the same kind of diner he always did, small and overcrowded, with slow and deeply unreliable service. Eddie found the anonymity, the focus-group approved consistency in decor, the knowledge that there was a chain of command for review, reassuring. Richie was inspecting the fliers pinned haphazardly over the bulletin board when the hostess called their name. 

"Edward?"

"That's him!" Richie called.

Their waitress was in a t-shirt that showed most of a tattoo that covered her visible upper arm and crawled up beyond the sleeve. It looked like some kind of multicolored spaceship and Edde had no idea what it was, for all that he tried not to stare.

"Whoa!" Richie said. "That's sick! Out of the Blue?"

The waitress turned, face lit up, and Eddie knew Richie had been caught again. It drove him absolutely wild. They were going to spend twenty minutes talking about the best live album, or the best tour, and Eddie's stomach was going to begin the slow process of devouring his other organs. She led them to a booth and put the menus down in order to pull up the hem of her sleeve and show Richie the entirety of the tattoo. Eddie tried not to sigh audibly as the conversation drifted, the waitress's hands with their heavy silver rings and bracelet winking in the light as she gestured.

Richie was in the process of starting another anecdote about doing crowd warm up when Eddie gave up and began flipping through one of the menus. Richie turned his head a fraction and caught Eddie's eye. He didn't pause in his telling of the story, but Eddie, who had heard it at least a few times before, could hear the places Richie was skipping over in the middle, wrapping it faster. He'd always had a fast mouth, but at some point he'd become nimble, too. It had become harder to catch him in his omissions and truth-twisting. 

"Sorry about that," Richie said, after the waitress had offered them a few minutes to look over the menus. 

"No, I get it," Eddie said, trying to keep his tone serious. "It was a pretty sick tattoo."

"Ugh, I take it back, you sound like you're about to call me in front of a senate hearing."

The menu was brief enough that they were ready to order by the time the waitress - her name was Emma, Richie reminded him, I know you can read a nametag - returned with their waters. As she tucked her notepad and pen back into her apron, she told Richie it was nice to meet someone else who believed. She said this with a significant widening of her eyes, and Eddie realized how off the rails their conversation had gone while he wasn't paying attention. 

"Most folks around here have their version of a story about something bigger," she added. "But it's always nice to hear it from someone who's, you know, from the city and all," giving a self-deprecating roll of her eyes. 

"Yeah," said Eddie. "Could you give us a minute?"

The waitress - Emma - had barely stepped away from them before Richie responded. "Well, that was rude."

Eddie leaned forward across the table to hiss back, "What the fuck were you talking about?"

"She was asking if I still lay the best pipe in the tristate area."

"Why the fuck were you talking about aliens!"

Richie threw his hands up. "Why the fuck do you keep asking questions if you don't care what i'm going to say!"

Eddie took a breath. "Fine. Fine. I'm sorry, please continue."

Richie took a breath and made a show of waiting for any last interruptions from Eddie. "We were talking about aliens after I brought them up -"

"Oh great, was she abducted by aliens?" 

"Actually, the preferred term is experiencer," Richie said, raising his voice over Eddie's scoff. He was doing something with his voice, half a lisp, that suggested he was quoting something, but Eddie couldn't place it. "Okay, but technically, don't you think I was?"

Eddie stared at him. "That wasn't - are you joking about this?"

Eddie knew he sounded angry as he asked, but Richie looked more relaxed than he had all morning as he answered. "No. Well, maybe a little." 

*

It was an inevitability that they would spend longer than Eddie wanted getting lunch. He wasn't made to linger, not like this, sitting on acrylic vinyl made sticky with humidity and this itch under his skin every time Richie twisted around the booth to crack his back. 

"You're going to break your back doing that, bro," Eddie said, and grimaced as Richie pulled at his neck until it audibly cracked.

"Break my back, huh," Richie replied, and he gave Eddie a look that completed the thought, the dare, in his mind. 

"Fuck off," Eddie bit out.

"Why, Mister Kaspbrak!" Richie responded, holding a hand up to his face. The young debutante, shocked and scandalized.

"Stop using my full name -"

"- this is a family restaurant!"

Emma materialized at Eddie's elbow while he still had his arm half drawn back, the cheap metal spoon from his place setting aimed at Richie's head. He tried to school his face back to something approximating normal, and made the mistake of glancing back at Richie, who had made no such effort.

"Are you boys just about ready to settle up?" Emma asked. She held a small clipboard with the receipt pinned to it, and this Eddie accepted from her.

Eddie reached for his wallet, accidentally making eye contact with Richie again. Boys, Richie mouthed back at Eddie. He felt a flush climb up the back of his neck. "Yes, thank you," he said, glancing briefly at the total before clipping a few bills on top of the receipt. "There's no change, everything's great." He kicked at Richie, just once, under the table. "Thanks again."

*

"I don't know why it's my fault that we took longer than you planned," Richie said. He was settling back into the seat of the car, shifting his shoulders back and forth. He'd buckled his seatbelt first and each time he moved it produced an audible strain from the hinges, and perhaps this was why Eddie found it so maddening.

"What?"

"I just mean if you know we're going to end up sitting for a while. It sounds like a problem with your accounting, not my eating habits."

"That's not - that's not how accounting works!" Eddie snapped. He jabbed the ignition button with his thumb as Richie laughed.

It hadn't been difficult to get from the highway to the restaurant, but nothing could be done easily in reverse. Jersey barriers now blocked seemingly most of the roads save one small roundabout that Eddie managed to sneak through. As they rounded the final turn, he had to suddenly step on the brakes. The exit was neatly blocked by a huge wheelbarrow, filled with flowers. There were two women working nearby underneath a sign with the town's name, sunhats and gardening gloves implicating them as responsible for the wheelbarrow.

"Jesus," Richie said. "Can you go around?"

"How is this possible," Eddie said, squinting up at the road. "That this breadbox can't fit around, isn't this the explicit point of this fucking car?"

The women continued on, seemingly fully absorbed in turning the soil. Eddie waited a minute, and then two, expecting that one or the other would make her way back to pick up a plant, or at least look up. Eventually he gave into his impulse and honked. He didn't lean on the horn, just the normal amount to alert someone to their presence. It was, Eddie thought, relatively polite, given the circumstances.

"What the fuck, Eddie," Richie said.

Both women looked up in surprise at the car. One woman said something, inaudibly but with an obvious meaning, from the look on her face.

As Eddie began to inch the car forward, he saw Richie put up a hand to give them a wave and a smile. The women stared back into the car. It put Eddie in mind of the teacher's lounge in school, for all that both women looked no more than twenty five. They both jumped as the radio spat out a blast of static before resuming the low talk radio Eddie had left it on, seeking out a traffic report, as they had driven into town. 

"I think she heard all those things you've been saying about her today, Eds," Richie said. He ran a hand along the dashboard and made low soothing noises as if the car were a dog having a nightmare. There was no reason for it to be as sweet as it was.

"She should know I only said those things because this is an objectively terrible car," Eddie said. "Nothing personal."

*

"It's not that I don't like all of it," Eddie said. "I just think if someone went to the trouble to invent percussion they might as well use it."

The car's radio had gotten stuck in some way in the FM broadcast and they could no longer find the traffic report Eddie had intended to have on as they approached more populous areas. Richie had become hellbent on finding something out of the endless fields of static they were driving through. He had found a singular station that was playing Simon & Garfunkel when they landed on it, and was losing instrument groups the longer they stayed and the more Eddie complained. They had been listening to the ramblings of one man about a restaurant, or possibly the Vietnam War, when Richie suggested it was more of a problem of Eddie's limited interest.

"You talk a big game for someone who instituted a complete John Bonham ban for basically the entirety of high school school, as far as I can recall," Richie began. 

"That's not true," Eddie said. "I was just sick of hearing them constantly from the dirtbags cruising around the high school."

"Oh, the dirtbags! Gosh, Eds, tell me how you really feel!" Richie cooed. "And now?"

And now. Now he remembered with full color details why there certain things that set his teeth on edge. Certain bands, specific sounds. For an employee appreciation luncheon years ago, HR had gathered childhood photos to stream on a projector as part of a contest, which was how Eddie found out that his least favorite of the sales team had spent most of the late 80s with a mullet and a tank top. Perhaps this feeling, too, was unfair. 

Of course Richie would understand, but there was that old burrowing instinct. It was a lot to lay out for what was, for all that, a pretty low effort joke. "Not a fan." 

*

It was a beautiful, quaint town that they drove through, with huge ambling sidewalks and multiple roads closed to traffic, with one little six spot parking lot for their bed and breakfast. It could have been in the middle of a six lane highway and Eddie wouldn't have taken an extra second before throwing the car into park and climbing out. 

*

They had gotten lucky with the weather for the weekend. The sky had been clear but for a few huge and drifting cumulus clouds that provided some relief from the worst of the road glare, and an easy excuse as Eddie insisted on walking to meet everyone at the harbor for lunch. He was not irrationally avoiding the car if he wanted to stretch his legs on a beautiful day. 

For all of Richie's incessant goading about Eddie's height, the length of his stride, and all variations on the theme, Eddie had found over the last months that they didn't have trouble keeping pace with one another in the city. Eddie usually tried not to waste too much time getting from point A to point B, not wanting to linger in the smells and jostling of the sidewalk, but Richie was constantly pulling at the wrist of his sleeve, leaning down to say things like, "Jesus, that guy had a snake in a baby stroller, did you see that?" People had always told Eddie it would be good for his health to occasionally slow down, stop and smell the roses, but he really didn't think it was that beneficial for his blood pressure to have more detailed updates on the illegal wildlife of New York. Despite the warm weather, Richie didn't take his hands out of his pockets along their walk, and after a few blocks of his own arm swinging aimlessly Eddie did the same.

The harbor seemed unusually busy with what looked like a huge variety of different boats covering the calm waters. There were a few of the small Sunfish sailboats Eddie could recognize, but larger ones too, and all decorated with brightly colored flags and pennants. The sidewalks weren't terribly crowded, but still Richie was able to spot everyone before Eddie. He stuck his thumb and index finger into his mouth and before Eddie could stop him or cover his own ears gave a piercing blast that echoed up the street. 

A few heads snapped around them, but Eddie's attention was drawn to where he could see Bev jogging the hundred yards or so from the restaurant. She had on a pair of ostentatiously large sunglasses, but it was still obviously her from the equally large open-mouthed smile. "You fucking show off," she shouted, just as she collided with Richie into something slightly too aggressive to be called a hug. 

"Takes one to know one," Richie said through a mouthful of her hair. He'd leaned down to wrap both arms around her and wound up lifting her up off the ground. After a moment they began extricating themselves, and Richie pressed a hand to his lower back. "Fuck, I think I might have actually pulled something that time."

Bev looped an arm around Eddie's waist and reeled him in for a more modest hug. "We just ordered a bunch of stuff for the table," she said. "Stop making a scene and come sit down." Without releasing Eddie she led them back up the street. Through the chorus of greetings and exchange of hugs it became apparent Bev had interrupted herself in the middle of a story related to the harbor celebration they saw now.

"Well, anyway, Ben has a friend who belongs to the Chicago Yacht Club, so that's where we went out," she said, throwing her hands up in the air in exaggerated irritation. "The end."

Eddie snorted into the glass of water he'd claimed. "The Chicago Yacht Club."

This garnered a largely silent response. He looked up, expecting to see other incredulous faces, and found instead Bev looking at him, eyebrows raised. "Yeah," she said. "The Chicago Yacht Club."

Eddie felt himself make a face. Knew it was a mean, sarcastic kind of smile. "Where did you yacht, exactly?"

"In Lake Michigan, thanks for asking," she replied, expression serene. "It was nice for how late in the season it was."

"So in a lake."

Richie cut in. "Have you ever been to the Midwest, Eds? You're pretty confident for someone who's never set foot in all that flyover country."

"Fuck you," Eddie bit back. "We have an office in Chicago."

Richie was smiling that big asshole smile of his now, like he knew he had Eddie's number already. And how? It's not like Eddie was lying. "Yeah, I bet a lot of people do. You been out there a lot, huh?"

Eddie didn't think this was an entirely fair line of argument. It wasn't the case that all the Losers were that well-traveled. Eddie knew that Mike had never been to Chicago, for example, but he was equally sure this line of argument wouldn't get him very far. "It actually has tides," Ben interrupted. "A lot of people sail out there."

Stan nodded. "It's actually an incredibly dangerous body of water for ships. Some of the most deadly maritime incidents in the 20th -"

"Stanley, I swear to god," Eddie snapped. "No one wants to hear about the Edmund Fitzgerald right now."

Richie put a placating hand out toward his shoulder. "Sorry, he's a little touchy about Gordon Lightfoot right now. The radio in our rental has a personal tour through the greatest hits of North American folk after Eddie specifically requested it."

"Fuck off, no it didn't." Eddie took a breath and pointed at Bev and Ben in turn. "You should both be embarrassed to call yourselves Mainers, honestly."

"I haven't, historically."

"No, me neither."

*

He skimmed through his phone while Richie and Bev ran through their gossip, shared acquaintances, sending most of it to trash and flagging a handful to actually read later. At some point that the tone of the conversation turned, Eddie realized, and became louder, more combative. He raised his eyes to find Richie leaned up one elbow on the table as he held up the middle finger on his left hand, Bev rolling her eyes hard enough that she turned her neck to the side. After a moment Eddie realized that Richie had been counting off on his fingers.

"...and I don't care if that's a mens' jacket, wearing Tom Ford still gets you mega points. You're definitely the bougie king here."

Eddie glanced down quickly and frowned. "What's wrong with Tom Ford? I'm wearing Tom Ford."

"Oh, Eddie, baby, we know." Richie reached across the table to grab at Eddie's shoulder. In deference to the late afternoon heat and in a demonstration of confidence Eddie was trying to prove to himself he had left three buttons undone. As a result of this, and of Eddie's instinctive and defensive curl, as Richie's hand landed heavily on his shoulder, Richie's thumb slipped just under the placket and across his collarbone. Eddie didn't look away from Richie's face as he let his smirk grow bigger, touching his tongue to the corner of his mouth. "This is just the race for silver, you've got the gold all locked up."

"I'm sorry we can't all just buy the ugliest shirt at Goodwill like you fucking seem to," Eddie snapped. His neck was too warm.

Bev snorted. "Oh, please. Like Goodwill's authentic anymore." 

Richie finally took his hand off Eddie's shoulder and slumped back into his chair. "What would you know about authentic, you high street sellout? It's not authentic unless it's still damp from the laundromat, thank you." 

Eddie made an involuntary noise of disgust. "I truly hate every single thing you've told me about your college years." 

Richie shot him back a wink. "Oh, baby, that continued well into my late twenties." 

*

He made a vague excuse about a call as they started the walk back through the town and waved off their offers to wait. Watching them walk away he was struck by how different their silhouettes were, now. Bev had been all polish and easy grace when she walked up to their little table in Derry, but it was different now. Eddie could remember the two of them in high school, seeming adult and remote with their dirty jokes and knowing laughs, the cloud of cigarette smoke that followed them everywhere. If it was a mens' blazer that she was wearing, it was unlike any he'd even worn: huge swirls of black and white, almost like an enlarged photographic print. He doubted sincerely that any of them could have pulled it off other than Bev.

He'd been impatient and snappish again after lunch. It was as though something happened to all the soft things he meant to say, some kind of reversed filtration, that made them come out so brittle and hard. They deserved better, these treasured focal points of his life. This had been a central feature of the arguments he and Myra had, in the last few weeks of their marriage. Surely he was capable of more. Surely someone he made vows to, someone he loved deserved better than this.

Eddie took his time walking back. It was a picturesque part of town, less curated and sterile than some of the seaside getaway towns he and Myra had visited when they still thought they might be that kind of couple. The brick and cobblestone had been laid long enough ago that it was uneven under Eddie's feet as he rubbed a hand across the late afternoon stubble on his neck and down over his collarbones. 

*

The restaurant that Bill had found for them was on the formal side, which meant several people stared as their group made their way through the main seating area, no one actually got up to approach them. It was trendy in a way that Eddie had never really understood, clearly expensive polished furniture mixed with woven wall hangings of the kind that Eddie still associated with the indoor plant hangers of his youth.

They passed through several small, connected rooms filled with mostly occupied tables, all with the same mixed decor. The hostess opened a final set of doors to usher them into a room slightly larger than the rest, dominated by the kind of large potted plants that seemed to come standard in these restaurants, creating a false sense of privacy. It had the kind of dark, high gloss wood and dramatic wallpaper that he expected from a nice restaurant.

Eddie had been to enough corporate dinners to know that groups of people were capable of surprising amounts of noise in getting settled but even still, the amount of commotion in determining where everyone should sit, come back over here, Ben, Stan wanted to pick his brain about a project. Eddie knew they were causing a scene but couldn't find it in himself to care overmuch. He couldn't remember feeling similarly in his adult life before the last dozen or so months but constantly since then, this need to lay claim to each other and show off but then - surely everyone else should understand how amazing it was that they were there at all.

As everyone settled into the routine of removing jackets and flipping open menus, Eddie looked over to Richie to get his attention and, when that failed, pinched at the back of his arm. Richie hissed and glared at Eddie. "What's your problem? Can't reach the water pitcher?"

"No, fuck you. That's not - listen. I think Bill's going to try to pay for dinner."

Richie nodded agreeably. "Okay."

"No, that's not - I mean we shouldn't let him. That's going to be at least six hundred dollars, probably closer to eight."

"How do you figure?"

"Look. There's eight of us. Half the entrees are market price only, plus everyone's drinking -"

Richie was shaking his head. "Hate to step on a good rant, but everyone's definitely not all drinking. Use your seat of sight for once. Only like half the table is."

Eddie looked around more carefully and found that Richie was right. Eddie noticed the water glass in front of Bev, in particular, and was struck by something. He looked from her glass back at Richie, who smirked in response to his obvious train of thought.

"Don't ask Bev if she's not drinking for a reason, by the way. Word to the wise. Tried that a few months ago and she had my balls as a garnish in a martini in under two minutes."

"Okay, well, that's, that's not what I was thinking," Eddie snapped, feeling caught out for being both so obvious and so behind the times. "And it's your own fault for saying that shit out loud anyway."

"Are you saying I was asking for it?" Richie tilted his head back and let out a low whistle. "Wow, Eds. I knew you were a Wall Street bro, but I didn't realize how deep they'd gotten you."

"No, shut up, you know that's not what I meant," Eddie muttered. 

"Hey," Stan said suddenly, surprisingly loudly, leaning across over Ben's table setting. "Pay attention. They're trying to take your orders." Eddie looked back at him, retort ready, to find Ben hiding a laugh in his menu.

Eddie, on an impulse, ordered the braciola, with pork. He would almost certainly regret it, another day, when he was more inclined to consider, say, the odds of encountering techinosis. Or maybe later, when he was awakened by stomach cramps. At this moment, he needed the small purposeless indulgence. He crossed his legs and adjusted the napkin as it threatened to slip onto the floor and reorganized his own thoughts, ignoring the rest of the orders as they were placed. He was pulled back to the table as Richie stretched one long arm across the back of his chair. Eddie didn't acknowledge it, and Richie drummed his fingers against the side of Eddie's neck. Eddie looked up at last and glared.

"Look," Richie said, in a low voice. Eddie tried to ignore the sensation of goosebumps along his arms in order to listen over the clatter of dishes and hum of conversation behind them. Richie was surprisingly good and talking under the noise, all things considered. "You haven't seen him when he's in L.A.. This is just what he does when he's in professional mode." Eddie couldn't explain why this sat so badly with him, in such a raw spot in his gut. Isn't he worried it's too much, he couldn't bring himself to say. Eddie sighed and leaned his head back and felt it rest briefly on Richie's arm. He jerked back up to find Bev carefully watching them and Eddie, furious, turned to Ben to demand an update on the project he'd been considering in Denmark.

*

The room itself had seemed pleasant enough in the afternoon, if clearly decorated with an eye toward the rustic: a four poster bed with a large cedar chest at the foot, a wooden rocking chair complete with a quilt folded over the back. Eddie deeply suspected that there would be still more quilts inside the cedar chest, were he to open it. He hadn't drawn the curtains before, and some animal part of him shied away from the dark windows of this quiet old house.

"It's the third story, come on," he muttered, and made his way over to the window. He had noticed with some chagrin earlier that his room overlooked the parking lot, and as he came closer to the window he realized it was not fully dark out, after all: someone's headlights were still on. As he stood, one hand on the gathered fabric, the lights blinked off and on twice, and then went out. He closed the curtains firmly and got undressed for bed.

As he lay, waiting to fall asleep, he thought about the jumper cables he had made sure were in the trunk, and not about how unwavering the light had been before it went out.

*

That night, Eddie dreamed. 

He was aware of himself, suddenly, sitting upright in bed. The room seemed precise to his eye, with none of the blurriness of the unconscious. His dreams were always so literal.

Something dragged across the glass pane of the window, the harsh sound blending with the high wail of the wind outside. The shutters, so high off the ground, so removed from reach, rattled with a loud knocking. The curtains that Eddie knew he had drawn were open as a bright, roving light shone through the room, across the foot of the bed, down to the rocking chair in the corner. In it sat a young woman, in a plain and old-fashioned dress, leaning forward to look intently back at Eddie. 

"Wake up, Eddie," she said, and with an awful chill racing along his spine, he did.

Eddie awoke with a gasp, sitting up once more in the tidy little room. He could feel sweat prickling at his brow, his neck. He took one deep breath, held for five seconds before releasing, and then another, before he tried to look around the room. The covers, duvet and blanket both, had fallen off the bed.  This, then, must have been the cause of his sudden temp drop, which must have been what woke him, eventually. Eddie reached for his phone where it sat on the nightstand and fumbled at the screen to turn on the flashlight. He shone it around the room. He felt a swell of relief when it revealed an empty chair that he swept aside. 

Eddie went about the business of adjusting the cover, fixing the sheets and pulling the duvet back up properly onto bed. He turned the flashlight off on his phone and leaned to plug it back into the charger. As he did there was a single stretched out creak from a floorboard, and then silence. "This is an old house," he muttered aloud to himself. "It's shifting as it cools down." He lay down still holding the phone, and began the work of falling back asleep.

*

The morning bloomed, orange and lovely, with a perfect crisp to the air. Eddie woke with his hand still clutched around his phone, muscles cramped and stiff. He'd slept fitfully, and on the same side all night. He sat up and rolled his neck and shoulders back, tapping at the screen of his phone where it sat on the rumpled bed sheets. It remained black. Frowning, he picked it back up, and heard a small clatter. He looked over the side of the bed and found the cord to his phone charger had fallen to the ground. He hadn't unplugged it yet this morning, and distinctly remembered setting everything up the night before. He pressed the power button, and the screen briefly illuminated to inform him that it needed to be connected to a power source.

He found Ben and Bev with Patty in one of drawing rooms that seemed to make up the entirety of the house. Bev, clutching a mug and dwarfed by a plush tartan armchair, was directing the assembly of some kind of wooden structure on top of the largest coffee table Eddie had ever seen. Patty and Ben were sitting on cushions, Patty flipping through what looked like an instruction manual as Ben attempted to find the piece Bev was describing.

"Oh, perfect, Eddie, come help, would you? No, Ben, to the left of that one - no, my left - it looks like a little key, I think it's the - yes, that one! Try that one."

Last's night's strange chill felt distant in this overstuffed, overdecorated room, but that was a trick he remembered from Derry, too. After a minute of picking up and discarding more little wooden pieces, Ben reached for his coffee mug and suddenly looked up at Eddie. "Oh, sorry, man! I should show you, there's a little nook in the southern side, just behind the, uh," he stopped and squinted, closing one eye. "Which was it, Bev?"

"Damask room," Bev said, taking a long sip of her own coffee. "I don't know if that's the official name."

Ben nodded. "It's behind the staircase, just to the left. The coffee, I mean. We made some after we got back."

Eddie checked his watch, perhaps a little showily. "Back?" It was just passing nine. He had a lifelong horror of being the last one up at a sleepover that everyone had evidently remembered with mortifying detail, at least in the first few trips.

"We tried texting but you didn't answer," Patty said, answering his real question. "We just went for a little hike. You didn't miss much."
"Rude," Bev declared, beginning to unfurl herself from the armchair. "Come on, I want another cup anyway. Give me a hand, would you?"

Eddie held one of her slim hands in his own and tugged. Bev hissed and groaned as she stretched her legs out in front of her, digging her free hand into the meat of her calf. "You know you're supposed to stretch sometimes, right?" Eddie asked.

"Yeah, Ben already told me about the thetans."

"Lactic acid is not the same thing as thetans!" Eddie yelped, and Bev turned around to pull a big showy nod and tapped her finger against her nose. Eddie didn't have to turn around to know who this was really for, as he heard Patty's answering laugh.

The damask room, if that's what it was, was an equally furnished sitting room, with much louder wallpaper, than the one where Eddie had started the morning. As Ben had indicated, there was a space under the staircase, some kind of renovated closet. There was a large nook carved out of the wall that Eddie thought had been for an old standing phone. He'd ask Ben later. Now there was a large farmhouse sink and a wood block table with several french presses and an electric kettle, one disassembled and placed carefully over a dishcloth. 

The nook itself housed a small mug tree with a collection of mugs advertising improbable tourism spots. Eddie eyed them over and selected one with what looked like a Batman insignia on it that turned out to be for a national park. Eddie ran the water to begin filling the electric kettle before setting it to boil. He scrubbed with the heels of his hands at first his forehead and brow and then the eye sockets themselves, as Bev, leaned casually against the wall, eyed him over.

"So," she said. "How'd you sleep?"

"Oh, was great. Hotel pillows really work great for my accumulated scar tissue," said Eddie, snappishly. 

"You want me to ask about the drive instead? Or maybe why you and Richie were arguing all night? It's called small talk, Eddie."

"I don't know. The drive was fine. Dinner was fine, my room is - fine, Richie is fine. My wrist hurts." Her eyebrows up, startled, he pinches all of his fingers together in her direction, "because I'm in my forties and I have fucking nerve damage, Beverly, shut the fuck up."

She rolled her eyes up at the ceiling quickly and made a face, playing to an invisible audience. "You know, this is a legal state. I'm sure one of the owners could scrounge something up for you."

Eddie briefly considered the handful of times he'd tried getting high. He trended toward an overwhelming preoccupation with touch, becoming one of those people who wouldn't stop wandering up to people to stroke their clothes. "Ugh, that's the last thing I need."

"Why's that?" Bev asked. Eddie couldn't tell from her expression if she asked because she could tell there was an embarrassing story behind it or simply to respond, but he had no interest in going down that particular rabbit hole. 

"Because I'm one of the drivers this weekend," he responded. She pulled a face in response.  The kettle finally clicked off, saving him from having to respond as he buried himself in the numerous small rituals of portioning out the water, the sugar, the cream.

They walked carefully back to the front room in which Eddie had originally found everyone, both taking artificially small steps and attempting tentative sips from the still steaming mugs. They arrived back at the door in time to hear Patty explaining an upcoming wedding to Ben.

"It's my mom's youngest sister's kids, so they were all born when I was in my teens already. I think they used to think I was cool when I was in college and they were in middle school, but now…" she trailed off. 

"I get that," Ben nodded, and both turned as Bev swore loudly at the hot coffee dribbling down the side of her mug and onto her wrist. She set it down and accepted the tissue Patty handed her. Eddie sat down in one of the many plush armchairs in the room and tried to pull his shoulders back down from his ears. He watched Bev settle, kneeling, back in front of the puzzle as the three resumed their investigation.

Bev leaned away from the table to catch Eddie's eye. "Come on. Delegate something. I know this is killing you."

"We're on vacation," Eddie said serenely. "People are free to mismanage their resources however they see fit. Besides, you couldn't afford me."

As if he'd been waiting in the wings for his cue, Richie appeared in the doorway beside Eddie's chair. "Are we already at the indecent proposal part of the weekend? I'd thought we'd make it to cocktail hour at least before that started."

Eddie remembered Mike telling him once about flowers that followed the sun, opening their petals with its rise and following its path throughout the day. He'd seen them a few times, once he knew to look for it, the large wild daisies that grew out along the train tracks leading west out of Derry. He thought perhaps they could understand the undercurrent of mortification he felt, realizing he'd already begun looking up at the door frame when he recognized Richie's steps coming down the stairs.

*

The morning passed pleasantly enough, with the kind of not unintentional slothfulness Eddie had come to associate with these trips. Stan returned not long after Eddie and Bev settled with their coffees with a bag of breakfast pastries from a cafe they'd seen that morning that were remarkably, incredibly good. He and Ben worked steadily on the puzzle as the others drifted in and out of the little sitting room. After some time Patty had determined that the instructions left by the pieces were for a separate puzzle. Stan had suggested searching out the instructions online before falling into a lengthy debate about whether that constituted cheating. Through all of it, Eddie felt the slight veil of exhaustion pulling at the back of his mind. He'd fallen back asleep but slept uneasily, and his muscles ached. His shoulder burned, under the socket and up through his vertebrae. He wanted to lie down and equally wanted not to have to voice such a thing.

Richie noticed, of course. At the end of the day there were very few things Eddie had ever been able to successfully hide from him, and in this he wasn't even trying particularly hard. The third or fifth time Eddie closed his eyes and slumped into the chair to rest his head along the back cushion, Richie pulled one leg up from the profound slouch he had fallen and tapped lightly against Eddie's calf. "Hey, Sleeping Beauty," he said.

"Don't kick me," Eddie said without opening his eyes.

"That wasn't a kick. It was a tap. Like a love tap," Richie said. "Anyway. We're all old here, what's with the smokeshow?"

"What?"

Richie scoffed. "Like you think we're not all about to go take naps in like ten minutes. Come on."

Mike rubbed a thumb over his eyebrows and pulled out his phone to consult the time. He frowned, slightly. "I definitely need to lie down or i'm going to really embarrass myself tonight."

Eddie thought about it. He thought about how awkward and rude it would seem for him to be stifling yawns the whole time Bill and Mike were talking. He thought about how much he didn't want to examine his resistance to his own hotel room. He also thought about kicking Richie back. While he considered his options, Richie weighed in again. "I'm going up in a minute. I'll even let you be little spoon."

"Fuck you."

"Fuck you! Little spoon is objectively the best."

*

Eddie walked slowly back to his room, digging his fingers into the sore flesh of his shoulder. He reached into his pocket for the decorative fob attached to the hotel key. It was funny how things came back into fashion, he thought absently, turning it over in his hand. This place probably hadn't had the money twenty years ago to invest in the electronic keycard readers but now could play it off as part of the retro leaning of the whole place. Bill could probably spin a whole essay about it as a metaphor. 

Eddie pushed the door open and came to a stop in the doorway. He'd unpacked his suitcase and tucked it out of the way beside the nightstand, leaving his small carryon backpack on top of the cedar chest at the foot of the bed. He'd brought a few files and his laptop on the off chance he'd think to do some work, and there it sat, closed, in front of a strange woman. "Excuse me," Eddie said. "I didn't think there was a cleaning staff here?" 

The woman had looked up when the door opened, smiled at this. "Well, isn't that a flattering assumption," she said. "Was it my dress?"

"I'm sorry," Eddie said automatically, and then kicked himself. "Actually, no, I'm not sorry, what are you doing in my room?"

The woman frowned. "Oh," she said. "Usually they're more afraid at this point."

Eddie had to tamp down the urge to laugh. This woman couldn't be more than an inch or so taller than Bev, and she was - was she actually threatening him? "Was that a threat?"

"No!" she said quickly, and then paused. "That is. Did you have any dreams last night, Eddie?"

Eddie blanched and took a step backwards. The woman looked suddenly pleased. "Ah, there we go!"

The pressure in Eddie's ears was steadily increasing, as if in a plane taking off too quickly, and Eddie knew his headache was turning the corner into a migraine. "You know you're awfully mean to your friends, Eddie," the woman said. "Didn't anyone ever teach you the golden rule?" She smiled and winked at him, and vanished.

Eddie fell backwards, pressure in his ears giving way to a high-pitched ringing. He couldn't think for how loud it was. He scrabbled for the doorknob behind his back and slid, too quickly to be graceful, around the edge of the door. He stumbled backwards into the hallway and let the door slam in his face. He was breathing hard, the kind of shallow, panting breaths that couldn't carry any oxygen. Eddie let his head drop against the door and forced himself to take a slow breath, then hold it. He opened his eyes and looked at the door while he took his breaths. It was a heavy door, real wood, maybe the original to the building. There was a dark finish on it. He wondered idly if there was a limit to the number of times you could redo the finish on something.

A loud knock made him jump. He looked around wildly, heart already racing again, but it was just Richie, knocking against the wall to get his attention. His room was one down the hall, Eddie remembered, and felt foolish. Richie seemed pleased to have really surprised Eddie, but his smile was fading. 

"You good, man?" He leaned against the wall, now, his back slumped where he had knocked beside Eddie's resting head a moment earlier. 

Why did he have to take up the whole wall like that, Eddie thought, an idle fury at the back of his mind. He closed his eyes. "Fine," Eddie said. "It's just. My room."

"What's wrong with your room?"

What was wrong with his room. Nothing that he could show Richie now, no evidence of anything other than his own paranoia. Eddie knew she'd been there, but now - 

"Just thought I saw something." 

Richie didn't say anything, and eventually Eddie opened his eyes again. Richie was looking down at his hands and picking at his cuticles. "I'm fine, Richie," Eddie added.

Richie raised his eyebrows and nodded his head noncommittally. "Okay. Well. Offer still stands on the room, if you want."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, with a, uh, bonus one time offer of no further questions about whatever this is," Richie added.

"Really," Eddie said. He could feel the slight amount of sweat still at his hairline, and wished he had a handkerchief. "I'm fine."

"Okay," Richie said, and stayed where he was. "You gonna go in, then?"

"In a minute." 

Richie threw his hands up in the air, obviously frustrated. "Fine! Just sleep in the hallway then." It was rare to see this unfiltered reaction from him, and it made Eddie pause. There was a sharp response at the tip of his tongue, something about the lower risk of encountering bedbugs out here, but it felt wrong in the face of Richie's reaction.

"You know what," Eddie said. "Fine."

"Fine, what?" Richie said.

"Fine, you better not have left your towel on the bed this morning, because I'll absolutely smother you if you did," Eddie answered.

"You wound me," Richie said. "I open my house to you and this is how you respond?" Richie walked the few steps back to the door to his own room and pulled the key from his pocket. As he opened the door, he turned back to where Eddie remained motionless against his own door. "Let's move, Eds, daylight's burning," he added, in the gruff voice Eddie thought was meant to evoke someone in the military. Colonel Jessup, maybe. Eddie pushed himself off the wall and walked into Richie's room. 

It was, all things considered, relatively tidy. Richie hadn't unpacked as Eddie had, but he'd made a halfhearted attempt at pulling the covers back up. Eddie hadn't been in Richie's bedroom in close to thirty years and it seemed reasonable that in this, at least, he should have matured. 

Eddie sat down heavily at the foot of the bed and began untying his shoes. The pressure of his headache was a dull ache at his temples, behind his eyes, at the base of his skull. "Do you have any painkillers?" Eddie asked.

"Of course," Richie said. He finished toeing off his own shoes and walked toward the bathroom. "We run a full service establishment here, of course. What's your poison?"

"Uh, ibuprofen."

Richie emerged with a small bottle and a blue-tinted glass that matched the one Eddie had found in his own bathroom. "Full disclosure, I am going to sit up for a minute to answer an email, but I'm not gonna, like, watch you sleep while I'm at it."

"I definitely didn't think you were going to until you said that, man," Eddie said. He should care that he was about to lay down in bed in street clothes, but it wasn't like he'd worn them outside. There must be a loophole in there somewhere. After a minute the bed dipped as Richie settled in at the head. Richie shifted his weight around, crossing and uncrossing his legs, eventually kneeing Eddie in the spine. Eddie pushed a leg back and kicked at him under the covers.

"I see how it is," Richie said. "You're finished with me and now you're just gonna kick me out of bed."

"You started it!" 

"And you're finishing it, is that it?"

"Quiet," Eddie said. "It's quiet time now." Eddie felt the slightly rough stiffness of the sheets and finally placed it as he couldn't the previous night as the texture from line drying. He lay carefully on his side waiting for the ibuprofen to kick in, carefully not thinking about the oily slick of pain crawling up his spine, not thinking about the other times he had laid awake next to Richie, intentionally plotting the course of his mind's wandering before sleep, and following these familiar well trodden paths he fell into sleep.

*

Eddie didn't care for naps, not really. The shorter REM cycle led to more vivid dreams, ones that stayed with him for longer, and he didn't particularly care to keep them. He felt himself drifting in and out of sleep, thinking he was typing something into his phone before drifting back to sleep. Feeling a hand smooth across his foot, through the blanket.

Gradually Eddie became aware of himself again, his body, the places he was pressed into the mattress. He rubbed his face on the pillow, felt the light stubble of his afternoon shadow catch on the nice cotton of the sheets. He could hear a noise, running water, from the bathroom, and realized it must have woken him. It took another few moments for the second realization, that Richie must have already awoken and risen from bed without waking him, to hit him. He stretched an arm out across the bed and felt cheated out of something.

The bathroom door opened and Richie emerged. His hair was damp and curling on itself slightly in the humid air. "Oh, sorry," he said, scrunching up one side of his face apologetically on seeing that Eddie was awake. "Okay, but if you're awake, you gotta see this interview. Bill's publicist tweeted it out while you were asleep. It's from like 2005, but Bill has a ponytail."

*

The bed and breakfast was within walking distance of the bookstore that would be hosting the talk, yet another reminder that Bill had truly remarkable luck in his staff.

They walked in relative peace for a block or so until Richie turned and began walking backwards. "So," he said. "I was doing a little quote unquote research this afternoon while Eds here took his afternoon siesta."

"Gross," Bev said. 

Richie pressed his hands together as if in prayer and shook them lightly. "I just think it's our responsibility to make sure the full scope of Big Bill's personal credentials are represented. Right? Eddie knows, he helped with the research." He waggled his eyebrows in a truly horrible way as he said research, and Eddie was grateful for the forgiving light of dusk as he felt his face heat. "You fucking," he started furiously. "I don't know what you're talking about but sure as shit I didn't do any of it!" 

"So humble, that Eddie." Richie sighed dramatically. "Here, I wrote down some ideas."

Richie slid an index finger over the screen of his phone. Unlocked, the glow of the screen illuminated the bottom half of his face as if he were about to begin a ghost story. And depending on whether your last name was Denbrough, Eddie thought, perhaps he was. Richie cleared his throat, loudly, ostentatiously.

"Dear Mister Denbrough," he began.

"Did you write him a letter?" Ben asked. "Is this fanmail?"

"Would you say, Mister Denbrough," Richie continued, raising his voice. "That your experience wiping out in front of the entire senior class the week you tried to be a skateboarder informed your specific understanding of the mothman?"

Stan huffed out a small noise. "I just can't imagine that he hasn't warned the host in advance to ignore you."

Bev began giggling. With a hand pressed to her chest, she choked out, "They're going to have one of those signs up, like, "Do not serve this man"."

There was something to the mental image of Richie standing at the back of the room, throwing these questions up at Bill. It had all the cadences of a school presentation, Richie perpetually unable to see any of them in a serious light without catching church giggles and being sent out into the hallway. "Stan's right, man, that's too obvious. If you really wanted to get him you should give the question to someone random in the crowd."

Richie finally stopped walking backwards, coming to a halt as he pointed, eye wide, at Eddie. "Yes."

"Eddie, what the hell," Ben said, his own eyes wide as well. Bev had given up attempting to contain her giggles and threw her head back so that her laughter echoed off the trees around them. 

*

There weren't many things about Eddie's adult life that were what he'd imagined in his youth, but walking up to a bookstore to the whole front display dedicated to Bill's books felt like an olive branch to himself at twelve. He sent a mental apology to Mike for having excluded him, but even now his understanding of academic publishing was somewhat limited. There was less formal atmosphere than Eddie had thought, maybe, but as they walked inside he could see the standing banners set up around the store proclaiming the Special Author Event! and reminding patrons to Reserve Tickets Today!, all with Bill and Mike's names. Bill had been slightly bashful in telling them about it, and Eddie supposed this was old hat for him. 

Richie was loitering in the back, sitting against a radiator and trying very obviously to scan everyone milling around the bookstore. Eddie had not once since Mike's call lost Richie when they were out in public together, always catching sight of his head over the people or shelves or whatever else happened to be in the way, and he deeply enjoyed watching Richie attempt to blend in now. 

Richie stood from his perch, rubbing at the backs of his legs, as Bev picked her way back to them. "Ben doesn't want to be part of whatever the two of you are doing," she announced.

 "The two of us!" Eddie said incredulously.

This, Bev ignored him. "So who's your guy?"

Richie made an indecisive noise.

Bev scoffed. "You still don't know? They're supposed to start in like, five minutes." She looked around the room without much attempt at subtly. After she had craned her neck around a few times, with all the intensity of a spectator at a tennis match, she nudged Richie with her elbow. "There. Toward the back. Baseball cap."

Eddie turned to look, realizing a moment too late that Richie had done so immediately as well. "Worst spies in the world," Bev muttered. The man she had pointed out to them had his cap pulled down over his face, but was still obviously the oldest person in the room by a country mile. Eddie wasn't positive that he was actually awake.

"Fuck you guys. No, there he is! I've got my guy," Richie said, and casually walked over to a group of kids Eddie estimated to be college age. He seemed to recall there being more sweatshirts with college names around when he was in college, but he also hadn't been the type to know about or attend author events. The one Richie was approaching had pulled a beaten up looking paperback out of a backpack, and was flipping through it. At this small distance Eddie could see the book was filled with highlighted sections and notes.

Richie slid into the seat next to him and said something in a low tone that Eddie wasn't able to make out. He glanced over at Bev, who seemed less concerned about how obviously she was eavesdropping. She shrugged, and Eddie looked back. Richie pointed up at the lectern that had been set up, and finished whatever he was saying. His eyebrows indicated that there had been a question involved somewhere.

The kid nodded in a way that seemed somewhere between deeply earnest and deeply stoned. "That's cool about your friend, man," he said, voice unmodulated and clearly audible from several yards away. "But I'm, uh, I'm not really into flash mobs."

Richie had only a second to fumble for something to say in reply before Bev barked out a laugh that she turned too late into a cough, covering her mouth with her hand. A young looking bookstore employee approached them, clipboard in hand, and asked with a tone of great exhaustion, "are you friends of the author? Are you all here together?"

Bev quickly dropped her hand. "Oh, no. I've never seen these men before in my life."

*

Eddie stayed where he had stationed himself when Bev returned to her seat in the front. privately awed by the promotional materials, Eddie couldn't get over the fact that people who had never met either of them came here specifically to hear what they had to say, just to hear their ideas and ask them questions. He was torn between the urge to pull them aside to explain how Bill used to share his half-finished stories when they were scribbled onto a legal pad, that Mike knew more and had read more than anyone he'd ever met and if Mike thought something was real then it probably was, and a feeling of total rightness that these people would have gathered to see his friends. 

There had been two rows of seats set aside for in front of the lectern, where Eddie could see Ben sitting alongside Stan and Patty. After the initial deluge of memories had returned Eddie had found himself thinking about his teenage years constantly. This was the soda Bev used to get from the vending machine in the cafeteria, he'd remember in line at the deli. Ben had never dated anyone in high school, not really, but seeing him with an arm stretched across the back of Bev's chair, a nicely matched set next to Stan and Patty, made him feel young and hormonal. It itched somewhere, deep under his skin.

Eddie was watching the staff make small arrangements to the water bottles and notepads on the table when Richie spoke again. Eddie jumped, just a little bit. He'd thought Richie had stepped outside and he'd returned silently, more silently than Eddie thought possible.

"If you keep standing back here with your face like that, they're gonna think Bill's started traveling with a bodyguard."

"With my face like what?"

"You know." Richie widened his eyes and grimaced, furrowing his brow. The effect was deeply off putting.

"You look like a constipated Bert."

Richie let his face relax and winked. "Hey, you said it, not me."

"Big talk from Mister Snuffleupagus in glasses, over here."

"Fuckin' zing, Bird!"

Eddie turned his face to hide his smile in his shoulder. It was really a pretty good Snuffy, all things considered. Not for the first time Eddie wondered how much time Richie spent practicing his impressions or if he'd just gotten that good at controlling his own voice and intonations. He scratched at the underside of his chin, as if that had been the reason he turned his head. When he looked back, Richie looked smug enough that Eddie didn't think it had been all that successful a ruse. To distract him, Eddie asked, "so are we going to sit up front or what?"

Richie scoffed. "Up with the other teacher's pets? Please. I gotta maintain the cool facade."

"Fuck you," Eddie replied automatically. "Who ever thought you were cool?"

*

The event itself seemed like a success, as far as Eddie could tell. The audience was engaged, laughing at the right times and numerous hands going up despite the reminders that questions would be addressed at the end. From their vantage point at the back of the bookstore Eddie could see most of the audience had brought books with them. Well, that made sense, he thought. If this was your time to meet your favorite author. He should really see if he could dig up one of the old stories Bill used to share. Wouldn't that be something if he still had one somewhere. Bill would get a kick out of him bringing that to the next one. Richie, too.

They didn't attract much attention in the back, despite Richie's fidgeting. He half knelt, leaning heavily onto first the left calf, then the right. Eddie nearly asked several times if it wouldn't be easier to just sit and rest fully before seeing again how closely the rows of chairs had been placed, how Ben's legs were half outstretched into the aisle next to them. Richie must have noticed this, too.

Eddie was thinking about this and only half listening as the audience questions began, but Mike's voice pulled him back to the present. Eddie hadn't caught the question, but Mike looked serious as he formulated his response. "Well, I don't know how much that matters, exactly," he said. "I think there's value in both a literal interpretation and something more figurative. There are some writers who would say that all ghost stories are just psychological metaphors."

The lights flickered once, and then twice, emitting a loud buzzing noise. There was a slight murmuring from the crown, and Eddie's breath caught in his chest.

Mike laughed a little, looking pleased. "Those of us who are still, uh, superstitious," he said, looking up at the ceiling and raising one hand in something just less than a wave. "We would obviously disagree with that. But for the sake of argument!" He paused for a second, with a slightly theatrical look to the audience. The lights steadied and the buzzing noise ceased. Mike made a triumphant little noise. There was some scattered laughter and a few claps as the host reclaimed the audience microphone and began walking it back up to the front of the store.

*

Eddie drew the curtains to the window. It was a warm, still night, that made for a pleasant walk back from the bookstore. They'd been a boisterous group as they emerged from the bookstore. There was a little bar attached to the bookstore that Eddie hadn't noticed initially, with a few tables on an outdoor patio. The owner had left them with an assortment of beers and water glasses while Bill and Mike signed books. There had been a sizable line when the event was over, and Eddie was pretty sure they had only been shown out here as a favor to Bill. 

"This is nice!" Ben had said, standing against the little wooden fence that divided the patio from the parking lot.

Eddie had been studiously not watching Richie leaning his chair back onto two legs. "Yeah," he said, attention focused on his peripheral vision. "It's too bad they can't move anything outside."

"Yeah, I can't imagine why," Richie said, head tilted back to look at the sky. "Why wouldn't this bookstore want to put all their paper shit outside?"

"I just said it's too bad," Eddie snapped. "Obviously I know why a bookstore wouldn't put all their shit outside!" 

Richie let his chair collapse back to the ground as he burst into laughter. "That's," he choked out. "That's not." 

"I mean, there are actually," Patty started, but Richie was laughing too hard to hear. He had propped one arm up on the table, and with this arm he grabbed Eddie's wrist as he continued laughing.

The door to the bookstore creaked open and the owner walked back out. "Is everything okay out here? You need anything?"

He was greeted with salutes from those still holding beer bottles and a chorus of voices largely happy to kill time. "Well, all right," he said, and hesitated at the door. "This is really something, you know? Can't remember seeing a crowd like this in a while."

Eddie made a vaguely affirmative noise. It did seem like a lot of people for a weekend at a bookstore, but he wasn't exactly the expert here.

"So," the owner said, glancing around the half-assembled sprawled group of them, ending on Eddie, sitting closest to the door. His wrist burned where Richie was still clutching it. "How long have you…?"

"Oh, that's," Eddie said. "That's not."

"Oh, uh," the owner had responded. "I mean, all of you, as friends. You all seem close!"

Very smooth, Eddie had thought. Well, he was in customer service.

He went through his usual evening routines. Teeth brushed, toilet visited, hands washed. He applied the lotions with their various moisturizing and anti-aging properties. Finally there was nothing left to do but lie down.

He sat on the edge of the bed, phone in hand, looking at his recent text messages. He'd wanted to say something to Bill, to Mike, to express some of how he felt. Every possible iteration he'd found seemed hopelessly inadequate, but who was he to try and impress someone with words? Why don't you put together a ranked list, suggested a mean voice from within him. Better or worse than being released from the hospital? Better or worse than seeing Stan's wedding photos?

He typed out a few compliments to the venue, the staff, and after a long moment slowly typed out Really glad we could all be there. I've never been to anything like that before, so thanks.

Eddie sighed. It wasn't what he wanted to say, but he wasn't going to come up with anything better. They were friends. They'd understand what he meant, and if Bill gave him a hard time over it, so be it.

He plugged the phone into its charger, settled it onto the nightstand and turned off the light. The phone chirped with a text notification from Mike. It was really special having you there! He'd replied. Very grateful to have been able to share it w you.

*

He knew, for instance, that Stan had reviewed several years of Marsh & Rogan's corporate tax returns during the protracted legal battle over ownership. Bev had mentioned it as an aside to a larger point about how absolutely and completely shitheeled her husband was, even his fraud had been obvious once you started looking, and Eddie had to stop and think when it had stopped being an automatic response to offer anything he could to his friends. This morning Bev had heard Patty's uncertainty about the wedding and insisted over her demurrals on designing her outfit. At some point he'd lost the ability to gauge the distance between friendly pushiness to truly overbearing. Bev was so certain, when she offered, and Eddie wanted that certainty for himself. 

Of course there were things he wanted. He wanted to move back to the city, in an apartment facing east. He wanted terrazzo countertops. He wanted to see his friends, all the time, with an intensity he had not felt in thirty years. He wanted to bury Tom Rogan in slow drying cement. He wanted the wet rasp of slightly greying overnight stubble against the pillow next to his. This was the worst realization he'd had, since the memories returned: the knowledge that he had to choose, and keep choosing. 

Eddie had gotten into a long argument with Mike about the Red Sox chances in the postseason. It had gone on for longer than was polite, probably, Eddie having noticed the other conversations drying up around them, but he had wanted to linger. Still wanted to clarify another point or two. He was enjoying himself, and Mike had looked pleased, too, his face lit up. He had felt at least some of their friends watching them, and had felt his face heat at the idea that one of them might be Richie watching Eddie, engaged in having this pointless little argument. What if Eddie never looked back. What if he did. Was this why Eddie had suffered through the long months of mediation and asset evaluation, the self help books and therapy podcasts, to let himself off the hook at the last possible second and not change the thing in his life that most fundamentally needed changing? 

*

Eventually Eddie acknowledged that sleep was not coming. He turned from side to side periodically to relieve the stress on his back, and each time he turned back to the window it was more evident that dawn was approaching. He made himself get up and walk to the bathroom, where he splashed water on his face. He was too old to operate on this little sleep. His face looked pale under the summer freckles. Wan. Any number of unflattering adjectives.

He felt the small chill that always followed him after a sleepless night. He dug the black pullover out of the dresser where he had unpacked it and slipped it over his nightshirt. It wasn't good practice for insomnia to be exposed to excess lights, too much stimuli, but fuck it, Eddie thought. Better go back downstairs and see what decaf tea, or plain hot water, he could make with a French press than continuing stewing in his thoughts. 

He had the half-conscious thought that he might trip some kind of alarm system in going down the stairs, but of course that wouldn't be the case. It looked like a house but this was the same as any other hotel, and no one was going to shoo him back up to his room like a child. The curtains had only been half-drawn over the big bay windows in the front rooms and he could see the blue morning light. It looked beautiful, in a cold sort of way, and he walked over to the windows to see better. Out of curiosity he pressed a hand against the window and found it cool to the touch. Maybe he should go for a walk, he thought idly. He turned his head, trying to get a look at the sky. It looked like it would be a clear day. As he eyed the parking lot, he noticed a figure standing not too far from the entrance. It looked like a woman in a long kind of dress. It looked actually an awful lot like the woman Eddie had seen in his room.

He found himself pushing through the front door without entirely having decided to do so. He let it slam behind him. The woman didn't move. 

"Excuse me," Eddie said. She stayed still, looking out across the parking lot toward the forest behind it. He hesitated for a second before walking in front of her. "Excuse me," he said again.

The woman turned her head and smiled slightly, blinking long and slow. "Hello again, Eddie," she said.

"Are you following me?" Eddie said. 

She sighed. "Look, this will be faster. Could you just - just shake on it", she said, holding out her hand. He stared back at her incredulously, and she raised her eyebrows back at him. She pushed her hand a little closer to him, and, slowly, he reached out to take it. At the moment his hand should have touched hers, there was a sudden pressure in his skull. Eddie felt it this time as something like a burst of static electricity burst, a sudden burst between his ears. His hand had not touched hers. It hadn't touched anything at all.

The woman laughed. It was surprisingly girlish, and sounded so, so pleased. "I'm sorry," she said, holding a polite hand over her open mouth. "I just can't resist doing that."

Eddie realized his hand was still stretched out in front of him, and yanked it back. He rubbed it against the leg of his pants, as if to dispel the last of whatever was still rattling through his nerves.

"What," Eddie said. His ears were still ringing. "What is this?"

"Oh, come on," the woman said. "I think you already know by now. Those friends of yours with the book sure seemed to know a lot about it!"

"So you are following me!" Eddie yelped.

"Lord!" she exclaimed. "Like a dog with a bone. You sound like my great-granddaughter. You know, the one you were harassing in town?"

This, Eddie was not expecting. Besides lunch and the bookstore, how much has he even been into town? He felt himself make an incredulous face and did nothing to stop it. He opened his mouth to respond but was interrupted before he could speak.

"Oh, now he doesn't remember," the woman signed. "She was planting flowers!"

"She was blocking the flow of traffic," Eddie snapped. "It was incredibly unsafe, actually! Is that - is that what this has been about?" 

She shook her head noncommittally. "For a little while. I was getting a little bored in town, to be honest. Haven't seen anyone really jump when I knocked on their window in a while, you know?"

Eddie felt the rush of static electricity all along his fingertips. "Jesus, that was you -"

"And you and these friends of yours!" she went on. "There's just something about you. I haven't felt anything like this before, and believe me, I do not care about impressing you.

"You could talk to them, you know," Eddie said. He knew they would do it, too. It might be the only way Mike would forgive him for his missing out on whatever this was, should Eddie ever tell him.

"Oh, please," she said. "And have my town overrun with all you city people? No, thank you." She thought for a moment. "Besides, I don't think I cared for some of their terms very much. Do I look like an anomalistic metaphor to you?"

In truth Eddie hadn't followed along with the lecture all that closely, but he still rose in defense. "Actually -" 

She waved him off with an impatient hand. "Do you want my advice?"

"Uh," he said. "Not really."

"Life is short," she said.

Eddie paused for a moment to think. He really could use a cup of coffee. "That's not really advice," he said. "Is it?"

"Well," she said. "I thought you didn't want it, anyway."

Eddie rubbed a hand over his face with a groan that he allowed to turn in a laugh, just a little bit. "God," he said. "Fine."

She gave him a long look. "Do you want to sit down?" 

Eddie looked down at himself. "Not especially, these aren't really outdoor clothes."

"Have it your way," she said, and turned back to look over the tree line again. They watched the colors slowly appear across the sky in silence for a few minutes before she turned back. "Do you have a cigarette?" 

"No, smoking is terrible for you," Eddie responded automatically. 

"Yeah," she said. "Might kill you." She gave him an ironic look before laughing again. 

Eddie finally gave in to his curiosity. "So what are you really doing out here?"

"Watching the sunrise," she said. Eddie huffed out a laugh. Of all the things. "Really! It never gets old, believe me. It's been a while since I saw one from a new place, anyway." After a moment, she added in a considering tone of voice, "It is awfully romantic, isn't it?" 

Eddie froze, and she burst into laughter. "Oh, you should see your face. Not like that, obviously. I mean whenever your man finally comes downstairs."

"He's not - "

"Didn't you sleep in his room?"

"That's not what that was about!" Eddie yelped.

"Oh -"

"And besides, he didn't actually share the bed."

"Oh," she said, in a different tone of voice. "Well." She had a deeply knowing tone to her voice now, one that Eddie couldn't stand. It was, if anything, worse than the dream.

The sudden slamming of the metal front doors made Eddie jump, though it had no effect, he was chagrined to note, on Shirley. Even from the slight distance, Eddie saw Richie's face transition from surprised to pleased to confused, working through each too obviously and too slowly to be put on. Eddie despaired of Shirley's leaving anytime soon, watching Richie slowly amble over, tucking a small packet of something into his pocket as he did. 

"Hey," Richie said. "I tried knocking on your door when I saw the light was on, but you didn't answer."

Shirley laughed, and it put all the hairs on the back of Eddie's neck up. "Oh, that was me! I thought it might be funny, and, well." She made a comically oversized frown, a caricature of sheepishness. "Sorry."

Richie made a horrible face in response, something that started out as a smile but absolutely failed to stick the landing. Eddie understood what he thought a moment too slowly. "No, she doesn't mean like that, that's not - that's not what this is!" 

Richie's eyes were wide behind his glasses, then, as he put up a hand as if to hold back whatever Eddie could say. "It's fine, man, you don't have to explain yourself - "

Eddie felt the quiet shell of the morning evaporating around him. Perhaps the woman - the ghost - had been right that there was romance in a sunrise, but they'd lose it, now. "No, could you just listen to me -"

Richie closed his eyes and shook his head, once, quickly. "Listen, it's been a weird couple minutes for me," he started.

"Yeah, right, I wouldn't know anything about that," Eddie interrupted. Richie continued over him, raising his voice. "Where I thought maybe had happened to my, uh, my best friend, and now, I'm here finding out about whatever this is,"

Shirley coughed politely. "Well!" she said brightly. "This is probably my cue to head home." She looked between them for a moment before pointing a finger at Eddie and adding, "Remember what I said! And Eddie - don't be a stranger!"

Richie's face was rumpled in an obvious question, but this time at least Eddie knew what was coming: she winked once, and was gone. Eddie didn't feel anything this time, no pressure and no shock, and wondered for a moment if she had done it on purpose. Richie took a quick breath and grabbed Eddie's wrist. He was holding on very tightly, actually, and it pinched. Eddie turned his head slightly, and found Richie already staring at him. "What the fuck," Richie hissed. 

"I know," Eddie said. "This has been, like, my whole weekend."

"What the fuck," Richie said again. "So she -"

"I guess so," Eddie said.

Richie learned his head back slightly, staring up at the sky. He was still holding onto Eddie's wrist. Eddie could feel where his thumb and index finger overlapped, where Richie was moving his fingers absentmindedly. The skin of his wrist felt hot. "Huh," Richie said.

"Could you at least pretend to be surprised?" 

Richie's head snapped back down. "This is how I do surprise, man," he said. "I don't know what to tell you. Besides, haven't you been reading Mike's shit? This is, like, the least surprising thing."

He stopped suddenly and scrunched one eye, ran his tongue over his teeth. It was a gesture that Eddie didn't exactly recognize but had seen over the last few days. He thought it might mean Richie was nervous, was trying to be honest.

Eddie nodded a little, mouth pursed. He could feel all the things he needed to say pushing up behind his teeth. Instead, he asked, "Did you seriously come out here this early to smoke?"

Richie shrugged. "Sure, you know what they say, the best part of waking up is Newports in your cup."

"God," Eddie said. "Too bad you weren't down here earlier, she'd asked for a cigarette. You could've bonded."

"That's funny," Richie said, turning the carton over in his hand.

"Is it?"

"I mean, could she still, you know," Richie said, and held two fingers up to his mouth. He raised his eyebrows. "Right?"

The joke of it finally completed itself, and Eddie groaned. "Oh, my god." He shook his head, furious with both of them. All three of them. Richie laughed.

"God," Eddie said. "I'm going to need a stronger coffee than whatever they have in there. Were any of those coffee places we passed yesterday twenty four hours?"

"Eh, probably not. I think ideal picturesque hours don't start until, like, eight."

Eddie groaned and dug his thumbs along the bridge of his nose. "The next one of these should be in New York. Both of us live there, plus Ben, and Bev half the time, it's actually pretty rude that no one has bothered yet."

Richie lowered his head condescendingly. "I think we've been trying to meet some of the others where they are, rather than making them spend all their money in like, the most expensive city in the country."

Eddie narrowed his eyes, still focused on the first part of what Richie had said. "What was that? Was that Stan?"

"Yeah, he has this Atlanta thing now. I can't quite get it."

"Well, whatever, Stan's not in charge of anything. I'll find a way to make it work."

"He'll make it work!" Richie exclaimed. He threw his arms up, toward the parking lot, as if pleading with the audience. Eddie wanted to wring his neck. "What are you going to do, rent out a block of rooms at the Waldorf?"

"Yeah, fuck you, maybe I will." Eddie said, and then ground his knuckles of his free hand into his eyes, suddenly exhausted by the prospect of returning yet another volley from Richie. How much easier this would be if someone could just tell him what to say. "Look. Can we just. I need a minute, I think. I wanted to say something to you."

"Sure, man," Richie said immediately. All his big energy brought back down, just like that. It used to frighten Eddie, how quickly Richie could do that. How easily he shifted from one to the other. "Take all the time you need." He was so calm, still, like it was any other morning. Like he wasn't struggling to rearrange his entire understanding of the universe. Like Eddie was trying to work through a proof that Richie had solved minutes or hours ago, and was still waiting for Eddie to figure out, while he moved on. It made him furious, just as it had all those long wasted years ago.

"I don't know what I'm doing," Eddie finally managed. It was difficult to start again, to break the silence with his awkward words. He should have let Richie keep spouting shit and take a running start at it, at least. "I kept thinking I'd be able to figure out the right way to do this, you know, something nicer. Uh, romantic," he said, and watched Richie's face go still. "But I don't think I actually have a nice way."

"I say this with all the affection I can muster," Richie said. He sounded almost hesitant, now, and Eddie hated it. "What are you talking about."

"Look, we both know the limitations we're dealing with here -"

"You are the most dramatic fucking lunatic I have ever met. Jesus Christ," Richie said. He was smiling again now, but there was no humor behind it. He reached out with one hand to poke Eddie, hard, in the chest. "So what's the problem this time, doc, huh? is it fatal?" 

"You!" Eddie shouted. "You, you are driving me to the grave. Jesus. I'm so jealous, all the time, and you -" he stabbed a finger into Richie's chest. "You! Walk around like none of it means anything, who cares if Eddie's in love with me!" He felt all the air in his lungs catch. Both his hands were clenched into fists in front of him, and these he brought up to his face to push into his eyes. When he opened his eyes again, Richie was still frozen in place, looking almost grave. They were standing close enough that Eddie could see a muscle jump in Richie's jaw as he brought a hand up over his mouth, shoulders shaking. "Fuck," Eddie said. "Richie - "

And Richie burst into laughter.

This, after everything else, was at last too much for Eddie. He jabbed at Richie's chest again. "Would you just - could you stop laughing," he hissed furiously. "Just shut up for like, one minute, I swear."

"I really can't, this is so sad," Richie managed.

"Shut the fuck up, I'm trying my best!"

"I know you are, man, that's what's so sad." Richie wiped at his eyes with a thumb and forefinger, glancing back at Eddie above his glasses. It felt like a very intentional kind of look. "Okay."

Eddie felt the small trembling of his hands. He felt very aware of his own breathing, too shallow, and the stiff way he held his shoulders. He had tried to find a way to put a gloss over it, say it nicely, but he had never been any good at that with Richie. And yet here Richie still was. "Okay?" Richie nodded. "Okay, what?"

Richie gave him another long look. "Do you want to try that again?"

"No, I'm too embarrassed now," Eddie muttered. "I'm gonna find one of those fucking harbor monsters Bill wouldn't shut up about yesterday and get him to put me out of my misery."

"Bill or the sea monster?" 

Eddie sighed, heavily. He'd done all he could. "No, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, come here," and Richie stretched one of his long arms to tug at the fabric of Eddie's shirt, just below the shoulder. Richie didn't put much force behind it, that Eddie didn't have to follow. He wanted to follow, and so he found himself with Richie's arms folded across his shoulders. Richie's head leaned up against his, just above the ear. Into this ear Richie said, "Okay. I, uh, I wrote a short story about us."

Eddie had no reserves left to respond to this kind of pronouncement nicely, or with the gentleness it deserved. "You what."

"Yeah, Bill made me go to this, like, therapeutic writers workshop with him. It was incredibly pretentious. Anyway, I didn't mean for it to be about us but it definitely is. Bill definitely knew."

"Can I read it?"

"No!" Richie drew the word out into nearly three syllables.

"What the fuck, you just said you let Bill read it!"
"Yeah, and now he keeps trying to have all these horrible conversations about it."

"What a disaster," Eddie said. 

"Now what?"

"This. Everything. I don't know. Richie," Eddie said, trying to pull back and look Richie in the eyes. He managed it, more or less. "I meant it, what I said. About you killing me. But also the other part."

"Oh, the romance," Richie said. "If I wanted romance I'd still be upstairs, trying to convince Bev to go splitsies." He met Eddie's gaze steadily. "I know who you are."

Richie's face was so close to his now. What else could Eddie do? He leaned across those last inches and kissed Richie. 

By any objective measure it wasn't a good kiss. His nose was in the way, and he'd caught Richie unawares with his mouth still slightly open from speaking, and so Eddie pressed his lips half against Richie's teeth. Well, no matter: he'd already embarrassed himself, what was a little more. Richie made a small noise and slid his hand along Eddie's shoulders to clasp the back of Eddie's head, long thumbs pressed against the hinge of his jaw.

Eventually Eddie remembered his own hands, and brought them up to Richie's neck to thread along the short hairs at his nape. If this felt like a revelation it was one Eddie intended to have again. 

He let his head fall heavily onto Richie's shoulder. Richie laughed his small surprised laugh again. Richie's hand had come to rest on the small of his back, and Eddie felt his fingertips slip under the hem of his shirt. There were warm, bright streaks of light across the sky, and Eddie felt indescribably tired. Richie's hand was still wrapped around his wrist, his long fingers looped back over. "Were you ever going to say anything?"

"Me?" Richie said, sounding surprised. "Come on." He didn't elaborate but turned his head to kiss just behind Eddie's ear. 

"Wait," Eddie said, and then wound his fingers into Richie's belt loops to stop him pulling away. He stumbled to explain at the look on Richie's face. "No, it's just, maybe we should. Go back upstairs." 

Richie's eyebrows shot up. Eddie tried to keep his face still, he did, but he couldn't help glancing back at the parking lot. "Oh, I see how it is."

"No, you don't."

"Yeah, I do," Richie said, a small lopsided smile pulling at his mouth. "You're trying to leave some room for the holy spirit."

Eddie dug his forehead further into Richie's clavicle, trying to stave off the inevitable, but it was no use: smothered though the sound was, he was undeniably giggling, perhaps hysterically. 

"That's really tasteless, bro," he managed to choke out. "Really insensitive. It's been a really stressful couple days for me. I should leave."

"No, you shouldn't," Richie said. "You're gonna say no to this face?" Richie pulled an excessively hangdog face and caught Eddie's hand where he had attempted to yank it back, and drew it up to his face to place a lingering kiss on the thin flesh of Eddie's inner wrist. "Bet I can make it up to you."

And upstairs, Richie kissed like a promise to live up to his word, pushing Eddie to sit on the bed before pulling back. "Take your shoes off, god, how am I the one to have to tell you this," he said.

"Okay, just let me," he said, and pulled back again, out of Eddie's hands, moving toward the bathroom. "Any second now you're gonna realize you're kissing an ashtray."

"Unlikely," Eddie called. Richie didn't close the door all the way and he could hear water running, toiletries clattering. He began to feel foolish sitting still, in the same place Richie had left him, and he lay back onto the bed. 

The layout of Richie's room was different to his own. The headboard sat against the shared wall with the bathroom, and there was a large triangular shelf in the corner of the room rather than a rocking chair. The curtains, too, were different, a darker pattern of reds shot through with purple, limned with golden morning light where they were still drawn over the window. Eddie closed his eyes for a moment. 

The pillow smelled faintly of aftershave, of sweat. It burned in Eddie's veins. How strange to think that Richie had been lying here, so close by. How stupid to think he could have been doing this all along. This was what he wanted, and what he wanted to choose every day. So this was Eddie, choosing. He stretched his arm under the pillow and pressed his face into the pillow. He could feel sleep pulling at him every time he blinked. 

Some minutes or days later the mattress dipped behind Eddie. An arm snaked across his stomach, and held on. "You still there?" Richie whispered. 

Eddie had to try a few times before he was able to respond. "Yeah," he managed. He pulled a hand out from the pillow to slide around Richie's. His eyes seemed to be weighed down. "No, yeah. I'm here. I'm awake."

"You want to set an alarm?"

"No," Eddie said, tightening his hand around Richie's. "Just stay here."

"It's fine," Richie murmured, mouth pressed against his spine. "It's fine, I love you. We've got all day."

Eventually the air in the room would become too hot. They were sure to both wake up sweaty, pressed together under the covers as they were. Eddie felt Richie's breath as he slowly relaxed, muscle by muscle, as he let himself slip back under.