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Chapter Text

Eddie was still taking the subway to work a month after he crashed his car.

He told his wife he wanted to think about it in-depth before buying a new one when, really, he didn’t want to think about it at all. Buying a new car meant he would share joint custody of it with Myra, who never drove anywhere but whose name would still be on every sheet of insurance paperwork next to his. Buying a new car would be guaranteeing that he would eat the same thing for breakfast every morning for the next five years that he’d been having for the last five - oatmeal with cut up slices of banana and only water to drink in their strictly caffeine-free household. It would be like putting a down payment on what the rest of his life would look like.

He was half-asleep with one stop to go when his phone buzzed him awake.

Are you busy right now? It was Stan. I need to talk to you about something.

Eddie frowned. No what’s wrong

The train screeched to a halt. Stan called as he was making his way up the steps out of the station, still looking down at the screen.

“Hey, hi.” Eddie stopped. “Are you okay?”

“We’re fine,” Stan said, because getting relentlessly made fun of by Richie for being the kind of married guy who referred to himself using plural pronouns didn’t stop him from doing it. “Everything’s fine, don’t worry.”

“You can’t send me ominous messages and expect me not to worry. Do you know me?”

“Yes, Eddie. You have an anxiety disorder you should see someone about.”

A man with a neck tattoo shouldered past him on the stairs and mumbled, “Hey, why don’t you get out the fucking way?”

“Why don’t you wear some fucking sunscreen?” Eddie snapped. He made his way up the rest of the steps and onto the street. “I hate taking the subway,” he told Stan. “I hate it. I don't know how much longer I can live this way.”

“I don’t know how much longer you’ll live if you get back behind the wheel.”

“Oh, fuck you. Is Patty there? I’d like to speak to someone who isn’t a total dick to me.”

“She’s at her painting class,” Stan said. “Look, I need you to do something. I don’t want you to worry, just -” The line made a crackling noise. “Can you go check on Richie?”

Eddie pressed his back up against a dirty shop window and felt his heart sink. “Why?”

Stan sighed. “Because he left me a drunk voicemail at two in the afternoon where I could barely make out what the fuck he was saying, and now he won’t answer my calls. He just texts me saying he’s going through a tunnel. He’s been going through the same tunnel for four hours now, I want to come down there and strangle him.”

“At two?” Eddie said, stuck.

“You need to go over there and see him, and you need to tell him to stop pulling stupid shit.”

By ‘stupid shit’, Eddie figured Stan was also talking about how Richie had bailed every single time Eddie tried to arrange to see him since they’d gotten back to New York - five all in all, five fucking times. They weren’t talking much lately because of it. It was awkward, being turned down that much.

Eddie pressed his knuckles into his eye. “Yeah. I can do that.”

“Thanks, Eddie.” Then, after a pause, “He hasn’t been right since we left.”

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “I know.”

All of the Losers had stuck around in Derry while Stan got his broken leg surgically wired - the doctor had described the fracture as ‘gruesome’, and he hadn’t even been there for the part when the bone actually ripped out of Stan’s skin - and while Eddie waited to find out whether he was going to need another operation after the emergency laparotomy he’d been greeted with upon arriving at the hospital, which he thankfully hadn’t.

Richie seemed fine then, like his normal self. He made an effort to make the whole hospital stay less morbid and horrible for everyone, coming in every day with a cheap deck of cards to play with, although everybody got tired of he and Eddie's competitive hysterics pretty quickly. They ended up having to Wikihow how to play some two-man games and Richie sucked at every one of them - he would pick up every hand and squint at it and say something stupid like, “Jesus, Eds, did you wash your hands before you dealt these cards?” Sometimes Mike would sit with them and offer Richie good advice he would try and fail to follow, and sometimes after Eddie won, Stan would mumble all the way from across the room, eyes shut and half-asleep, “Rich, you’re an embarrassment,” and Richie would flick his cards at him.

It was only when they left Derry that he seemed off. On the flight back to JFK he got progressively quieter, and when they landed to find out their luggage had been misrouted, he didn't even poke fun at Eddie for throwing a shit-fit at the information desk. He drove Eddie home, even though it was out of the way and even though he barely spoke the entire car journey - Eddie just thought he was tired, then - and when they got there they just sat parked outside the front door of the building for a while, eyeing it from afar.

Eddie turned to him, but Richie stayed facing forward, both hands on the wheel, mouth curled to one side.

“I love you, buddy,” he said, then he reached across Eddie to open the passenger door. “Now get the hell out.”

Eddie had expected more of a goodbye after the way they’d left Mike at the airport in Maine earlier that morning, standing at the gate with a weighted kind of sadness in the air, exchanging long, firm hugs. Mike had even kissed his unbandaged cheek. He and Richie lived in the same state, closer than any of the other Losers, but there had still been a sense of finality to it. He wanted more than a joke.

He shouldered his sports bag, rolling his eyes.

“Thanks for the ride, Rich,” he said, and got out.

They were supposed to see each other a week later. When the day came, Eddie woke up to a handful of messages from Richie, the first one he clocked just saying, hey something came up

It didn’t bother him that first time, but then it kept happening. Richie kept making bad excuses, and Eddie started feeling too embarrassed by how unwanted he felt to say anything back.

He knew what building Richie lived in but not which apartment was his, so he texted Richie EMERGENCY!! without feeling good about it and then called him. Richie picked up on the second ring.

“Eds, are you -”

“I’m outside.” He held his briefcase over his head, even though his clothes were already soaked through with rain. “What’s your apartment number?”

“You - what the fuck?” There was a series of clattering sounds on the other end of the line. “You’re outside? Like, right fucking now, you’re outside?”

“Yeah.” Eddie squinted up at the building, rain hitting his face. “And I don’t have an umbrella with me.”

“It’s 201,” Richie said, and then he punctuated it with a, “Fuck,” and hung up.

Eddie pressed the button and was instantly buzzed inside. He dripped his way through the building foyer, up the stairs. When he reached Richie’s door it swung open before he could even knock.

“Wow,” Richie said, looking Eddie up and down. His voice was gravelly. “Is it raining outside?”

Eddie stared at him. Water dripped off of his nose.

“You look like shit,” he said.

He couldn’t help it. Richie didn’t look fall-down drunk like Eddie had worried he might, but he did look fall-down hungover, and that seemed like a worse alternative for a forty-year-old at 6pm on a Wednesday. He looked tired more than anything else, his face set into something half-awake and unhappy about it, and he was still wearing the broken glasses from Derry, the ones with the leg hinge Eddie had taped up for him in the hospital room a month ago. He needed a fucking haircut.

“Jesus, okay.” Richie’s crossed his arms over his chest. His toes curled on the carpet. “Is that really necessary? You didn’t give me a lot of notice before you showed up, Eds, you’re lucky I’m wearing underwear.”

Eddie shook his head, rain sprinkling from his hair. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Act all glib,” he said, pushing past Richie into the apartment. “Stan called and told me you got drunk and left him an unintelligible voicemail at two in the afternoon. Two in the afternoon!” His voice rose the uncontrollable way it did when he was upset. “What the fuck is that, Richie?”

“I guess I’ll just,” Richie said, and he closed the door.

“He’s really worried about you.” Eddie struggled with his wet laces. “I could tell on the call. I’m really worried.” He looked up. “Should we be worried?”

Richie rubbed his forehead. “I need painkillers if we’re doing this.”

He walked past Eddie. Eddie left his damp socks stuffed into his shoes and followed him barefoot out of the small entryway, into a kitchen living room that both smelled and looked like someone had smoked a fuckton of weed in it.

The curtains were closed, the only light source coming from a washed out crime show on the TV until Richie flicked the lights on, and then Eddie could see the comforter mussed across the couch, the well-used ashtray covering ring-stains on the coffee table, the bottles everywhere, the general state of disarray. A plant in the corner of the room was dying.

Eddie stood frozen for a moment, staring at everything. Then he turned to Richie, eyes huge.

“Yeah,” Richie said without even looking at him. He pulled out a box of aspirin from a kitchen cabinet and threw back two pills, cringing. “I know.”

“Have you even left this place since we got back?” Eddie found something newly concerning everywhere he turned. “Or have you just...”

He gestured. Richie followed the movement and looked at his apartment, saying nothing. He gave a barely perceptible shrug.

“Richie,” Eddie’s briefcase dropped out of his hand, “for Christ’s sake.”

How could he have spent a month like this? How the fuck could Eddie not have noticed something was wrong? All his anger and embarrassment at having Richie turn him down for coffees and lunch dates seemed so unacceptable now, so fucking stupid. He should have barged his way in here sooner.

“Oh, no. Eddie.” Richie stepped closer to him, hands raised in mid-air. “Please don’t. I’ll die of shame if you actually cry over how crappy me and my apartment look.”

Eddie squeezed his eyes shut before anything worse than tearing up could happen, digging into his eyelids with his fingertips. “I’m not, I’m not. Shit.”

“I swear it’s...” Richie touched his shoulder gingerly. “Fuck. You’re soaked, Eds. You need to get out of those clothes and take a shower.”

He pulled on Eddie but Eddie stayed put.

“We need to talk about this,” he said.

“After,” Richie said, squeezing. “You can yell all you want and I won’t say any stupid bullshit or anything. Come on.”

He tugged on Eddie’s arm again and this time Eddie went.

Richie led him to a bathroom that was in relatively clean shape compared to the rest of the place and left Eddie in there while he went to find a towel and some clothes that had a shot at fitting him. Eddie could feel the cold now there was no distraction from it. He started peeling off layers of clothes with his pink hands, leaving them in a damp, carefully folded heap on the toilet lid.

When Richie came back, he was shirtless and in the process of undoing his belt.

“Oh, Jesus,” Richie said under his breath.

Eddie looked down at himself. He covered the scar on his side with a hand. “Oh. I know, it’s still pretty...”

Richie jerkily shook his head. “No, no, I -“

He cut off. He handed over a towel with some clothes stacked on top of it, looking at the shower curtain instead of Eddie.

“It looks way better than the last time I saw it,” he said.

“Yeah, well, it’s not geysering blood anymore.”

Richie didn’t laugh, didn’t even smile.

“That was meant to be a joke,” Eddie said, awkwardly.

“I don’t think I can joke about it.” Richie‘s hands flexed at his sides. “I’ll let you, uh.”

He pointed at the shower and left, closing the door behind him.

Richie had given him a pair of sweatpants that were way too big on him, even with the drawstring tied as tightly as it was, and a soft pink T-shirt with an 8-bit sunset on it that reminded him of teenaged Richie’s shitty fashion sense. It felt strange wearing his clothes, his body wash. Eddie observed himself with interest in the bathroom mirror - pink-cheeked from the shower, looking unlike himself in a way that made his stomach clench.

He checked his phone before leaving; Myra hadn’t questioned the message he’d sent saying that he’d be staying at work late. He told her that often, and sometimes it was true, but sometimes he’d just go get a cup of coffee and take an hour long walk, or see a movie, or try on clothes he wouldn't end up buying. That had been true long before Derry.

In the living room, Richie was making an attempt at cleaning, putting trash into a black bag that clinked with every addition.

He glanced over his shoulder when Eddie padded in then did a double take. Under his gaze Eddie felt inexplicably guilty, caught. He shoved his hands into the pockets of Richie’s sweats.

“What?” he said.

Richie’s eyebrows shot up. He turned around again. More bottles clinked together.

“Those pants are falling down your little Polish ass,” he answered.

Eddie yanked them all the way up to his waist, frowning. He went over to the coffee table and picked up the ashtray, holding it away from himself.

“I’m throwing this out,” he said, “because what’s in it is gross and it’s fucking ugly on its own.” It was painted glass and looked like it belonged to someone’s cancer-ridden grandmother. Eddie scrunched his nose. “Why do you have this? I know what tax bracket you’re in.”

“Snoop Dogg gave it to me,” Richie said.

Eddie blinked. “What, really?”

“No, Snoop Dogg has no idea who the fuck I am.” Richie took the ashtray out of his hands and shoved it into the trash bag, then went back to cramming old takeout boxes into it. “I got it from Goodwill like twelve years ago.”

Eddie opened a window to let some fresh air in and took another look around the apartment. His eyes caught on a framed poster of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? hanging crookedly next to a bookshelf of DVDs. Something was scribbled on the corner of it. Eddie squinted and got closer. It said:

Richie,
I didn’t go to college either and I was in a movie with this cartoon rabbit.
Good luck!
Bob Hoskins

“Yeah, that one’s real,” Richie said from beside him.

Eddie turned. At this angle, he could see the layers and layers of tape he’d wrapped around the leg of Richie’s glasses over a month ago, shaped like a little cocoon. He reached out and touched it with the tip of his finger.

“These don’t even sit straight anymore,” he said. “Why are you still wearing them?”

Richie didn’t blink from behind the lenses until Eddie took his hand back.

“I don’t know. My life is kind of a mess right now. They feel appropriate.”

“Your life isn’t a mess, Rich.”

“It really, really is.” Richie straightened, started talking with his hands when he said, “Hey, shouldn’t you be shouting? I feel like this would be easier if you were shouting.”

“You said you’d take this seriously,” Eddie said.

Richie looked off to the side. He shook his head.

“It makes me feel like an asshole.”

“What does?”

“This whole situation,” Richie said. “It’s fucking embarrassing.”

“Don’t say that.” The idea of him being embarrassed physically hurt Eddie. “Jesus.”

Richie’s mouth pressed into a line. He went back over to where he’d left the trash bag and started tying it off.

“I wish you’d told me you were feeling like this,” Eddie said. “I need to know. If you’re not okay, I need to know about it.”

“I wanted -” Richie started. His fingers fumbled with the plastic. “I don’t know. It’s weird. I wanted to. It’s like I know all the ways my life needs fixing, but when I try to think about doing anything about it, I just can’t. There’s like a mental block or something.”

Eddie’s stomach gave out while Richie was talking. He understood what Richie meant so clearly he couldn’t say anything for a moment.

“I just didn’t want to be like this around you,” Richie went on quickly, glancing up at him. Silence always made him agitated. “I thought I might sort my shit out before any of you found out about it, but then I had tequila and weed for breakfast and I thought it would be a great idea to call up Stan to tell him that - Christ.” He straightened, pushing a hand through his hair and clutching at it. “I don’t even know what the fuck I said.”

He went to the couch to sit down, back hunched, hands over his mouth. Eddie sat next to him and turned the TV off, the murmuring sound of it cut out all at once.

“You know you can talk to me about anything,” he said, quietly.

Richie’s hands dropped to hang between his knees. “I don’t want to put this on you.”

“You would want me to talk to you if it was the other way around. You’d make me.”

“You have someone for that.” Richie shut his eyes and shook his head slightly. “All of you do, I mean. I should just do what Mike did and get a crystal-loving, Reiki-peddling therapist, he had the right idea.”

Eddie frowned down at his lap. “You think I talk to Myra about what happened to us?”

“I don’t know, man. Patty knows. Audra knows.”

There was a difference between Stan and Bill’s marriages and Eddie’s. His was predicated on dishonesty, and not something that could be blamed on temporary amnesia, but something he’d always had some awareness of. If he told Myra the honest-to-god truth about his childhood, about IT and the friends he was willing to die for - even now, outside of any immediate danger - she wouldn’t understand. Part of him felt like she wouldn’t even be able to hear it. What existed between Stan and Patty, between Bill and Audra and Ben and Bev, it had never existed between them.

“I wanted to talk to you about it, Rich,” Eddie said.

Richie’s mouth pressed into an odd shape, the muscles tight. He scrubbed a hand over his face.

“Yeah,” he said.

“I kept... I kept trying to.”

“I just -” Richie pressed both hands against the coffee table like he was about to use it to leverage himself up to standing, then he just stayed like that, curled over, a line of tension from his knuckles running up the muscles in his arm. Eddie had never seen him try so hard to keep himself still. “I couldn’t,” he said.

He breathed in deep, chest moving unsteadily. If Richie was upset when they were younger Eddie would put an arm around him, would do something; if they were still in Derry with the others he wouldn’t hesitate to. It seemed to carry more weight when they were alone like this. The urge to touch Richie seemed stronger with nobody else around, and that worried him, so he sat ramrod straight and did nothing.

Richie put his face in his hands.

“I think I’m too big a coward for this shit,” he said.

“You’re not a coward,” Eddie said without hesitating.

“You have no idea.” Richie breathed out a laugh. “You really don’t. Jesus.”

He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes and Eddie couldn’t take it then, couldn’t take Richie trying not to cry in front of him the way did when they were kids. He wrapped an arm around Richie’s shoulders.

“Sorry,” Richie said. “I’m sorry.”

“Stop, Richie. It’s me.”

Richie's breath shuddered out of him. He made a soft sound, a sob, and Eddie could feel his muscles straining to contain it. In that moment all he wanted was to take whatever Richie was feeling, to feel it for him instead.

He rubbed Richie’s side, murmured into his shoulder, “It’s okay.”

His eyes were fixed on a freckle he recognised at the first bump of Richie’s spine, faded but still there. They had sat like this before, he thought, had alternated these positions throughout their childhood. The last time Richie had held him like this was twenty-five years ago in Eddie’s mom’s garage after Eddie told him that he was moving away, both of them crying so hard it was like someone they knew had died. Richie still cried the same way he did when he did as a kid: one awful, full-bodied moment, and then it was over again.

His voice was thick when he spoke. “After everything that happened, everything we did, how the fuck can I still be this scared?”

“I’m scared, too,” Eddie said. “That didn’t just go away. I’m scared all the time.”

Richie turned to him, his forehead creased. “Of what?”

Eddie wondered if he could admit it out loud. Going back to Derry had put his life into such unbearably sharp perspective that most days he found it too painful to even think about. He wondered if he could explain how remembering what it was like to be happy meant he was constantly aware of the low-level unhappiness that existed in him now, something he felt the weight of inside of him as soon as he woke up in the morning, like he swallowed it every night in his sleep.

“I’m scared I’ll never leave Myra,” he said.

“I didn’t know you...” Richie swiped at his eyes and cleared his throat. “I didn’t think you wanted to.”

It felt realer now that he’d said it out loud, like he’d given himself permission. Eddie breathed out. “I tried to make myself stop, but - I think about it all the time. It’s probably the first thing I think about.”

Richie stared at him through his crooked glasses, eyebrows drawn. He looked so sincerely horrified by what he’d just heard it was almost funny.

“It doesn’t sound like you’re okay either, Eds,” he said.

It didn’t, Eddie thought. “It’s like you said. You know what you should do, you just can’t make yourself do it.”

“I’m sorry,” Richie said. “For not hanging out with you. I was lying, in case that wasn’t obvious. I didn’t have any meetings. I didn’t have jack shit going on. When we got back I told my manager to cancel everything I had planned.”

Eddie frowned. “Because of Derry?”

Richie’s mouth went thin. “It’s just bullshit, man. My career, the whole schtick I have going. If I have to keep pretending to be that guy for the rest of my life, I’ll lose my fucking mind. And it didn’t even bother me that much before!” He raised his hands, incredulous looking. “It still felt like shit, but I was making stupid money doing it. I didn’t think I’d end up hating it enough to want to stop.”

“Then stop,” Eddie said. “Fire your writers. You don’t need them, Rich, fuck them. You could write way funnier shit than them.”

“I know,” Richie said. “So many people are visibly surprised when they meet me in person and find out I can tell a funny joke. It’s depressing.”

He fidgeted with his hands.

“It’s not just that,” he went on. “It’s like - when I remembered Derry and you guys, I remembered me, too. I was this other person when we were together, and I like that version of myself. I like him a lot better than the New York one.” Richie gave him a hard smile. “Coming home to that guy fucking sucked.”

Eddie thought of the hospital room in Derry, the comforting sound all of the Losers’ voices made speaking over each other. He thought talking to Stan in their room at night, in the dark, of Bev fixing his hair in the mornings, tired but smiling, of Richie narrowing his eyes at him over a bad hand of cards. He’d had no idea that he was going to end up missing that claustrophobic little room so much, not until he was back home, making up excuses for Myra while he unpacked his suitcase and she stood in the doorway and stared at the scar on his face, wide-eyed and afraid. He’d said I’m fine over and over and over again, until it lost all meaning, until he’d felt himself slowly shifting back into the man he’d been before he’d left, unable stop it from happening.

He nodded. “I get that. It felt different when we were with each other.” Right, he meant. “I - I miss it.”

“I miss it so fucking much.” Richie shook his head. “I didn’t know it was possible to love people so much that not being with them feels kind of fucking awful.”

Eddie knew what he meant. Those first few weeks after they’d come back to New York, all he wanted was to sit across a table from Richie and listen to him talk through a mouthful of half-chewed food.

“Are you gonna do it, you think?” Richie was looking at Eddie’s feet, the green polka-dot socks he’d leant him. “Leave her, I mean. I know it’s not like I’m in any position to judge anyone’s life choices right now or anything, but -” He frowned. “Actually, no, fuck it, I’m going to. You need to leave her.”

“I know,” Eddie said. “I’m going to.”

It was the first time he knew that with certainty.

He put a hand against his forehead. “Jesus. I think I’m really going to.”

Richie’s face broke into a smile. “Mazel tov, Eds.”

He could live in an apartment with where he got to pick the colour of the paint on the walls, that he got to pick out himself. He could even - he could be...

He was still touching Richie. At some point his hand had fit itself into the space between his shoulder blades and stayed there. He pulled it back belatedly, clasping it on his lap.

“What about you?” he said.

Richie’s smile faded. His lips pressed together. “I don’t know. I thought maybe I’d changed after Derry, like automatically, but that didn’t happen. It’s like, man, if that didn’t do it, then what the fuck will?” He looked down. “I’d pretty much have to upheave my whole life if I want to stop feeling like this.”

“So do I. We can do it at the same time.” Eddie could feel himself talking too fast. “We can make the responsible adult equivalent of a blood oath or something. You can’t just keep -”

He gestured around the apartment.

“You’re better than this,” he said emphatically. “You know that.”

“Yeah,” Richie said, shrugging.

“And I really -” Eddie struggled for the right words, then he gave up and just said, “I need you around more than this, Rich. We missed having each other in our lives for too fucking long as it is.”

When Eddie thought about all the time they’d spent living in the same city, orbiting each other without ever knowing it, it made his throat close up tight. It made him want to claw his way back through his life to whatever moment in time they’d been closest to each other, made him want to go back in time ten, twenty years, so he could spot Richie in a crowd of people or through a cafe window and have known him again from then on. It made him feel like he had to do something important, and quick.

Richie softened. “I know. I’m sorry, Eds.”

“Promise me, okay?” Eddie asked, knowing how stupid it was. “I need to see you, like, once a week, at least. If I’m getting divorced, I’ll be lonely. I’ll have a lot of shit to say.”

Richie laughed. There was something strange about the way he smiled, eyebrows drawn. “Yeah, I wouldn’t want to miss out on that.”

“Good.”

They looked at each other for a moment longer.

“Are you an alcoholic?” Eddie asked.

Richie blinked. “Wow. No preamble whatsoever. And you were really impressing me with your level of tact for a while there.”

Eddie looked at him.

“No,” Richie said. “I don’t think so. I think I’ve just been behaving like a dumbass.”

Eddie nodded slowly. “I’m gonna be really blunt with you now.”

“I’m surprised it took you this long,” Richie said.

“You need to take a shower,” Eddie told him. “And you need to dust this place. If you ever want me back in here you need to give it a goddamn deep clean, I’m not kidding. You need to stop drinking and smoking weed and ordering so much Chinese food, it’s not good for your heart. And you need to get a haircut and some new glasses.”

Richie’s mouth curled up. “Anything else?”

“Yes,” Eddie said. “Call Stan.”

It was after eight, and Eddie had to go home and deal his own problems. He took his damp clothes off of the bathroom radiator and rolled them into his briefcase, tried and failed to fix his unstyled hair in the mirror. With his briefcase in hand, wearing his shiny work loafers, Richie’s oversized sweatpants and T-shirt and bright green socks, Richie assured him that he looked fucking stupid.

“You look middle-aged and twelve at the same time,” he said.

He gave Eddie a long coat to help him to avoid the very real danger of accidentally committing indecent exposure on the subway home if the sweatpants slipped down his ass and then they lingered by the door.

“Thanks for coming,” Richie said. He scuffed his feet on the carpet. “And for - yeah.”

“Yeah. Of course.” Eddie shoved his hand into Richie’s coat pocket and fumbled with a chapstick there. He swallowed. “I’m always here, Rich, if - if you ever -”

Richie grabbed him before he could finish and pulled him into his arms. He held Eddie tight against himself and, after a brief moment of surprise, Eddie sank into it. He lifted his arms and hugged him back just as hard.

“You,” Richie said, haltingly.

“What?”

“Nothing, just.” Richie pulled back, eyes on the floor. “You smell like my shampoo.”

Eddie squeezed the chapstick in his pocket hard into his palm and said, dumbly, “Oh.”

“Yeah.” Richie unlocked the door and pulled it open for him. “Night, Eds.”

Eddie walked out on autopilot. “Night, Rich.”

The door clicked shut behind him with an oddly final little sound.

He took the subway home and took a forty minute walk around his neighbourhood instead of going to the apartment. When he got in Myra was already upstairs in bed for the night and he felt worn out, over-exerted somehow. He pushed some velvet pillows out of the way so he could drop onto the couch and then he just lay there, deliberating over whether or not to go upstairs and break the news to his wife that he did not love her and he thought he should probably leave.

That was where he woke up the next morning to find Myra standing over him, clutching at her bathrobe.

“Eddie-bear,” she said, “what the hell are you wearing?”

Eddie rubbed the grit from his eyes and sat up slowly. He looked around their living room, at the wallpaper he’d tried and failed to argue against when they’d first moved in. He looked down at himself, bleary-eyed, and touched the sunset design on Richie's T-shirt.

He looked back up at her. “Myra, I’m gay.”

She stared at him. “What?”

“I’m gay,” he repeated.

She proceeded to mishear him three more times. Then she said nothing and walked out of the room.

Eddie heard her in the kitchen putting the kettle on the stove like she did every morning. He squeezed the bridge of his nose and thought, here we go. He followed her into the kitchen, where she was puttering around making her morning cup of chamomile tea like he hadn't just told her what he'd told her.

“Myra,” he said. “I’m sorry. Listen. I’m really sorry. We need to get a divorce.”

Steam poured out from kettle. She clicked the stove off and stood there with her back to him, still.

“You’ve been acting strange ever since those men attacked you in the woods,” she said, gravely.

For a moment Eddie had no idea what the fuck she was talking about. Then he remembered lying strung out in his hospital bed with Ben holding a phone to his ear, giving Eddie a very doubtful look, along with everyone else in the room, as he recited the absurd story they’d put together for him: he’d run into some trouble on his business trip in Maine and gotten jumped by two drifters during a team-building exercise in Acadia Park. Bill had reluctantly agreed to be the voice of his doctor after Dr Tozier took the phone and went mute.

“Well, that -” He looked at his bare feet on the kitchen tiles and cleared his throat. Lying was harder when he wasn’t high on painkillers. “It really put things in perspective for me.”

She started asking him questions that could not be answered well, like why do you think you’re gay? Why did you marry me if you’re gay? Why did you stay with me for five years if you’re gay? Why did you have sex with me if you’re gay? Why are you only saying this now? She didn’t even seem angry, just blindsided and disbelieving, like this information was entirely outside of her realm of understanding.

It was almost exactly how he’d imagined it might go in the past when he thought about being honest with her - not just about this, but about other parts of himself that had never found a way to make their existence known in their relationship. It was why he hadn’t told her about the Losers Club or Derry, why he’d never talked to her about the way he’d left things with his mother. He’d known she wouldn’t be able to hear any of it because it could not be reconciled with the Eddie she thought she was married to, a man who had never really existed at all.

It took two hours all-in-all to successfully extricate himself from the apartment, and in that time he managed to take a personal day from work, shower, change into his own clothes, and pack a small suitcase of essentials, all the while continuing to argue with Myra.

He wheeled his suitcase behind him to a cafe two blocks away, feeling light, almost numb - which was either a good thing or an indication of some kind of oncoming breakdown.

“An americano,” he ordered at the counter. He glanced at the sweets on display, his eyes landing on a pastry covered in some kind of sugary icing. “And - that.”

He drank his coffee and ate his pastry, occasionally looking at his left hand with idle fascination. There was a pink indent around the skin of his finger where his ring had been. Now it was in the pocket of the coat Richie had leant to him, and it felt weirdly small whenever Eddie poked at it.

When Eddie took out his phone to tell Richie what he’d done the screen lit up with a notification for a text from the night before. Richie had sent into the group text at one in the morning. Eddie’s brain stopped working while he read it.

just want to tell you guys im gay so you find out from me instead of my twitter. or worse a joke someone else made about me being gay on twitter

Eddie put his coffee cup down so hard it spilled all over his hand.

He no longer felt numb. He felt so awake it was disorienting.

He wiped his hand off on his pants without looking and scrolled through the others’ responses: Ben had replied first at 6AM (LOVE YOU TRASHMOUTH), followed by Bev (I love you!!! Call me back x), Mike (Thanks for telling us rich we love you xxxxxxxx), Bill (Stay off social media for a little while, buddy. Love you stupid amounts.) and finally Stan, who said, I saw it on Twitter first. Gay people are very upset.

Eddie managed to get onto Richie’s Twitter after some fumbling attempts and saw that, around midnight last night, Richie had posted a series of confessions - he hadn’t written his own material since he was twenty-five, he didn’t run his social media accounts 99% of the time, and he was a completely different person in reality than he was on-stage or online. for one thing ive never even had sex with a woman, he’d written. thats not me being funny thats me trying to be cute about 30 years of being closeted

He’d finished by saying, i hope by saying this publicly that, above all else, the homophobic dude on reddit who said he didnt like watching my stand up because i gave him ‘an even gayer vibe than john mulaney’ will feel vindicated

There were thousands and thousands of reactions to everything he’d posted. Eddie felt vaguely nauseous just looking at the numbers, ticking up by the second, one by one. He tapped Richie’s profile picture, a marketable shot of him doing an asshole kind of comedian smirk that didn’t look right on his face, and then he clicked off of it. He thumbed through his own camera roll until he got to the picture Richie had taken of himself at the hospital in Derry while he was putting in his contact information, the one that was assigned to a contact called BIG DICKIE. Richie was smiling pleasantly at the camera, unshaven and only a little tired looking, finger up his nose.

Eddie stood up. His mind wasn’t functioning the way it usually did, wasn’t obsessively working out worst case scenarios or trying to figure out everything that might happen next. He felt focused, clear. He grabbed his suitcase handle and headed for the subway station.

The eighth time he’d buzzed Richie’s door, he was starting to feel a little less sure about the whole thing and decided it was probably a good idea to call.

“Hello?”

“Stan?” Eddie stumbled. He checked the screen. “I meant to call -“

“I know,” Stan said. “He’s here. I took his phone off of him.”

“What, like - as in Vermont?”

“Yeah. Asleep in the guest room as we speak.”

Eddie stared at the front door of Richie’s building. “Oh. Okay. What the fuck?”

“I don't know. He showed up here at six AM, ate the leftover mac and cheese I was meant to have for lunch for the rest of the week, and passed out.” Stan added, flatly, “I think he fled the state.”

Eddie sat on his suitcase, back to the wall of Richie’s building, and dropped his forehead into his hand. People passed him on the street without him properly seeing any of them.

“How is he?" he asked, then he shook his head. "Jesus. That's a stupid question.”

“No, he's okay, I think. Considering. Sort of a nervous wreck, but I’ve spent a lot of my day so far reporting middle-aged bald men in his mentions for calling him slurs, so I think that only makes sense.”

“Christ,” Eddie said, shutting his eyes.

“He’s going to stay with us for a couple of days,” Stan said. “I think he needs to get out of the city for a while.”

Stan was still using his crutches, having too hard a time moving around to go back to work full-time yet, and he also was not planning on springing a divorce on his wife in the near future - or ever. Eddie understood why Richie would go to his place; it wasn’t like he even had a place for Richie to come to. He wished uselessly that he hadn’t left last night, that he’d just stayed over, sat with Richie on his couch and kept talking to him. He wished that he was the one with Richie right now.

“When he wakes up, can you tell him to -” Tell him to what? What was going to happen from 500 miles apart? “Just tell him I called.”

Before Stan could even respond to that Eddie blurted out, “I had no fucking idea. None. Did you?”

Stan made the kind of awkward, space-filler sound he only made on the rare occasion he didn’t know what he wanted to say. “Yeah, I - yeah. I knew. Since like, ninth grade.”

“How the fuck did you know about it then?”

Stan ignored him. “He told me you were talking about leaving Myra last night. Is that true?”

Eddie touched the ring in his pocket. “Yeah. I was.”

“You must have had some conversation,” Stan said. His voice lowered slightly. “I was really proud of you, when he told me. It’s a hard decision to make. I know what that takes.”

Eddie didn’t know what to say. He swallowed. “Yeah, well. I should really - will you let him know that I -”

“Of course. Bye, Eddie.”

“Bye, Stanley.”

Eddie didn’t get up after he ended the call. He sat there and felt the city around him, sprawling so far in every direction, suddenly terrifying in a way it hadn’t been a few hours ago when he’d still had a home in it. In the twenty years he’d lived there, he’d never been in New York without a place to stay before.

He managed to stave off the inevitable panic attack until he’d booked himself into a hotel room for the night. After getting inside his immediate thought was to call Bill - it was like a thirty year old reflex that had been long buried in him, a tried and tested response to dealing with personal crisis - but then he thought better of it.

“I opened my suitcase and realised I left all of my socks there,” he said. “Bev. I have one pair of socks.”

“You’ll get new socks,” Bev assured him.

“She keeps trying to call and I don’t know what the fuck to say to her. What the fuck do I say to her? I kept trying to explain it for hours but I couldn’t -”

“Slow down, hon.”

“She doesn’t -” he said. He breathed out, felt himself deflating. “She doesn’t get it.”

Bev’s voice was gentle. “She doesn’t have to.”

There were weird little stains on the hotel carpet and a feeling of immediate, inexplicable terror was throbbing in his chest.

“I thought,” he started - but what had he thought? What had he expected? Whatever had convinced him it was a good idea to show up at Richie’s apartment that morning, it wasn’t there anymore. Somewhere on the walk from Richie’s apartment back down to the subway it had ebbed out of him and left nothing of itself behind. Now all Eddie felt was a rattling anxiety. He’d overturned his whole life. He’d actually done it.

“I didn’t think, actually.” He squeezed the bridge of his nose, eye shut. “That’s the problem. I just did it, and now I don’t have a place to live anymore and I have to find a divorce lawyer, and I don’t have any fucking socks.”

“Hey,” she said. He could hear the smile in her voice and pictured her expression, the appreciative one she wore when they both knew he was being overdramatic. “How about I come see you this weekend?"

Bev had been darting back and forth from Ben's place in California for the last month over the divorce proceedings. She never stayed in the city overnight - they'd managed to grab lunch once a few weeks ago, before her first meeting with the lawyers, but she'd been anxious and quiet the entire time, gripping his hand on the table so tight he'd wanted to kill her husband barehanded.

He shook his head. "You don't have to do that, Bev. I know you don't like staying longer than you have to."

"I'd like to see you," she said. "It's okay. I have something that might make you feel better.”

What Bev had was the keys to a studio apartment her friend Kay owned.

She led him there Friday night after the meeting with her lawyer, before they even had time to grab dinner. It was tiny and barely furnished, just a double bed and a kitchen space, a green dress hanging on the closet door. There was a window with no curtains that spanned almost the whole far end wall, and as they came in the sun was setting between the buildings across the street.

“She gave me the keys to this place years ago, thinking I’d...” She shrugged, looking out at the view, her hair glowing in the light. “I always did like it, though. I’d come here sometimes just to remember it was there for me.”

Eddie reached for her hand. She smiled at him, swinging their arms a little.

“It’s better than a hotel, right?” she said, looking around, and then Eddie realised belatedly what they were doing there. “I know it’s not much, but you could stay ‘til you get back on your feet.” She shrugged. “And it’s here, anyway. I don’t need it anymore.”

She reached into her coat pocket and pressed the keys into his palm.

“What do you think?” she asked.

He swallowed and closed his fingers over the keys, over hers.

“I’ve really missed you, Bev,” he said.

They darted back and forth around the city to get his things from his hotel room. As they walked the last few blocks back, they ducked in and out of stores that were open late and picked up wraps from a falafel stand Bev swore by. She convinced him to do the kind of impulse shopping he had never allowed himself to do in his life and it was so much easier not to overthink it with her there, triumphantly holding up cheap looking bottles of wine, texting Ben for his seal of approval on a bedside lamp from HomeGoods.

They arrived back at the apartment with the wine and the lamp, a set of glasses, a pair of curtains, Eddie’s suitcase, and a 3 Musketeers bar Bev had gotten at the newsstand just outside. Bev poured them two glasses of wine and they drank them cross-legged on the bed, looking out the window at the night sky.

She reached over the side into one of the bags and pulled out a 7-pack of black socks.

“Here,” she said. “A little housewarming present.”

“How did you know?” he asked, holding them to his chest, and she laughed.

They made their way through half of the wine before the jet lag caught up to Bev and she fell asleep curled around his back. He lay there for a while looking out of the window, not quite ready to close his eyes. He checked his phone and realised that some of the others must have pieced together from Bev’s message about the lamp that Eddie had moved out of his apartment with Myra. Ben and Mike had messaged him individually about it.

While he was in the middle of responding, his phone went off and the words BIG DICKIE flashed across the screen.

Eddie jolted up. He hastily padded across the apartment and opened up the fire escape window, glancing over his shoulder to check that Bev was still asleep as he climbed out.

He answered, gripping the railing. “Richie?”

“Hey, Eds. I didn’t really think before I called, I can - I know Bev’s there, if you guys are busy I can call later.”

“It’s fine,” Eddie told him, shaking his head like Richie could see it. He felt weirdly nervous: it was the first time they’d spoken to each other since he messaged Richie to say he was proud of him and Richie responded with an awkward thanks before going straight into making jokes about Stan’s apparently borderline Amish lifestyle. “Bev was asleep by, like, nine.”

“Oh, man. Bummed I’m missing out on this wild night you guys are having.”

“You should be. We hung curtains and spooned.”

“Wow, you move fast,” Richie said. “Does Ben know about this? You’ve been single for, like, a day.”

“Two days,” Eddie corrected. Being called single felt weird. He hadn’t been single for the last five years of his life. “I told Myra first thing yesterday morning. Which was fucking stupid in retrospect, but it just kind of, uh - came out. When I saw her.”

“I didn’t think you’d do it that soon, or I would've... How’re you feeling about it?”

Eddie looked back through the window at the Bev shaped lump under the covers.

“Better today,” he said. “Don’t worry, Rich. I get it. Are you doing okay?”

“I don’t know. Kind of.” There was a soft rustling sound on the other end of the line. “My agency dropped me, but it seemed like it was more of a ‘you told everyone you’re a total hack’ thing than a ‘you’re gay’ thing. I kinda did fuck them over there so I can live with that. People I haven’t spoken to in twenty fucking years keep finding ways to contact me - people who did not give a shit about my existence before are churning out think-pieces about me, or trying to figure out if me and some guy I used to do improv with in Chicago were fucking way back when. It’s bizarre, man.”

“It fucking sucks,” Eddie said. He’d read a few articles over the last few days, stories that felt weirdly invasive and impersonal at the same time, that either posed Richie as a sympathetic figure or someone whose shitty jokes in 2009 made him undeserving of whatever redemption coming out could offer. “I want to make a Twitter so I can lay into all those jilted fucking Republican step-dads, but Bev told me that would be bad for my mental health.”

“She's right,” Richie agreed, and Eddie could hear him smiling. “I still appreciate the thought. I’m done talking about this shit, honestly. Tell me about how leaving your wife feels, that’ll cheer me up.”

Eddie looked at his bare left hand. “Leaving my wife makes me feel like a character from one of my mom’s old soap operas that she’d call sleazy. Is that stupid?”

“Yes,” Richie said. “You’re the least sleazy human being I know.”

“That’s because you’re in show business.”

Richie laughed and Eddie grinned listening to him, leaning out over the fire escape. In the cold night air, with the sound of the traffic beneath him and Richie’s voice in his ear, he felt oddly free and certain of himself. He wanted to tell Richie right then. His chest was swelling with it.

“When are you coming home?” he asked.

“Soon,” Richie said. “A few days, I think.” He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “It’s cool of them to let me stay and everything, but Jesus Christ, man. They’re so normal. It’s fucking oppressive. I’ve drank more tea since Thursday than I did in my entire life before I got here. All Stan wants to do is sit in his bird shed - that’s a thing that he has, by the way - and talk to his little yellow-breasted whatever-the-fucks. It’s nice, don’t get me wrong. I’m grateful. But at the same time, it’s twenty-fucking-sixteen and there’s no acceptable explanation for not owning a TV.”

“I don’t own a TV.”

“Okay, there’s one acceptable explanation for not owning a TV. We’ll get you one when I’m back. A seventy-inch motherfucker. That’s about as big as you are.”

“Fuck off."

“I’m just giving you an idea of scale. You don’t want to waste your time with a TV that’s any smaller than one Eddie.”

“We’ll do that when you get back, then.” Eddie squeezed the railing until pinpricks of rust were digging into his palm and said, “I’ll take you out for dinner after.”

He was intensely aware of the brief silence on the other line.

“You guys are spoiling me,” Richie said, after what felt like longer than it really must have been. “Letting me freeload. Treating me to dinner.”

Eddie closed his eyes. He opened his mouth without knowing exactly what he would say, and then he jerked at the sound of tapping on the window behind him.

He turned. Bev looked at him through the dirty glass, sleepy and worried.

Myra? she mouthed.

He shook his head, lips pressed.

“Hell was that?” Richie asked.

“It’s Bev.” Eddie was grateful for the steadiness of his voice. “I should go back in. Thanks for calling, Rich.”

“Yeah.” Richie was quiet. “See you soon, Eds.”

“Goodnight,” Eddie said, and hung up.

He stood out there for another moment with his hands braced on the railing. Bev was sitting up on the bed waiting for him when he came in, her hair flatter on one side than the other. She squinted at him in the dark.

“Everything okay?”

“Yeah.” Eddie closed the window over again carefully. “It was just Richie.”

He got back into bed, and Bev stayed awake longer than he did this time, lay next to him and held his hand, thumbing along his knuckles until he fell asleep.

Chapter Text

They did buy a TV and go out for dinner together when Richie came back to town, but they couldn’t have the conversation Eddie had been rehearsing in his head non-stop for the last week because he didn’t come alone.

Stan’s excuse was that he was tired of being stuck in the house all the time. Richie rolled his eyes at it.

“Come on, man,” he said, breaking his chopsticks apart. “Just tell him you were worried about him.”

“I was being tactful,” Stan said. “I understand that might be a foreign concept for you.”

“What, you came down here just to see me?” Eddie asked, pointing to himself. Bev was the kind of person who didn’t mind travelling with minimal planning in advance, but Stan absolutely was not. “What the fuck, I’m fine.”

Stan sat his menu down on the table, clasping his hands over it in a paternal way that Eddie didn’t appreciate. “Eddie, change makes you nervous. You could barely handle having to sleep on a spring mattress at the inn in Derry, and now you live in an apartment where the bed and the kitchen sink are in the same room.”

All of this was accurate. Eddie frowned. “Fuck off, I like that apartment.”

Richie covered his mouth with his glass of water, muttered, “Imagine hearing this shit for nine days straight.”

Stan looked unimpressed. “You kept saying you were fine too, even though all you did was mope around listening to Patty’s vinyls and eating cheese. I’m entitled to worry about you guys.” He picked his menu back up and gave it his full attention when he added, “We’re practically brothers.”

Eddie and Richie exchanged a look. Richie shifted around awkwardly.

“Don’t be gay,” he said.

“Christ,” Eddie said.

Stan rolled his eyes. “Are both of you ready to order?” He flagged someone down without waiting for a response.

Richie was weirdly the kind of person who knew good food, so after they’d picked out some behemoth of a smart TV in Best Buy so big it had to be delivered, Eddie let him decide where to go for dinner even though he’d never tried Japanese food in his life. He’d only had curry for the first time a week ago when Bev got Indian food delivered and he asked her, feeling stupidly nervous, if he could try a bite, and then it was so unbelievably fucking good he ended up eating more of it than she did, along with some crisp dosa bread he dipped into the sauce and two fried spinach things that she hadn’t ordered enough of.

Even though he’d already spoken to the doctor in Derry, ran the relevant allergen tests, had his bloods tested, and then been given documented confirmation that he had no underlying health issues or allergies to worry about, he’d still spent the next forty-eight hours regretting eating it and anticipating some kind of punitive reaction from his body - but nothing had happened. It had just been good.

He could remember the knowing kind of look all of the Losers had given him at Jade of the Orient - where he’d eaten plain boiled rice, no seasoning, and poked dubiously at some dry chicken - but none of them had said anything about it. They’d still been reacquainting themselves that first night together, easing back into the familiar waters of their friendship. Richie had looked close to commenting, but in the end all he’d done was eye Eddie’s plate, looking distant and maybe a little dark, then asked the waitress for a vodka-heavy refill, raising his glass at her, the ice still fresh enough in there to clink.

As Stan was ordering, Richie’s knee nudged his under the table. He gave Eddie a look, eyebrows up, as if double-checking whether or not he was still okay with eating here, and smiled when all Eddie did was nudge him back.

“Man, look at you,” Richie said after they were done ordering, grinning at Eddie, leaning his chin on his hands. “Divorcing your mom-wife. Buying nice shoes. Eating food that has umami.”

“What the fuck is that? Octopus?” Eddie frowned at his menu. “That's not what I ordered.”

Richie snorted and read him a googled definition.

“I still don’t know what the fuck that means,” Eddie said.

“Yeah, I kinda don’t either, I just like it when chefs on TV talk about it,” Richie said, putting his phone back in his pocket. “You’re really doing it, huh.”

“Doing what?”

“I don’t know. Unlearning a whole mess of shit.”

Eddie paused, struck by the clear opportunity to segue into a conversation about the real reason he’d left his wife - to tell Richie that he, too, was about to find out what it was like to be out of the closet at forty. Then he glanced at Stan, who was messaging his wife so intently and quietly that Eddie had almost forgotten he was there for a moment, and decided this wasn’t how he wanted to have that conversation.

“We both are,” he settled on. “Right? I’m trying to stop convincing myself I’ll die if I ingest dairy. You’re trying to stop making jokes about fucking people’s moms.”

“You’re just putting words in my mouth with that one.” Richie gestured his head. “They’re cool, by the way.”

“What?”

“The shoes. Don’t know if you know this, Mister Rockefeller, but you really shouldn’t wear shoes that cost upwards of five-hundred dollars on the F train.”

Eddie looked down at his absurdly overpriced Gucci loafers. They were black leather with a red and green stripe under the horsebit and a heel that brought him up to Stan’s height, and he loved them more than he’d ever loved an article of clothing before. Bev actually called him up after he sent a photo of them to express her emphatic support, which helped him feel less ridiculous about the whole thing.

“I’m paying for a divorce and rent on two apartments. I probably shouldn’t be buying shoes that cost upwards of five-hundred dollars in the first place.”

“You should do whatever the hell you want,” Richie told him, seriously.

Before Eddie could think of what to say to that Stan looked up and asked, “How’s the divorce going?”

“Shittily,” Eddie said, and then he was saved from having to expand on the subject by the waitress bringing over the appetizers.

For the main course Eddie ate ramen with black garlic and ground pork belly, but not well.

“Here, like this,” Richie said, reaching over to readjust Eddie’s fingers on the chopsticks. His hand was warm and so unexpectedly gentle Eddie had a weird, half-hysterical impulse to laugh. “How did you get this far in your life without knowing how to do this? What the hell did you eat in college?”

“Couscous,” Eddie said. “With a fork.”

Richie let him go, blinking. “Couscous? Couscous was your defining college food? God, that’s sad.”

“Yeah, and what was yours, you big foodie fuck?”

“Lucky Charms,” Richie said. "Want to try some wasabi? We need to broaden your palate beyond shit that tastes of nothing.”

“Jesus, no. You ate the tiniest little dot of it and your nose is still running.” Eddie successfully pinched some noodles. “One thing at a fucking time, man.”

He glanced up and caught Stan looking at them, smiling.

“Does being around us make you feel good about yourself?” Richie asked, noodles dangling out of his mouth. The food slipped from Eddie’s chopsticks as he brought it up to his mouth.

“No,” Stan said. “It makes me feel worse about how you both make more money than me.”

Eddie had always been aware of the brotherly kind of intimacy between Stan and Richie - maybe even envied it when they were younger and any kind of exclusion felt stressful, indicative of something - but now Stan had mentioned it, he kept noticing how that intimacy existed between him and Stan, too. He could hear it in the way they spoke to each other, see it in the sideways looks Stan gave him, as if expecting Eddie to know exactly what he was thinking, which Eddie normally instinctively did.

Even when they were twelve, when Richie was annoying the bejesus out of him at every opportunity and he was taking the bait every time without fail, it hadn’t felt familial in the same way his relationships did with the other Losers. It had always been coloured by something else, intimate in a deeper sense, one that he hadn’t understood at the time. He hadn’t even felt the need to examine it too closely back then because that was just how he’d always felt around Richie: bright and seen and a little stupider than usual, but in a good way. It was how he felt with him now.

“You seem better,” he told Richie, honestly.

Richie’s mouth caught between a grimace and a smile. “I showered since you last saw me. That probably helped. And I got a haircut like you told me to, but now it’s too short and I look weird, and I feel like that’s on you.”

It was too short at the sides to do the swoopy thing it usually did. “You need to grow it out a little,” Eddie admitted. “You look like someone’s accountant.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” Stan monotoned.

Richie snorted. “You own about a million cardigans, you know what it means.”

“You stretched half of my cardigans out.”

Richie swept a hand over himself and said, “I can’t help it if I have a naturally muscular physique.”

Stan ignored that, dabbing at his mouth with a napkin, and said, “You are doing better, but you have to be careful. It’s going to be hard. It is hard, for all of us, in different ways, but...” He frowned, gave Richie a pressed look. “It’s worse for you.”

“Right,” Richie said, staring into his bowl, listlessly stirring the broth. “Cool.”

“He means because people know who you are, Rich,” Eddie said. “It’s enough to make me fucking crazy when I see the shit people say about you sometimes.”

“Yeah.” Richie looked up at him, shoulders curled up, mouth thin. “My old agent from like ten years ago called me up a few days ago and told me I should capitalize on all the publicity. Everyone is kind of saying that, actually, even though it sounds fucking terrible.” He shrugged. “Maybe I should. I don’t know. People would watch it.”

“No.” Eddie shook his head. “You aren’t ready to go up on stage and make jokes about it yet.” He jabbed at a sheet of seaweed with his chopsticks. “Fuck this guy for asking you to. Do you want me to kill him?”

Richie laughed. “You keep offering to kill people for me, what are you gonna do if I actually take you up on the offer?”

“Start killing these fucking idiots, I guess,” Eddie said, irritably.

“We've killed enough people this year,” Stan said.

Eddie shot him a wide-eyed look while Richie choked and coughed water all down himself.

“You can’t just drop that into regular conversation, Stanley,” Eddie said, half-whisper, half-yell, jerking to look over his shoulder. He passed Richie a clean napkin.

“Thanks, Eds.” Richie dabbed at his shirt, shaking his head. “Jesus," he muttered. "How do I keep forgetting about that?”

While Richie went to the bathroom in search of more paper towels, Stan took a photograph of the giant gold cat statue waving at them from the bar and sent it to Patty.

“She likes gaudy decorations,” he said, putting his phone back down on the table. “She turns our yard into a living nightmare at Halloween.”

Eddie tilted his head and looked at the lock screen photo: Patty in some coffee place with a glass of iced tea and a book with a wolf on the cover, her face smile-lined and warm.

“She looks exactly like you make her sound,” he said.

“I showed her the photos Mike sent of us.” Stan smiled. “She said you were adorable.”

Mike had gotten them all sentimental when he sent a picture of an old photo-booth strip that he’d been using as a bookmark for the last thirty or so years where they all looked stupid and thirteen. It was Eddie's phone background now - he never got tired of seeing it, all their goofy little faces together.

“She really wants to meet you,” Stan added. “You should come down, stay with us.”

He talked about her so much Eddie felt like they already knew each other, and she’d probably heard enough of him yelling in the background of phone calls with her husband while they were in the hospital to unfortunately get a clear enough idea about him as a person.

“Yeah,” Eddie said, nodding. “I’d like that.”

Stan adjusted his glasses by pushing them up by the legs, Eddie noticed, unlike Richie, who still poked them up his nose with one finger the same nerdy way he always had.

“I’m serious,” he said. “We want you to come for Thanksgiving. Or if you ever just want a break with everything that’s going on. You’re always welcome.”

Eddie blinked. “Thanks, Stanley.”

“I meant what I said before,” Stan went on. On the table, his hands were stacked on top of each other in fists in a way that reminded Eddie of the awkward teenager he used to be. “You're more like my family than my real family is. You know that.”

They’d talked about their parents a little, lying in the dark in the room they’d only been allowed to share through the saving grace that was the general indifference of Derry Memorial Hospital employees. Stan told him that he hadn’t spoken to his father since he was twenty-five and had strained contact with his mother every few months where they both pretended nothing was wrong. Stan was the only person in the world who knew the real, awful reason Eddie had missed his flight for his mother’s funeral - who knew that he’d gotten to the airport hours early, in a daze, that he’d sat at the gate until it was time to board and then continued to sit there until the plane he was meant to be on flew out of view.

He grabbed Stan's hand in a clumsy movement and didn’t know what to say. Stan squeezed his fingers, hard and reassuring, and he let go again. His chest had seized up.

“This therapy shit seems like it’s really working,” he said, quietly.

Stan gave him a soft look from over his glasses. “I think it is. You and Richie are the last hold-outs, you know. Even Bill started seeing a professional instead of trying to unload all his trauma onto his editor.”

Eddie had once brought up the idea of going to therapy to Myra after it was suggested by his doctor for the thousandth time, but it turned out that was the only area of his health she was convinced he didn’t need any professional help in. At the time part of him had known that was bullshit, but he’d taken too much comfort in her certainty that he was mentally well to want to do anything about it.

“Bev recommended someone that her friend goes to for anxiety,” he admitted. “I don't know. How the fuck do you talk to someone about what happened to us?”

“I don’t mention the parts about the killer clown from outer space, if that’s what you mean,” Stan said, deadpan as ever. “But the things I need to talk about, I make myself talk about.” He looked down at his hands on the table, shrugged. “Sometimes explaining how Derry fucked us all up feels like ripping my own teeth out, but now I wish I’d just started talking to someone about it sooner. It makes it all feel less scary.”

“Is he talking you into doing therapy?” Richie said, sitting back down. He shifted his chair closer. “He’s good at it, right? My mom’s been pushing me to see someone for twenty years and Stan convinced me to do it five minutes after I walked into his house.”

“All of us are in dire need of therapy,” Stan said.

“I know. Jesus. I’m like a therapist’s wet fucking dream.” Eddie looked down and played with a button on his shirt. He’d spent most of his life feeling like a miraculously functioning cluster of neuroses, like a handful of squirming, nebulous feelings tangled into the shape of a person. He’d resigned himself to being that way for a long time. He shook his head. “I need someone professionally trained to go into my brain with a chainsaw and start taking shit apart.”

“That’s a vivid mental image I didn’t need,” Stan said.

“I think you turned out pretty good, considering,” Richie said, looking at him with his eyebrows drawn.

His hand lifted from the table, and for a second Eddie thought Richie was going to reach out and touch him, the way he was looking at him, but then it dropped back down again, pressing flat to the surface.

“I like your brain,” Richie said. “It doesn’t - it doesn’t need chainsawed.”

They looked at each other for a moment. Eddie wanted to yank him over the table by the shirt collar and kiss him so badly he couldn’t speak.

Then Richie looked away. “I think you just need some CBD.”

“I think you mean CBT,” Eddie said, still staring.

“No, I don’t think he does,” Stan said.

While they were waiting for the check, Stan took his phone out and went over the travel itinerary for tomorrow he and Patty had written up together. Eddie enjoyed how meticulously well-planned out it was. Richie looked like he’d heard this multiple times already, pressing a longing hand to the cocktail menu that Eddie slapped away.

Richie jerked a thumb at where Stan’s crutches were propped up against the table. “Shouldn’t you be staying off your feet?”

“I need to get used to moving around more. And most of this involves sitting on public transport.” Stan put his phone down. “Nice try, though.”

“Eds, call in sick tomorrow and come do tourist bullshit with us,” Richie said. “It’s going to fucking blow. You don’t want to miss it.”

“I’d rather go back to Derry than go to Times Square,” Eddie said, and Richie dropped his head all the way back and groaned.

Stan’s phone lit up on the table with a message.

“Patty says we should go to a gay bar,” he said.

Eddie bit down on the inside of his lip and glanced sidelong at Richie, stupidly grateful to find that Richie looked equally uncomfortable at the idea, his top lip pulling up, teeth clenched.

“Yeah,” he said, “I’m not ready for that level of gay experience.”

Thank fucking god, Eddie thought.

Stan hummed. “That’s a cop-out. I would have gone.”

“How much gay experience do you have, Stan?” Eddie asked.

It was meant to be a joke. The atmosphere shifted after he said it. Richie’s bottom lip disappeared into his mouth and he and Stan gave each other a strange look.

“Um,” Stan said, blinking.

“Oh, god. Okay.” Richie put a hand over his eyes, shoving his glasses up. “I was really hoping that was a memory you didn’t get back. Or that we could just keep not-talking about it for the rest of our lives.”

Anxiety crept into Eddie’s stomach. He heard the startled sound of his own laughter.

“You mean you -” he said, stumbling, “you two -”

Richie’s eyes went huge. He shook his head and raised his hands up in the air, fingers splayed wide. “No, no, it wasn’t - no. It was just a kiss. It wasn’t even a real kiss, it wasn’t anything. It - Stan was just being a good friend.”

Stan looked at Eddie, a line appearing between his eyebrows. “It was the day you -”

“Let’s not talk about this,” Richie cut in, a little too loud even by his own standards. “It’s not a funny story.”

“I didn’t...” Stan darted looks between them both for a second, then he looked at Richie and said, quietly, “Sorry.”

The three of them sat without speaking. Eddie was still processing the conversation when he turned to see Stan looking over at Richie with his eyebrows drawn apologetically, to see Richie staring down at his lap, chin to his chest, ears red - and then he thought, oh, god, and all of the air went out of him at once, knocked out of his chest by an invisible force. He’d thought - Jesus, he’d almost -

Their waitress came over and put the checkbook on the table with a soft thud.

Richie raised a hand and said, “I’ve got it,” and he took out his card and paid before Eddie or Stan could argue with him, his mouth a line.

He didn’t see Stan again before he went back home two days later, too busy working and feeling a little too emotionally all over the place to be seen by anybody who loved him and would be concerned by the tense, wide-eyed look that was now his default expression. It was easier to talk to his friends over the phone, where they couldn’t see him pacing around the apartment or lying face-down on the bed. It was also incredibly easy to admit to someone who pried as gently as Ben did that he wasn’t feeling great.

“My head feels cluttered and all over the place all the time,” Eddie said into the shitty spring mattress. “I can’t think straight. I’m not sleeping well because I just lie awake and I don’t know how to shut my brain off. Can you forget how to sleep? Is that a thing that happens to people? I think that’s happening to me.”

Ben told him, with the calm air of someone who’d actually read the insane amount self-help books listed on his Goodreads account, “You should go for a run.”

“I can’t do cardio,” Eddie said. He didn’t even have time to consider it - it came out of him reflexively, and in his chest, he felt a flare of panic he couldn’t explain.

Ben was too nice to say what they were both thinking then, which was that that was bullshit because Eddie didn’t have asthma, had never really had asthma - had never really had anything.

“You don’t have to go any faster than you want to, Eds,” he said, softly.

A warm feeling settled over that initial clench of anxiety in Eddie’s chest and smothered it. “Yeah. Okay. Maybe.” He turned to lie on his back. “How are you guys doing?”

“Good. We did a pottery class this afternoon.” He could hear the smile in Ben’s voice. “I made a vase for the dining room. It’s really wonky. Bev said she couldn’t believe I design things for a living.”

Eddie knew this was the happiest Ben had ever been in his life, and hearing proof of it helped make him feel better about everything - they were all living different lives now than they had been a few months ago, they were all different people just from knowing each other again, capable of a kind of happiness they hadn’t been before. He wasn’t alone in changing.

He smiled. “Did you do the thing from Ghost?”

“Yeah,” Ben said. “She was Patrick Swayze.”

The next day, Eddie woke up half an hour earlier than usual, feeling uneasy but motivated. He looked out the window to find nothing but grey stretching overhead and the impression of light rain on the sidewalk. He hesitated there, curtain in hand, then he thought, fuck it, pulled on his exercise clothes and waterproofs, and left.

Outside it was quiet, the sky still half-dark. He started off at a slow jog, unsure of what his body could take and intensely aware that he hadn’t ran just for the sake of it since he was a kid, before he’d learned to be afraid of his body and every imaginable consequence for using it the wrong way.

That awareness started to dim after a few moments. He didn’t go fast but he kept going, a steady, controlled pace. The way his sneakers hit the wet pavement, the sharpness of his breath in his lungs, the stretch and contraction of the muscles in his legs - it was all so functional, so oddly satisfying.

Ben had sent him a playlist of nostalgic high-energy songs that thumped in his ears. It helped that he couldn’t hear the sound of his own laboured breathing, just oh that sleepwalk should be over by now and but I’m proud of you, but I’m proud of you. There was no distraction, no way for his mind to wander in an unwanted direction, nothing but the forward momentum of his body and the ache travelling across it, well-earned, not frightening at all.

When he stopped he was panting, leant over with his hands braces on his knees and his eyes squeezed closed. Bruce Springsteen was singing you ain’t a beauty but hey, you’re alright. He listened to the song until it ended and felt rain and sweat trickling under the neck of his windbreaker, cooling his skin, a purifying sensation, then he straightened and looked around.

He’d circled back to his building. The street was busier now, people and cars and store shutters in motion. It had felt like the city was all his for a little while there, like it was nothing but a series of pathways laid out for him to choose from.

His hair was clinging to his forehead, soaked, and he felt oddly present in himself. His lungs felt stretched, like they’d somehow expanded.

After he was back in the apartment, he took off his wet clothes and sent Ben a message (TRIED YOUR ADVICE, STILL ALIVE.), then he paused and, without thinking too much about it, sent Richie the Springsteen song. It reminded him of listening to Went Tozier’s music collection in Richie’s bedroom, of how twelve-year-old Richie had known every word to The River well enough to recite the entire thing in the style of Yoda and make Eddie laugh Coke out of his nose.

man this takes me back, Richie replied, and then a few hours later when Eddie was on his lunch break at work, he added, remember when i made you spray snot and coke out your nose like a busted fire hydrant

In my defense that was the funniest thing you’ve ever done, Eddie said.

ive been chasing that high ever since, Richie said.

Eddie left it there and went back to his lunch - a stacked, delicious sandwich from a deli place it turned out his coworkers had been right about all along. His phone buzzed again a few moments later.

just looking over my busy unemployed schedule and i think we’re due our once a week hang out

Oh, Christ. Now Richie was the one who wanted to see him and Eddie was the one who didn’t feel prepared to be in his company.

It wasn’t just the Richie thing ruining his sleep and making him feel like he was slowly unhinging. The weight of all of his rash decisions was settling in now - the financial cost of getting a divorce, the emotional cost of knowing what he’d done to Myra and how he felt about Richie, the strange, inexplicable personal cost of losing an identity that he had never liked, but that had been all he’d really had of himself for most of his life. His life was unrecognisable to how it had been a few weeks ago, and his apartment didn’t have enough storage space, and the lack of hot water was going to make him attack his neighbours in the hallway one of these days, and unfortunately, it turned out that being in love with Richie was just as singularly agonizing an experience as it had been when he was a kid.

But even if thinking about the look on Richie’s face at the restaurant that night made him want to die a bit, he loved him too much as a friend to honestly consider the idea of taking a step back from him. After thirty years apart, any amount of Richie was enough. More than enough. It could be enough.

mr gucci shoes too good to hang out with me now, Richie said after Eddie took too long to respond. mr huge tv thinks he can just divorce anyone he chooses

Eddie said, Yeah pretty much.

mr bigshot bachelor thinks hes so funny

Eddie tapped the sides of the screen with his thumbs. I’m putting up shelves tonight if you want to come over and help.

i can do one of those things, Richie said.

“Okay, you were right,” he told Richie that night, taking the power drill out of his hands. He could only take so much of seeing Richie nervously fumble around with dangerous machinery in the shape of a big fucking gun before he felt he had to intervene. “You should not be handling this.”

Richie drummed his fingers on the front of his jeans and nodded. “Good call.”

He sat on the little couch while Eddie drilled a row of six neatly spaced holes into the marked wall and set about hammering the screw anchors into them. He only had two screws left when he realised Richie had been silent for about ten minutes and turned around to see what he was doing.

Richie was sitting up straighter than usual, staring at him. He blinked when Eddie looked back at him, mouth falling open a little.

“You’re never this quiet,” Eddie said. “What the fuck.”

“You think I’m gonna yell over all the drilling and hammering going on?” Richie asked. The pitch of his voice was off.

“That’s what you used to do any time you walked past a construction site.”

Richie’s face did something weird. “I’m not going to distract you when you’re holding a machine that sticks holes in things.” He turned to look over at the kitchen, his ears red. “Why don’t I make dinner or something?”

“Oh. Sure.” Eddie followed his line of sight. “I don’t really have a lot of stuff in there.”

Richie clapped his hands on his knees and stood up. “I’ll see what we’ve got.”

Eddie drilled the last screws into the wall while Richie rooted around the kitchen cabinets.

When he was done he stuck his head in the fridge and shouted over the rattling sound, “You have literally fucking nothing!"

Eddie stopped drilling.

Richie leaned out from behind the fridge door to look at him. “What are you eating, man?”

“I mostly order,” Eddie admitted.

“What, every day?”

Eddie pretended to do something with the power cord.

“Eddie, you’re forty.” Richie shut the fridge door. “You need to learn how to cook. You at least need to own a few pots and fucking pans.”

“What am I supposed to do?” Eddie asked. “I just discovered food and I don’t have any self-control with money anymore.”

“I’m gonna go buy you groceries,” Richie said, grabbing his jacket from over the side of the couch. “The inside of your fridge is too divorced looking, man. I can’t let you live like this.”

“Oh my god, fuck you. Are you seriously going?”

“I’ll be quick,” Richie said, shucking his jacket on. He squeezed Eddie’s bare arm on the way past and, without warning, Eddie was thinking about how he hadn’t had sex in two years. “You just finish doing your handyman thing, Tim Allen.”

Eddie finished installing the shelf into the wall, then he set up his new inconveniently big television, made himself a profile on the Netflix account Bev had shared with him, watched half an episode of a miniseries adaptation of one of Bill’s books, and was honestly starting to grow concerned about Richie’s wellbeing by the time the buzzer went. A few minutes after Eddie let him inside, Richie came into the apartment with rows of packed bags hanging from his arms, holding a box that said 12 PIECE GOURMET NON-STICK on the side.

Eddie must have looked as outraged as he felt because Richie immediately started explaining himself.

“Okay, before you say anything,” he said, voice straining as he dumped the box onto the worktop, “this is like my housewarming gift for you, so you aren’t allowed to be annoyed by it. You just have to be a gracious friend and accept it.”

“Fuck you, no I don’t,” Eddie said. Richie started unpacking the bags. “It’s too much. Take it all back. Jesus. Is that a fucking ladle?”

Richie held it up, pointed to it. “Yeah, this is what a ladle looks like, Eddie. Want to see how spaghetti looks before it gets cooked?”

“You patronising fucker,” Eddie said, flustered. It was too fucking much. It was making him blush like a prepubescent teenager, watching Richie pull more and more out of the bags, the idea of him grabbing everything in sight in the kitchenware aisle like the thoughtful and considerate shithead that he was. “Take your gifts and get the hell out.”

Richie stopped what he was doing. “Are you really just going to stand there while I put all this stuff away? You live on the third fucking floor of a fucking walk-up, man, do you know how hard it was for someone as out of shape as I am to carry this amount of crap up that many flights of stairs?”

The hair on his forehead was damp with sweat and Eddie wanted to fuck him so badly it was actually tragic. He wordlessly grabbed a bag and started putting food into the fridge so he wasn’t looking at Richie anymore. After they were done arguing about where the ketchup should go and everything was put away, Richie rolled his sleeves up and started on dinner.

“I should shower before we eat,” Eddie said.

It hadn’t even taken that much physical exertion to fix the shelves to the wall, but still. His mother had enforced a rule that he scrub himself clean before they ate dinner together every night, and it hadn’t been something Myra had insisted on personally, but it was something she’d had appreciation for - like it was out of his ingrained sense of propriety and not because his mother had worked painstakingly for years to carve all of her anxieties about uncleanliness into his brain deeply enough that he got stress migraines if he noticed his fingernails were slightly too long.

Richie stopped cutting up an onion to give him a look up and down. “You’re fine, man,” he said, a little gruff sounding. “Besides, you have to be here for my cooking demonstration so I know for sure you can feed yourself. And so I don’t get bored.”

He narrated as he went like he was the host of a cooking show. Like all of his genuinely stellar impressions as a kid, it started out as a bit but quickly became a character he just decided to inhabit for a while, with strange little idiosyncrasies that didn’t always seem to be being played for laughs. Eddie felt such a deep sense of contentment watching Richie move around the tiny kitchen space, his back straight, chin jutting out slightly, talking in a clean, nasal English accent that didn’t drop at all while he explained the easiest way to cut up a butternut squash. It was affecting to see twelve-year-old Richie in him so clearly then, to see something that had always existed so strongly in him that it had survived in spite of everything.

“This part is imperative,” Richie said, closing his eyes on the last word. He picked up the table salt he’d bought and displayed it in his hands like a piece of fine jewellery. “The French call it le sel. All we’ll be needing is un peu de sel.”

Richie pinched some salt between his fingers and flicked it into the water for the pasta with a flourish, turned to Eddie and said, very seriously, looking more like this character than himself, “You know, before they found all that coke on me I was in charge of a Michelin star restaurant.”

Eddie laughed.

“And now you post cooking videos on YouTube,” he said, equally serious.

Some of Richie peeked through then, his eyes crinkling at the sides, pleased that Eddie was playing along. “Yes. Very few people actually watch them, sadly. I do much better with my PornHub content.”

“You had a different way to prepare butternut squash on there,” Eddie said.

Richie grinned at him. Eddie loved him so much he couldn’t believe Richie could so much as look at him without seeing it, felt like it was radiating out of his chest in neon light.

He kept thinking about Stan saying he’d known Richie was gay since high school, remembering how Richie used to reach across their lunch table to pull on one of Stan’s springy curls, and how he’d grin, bright and pleased, when Stan told him, never touch me again, without even looking up.

You couldn’t redirect that feeling, the kind of love you had for someone since before you even knew what to do with it. You couldn’t even get it to fucking budge, he thought, watching helplessly as Richie stirred the pasta sauce he’d made and told Eddie an elaborate backstory about growing up in the South England countryside.

They ate next to each other on the couch with Bill’s show as morbid background noise - fusilli with butternut squash, diced pancetta and spinach, sprinkled with parmesan.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Eddie said after the first bite, food half chewed in his mouth. “Why the hell are you good at cooking? Your freezer was full of Hot Pockets when I saw it.”

Richie shrugged, ducking his head. “I went through this whole thing after dropping out of college where I swore off, uh. Sex. With men.”

Eddie was hit with a barrage of unhelpful mental images of Richie having sex with men.

“Oh,” he choked.

“Yeah,” Richie said, drawing the word out. “So I got really into cooking instead. Like, really into it. I basically just directed all my twenty-year-old sexual energy into making crazy good enchiladas.” He shrugged. “I kind of fell away from it when my career took off. Partly because I was embarrassed and partly because I got told I had to lose weight.” He turned to Eddie and told him, big-eyed, “I was baking so much fucking bread.”

Eddie looked down at his pasta and stirred it around his plate. “I wish we’d been friends back then.”

It was painful to linger on all the time they’d spent separated from each other, but he sometimes he still wondered how all those years he’d spent feeling fundamentally unfriendable and alone could have gone differently if only there had been no clown, no crooked house on Neibolt Street, no Derry curse, nothing to keep them all from each other.

“Me too,” Richie said. “You'd have kept me right.”

Eddie stared at his food and clenched his jaw to keep it shut. The words were pushing up against the backs of his teeth; if he looked at Richie it would all spill out of him at once, and this moment would end and who knew what would come after it. He loved Richie way too fucking much to do anything about it, he realised, and decided at that moment that they weren’t going to talk about it, any of it - they weren’t going to talk about what happened at dinner with Stan or why they’d all been so quiet the rest of the night, or why Richie had called Stan up drunk and depressed in the first place, or why he’d chosen to drive six and a half hours in the middle of an emotional breakdown just to sit with him in his tiny birdshed. They absolutely were not going to fucking talk about how Eddie went straight to Richie’s apartment after leaving his wife and all but battered the building door. Eddie now thought it might be a good idea to never tell anyone about that, ever, and that his best plan of action was to let that information eventually die with him.

On the TV, the slow song at the credits of Bill’s show cut off abruptly when the next episode started.

“What were you like in college?” Richie asked.

“Probably exactly what you think I was like,” Eddie said.

Richie pressed his lips together into something that looked like a smile but wasn’t. “Man. When’d you get all cagey?”

Eddie didn’t know the answer to that. He didn’t know why it was so hard sometimes to talk to Richie about his life, harder than it was with Stan or Bev or Ben. “My life wasn’t that interesting until recently, Rich.”

“There’s twenty-five years of shit I don’t know about you,” Richie said. “I don’t care how boring it is. I’m interested, Eds.”

Eddie looked at the TV for a moment.

“I went to Boston to study statistics,” he said. “I went to one party the whole time I was there and ran out when someone offered me weed.”

It had been a boy Eddie could still picture in his head, because it was the kind of thing that pathetically stuck to you when you’d rarely ever felt a mutual, instantaneous attraction to someone else. The whole thing had terrified him, and he’d gone to his dorm room after and cried. He was not going to share this version of the story.

“I thought you went somewhere in Ohio,” Richie said, giving him that sidelong look he always did whenever they talked around the subject of Eddie’s mom.

Eddie shrugged. “She wanted me to. She told me to, actually. And I always assumed I’d just end up staying there. When I left I think it surprised me as much as it surprised her.”

“Jesus,” Richie said. “How could you think I wouldn’t want to know that?”

“I don’t know,” Eddie said. He swallowed and pushed on. “It scared the shit out of me when I left her, and I don’t - I don’t want you to think I’m still that person.”

Richie blinked. “I like that person.”

Eddie wanted to argue with him, to say, it’s not me, but it had been. Maybe it always would be, a little.

He told Richie that when he turned eighteen he took the money his dad had left for him and headed east, that it hadn’t even felt like a decision he was consciously making at the time but like he was working on autopilot. His brain had suddenly told him go and he’d followed it. He told Richie how she never forgave him afterwards, how he never forgave himself, how he spent four years travelling back and forth between her and school, hating her for making something as normal as a son leaving for college sound so cruel and simultaneously trying, desperately, to earn back what he’d lost by leaving, a softness to her voice when they spoke to each other that never returned. Not even when he moved back home after graduating in a peace offering gesture she hadn’t accepted; by then she knew he was capable of leaving, really leaving. When he got a job in New York, she acted like he’d accepted it just to hurt her.

He told Richie what he’d told Stan: he didn’t go to her funeral. He’d never even been to her grave. There was no closure there, nothing. All the things Eddie had imagined saying to her since he was eleven, the things he still imagined telling her sometimes, spitefully and apologetically all at once - he would never be able to say them.

“It wouldn’t have done any good if I’d said any of it, anyway,” Eddie said. “I’d just feel bad about it now.”

Richie looked at him for a long moment. Their plates were next to each other on the floor, only half-eaten. It was dark out of the window and they’d had Netflix on for so long it had stopped automatically playing episodes to ask if they were still watching it. Eddie didn’t think he’d spoken to someone for this long since he was a little boy - it was probably Richie back then, too.

“What would you have said?” Richie asked. He was sitting facing Eddie on the couch, head resting tilted against the back of it, toes tucked under Eddie’s thigh. “If you could do it without feeling bad.”

“I don’t know,” Eddie lied, picking at the side of the pillow in his arms.

“Eds,” Richie said.

Eddie stopped. The backs of his eyes were burning.

“I’d tell her I don’t forgive her, either,” he said.

Richie didn’t say anything. He didn’t tell Eddie that he hated her - Eddie already knew he did, but hearing it out loud would still have hurt, somehow. He just leaned forward and put an arm around Eddie’s neck to pull him into the warm curve of his shoulder, and Eddie let himself sink into it, closing his eyes as Richie rubbed his back, grasping at his shoulders.

They sat that way for a moment, maybe longer than Eddie should have let it happen for. If he could tell Richie the things he wanted to say to him, he’d say that down in the sewers, when everything else had faded and gone dim, Richie’s face above him had been the focal point of the whole world. He would tell him, the way I feel about you would have been the very last thing to leave me if I’d died there.

As it was, he kept on keeping it down, and reluctantly broke apart from him again.

It felt quieter afterwards, but not in a bad way. Richie helped him clean up the kitchen even though Eddie insisted otherwise, and then they half-watched the finale of Bill’s series while Richie came up with increasingly unlikely ways for the story to wrap up and Eddie snickered, pleasantly tired, not really caring about how shitty he might feel at work tomorrow.

He dozed through the last fifteen minutes of the episode and woke up to Richie leaning over him, saying his name.

“Eds, hey.” He was wearing his jacket and holding Eddie’s arm, his thumb moving back and forth across the line of his elbow. “I got a Lyft waiting downstairs.”

“You’re going?” Eddie yawned.

Richie smiled at him lopsidedly. “I am.”

He pulled Eddie up to standing and kissed the hair at the top of his head.

“Go to bed, man.” He let Eddie go and walked backwards to the door. “Those risks aren’t gonna analyze themselves.”

“Thanks for dinner.” Eddie rubbed at his eyes. “And for, you know.”

“I know,” Richie said. He’d stopped at the door to look back at Eddie. “Night, Eds.”

The minute he was out the door, the apartment sounded so quiet without him in it, like a different place altogether. Eddie stood over by the window for a while before closing the curtains and going to bed.

Chapter Text

They met up with each other more than once a week.

Eddie saw him every weekend and met up with him during working days for lunches that always toed the line of running too long. Sometimes Richie would wait outside his attorney’s office with his coffee order and a cross between a grimace and a smile on his face, his divorce-specific expression. He didn’t coddle Eddie if they went out to dinner when his anxiety was especially bad and he couldn’t eat anything containing meat or seasoning as a result, just gave Eddie a hard smile and cracked a joke to the waiter about him being chronically white.

Even though Richie’s apartment was bigger and indisputably nicer, they went to Eddie’s place more often than not as they made their way through the catalogue of 80s cartoons they’d been obsessed with as kids on the too-big TV there. They would talk over the television until they checked out of what was happening on the screen altogether and Richie would stay later than either of them intended, two of them making themselves fit onto the couch together comfortably, limbs overlapping a little, a private space where Eddie didn’t feel bad for wanting to touch him.

He could have moved somewhere else, somewhere with more space. Bev seemed surprised he was still there whenever they spoke, but her friend Kay who owned the place had given him free reign to keep redecorating and he liked having something practical to work on. It made sense to him in such a straightforward, comforting way.

Richie came over to help paint one weekend. All he really did was wail along to one of Ben’s playlists, enthusiastically out of tune, and get ivory stains all over himself, but afterwards he cooked them dinner barefoot in the kitchen after ruining his socks with paint. Eddie liked seeing him like that too much to act convincingly annoyed about having to go over pretty much every section Richie had painted a second time.

He looked at Richie over his shoulder again. “Watch what you’re doing in there. I don’t know how, but your ass is covered in paint.”

“I’m not going to rub my ass all over your refurbished cabinets, Eds,” Richie assured him.

Before they ate he put on a pair of Eddie’s pyjama pants to keep from marking the couch, ones with a forgiving waistband that didn’t manage to reach his ankles, even though Eddie still had the pair he’d borrowed from Richie months ago washed and neatly folded in his bottom drawer. He never took them out but he liked seeing them in there, not his size or style at all. He had no real intentions of giving them back. He felt deeply pathetic about the whole thing if he thought about it for too long.

They had a few beers that night because it felt like the thing to do after spending a Sunday on home improvement but Richie switched to water after two.

“I’m trying to learn moderation,” he told Eddie. “My therapist says I don’t have any. He said I need to stop making banana bread.” He shrugged. “Maybe he’s right. I don’t even eat it, I just bake it compulsively.”

Eddie already knew this because Richie had given him so many loaves in the past few weeks that he’d had to start meeting his neighbours so he could pawn them off on other people. They’d all been impressed with his non-existent baking skills.

“It’s kind of like you with the apartment,” Richie said, looking around.

“You think I’m doing compulsive DIY?”

“I think we’re both a little obsessive,” Richie said.

He took a long drink of his water and Eddie wondered uneasily if he knew somehow, if he’d picked up on the way Eddie stared at his hands while he diced onions earlier that night. Maybe this wasn’t about him wanting to fix up the shitty laminate worktop in the kitchen; maybe it was about how they’d already planned to see each other three times over the next week, about how even when they weren’t with each other they were in near constant communication.

“I don’t mean to be,” Eddie said.

Instead of saying anything more about it Richie just said, “When are you going to start talking to someone, Eds?”

Eddie picked at the label on his bottle. “Has Stan been talking to you?”

Stan pushed Eddie into going to therapy on every phone call and over every text exchange. They really were like brothers - nobody could put so much effort into pestering you if it wasn’t coming from a place of love and genuine concern - but it had sounded so much easier when they’d first talked about it, in the abstract. When Eddie thought about sitting down with someone and actually doing it, actually giving all the weird, unspeakably embarrassing context for why he was the way he was and then having a stranger lay it all out and put it together, like he was an ugly puzzle that needed solved, he couldn’t stand it. He just couldn’t. He didn’t know how the others managed it.

“Uh, no.” Richie looked down. “We aren’t really talking right now.”

Eddie thought of Richie in the Japanese restaurant, head bowed, scowling at himself, and felt his chest ache. “You aren’t?”

“He told me we shouldn’t be...” Richie’s eyes flicked to Eddie’s and he cut off, looking away again, shoulders jerking in a shrug. “It’s fine. You remember what we were like in high school. We have some big blowout, take a couple weeks to calm down, and everything’s good again.” The look on Eddie’s face made him snort. “It used to freak you out back then, too. Don’t worry. It’s no big deal.”

It was, Eddie thought, because he knew why it had happened even if Richie wouldn’t tell him explicitly: they weren’t talking because Richie’s feelings for Stan complicated things too much. That’s what it came down to, and to Eddie that was terrifying. If he told Richie how he felt, it would reshape their friendship altogether. It would break his heart in ways he didn’t think anything could a few months ago.

He took a drink.

“I’m sorry, Rich,” he said.

Richie looked at him warily. “What are you sorry about?”

Eddie shrugged. He was sorry about what was happening between Richie and Stan and sorry that the same awkward, painful thing was happening between them, but he had to keep acting like he didn't know either situation was going on.

Richie’s shoulders were up by his ears. “Did he say something to you about me?”

“No,” Eddie said, quickly. He could see how badly Richie wanted to stop talking about this and added, lighter, “All we talk about now is Thanksgiving. Mike’s coming now, too.”

Richie’s posture softened slightly. “You’re going to have to pretend to be interested in so many bad holiday photos.”

“You’re so fucking jealous I get to see Mike and you have to go back to Maine,” Eddie said.

“Oh, fuck you.” Richie dropped back onto the couch, head lolling. “Maybe this year I can convince my parents to move literally anywhere else. My mom wants me home for the whole fucking week before.”

“What the hell are you going to do in Farmingdale for a week?”

“I dunno. Whatever it is all the old white people down there do. And I, uh.” Richie cleared his throat, uncertain looking, his mouth a slanted line. “I was thinking about writing some stuff while I’m there.”

Eddie turned to him, surprised. “You should.”

“Yeah.” Richie shrugged. “Maybe it turns out that I suck at being a comedian.”

“You did suck at it,” Eddie reminded him, and Richie laughed. “Maybe it turns out you’re actually good at it. I know at least five people who laugh at the shit you say, and they aren’t addicted to porn like your last fanbase was.”

“I’ll miss being the patron saint of masturbation addicts. They were really easy to entertain, before I had to block them all on Twitter.”

Eddie knew Richie checked his social media from time to time. Last week he’d showed Eddie the feed of weird tweets he got on a daily basis over coffee, his thumbs scrolling rapidly but never hitting an end point, and then he’d had to wrestle the phone out of Eddie’s hands after Eddie became enraged and started typing out an all-caps response to someone who said, ‘@tozier come back man nobody care that ur gay lol stop taking career advice from ur hairline lol’

“You go full Scrappy Doo whenever anyone talks shit about me,” Richie had said, grinning, tucking his phone away, and then Eddie had gone off on him for making such an unflattering comparison and Richie had just talked over him, working his fists, saying, let me at ‘em, let me at ‘em.

“Now you can have fans who are decent human beings,” Eddie assured him. “Who masturbate a normal amount.”

Richie’s left eye scrunched up when he smiled. “Can’t ask for more than that.”

He stayed over too late again. They sat on the fire escape to get away from the paint smell and held cups of tea to keep their hands from getting cold, the same brand Myra used to buy. Eddie had gotten used to the smell of it over the years.

“You know, I kind of love this little clusterfuck,” Richie said, gesturing his head back at the apartment.

There was a streak of paint across his cheekbone. Eddie felt the urge to kiss him there like a bruise spreading up his chest, into his throat.

He couldn’t take his eyes off it. “I kind of do, too,” he said.

-

Eddie took the day before Thanksgiving off so he could go to a meeting with he and Myra’s attorneys and make an evening flight to Vermont.

It would be his first time seeing her since he’d left the house. They’d spoken about the divorce exclusively through their lawyers. Even when he’d gone back to the apartment to pick up the things that she’d wanted rid of they’d scheduled it so they didn’t have to see each other in the process, which had taken a lot of awkward negotiating over text messages to time right.

Before the meeting he took one of the prescription valium he had left over. Bev told him he didn’t want to take any more than that in case it made him too tired to think straight when they were talking about important stuff like his house and his finances; Eddie tried to argue that he wanted to be as unconscious as he could get away with for this meeting, but she wasn’t hearing it.

He sat outside the courthouse office forty minutes early with a hand over his face. “I fucked up her whole life by marrying her.”

“You won’t get anywhere thinking like that,” Bev told him. There was slow electronic music in the background - it was 9am in California, and she would just be sitting down in her studio with one of the smoothies Ben made them every morning. Normally when she called at this time he’d be in his office pretending to do work but really going through she and Ben’s Pinterest boards for the wedding. “All you can do is get through the rest of this, give her a fair share, and move on. You didn’t know it wasn’t going to work out, Eds.”

He dropped his hand, looking around as well-dressed people darted past, folders in hand, without paying him so much as a glance. “I think I did,” he said, quietly. “I mean, I - I knew something.”

“Do you... are you talking about Derry?” Bev asked.

“No,” he said, hands curling on his knees. “No, not really.”

There was a pause on the line.

“I love you,” Bev said.

Eddie closed his eyes. He missed her so fucking much. “Yeah. I love you too.”

“It’s not worth punishing yourself over, Eds,” she said. “That kind of guilt, it’s worthless.”

After the call ended he sat there for another five minutes, perfectly still and thrumming with anxiety, then he looked up and caught eyes with his wife.

“Myra,” he said, dumbly.

She looked different to him, but he couldn’t tell how much of it was real and how much of it was imagined. Her hair was shorter and blonder and she’d had her nails painted a loud orange instead of the usual nude shade, and there was no ring on her finger anymore. It was strange to see her now, the person he’d spent the last five years of his life with.

She sat down at the far end of the bench seat he was on and said nothing, and Eddie desperately wished he’d taken another fucking valium when he had the chance. As if on cue, people filtered out of the hallway, leaving the two of them in silence.

He glanced at his watch in the corner of his eye. They still had fifteen minutes. His lawyer probably wouldn’t show up for another ten. Being religiously early was something he and Myra had always had in common and had always resented others for not practicing.

Eddie couldn’t hold it in, even though his lawyer and Bev and Richie had told him over and over again not to speak to her outside of the meetings. It rose up his throat like acid reflux.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Myra was quiet for long enough that Eddie thought she wasn’t going to say anything to him at all, and then he thought about his mom, and then he thought about how he really did need to go to therapy, and then Myra cut through his thoughts by asking, “Did you always know?”

Eddie turned to her. She kept looking at the mural in front of them.

“I don’t - I’m not sure,” he said. “A little. Sometimes. But I would tell myself... I really thought I could make it stop being true.”

The relief that came with dating Myra, marrying Myra, had never been able to reconcile with the deep feeling of grief that had existed alongside it.

He looked down at his shoes. An old pair. He hadn’t wanted her to see the loafers. “I shouldn’t have gotten you caught up in it.”

“I hate that you did,” she said, shaking her head. Her hands were clasped tightly in her lap. “I hate it, Eddie. I didn’t know I could be this angry at you.” She turned, as if sensing what he was about to say, and said, “Don’t apologize. That’s not what I’m saying this for.”

“Okay,” he said.

They sat in silence for another long moment, then she said, “I’ve been seeing a therapist,” and it was so unbelievable to hear from her, of all people, that he shot around to stare at her.

She smoothed a crease from the skirt of her dress. “She said I shouldn’t have told you not to get help when I knew you needed it, so - I’m sorry for that.”

Eddie could hear the telltale sound of his attorney’s heels clicking from the other side of the hallway. He kept looking at her, stunned.

“Okay,” he said again. “You - okay.”

She nodded.

During the meeting they agreed to sell the apartment: Myra was going to move to Maryland to be with her sister, and every month Eddie was going to pay her more money than he was currently spending on both their places, maybe for the rest of his life. While their attorneys hashed out the last few details of the agreement, he stared at his hands on the table in front of him and thought about the last five years, the last twenty-seven, compared them all to the sudden reality of his new life.

When it was over he went downstairs to sit in the courthouse cafeteria, dazed by it.

hope it went ok today, Richie had messaged him. call me with all the boring details

Then, two minutes after that, check this out

He’d sent a photo of himself posing with Springsteen vinyl they used to listen to together in his bedroom, faux-serious, handsome in that way he never seemed to know about. Eddie saved it.

-

He went home before his flight to sort through the essentials he would never in a million years forget but always worried he somehow had. Richie kept him company on speaker phone.

“I thought she’d be way fucking angrier,” Richie said, his voice tinny on the line, “but I guess all my knowledge about divorce comes from movies and hearing Bill’s parents scream at each other in high school.”

“Oh, no, she was angry.” Eddie added, quieter, “I think she was just more humiliated than anything else.”

“Because you left?”

He stopped in the middle of zipping up his bag. His phone was lying on the coffee table and on the screen, under Richie’s name, the seconds kept ticking away. They were coming up on half an hour already.

He tested it out in his head. No, because I’m gay.

He’d thought about telling Richie a dozen times before, but that part of his brain that worked tirelessly to warn him about every possible consequence for his actions always won out. It would change things if Richie knew, because then he could figure Eddie out - and he could do it easily, because Eddie didn’t make it very hard.

And then what would happen? Things couldn’t stay the same after you found out one of your best friends was in love with you. Richie and Stan still weren’t talking, and Richie could make an awkward joke out of it sometimes but Eddie didn’t have a fucking clue how. If he told Richie the truth, if he said I left her because of my feelings for you, Richie would apologise for not feeling the same way, and then they would have to stop seeing each other like this. He wouldn’t call Eddie after watching a bad movie to tell him about the plot in rambling detail while Eddie did work on the apartment, and he wouldn’t he wouldn’t come over every other night and whistle in the kitchen while he cooked Eddie dinner.

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “I guess.” He swiped the zipper the rest of the way across and tried to make himself sound normal. “I gotta go, man.”

“Do you? Oh, yeah, right. You’re anal as fuck about flight times. Man, you’d hate flying with me.”

“Are you the guy who runs to the gate two minutes before it closes?” Eddie said, pulling his coat on. “Because Rich, I can’t fucking stand that guy.”

“Sometimes I am that guy, yeah. Hey, maybe we were on a flight together before. Maybe you gave me a dirty look and whispered abuse at me when I boarded late.”

They did this sometimes, talked about all the hypothetical encounters they might not have known they’d had. Even when it was funny it was never really a joke.

“That’s a nice thought,” Eddie said.

“Yeah, it is, isn’t it?” He heard the fuzzy sound of Richie huffing a laugh. “Have a safe flight, Eds. Drink some overpriced sky booze to celebrate.”

“Bye, Rich,” Eddie said, and hung up.

He thought about it as he was waiting at the gate later, watching the planes navigating the taxiway, his bag slung over his shoulder and suitcase handle in hand, stock-still.

-

It’d been four months since he said goodbye to Mike in Derry, in the immediate aftermath of what Eddie considered to be at least the second most fucked up thing they’d ever been through together. There was something about how normal he looked standing around the arrivals gate, sporting a new beard and a baseball cap, that made Eddie need to stop in the middle of the airport and just look at him for a moment.

When Mike spotted him he lit up and hurried over, wheeling two suitcases after him.

“Hi,” he said, grinning, and hugged Eddie so enthusiastically that his feet came off the ground.

Eddie didn’t really even mind. It wasn’t offensive when Mike made him aware of how short he was the way it was with Richie or a high-heeled Bev.

He patted Mike’s back. “How you doing, Mike? You been here long?”

“About an hour.” Mike let him go again and patted the messenger bag slung over his shoulder. “I had time to look over some of Bill’s pages.”

Mike was helping Bill write a thinly disguised memoir about growing up in Derry. They’d all given Bill their blessing to go ahead with it; Eddie had told him straight-up he wasn’t going to read any of the clown shit, because fuck that. Mike was probably the only one out of them who would be able to stomach the whole thing page-for-page, anyway.

“Am I in it yet?” Eddie asked.

“Yeah.”

He scowled. “Am I in it a lot?”

“Well, yeah,” Mike said, blinking. “You’re kind of a key player, Eddie.”

“Oh, Christ. Oh, fuck. Why would you tell me that?”

“Why did you ask?”

“I don’t know. Fuck.” Eddie rubbed his forehead. “What’s my name in it?”

Mike pressed his lips together like he was considering how to answer that. “Frederick.”

“Frederick,” Eddie repeated, and then it slowly started to dawn on him. “Frederick, as in...”

“As in...” Mike looked over at a Dunkin’ Donuts stand. “Freddie.”

Eddie stared.

Mike touched his arm and said, “I know.”

On the cab ride to Stan’s, Eddie sent Bill thirteen furious messages and Mike showed him photos on the Nikon Ben and Bev had gotten him before he went on his trip, most of them not quite in focus. He told Eddie about Italy, France, the day he'd spent in Belgium, and about getting high on magic mushrooms in a public park in Amsterdam.

“Why in god’s name would you do that,” Eddie said, staring at him.

“It was fun.” Mike shrugged, unfazed. “Before that I’d only ever done psychedelics to see how to kill the clown. Or for Native-American rituals. That kind of thing.”

The cab driver adjusted the rearview mirror to give them a suspicious look. Eddie gave him a ‘mind your own fucking business’ kind of look.

The car slowed when they reached Stan’s street. Eddie could spot his house up ahead, exactly how Richie had described it - a real grown up’s house. Two storeys, green with white accents, a small porch out front and an idyllic, well tended row of flowers planted in front of it. It occurred to Eddie as the car pulled up that the life he’d been living before Derry was probably the exact opposite of Stan’s.

He paid for the ride before Mike could even reach for his wallet, and as they were unloading their luggage from the cab Stan came out of the house in a brightly coloured floral apron and jogged over to help.

“No more crutches?” Mike asked, pulling one of his suitcases along the path to the house.

“No,” Stan said, dragging the other one. “Just a permanently fucked up looking shin.”

Eddie poked the inside of his scarred cheek with his tongue. “That must be so hard for you.”

Stan smiled, rolling his eyes, and pretended to try tripping him up.

-

Patty was in the middle of prep-work for tomorrow's dinner when Stan led them into the kitchen, her hair tied back, shirt sleeves rolled up, in an apron that matched Stan’s. She stopped what she was doing when she saw them there and broke into a smile.

She gestured to them with a wooden spoon. “Mike.” Then she pointed it at Eddie and said, unexpectedly, “Eds,” which Stan had never called him in their lives.

“She picked that up from Richie,” Stan explained.

Mike swept across the room to see her with the kind of warmth he had with all of the Losers and gave her a hug. Eddie followed his lead and tried not to show how self-conscious he was about meeting a woman who he knew had definitely overheard him call her husband ‘shitbird’ on multiple occasions.

“It’s funny,” she said, looking at him from arm's length after his awkward attempt at a hug. “Finally getting to meet you guys.”

Eddie asked, alarmed, “Bad funny?”

“No, it’s nice. I feel like I can see bits of you all in each other.”

They spent a while catching up. Stan and Patty worked on food prep while Eddie and Mike sat at the breakfast bar eating the stew Stan had reheated for them, and there was a familial ease to being around each other that Eddie had missed since leaving Derry - this was what it must feel like to see your siblings, he thought. After he told them about the divorce settlement, Stan pulled a bottle of wine out of the fridge to celebrate and told Eddie, blank-faced and serious, “I’m extremely proud of you.”

Stan took Mike outside to show him the birdhouse before it got too dark outside. Patty slipped the apron her husband had left behind over Eddie’s head and tied it at the back for him and then put him to work helping her make the pie for tomorrow. Eddie found it refreshingly easy to follow a recipe where the instructions were limited to cutting a million pecans into halves.

“I wanted to say thanks,” he said. “For, um. Having me.”

She shook her head. Without looking away from where she was rolling out the pastry, she said, “We wanted you here. I like it, having a busy house.”

“It must be a little weird. All these people suddenly just... showing up.”

“I think meeting Richie first prepared me for the rest of you,” she said, mouth quirking.

Eddie snorted. “That’s the right way to do it, I guess. Straight into the deep-end.”

“It’s a shame he couldn’t come. He really filled the whole place.”

He had a way of doing that everywhere he went, Eddie thought. “I’m surprised he and Stan didn’t drive each other crazy.”

“They did, a little,” Patty said. “In a good way.”

Eddie hummed in response, glancing at her. He wondered if she knew Richie was in love with her husband and was just too polite to make any indication of it.

He watched as she lay the pastry out over the baking tin, carefully fitting it to the sides. He was starting to suspect he did not have the patience to bake or cook or do jack shit with food.

“Stan says you two see a lot of each other these days,” she said. “You and Richie.”

Eddie went back to chopping pecans. “Yeah, I guess so,” he said, even though he didn’t have to guess shit.

-

After Patty turned in and a day’s worth of travelling caught up to Mike, he and Stan sat up late with each other. Together, they finished the bottle of wine from earlier and started on a bottle of red that was supposed to be saved for tomorrow.

“Richie hates red wine,” Eddie said after his first sip. He snorted. “It’s the one food thing he can’t be a pretentious dick about.”

Stan looked at him for a moment. He hadn’t taken a drink yet.

“Has he talked to you about it?” he said.

Eddie took another drink before asking, “About what?”

“About why he isn’t speaking to me.”

“No.” It wasn’t a lie, was it? Even if Eddie knew the reason well enough for it to make him actually ache. “He didn’t say anything about it.”

Under his breath, Stan muttered, “Of course not.” He took his glasses off and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I told him something he didn’t want to hear, but it’s not -” He looked defensive in a way he’d never had to be with Eddie and that, as far as he was concerned, he didn’t have to be now, either. “I'm not trying to be a dick. I’m just trying to look out for him.”

“I know that,” Eddie said, quietly.

“And you, too,” Stan added, giving Eddie a sideways look.

He was talking about therapy again. The problem with going to therapy was that Eddie knew exactly what a therapist would tell him - that he was still repressed, still complacent, still not brave enough. He had no intentions of moving out of the apartment Bev had intended for him to stay in while he looked for a real place, even though he’d finished the work on the kitchen and even though he still had a dozen boxes arranged in the corner by the window that he would never be able to unpack because there was no space for anything else in there. It was supposed to be a midpoint between the apartment with Myra and something better, realer, but Eddie had gotten comfortable there. That wasn’t new for him. A therapist would see that - you get comfortable, Eddie, so you just stay still.

He’d changed in some ways. He let himself eat and he let himself run, but there were areas of his brain he gave himself restricted access to, thoughts he knew would eventually need dealt with that he couldn’t never bring himself to face, and a therapist would look him in the eye and describe those parts to him in agonising detail. A therapist would ask him about his mother, then about Myra, then make the humiliating connections between the two. A therapist would tell him to go to an actual cooking class and ask him if he really liked his job. A therapist would ask him why he hadn’t come out to his friends yet. A therapist would tell him it wasn’t healthy to see Richie so much, not if he knew Richie didn’t feel the same way about him as he did.

Eddie felt himself going from tipsy to morose, nauseated by the switch. He looked down.

“I know,” he said again.

They didn’t stay up for much longer after that. Eddie crept into the guest room and lay down on air mattress at the foot of the bed Mike had gotten to sleep in because he was six foot way too many fucking inches. He lay there for a while, too in his head to sleep, and then turned onto his side and closed his eyes tightly.

-

Over dinner the next day, Mike told them that it was his first Thanksgiving meal since his grandfather died ten years ago, and Eddie felt such an intense wave of sadness at the idea of him being so alone for so long that he stood half out of his chair and reached over the turkey, chair screeching across the floorboards, to touch his hand.

Mike laughed, more like he was touched by the gesture than like he found it funny. He squeezed Eddie’s fingers. “No, it’s okay. I don’t really agree with it as a holiday. I just like having an excuse to see you guys.” He shrugged. “I didn’t have much to be thankful about before.”

Eddie sat back down. “I don’t think I really did, either.”

He had a family now, split across the country in all different directions, who were always trying to find reasons for him to come stay with them. Mike was trying to convince him to take a break from work and come travelling with him at the start of the new year, and Ben, Bev and Bill wanted everyone to come to California for Christmas next month. A few months after that they’d all be gathered there again for the wedding, too. Eddie was a million times more excited for that than he had been for his own wedding.

After dinner he and Mike paged through the photo albums from the living room bookcase, pleasantly half-cut, and came face to face with 23-year-old Stanley Uris’s awful chinbeard and fuck-you-dad buzz cut.

Eddie yanked the album over for closer inspection. “Oh my god.”

“Here we fucking go,” Stan said.

Eddie looked up at him with a shit-eating spreading over his face. “You look like such an obnoxious asshole.”

“Aw, it’s not that bad,” Mike said. The look of genuine delight on his face said otherwise, along with the fact he immediately took a picture with his phone and sent it into the group chat.

tell me he took this pic at a limp bizkit concert and not his fucking wedding, Richie replied. Bill sent in five crying laughing emojis. Bev said, Oh. Well. Patty looks great here lol.

Patty read from over Stan’s shoulder. “Tell Bev thanks,” she said, squeezing his arm.

Stan did as he was told, then he turned his phone onto its screen and rubbed his temple. “This is what I get for inviting you guys into my home.”

Eddie snorted. He dug into his pocket and took his wallet out, pulling his driver’s license from the front compartment with the photo that, according to Richie, looked like a mugshot for a depressed felon.

“Here.” He handed it over to Stan. “This'll make you feel better.”

“Wow.” Stan’s face scrunched up. “What the hell happened to you that day?”

When he brought it closer, fingers shifting, another card slid out from behind the license. He looked at it briefly, frowned and did a double-take, then he took it out to read it properly.

“Oh,” Eddie said. “That’s just a dumb thing Richie did.”

It was a business card Richie had defaced: EDDIE ASSBAK RISKS ANAL. Stan’s eyes flicked to Eddie’s over his glasses.

He held up the card between his crossed fingers, pointed at it. “You keep this with your driver’s license?”

Eddie didn’t know what to say to that, because obviously he did. Heat crawled up the back of his neck. He shrugged.

Stan gave Patty a funny look.

“Huh,” he said, and he handed the cards back over.

Two glasses of wine later when she asked if he’d been dating at all, Eddie stained his shirt fumbling over it and said, “No, I - I don’t, I’m not - no. No,” and then he felt so weird for the rest of the night that he ended up dropping face-first onto the bed in the guest room at 11PM. He lay there, listening to the softened sound of their voices through the wall, feeling that weight in his chest he was tired of carrying around everywhere he went.

Being together in person like this, confronted by how well his friends knew him and loved him, made it so much harder to justify not telling them he was gay. He still made the same old excuses to himself: that it didn’t feel like the right time, that he didn’t want them to make assumptions about his relationships after they knew, that the intention had always been to tell Richie first.

He thought about the conversation he’d had with Stan the night before. How instead of pushing himself he kept relenting, over and over, because it felt safer to say nothing. To stay perfectly still.

He turned onto his back, looking blankly up at the ceiling. He took his phone out his pocket.

Hey, are you still Thanksgiving-ing over there?

Richie answered two minutes later. hell no my parents were in bed by 930

Eddie breathed in and out through his teeth and called him.

“Hey, Eds.” Richie’s voice was scratchy the way it got after he’d had a drink or two. The texture of it made warmth curl at the base of Eddie’s spine.

He tried to keep his voice down. “Hey. Are you busy?”

“Not really. I’m just sitting on my laptop wondering how Bill shits out thousand page books all the time.” Richie tapped a loud staccato beat out on his keyboard. “Like, what the fuck is wrong with him?”

“God, don’t mention Bill to me right now. I might go to California after this and fucking kill him.”

“What did the big man do?”

“I’m not telling you, you’ll love it. How’s the writing going?”

“Uh, good?” Richie answered, his voice going up. “Maybe. I can’t be sure. It started off with me watching like a million Chris Farley SNL sketches and googling ‘how to write stand-up’, but then I managed to get around to the writing words part, so. I’ve already accomplished more than I expected.”

“Good for you.”

“You always sound so sarcastic whenever you’re trying to be sincere.”

“I know,” Eddie said, frowning. “I can’t fucking help it.”

Richie snorted. “I didn’t expect you to call, man. Mike’s been sending some drunk-ass photos in. Everything good there?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I just wanted to talk to you.”

“Oh,” Richie said, and then, a little stilted, “Well. That’s okay, then.”

Eddie rubbed his palm across the lines of his forehead. He wouldn’t be doing this if not for the wine, but knowing that only made him want to do it all the more - quick, before it wore off and this conversation started looking too scary to him again.

He closed his eyes. “I’m gay.”

He heard laughter from next door as he counted the seconds before Richie replied - only three, but they seemed to stretch on and on.

“I didn’t know that,” Richie said, quietly.

Eddie left no pauses between his words, all of them racing to fall out of his mouth. “I haven’t really told anyone except Myra and my lawyer. And Bev knows, but that wasn't - it was more of an implied thing.”

“Yeah, she always works that kind of shit out.” Then Richie said, softly, “Don’t be nervous, Eds. It’s just me you’re talking to.”

“I can’t help it,” Eddie admitted, pressing his fist into the centre of his forehead.

“It gets easier to talk about.” Richie’s voice was gentle, how he sounded when they stayed up so late they found themselves having serious conversations. There was an intimacy to it Eddie could barely stand. “Want me to come out to you now?”

It was so stupid Eddie laughed, and that made Richie laugh too. He felt like he was at his most obvious when Richie made him laugh, like his chest was opening wide, everything inside on display for him. It was always disarming.

“Yeah,” he said. “Please do.”

“Okay.” Richie paused for dramatic effect and said, “Eddie, I’m gay.”

Eddie's stomach twisted, not unpleasantly. “I was gonna tell you sooner.” By ‘sooner’ he meant ‘immediately after I left my wife’, but Richie didn’t need to know that. He swallowed. “It felt weird. Nobody knowing.”

“How does it feel now?”

“Better,” Eddie said, honestly.

“Good. Thanks for telling me, Eds. It - it means a lot to me. That you called.”

“Yeah.” Eddie swallowed, throat dry. “Hey, I’m actually kind of tired. I just wanted to - before I -”

Richie interrupted his stumbling. “That’s okay. I get it.”

“Thanks. Goodnight, Rich.”

“Wait.” Richie cut in just before Eddie could hang up. “Wait, before you go - you’re leaving on Saturday, right?

Eddie blinked at his phone. “Yes?”

“Cool. Okay. Cool. Goodnight, Eds.”

“Night, Rich.”

Eddie lay in silence for a few moments. He turned to the empty space next to him on the bed next to him, dramatic from the wine, and thought of Richie staying in this room months ago, then he scoffed at himself, got up, and deposited himself onto the air bed for the night.

-

He woke up the next day mildly hungover. They were supposed to walk into town to get breakfast this morning, which had sounded nice when they planned it yesterday, and which sounded a lot less nice now, when all Eddie wanted was to cancel his alarm, roll over, and sleep for another fifteen minutes.

He sat up, scrubbing a hand over his face, and opened his eyes to find Mike standing at the window in their room, peering out through the curtain.

He tilted his head at him. “The fuck are you doing?”

Mike gave him a sleepy look of surprise over his shoulder.

“Richie’s here,” he said.

“What?” Eddie shot forward. “Richie’s -”

He sprang up to his feet, a stupid thing to do on an air bed, and all but ran over to where Mike was. They looked out the sliver of exposed window together.

Richie was there. His car was parked out front, in need of a good wash, as always. Out on the yard he was standing with arms wrapped around his chest, in the middle of a conversation with Stan that looked intense.

Eddie stepped back like he’d been burned.

Richie was here to talk to Stan. Eddie had no right to feel as dejected by that as he did; it was a good thing. They hadn’t spoken in weeks.

“How long have they been out there?” Eddie asked.

Mike shrugged, stretching, and pulled the curtain shut again. “I got up just before you did.”

Eddie went to the bathroom and scrubbed too hard at his face and then his teeth. His reflection in the mirror looked wired and insane and like someone had stabbed it in the face four months ago.

“Stop it,” he told himself.

When he stepped into the kitchen, Richie and Patty were sitting at the breakfast bar with cups of coffee, Mike was standing by the fridge eating leftover mashed potatoes straight out of the dish, and Stan was spooning more grounds into the french press. It didn’t even seem that awkward, all things considered.

Richie straightened when he walked in, his smile crowding to one side of his face. “Eds. Hi.”

“Richie’s here,” Stan said, gesturing over his shoulder with his thumb.

“I see that.”

“I just thought it was time to drop in unexpectedly again,” Richie said, looking at Eddie, who shifted from foot to foot and smiled awkwardly.

Stan looked between them.

“It’s not that unexpected,” he said.

He poured more coffee for himself and Eddie and ended up relenting and cutting Richie a slice of cold pie from yesterday after Richie very annoyingly and persistently complained about how hungry he was.

When he finished his coffee he touched Patty’s hand over the counter. “You ready to go, baby?”

Patty linked their fingers together loosely and nodded. Eddie watched Richie in the corner of his eye for some reaction and saw nothing except what looked like a deep appreciation for the pie he was eating.

“Mike, you good to go?” Stan asked.

“Whenever you are.”

“Hey.” Richie touched his arm over the worktop and Eddie jerked, agitated by the contact. “Wanna stay behind with me? I drove like two hours to get here, I’m done with the outside world for today.”

Eddie had actually been looking forward to this walk: Stan was going to show them all an eagle’s nest from a safe proximity and then take them to a coffee place that did nice cannolis. If it wasn’t for the nervous curl of Richie’s mouth he would have told him to shove that excuse up his ass and come with them.

“Sure,” he said. “Okay.”

He stayed put while the others put on their coats and headed for the door. On his way out, Stan gave Eddie a look he couldn’t read, one that made his stomach clench. Then it was just he and Richie, alone in the house.

“Christ, this is good,” Richie said, mouth full.

“I know. I helped make it.”

Richie’s eyebrows went up. “You did?”

There was syrup on the corner of his lip. Eddie didn’t mention it to him, just privately enjoyed how stupid he looked.

“What’s with the fucking tone of surprise?”

“It’s, like, edible.” Richie wiped his mouth on his jacket sleeve like a kid would. “I didn’t know you had it in you.”

“That was low-effort, even for you,” Eddie said. Richie just snickered. “How was your parents’?”

“Nice. Boring.” Richie shrugged. “I love them, I just missed you guys.”

“We missed you here, too.”

Richie smiled at him like maybe he knew what that really meant.

“You get more writing done?” Eddie asked, trying to keep his hands from fidgeting.

“Yeah, actually. It’s not total shit, I don’t think.”

“That’s good.”

“I don’t even know how much of it I’ll end up using. It helps, writing about everything.” Richie tapped his fork against the edge of the plate and then stopped, pushing it away. “I thought maybe that was just some bullshit Bill and my therapist kept telling me.”

“You think you’ll be okay?” Eddie asked, leaning forward on his elbows. “Going up and talking about it?”

“I don't know. Some of it. I don't know about all of it.” His bottom lip disappeared into his mouth, reappearing with teeth marks dug into it like little tracks in the skin. “I was going to add some jokes about being pathetically in love with my best friend, but maybe that’s overkill.” He looked at Eddie, throat working. “What - what do you think?“

They were talking about it. It was real. Eddie dug his nails into his palms to try and distract from the concentrated ache happening in his chest.

“If you’re ready to make jokes about it,” he said, and couldn’t believe his voice managed to carry it.

Richie’s eyes flicked down to his half-eaten pie, mouth curling into a sad smile. “You knew?”

He was holding the fork at an awkwardly straight angle and his shoulders had risen the way they did when Eddie knew he didn’t want to be seen. I can love you enough to make up for what he can’t give you, Eddie thought. Really.

“I never knew how to bring it up to you,” he admitted, voice low. “Or if I should.”

Richie nodded slowly. His top lip pulled into his mouth. “When did you...”

Eddie could remember with painful clarity, like pressing on a bruise - the three of them sitting in the Japanese restaurant while they were waiting for the check, Richie with his head bent low, embarrassed.

“When you came back to New York,” he said.

Richie winced, his fork clattering to the plate. “Sorry if I was obvious about it.” He shook his head and and pressed his knuckles to his mouth. “This is so fucking awkward of me, man. I’m sorry.”

“Hey, you don’t have to... Rich, look at me. It’s okay. I get it. I’ve been there. You don’t have to be sorry.”

“I shouldn’t have said anything. I just thought - shit.” Richie quickly wiped at his eyes with the bottom of his shirt and then huffed a laugh, eyebrows drawn. “I wish I didn’t fucking feel like this anymore.”

When he cried Eddie felt wild inside, agitated and helpless with it, like he would do anything, anything for him to feel better. Maybe it would ease the tension to tell him - you’re madly in love with Stan and I’m madly in love with you, isn’t that funny? You can put that in your set, too. But he couldn’t. It would only make Richie feel worse, having to tell Eddie no after.

Eddie reached for him but Richie drew back first, shaking his head. His lips were tightly pressed, teeth working them against each other.

“I think - I think we should probably stop seeing each other so much,” he said. “When we get back.”

The tiles shifted nauseatingly under Eddie’s feet. “You do? You - that's what you want?”

“No, Eds. Of course not.” Richie's head was so bent his glasses had slipped almost all the way down his nose. “Believe me. I’ve been agonising over this for a long time.”

Eddie tried to slow his breathing. “Okay,” he said, too late. “Okay. I’m just - I need to -”

His body was operating outside of his control, leading him across the kitchen floor. His hands were sliding the glass door open and then he was outside on the back porch, gripping the wooden railing and trying to breathe instead of think.

He’d known this was coming, that they would have to split ways, again. It’s what a therapist would have told him to do, instead of whiling the days away pining for something he wouldn’t get: let it go like it was any other childhood dream.

He didn’t even realise Richie had followed him outside until he felt a hand on his shoulder. He was next to Eddie, looking him in the eye again. Eddie would have to move, he realised, thinking of his tiny little apartment and the traces of Richie all over it, on the painted walls, all over the kitchen he spent more time in than Eddie did himself. It had only ever felt like home when Richie was in it.

“Sorry,” he said, cutting a hand sharply through the air like it could stop him feeling like this. “It’s fine. If that’s what you want, it’s fine, I just -”

But the unbearably real love he felt for Richie was there - always there, threatening to pour out of him, wanting so badly to make itself known. He needed to say it just fucking once.

He squeezed his eyes shut. “I’m so fucking scared I won’t get to make up for all the time I lost with you,” he said. He shook his head. “I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t be saying that to you right now. And even if we kept seeing each other all the time, I think I’d keep feeling that way. I think I might just always feel that way about you. Like it’s never going to be enough time.” He made himself look at Richie. “Is that how you feel, about Stan?”

Richie stared back at him, struck.

“Jesus,” Eddie said, hand coming up to his mouth, “I shouldn’t have - I’ll shut up.”

“What do you mean?”

Eddie glanced at him nervously. “What?”

A line had formed between Richie’s eyebrows. “How do you think I feel about Stan?”

“You,” Eddie started. His hands clenched on the railing. “You’re in love with him.”

Richie made a sound that was almost a laugh, high-pitched, strangled. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“You just said -” Richie kept looking at him like that, mouth hanging open, uncomprehending, and Eddie frowned. “You said you were going to write about being pathetically in love with your best friend.”

The little line between Richie’s eyebrows deepened. He blinked twice in quick succession, mouth parted.

“Eddie, you dumbass, you’re my best friend,” he said softly.

Then, as Eddie was processing this, he frowned. “Jesus. Did you think I was trying to homewreck Patty or something?”

“But - you - and you guys were -” Eddie couldn’t assemble his thoughts into a coherent sentence. He landed on saying, dumbly, “You kissed him.”

Richie’s mouth worked for a moment silently. When he spoke it was slow, with a strained kind of carefulness. “I kissed him because you left Derry,” he said. His fingers flexed at his sides. “I never got to kiss you so he told me to kiss him instead. That was it. That was all it ever was, man, I don’t - it’s not Stan. Jesus Christ, no, it’s never been Stan.”

Eddie couldn’t feel his hands. Unnerved by the brief silence, Richie opened his mouth to say something else, but before he could Eddie yanked him down by the collar of his jacket and kissed him - a small, hard press of lips - and Richie sucked in a breath, his hands flying up to grab at Eddie’s arms.

They looked at each other wide-eyed. Richie's bottom lip tasted like maple syrup, Eddie thought, stupidly.

“I love you,” he said.

Richie’s grip on him was painfully tight. He looked at Eddie’s mouth and swallowed. “Eds, I -“

“Wait,” Eddie said. “I have more.”

Hesitantly, he slid his hands from Richie’s jacket up the column of his neck, into his hair. Richie breathed unsteadily in response, and Eddie felt it on his mouth, warm and ticklish and sort of dizzying.

“I did back then, too. I don’t know how long for. Maybe the whole time.” He combed his fingers through the hair at the back of Richie’s neck and found it unexpectedly soft. “You know, I - I left her for you. I went to your place right after. I went straight there. I never told you that, but -”

Richie’s mouth was on his again, insistent and firm. Eddie didn’t need to finish talking: he could tell Richie like this, sighed into a kiss, and have Richie understand. He was saying it again when he pushed Richie up against the back of Stan’s house, and Richie was saying it back by shivering like that and letting him, and they were telling all of Stan’s neighbours while they were at it too, anyone who might have cared to look, but Eddie didn’t care. He wanted them to know. Richie loved him, too.

He was lit up inside from the feel of Richie’s thumbs glancing over the skin above his waistband, dipping under his shirt and sparking heat. They could talk like this now, he thought, half-delirious. They could have a whole new kind of conversation. Eddie could tell him everything he’d ever wanted to say - open his mouth and slide the words between Richie’s teeth with his tongue, so eloquently it made Richie groan.

Eddie kept him there, pressed up against the wall beside Patty’s pots of overgrown plants, and kissed him, slowly and exploratively, until they heard the sound of the front door opening from inside.

He leant his forehead against Richie’s. He felt giddy looking at him, the way he would have felt if they’d done this twenty-five years ago. Richie looked back at him with an expression of wonder that was so completely unironic that Eddie felt the urge to laugh sharply in his chest. Then Richie touched the scar on his cheek with the back of his fingers, gently, and Eddie couldn’t help himself - leant up on his toes to tell Richie the same thing he’d been telling him for the last fifteen minutes or so, only this time with less tongue.

“Oh, fuck,” he heard Stan saying, muffled in the kitchen. His keys clinked into the bowl. “They better not be in the guest room.”

Richie snorted against his mouth, his left eye screwing up. Eddie kissed him one more time, and once again after that for good measure, before pulling away.

They were going to go back into the house to see their friends, and Eddie was going to hold Richie’s hand in front of them and let himself look at Richie the way he’d always wanted to - adoring and stupid with it, red-faced like he’d just ran a lap around the whole neighbourhood - and later, if Richie wanted, Eddie would take him home and kiss him from the front door of his tiny studio apartment all the way down onto the bed. He would tell Richie with his entire body, with every inch of him, how much he loved him. It would be the perfect way of saying what he’d never be able to encompass with words.

He would make it happen just like that, he told himself, and he threaded their hands together and pulled Richie towards the door.

Chapter Text

They’d arranged to have a quick Losers lunch before the rehearsal dinner to celebrate everyone being on the west coast - the first time they’d all been together since Derry. Stan was the only one at the table when the waiter directed Eddie and Richie to it, cocktail in hand, looking out at the view of West Hollywood through his sunglasses.

He got up to greet them, pausing in the middle of reaching for Richie to give Eddie a look.

“How much will you read into it if we hug?” he asked in a flat, asshole tone of voice.

“Really?” Eddie said. “The first thing out your fucking mouth?”

Stan didn’t even bother keeping his face straight. He gave Richie a back-patting hug and drew a reluctant Eddie in for one before they sat down.

Richie tugged on the front of his cap and smiled, squinting in the sunlight. “Been sitting on that one for a while, huh.”

“I really couldn’t resist,” Stan said.

After they got back from Vermont it had taken Richie about three days to start testing out material on the whole misunderstanding. Eddie let him away with it because on the car-ride home Richie had confessed that, before Eddie came out to him, he’d thought he might be secretly in love with Bev and that was why he didn’t want to move out of her old apartment. Eddie had laughed directly in his face, delighted to have misread things in a slightly less totally incorrect way than that, and now his name in Bev’s phone was ‘My Gay Lover.’

“That’s the only crack about it I want to hear during this whole wedding,” Eddie told them. He cut the air. “That’s it. The quota’s been hit.”

Richie didn’t look like he was taking this warning as seriously as he should have. “What if there’s a really perfect opening for another one?”

“If there’s a really perfect opening for another one you shut your mouth and you eat it, Rich, thanks for asking.”

Richie grinned.

Eddie was getting over the lingering frustration he felt looking back on all the months he’d spent misinterpreting everything in such a spectacularly wrong way, even though it still made him want to travel back in time just to shout some sense into his own face. There was no point obsessing over it anymore, he knew, but that first separation had been too traumatic for him to let it go that easily.

They’d spoken about it before. Eddie had wanted to keep bottling away - they were together, so what was the point in sharing that pointless kind of negativity with Richie? - but his therapist had insisted otherwise, and Eddie had learned to listen to her even when he didn’t like what she had to say.

It was his last memory of staying in the old apartment from Bev, the night they’d spent boxing it up for the move to Richie's place. They’d sat on the empty space of floor where the couch used to be, Richie’s legs stretched out on each side of Eddie and Eddie curled in on himself as he explained, straining, that he was having trouble forgiving himself for being so stupid.

He’d shook his head and said, “It was just more missed time. And it didn’t have to be.”

“I don’t see it that way,” Richie had told him, softly. The box behind him had KITCHEN SHIT written on it in his bad chicken scratch and he’d been wearing the pair of pyjamas Eddie had stolen from him, the shirt with the 8-bit sunrise on it. “I mean, I wish I’d said something then too, but we still had each other, right? We were in each other’s lives.” He’d stroked a hand up and down the swell of Eddie’s calf, a comforting pressure. “It never felt like a waste.”

Hearing that had helped Eddie put things into perspective. He was starting to let go of the idea that he had to keep mourning the years they hadn’t been together, the lives they hadn’t gotten to live. What he had now was more than enough to make up for all of it.

“No, I need to make fun of you a little more than that," Stan argued, very seriously. “It was so obvious. He bought you a rotary saw.”

At the time Eddie had thought that was a platonic, albeit thoughtful gift to help with the kitchen renovations.

“I was supposed to read romance into a fucking rotary saw?”

“It was a seven thousand dollar rotary saw,” Richie said around the straw of Stan’s cocktail.

Eddie jerked to look at him. “It was a fucking what? What the fuck, Richie. If you’d told me that then maybe I’d have worked it out.”

“Would you have?” Stan said.

Eddie spluttered.

Richie snorted. “It’s not like you’re some master of perception, Stan.”

Seven months ago Stan had told Richie he had to stop spending all his time with their ostensibly straight, freshly divorced friend Eddie, which Eddie could understand as being level-headed advice at the time. Richie had responded to it by telling Stan youre insane if you think im really gonna do that stanley and then by not answering his calls.

Stan raised his hands diplomatically to signal that he was done. As Richie read over the menu he picked Eddie’s hand up to give it an absentminded kiss, and Stan met Eddie’s eyes over his glasses, mouth twitching up.

Mike and Bill showed up soon after, deep in conversation as they approached the table, presumably talking about the fucking memoir - Eddie’s character now went by the name Oscar after a lot of bitching on his part that Mike had thankfully backed him up on. Ben and Bev arrived to such an enthusiastic greeting that people from other tables directed irritated looks at theirs.

They were overly excitable because of the wedding the next day, because they were together again. Eddie was vaguely aware that they were all talking too loudly and laughing too hard but he couldn’t have given half a shit about it. It was too easy when they were with each other to resist that dynamic. It made him feel warm, unselfconscious.

They talked about what they would all do together for the rest of the week before Ben and Bev jetted off for their honeymoon, which mostly included a lot of food and alcohol and lying around Bill's pool. Bev asked Eddie about their new apartment and he asked her how Kay was doing. He could overhear snippets of the conversation Richie and Bill were having, two of them reminiscing the awful sketch show they’d tried writing together as kids after discovering Saturday Night Live and The Kids in the Hall. When Stan asked Eddie how therapy was going, his voice lowered, leaning over the table towards him and everything, Eddie told him it was slow and infuriating and shitty sometimes and he was glad he was doing it. He was glad they were all doing it, really. There was a sense of solidarity there, like they were all still undertaking something together, even now.

The third time the waiter came to the table Ben lied out of politeness and said they were ready to order. Eddie still didn’t know what to get. Richie hooked his chin on his shoulder to look at the menu with him, pointed to an elaborate sounding salmon rice bowl and said, “Here, you’d like that.”

Eddie did, it turned out. When he fed Richie a bite the dark sauce left a drop on his stubbled chin and Eddie thumbed it away for him like an afterthought. Around them, the others chatted, all of their voices rising over one another’s in order to be heard, and Richie caught his hand before it moved away and held it loosely for a brief second, smiling at him, a private little moment in the middle of it all.

They were both thinking the same thing, Eddie knew, smiling back. Saying it to each other with a look.

-

They ducked upstairs after the rehearsal dinner ended, just the right amount of drunk and handsy with it.

Back when he was a married man, Eddie associated hotel rooms with the business trips he’d make out to Chicago every year, the depressingly lonely feeling he used to get looking at the skyline of any city other than New York. Now, hotel rooms reminded him of the weekend trips he made to see Richie while he was touring a few months back, the rush of seeing each other and spending a few nights together after weeks apart. They reminded him of the specific kind of romance there was in ordering champagne and waffles with bacon without even having to roll off of your boyfriend first.

“I’m sorry, I am,” Richie said after fumbling with the keycard at the door again, the light on the lock flashing red, “but you’re gonna have to take your hands out my pants if you want me to get this open. The wine’s done a number on my motor skills as it is.”

Eddie reluctantly slid his hands out of Richie’s pants but stayed pressed up against his back, nosing into the collar of his shirt. His neck smelled like Eddie’s cologne and it drove him crazy in a caveman-brain way.

The lock blinked green this time and Richie shoved the door open, the two of them stumbling tipsily into the room wrapped around each other. Eddie walked Richie to the bed with his forehead between his shoulder blades, awkwardly yanking Richie’s belt out from behind and dropping it on the floor next to a rogue sandal.

“God, this place is already a fucking mess,” he muttered.

As he worked Richie’s pants open Richie caught his wrist, tapping at a cufflink. “It’s ‘cause you took everything out our suitcases looking for these.”

“I needed Bev to see them.” They were rose gold Montblancs and she’d complimented him on them immediately at dinner.

He put his hands on Richie’s hips to turn him around and Richie went along with it easily, grinning down at him half-lidded, his glasses sitting at an angle and hair already mussed from horsing around with Bill earlier. His pants were falling low enough on his hips for Eddie to make out the shape of his dick where it was stretching the fabric of his boxers.

Eddie pressed his mouth against Richie’s clavicle, open and wet, cupped him in his hand, and Richie grabbed his ass very tightly in both hands like he was holding on for dear life.

“Eddie,” he said, breathless sounding. “Eds.”

Eddie guided him down to sit on the edge of the bed with a hand on his shoulder. Richie looked up at him pink-cheeked, mouth parted, one hand curled into the bedsheets and the other up the front of Eddie’s shirt, moving back and forth over his stomach, fingers splayed.

“I feel like you’re angling for something here,” Richie said, pleased. His hand slid lower, stopping on the button of Eddie’s suit pants.

Eddie watched him lick his lips, heat rising under his skin. He pressed his thumb to the corner of Richie’s mouth. “I’ve been working on my communication skills.”

Richie grinned. “That’s hot.”

He let Eddie’s thumb slip between his lips, sucking lightly as he undid Eddie’s pants and pulled down his briefs. It made Eddie feel somehow drunker.

“Hey, man,” Richie said to his dick, speaking around the finger in his mouth.

“Do you always have to do that?” Eddie asked, but he was laughing.

Richie leaned forward to lick at the head, his tongue wide and wet, dragging slowly over the skin. Eddie’s breath hitched in his throat at the sensation. He threaded a hand in Richie’s hair, hips rocking in a minute circle back towards the heat of his mouth, and then Richie’s phone rang.

He looked up at Eddie wide-eyed, an inch away from his dick.

“Please don’t tell me to answer that,” he said.

Eddie waited for some of his higher mental functions to return. He let go of Richie’s hair, combing through it. “It might be Bev or Ben.”

Richie groaned, pained, and fished his phone out of his pocket.

He shook his head. “It’s my fuckin’ agent.”

He cancelled the call and tossed his phone on the bed. Before he could even get a hand on Eddie’s dick it started ringing again.

He dropped his head against Eddie’s hip. “Fuck.”

“Take it.” Eddie stepped back, hands in the air in a placating way that was directed more at himself than Richie. “If this isn’t the offer of a fucking lifetime tell Ian I’m going to hit him with my car.”

“Don’t put it back in, man,” Richie said sadly, watching him tuck himself back into his pants.

“I’m not just going to stand here with my dick hanging out while you’re on a call, Rich, answer it already.”

Richie heaved a sigh and reached for his phone.

“Hey,” he answered. He rubbed at his eyes under his glasses. “Not to be an asshole, but is this a conversation we could have at literally any other time?”

Ian’s reply was too low to make out. Richie crossed his eyes and mimed dying and then he frowned, his face clearing and turning serious. He looked up at Eddie, forehead creased.

“Is everything alright?” Eddie asked nervously.

Richie nodded. He started playing idly with the buttons on Eddie’s shirt, popping one out and moving onto the next one as he listened. When the muffled sound of his agent’s voice stopped he glanced up and said, “Hold on, I need to -”

He put his phone against his chest.

“He’s at a party with some Netflix guy,” he said. “He wants to set up a meeting for me out here on Thursday.”

“That’s good, right?” Eddie pushed the hair back from Richie’s forehead, smoothing across the lines there with the pad of his thumb. “Is it for a special or something?”

“It’s a TV show. A recurring thing. It would...” Richie pressed his hand to the flat plane of Eddie’s stomach. “I’d have to be out here for a while if I got it.”

“Oh,” Eddie said.

Richie’s expression was anxious, tight. “Yeah.”

Eddie thought about the two months Richie had toured for, how they’d coped with it. He felt his brain trying to kick into overdrive and stopped it before it could happen, breathing in slowly.

He pushed a curl of hair behind Richie’s ear. “It’s just a meeting, Rich.”

Richie looked up at him for a moment before nodding. He cleared his throat and brought the phone back up to his ear.

“Yeah, okay. You pushy fucker.” He paused. “Thanks.”

He hung up and looked at Eddie uncertainly.

“Did that kill the mood?” he asked.

Eddie adjusted his dick in his pants and grimaced. The idea of Richie leaving again, this time for even longer, did not do it for him. “A little, yeah.”

Richie dropped back onto the mattress and clutched his face in his hands. “Great. He should’ve just burst into the room and sprayed us with a fucking hose.”

Eddie lay down next to him and Richie turned onto his side to face him, lips pressed. He picked at the buttons on Eddie’s shirt again.

“I think he knows I might flake.”

“You shouldn’t,” Eddie said. The tour had gone well - Richie’s career was on an upswing and Eddie knew he was enjoying the high of being honestly suited to what he did for a living. “What good’s my hideous eighty inch TV if you’re never on it?”

Richie lay his hand over the bumpy skin of Eddie’s scarred chest. “I don’t want to be out here for months without you.”

The tour had been bearable, but eight weeks had felt like long enough. Eddie spent two of them in Lucca with Mike - a spur of the moment decision he’d made after a bad day at work, and the only vacation he’d ever been on that he would describe as being genuinely relaxing. He’d been in a good mood after coming home, freckled and overfed, after his therapist had told him she was impressed with him for doing something so impulsive and long overdue. Gradually, as the weeks dragged on, longer and longer, that feeling had faded.

It had been lonely back in New York without Richie. It seemed like a different city to Eddie when he wasn’t there now. He hadn’t even had any of the Losers around, just some work friends for company, and there had never been much to build on there. When Richie had returned, Eddie had felt the world right itself again around him, had kissed him so hard at the airport arrivals gate that he’d almost knocked them both over.

Eddie grabbed Richie’s face in both hands.

“Go to the meeting and see how you feel,” he said. “If you get worked up about this I’ll get worked up too, and nothing’s even happened yet.”

Richie hummed. He shifted closer on the mattress and looked at Eddie quietly for a moment, his glasses crooked between Eddie’s hands, and then he leaned in to give Eddie a soft, lingering kiss. Eddie closed his eyes, grateful for the distraction.

There was no sense of impatience anymore, no urgency. Eddie felt like savouring it now. He parted Richie’s mouth with his tongue and kissed him, slowly and languidly, and when Richie’s hand wandered back down to his dick to give it an encouraging squeeze he arched his hips into the touch with a sigh. Richie got him hard again in his hand, palming him over the damp fabric of his boxers until Eddie was panting into his mouth. When Richie broke away, Eddie knew why, knew what he wanted.

“Hey,” Richie said, a lazy smile across his face.

“Hi.“ Eddie kissed his cheek, added with a little thrill, “Are you angling for something now? In the interest of clear communication, I think you should just tell me what it is.”

Richie’s eyes, blown black now, crinkled slightly at the corners. “Oh, you want to hear me say it for communication’s sake?”

“Yeah.” Eddie reached down, hand slipping under Richie’s boxers, and squeezed his dick. “That’s right.”

Richie went hazy-eyed at the touch. His mouth was still quirked, playful, and Eddie loved this so much, all of it, everything about being with Richie like this, half-naked and pawing at each other like teenagers.

“I’m angling for you to fuck me,” Richie said.

Eddie didn’t even reply. He got to his feet and started looking for their toiletry bag so immediately it made Richie laugh. He found it strewn on the floor with the majority of his belongings, rifling through it hastily until he found the travel lube. He crawled over Richie on the bed with it in hand and Richie waggled his eyebrows up and down at him like a cartoon character, so fucking stupid looking Eddie couldn’t help but laugh.

He took his time, drew it out a little longer than he had to. He watched Richie as he sank his fingers into him to catch every reaction - the muscle jumping in his jaw, the arch of his eyebrows, the instinctual way he worked his hips back for more. The sex was still intense, even when they joked around, even that time Richie busted out his fucking Austin Powers impression with his dick in Eddie’s mouth. Eddie felt it differently than he ever had during sex with anyone else. He felt himself differently when he and Richie were fucking around like this. Present, alight. Steady. He could make Richie whine and dig his heels into the mattress. He could make Richie say, “Oh my fucking god, do that again” - so he did, over and over until he didn’t think either of them could wait any longer.

He had his face pressed into Richie’s sternum as he pushed into him and he felt the vibration when Richie moaned, one hand stroking Eddie’s hair and the other fisted in the back of his shirt. He’d asked Eddie to keep it on because fucking a well-dressed man in an overpriced hotel room did it for him, so it was hanging open, creased to hell and back, and Eddie was going to be unhappy about getting come on it later, probably, but he couldn’t care less right now.

He rubbed Richie’s sides. “Good?”

“Pretty fucking good, yeah,” Richie said, dazed looking.

Eddie rocked into him teasingly, the slightest movement, huffed out, “You feel so fucking -” and then he drew his hips back and made Richie’s voice break when he thrust back into him.

The first time they’d done this Eddie had been stunned by the intimacy of it. Richie looking up at him like this, wanting him like this. It was surreal to him that sex could be so gratifying. He knew what Richie liked now, knew that he liked being the one to give it to him. There was an overwhelming satisfaction in making Richie’s back arch off the bed and hearing him moan his name, something that hit Eddie so deeply it momentarily eclipsed everything else.

Richie’s eyes were fixed on him, half-open and dark, and Eddie felt it rising in him, up from the base of his spine, their bodies working together for it, a conversation they knew how to have. Richie’s hips stuttered up into the hand Eddie had curled around him and he made a low sound like he was close. He took Richie’s hand from his damp hair and held it above his head on the mattress, started fucking him faster, harder, spurred on by Richie’s breathy voice in his ear saying yeah yeah yeah, and then Richie came into his hand, onto their chests, a little on Eddie’s good shirt.

“Come on,” Richie said, breathing shallowly. He squeezed Eddie’s hand tightly in his and craned his neck to kiss him just off his mouth. “For me, Eds, come on.”

That was all it took. Eddie buried his face into Richie’s neck with a groan and snapped his hips forward.

They lay there for a while afterwards, coming down slowly. Sex made Richie tired and clingy. He wrapped himself around Eddie like a giant koala bear, tightening his hold every time Eddie insisted that they clean themselves up. Eventually Eddie had to physically drag him up to his feet again and into the shower.

After a thorough scrubbing, Richie pulled him against his chest and said, “Can I ask you a hypothetical question?”

The last time he’d asked Eddie that it had turned out to be a fuck, marry, kill based question and the choices had all been cartoon villains. Richie had not shut the fuck up about it until Eddie gave in and answered, and then Richie had insisted that he back up his answers with sound reasoning and Eddie actually had to explain to another adult human being why he would fuck Skeletor.

“That depends,” he said, warily.

Richie put his face in his hair. It was nice being held like this under the water, their skin sliding together warmly. Eddie closed his eyes.

“Hypothetically, if I got that TV gig,” Richie paused to clear his throat, “would you, hypothetically, move out here with me?”

Eddie leaned back to look at Richie properly. Richie squinted back at him trying to do the same.

“As in - for good?” He’d never considered moving, not since he’d left his mom’s place and drove 500 miles to New York in his busted old car. Back then, New York seemed like the farthest thing from her house in Cleveland, a different dimension from the miserable, lonely one he’d been operating in for so long. It had been home for that.

Richie must have been able to make out the look on his face even without his glasses on. “I don’t know. New York is... both of us have been there for a long time. We lived these fucked up other lives there. It could be a fresh start.” He pushed a hand through Eddie’s wet hair. “Somewhere that’s just ours.”

“You’ve thought about this before,” Eddie realised.

Richie looked almost guilty for it. “I just thought, you know, we have friends out here. Ben and Bev and Bill, and Mike’s here a lot these days. We could see them a lot more. You could whip some bougie start-up company into shape, and we could buy a nice place where you could do any kind of rotary saw shit you want to it.” His hands flexed nervously on Eddie’s shoulders. “But we don’t have to -”

“Okay,” Eddie said.

“I know you love New York.”

Eddie held his jaw in both hands. “Rich, I’m saying okay.”

“It’s just hypothetical,” Richie went on. “It’s not like -”

Eddie pulled him down, their foreheads touching. “I love you. I’d come with you.”

Richie blinked at him. “I love you too,” he said.

Before he climbed into bed Eddie opened the curtains wide. California glowed from below, orange light that faded into the night sky, and he lay with his head on Richie’s chest looking out at it, comforted by how the view reminded him of the window in the old apartment in New York, his hand-me-down sanctuary from Bev. He’d left with good memories of living there. Bev had held him the first time he’d stayed the night there and Richie had taught him how to peel butternut squash in the tiny kitchen space, and Eddie had fixed the place up with Ben’s playlists playing in the background, feeling capable, feeling okay. He’d stayed there until he was ready for something bigger.

He looked at the room around them in the half-dark, at their things mixed together everywhere, the cluttered signs of a life together, and fell asleep on the steady rise and fall of Richie’s chest.

-

He woke to Richie doing his weird hum-snore thing, like he was agreeing with someone in a dream. The alarm hadn’t gone off yet but it was bright outside already, a wide patch of light stretching across the sheets over their bodies.

Blearily, he wondered how Bev and Ben were doing and reached over Richie to blindly grab his phone from the nightstand. He sent Bev a heart because she always did that for him on days she thought he might need it. He dozed afterwards, cheek smushed into Richie’s chest, blinking awake again when his phone buzzed with her response a few moments later.

She’d sent him one back. I’m so so fucking excited

Eddie smiled. Richie murmured something in his sleep and pulled him close, so warm and solid underneath him that Eddie had no choice but to drop his phone on the bedspread, duck his face into his neck, and close his eyes again.

The alarm went off ten minutes later. Richie turned it off on his phone, yawning massively, and proceeded to just lay there.

Eddie propped himself up on his elbow to look at him. “You think you have time for a snooze today?”

“One minute,” Richie mumbled. He rubbed Eddie’s arm mindlessly. “Sixty seconds. Count ‘em.”

Eddie did count them, and when they were up he shook Richie by the shoulders the way he used to have to do at sleepovers to get him up by a reasonable hour. He did it until Richie couldn’t keep acting like it wasn’t happening.

“Fuck, okay, you win.” Richie sat up slowly, carefully. He groaned. “God. All I’m going to be thinking about during my best friends’ wedding is how much the seat hurts my ass.” He turned to Eddie, only half-alive looking. “You did this.”

“I’m not sorry about it,” Eddie said.

They showered again, no dawdling this time, just in and out. The room service breakfast helped restore them both to full consciousness, and while they finished their coffees Eddie fixed his hair and then helped Richie with his.

“You should just go like this,” Richie told him.

Eddie was only wearing a vest and his suit pants. He snorted, combing through the swoop of Richie’s hair with the last of the mousse on his fingers.

He nodded his head at Richie, who still had nothing on but a towel, and said, “I will if you go like that.”

“I don’t wanna upstage Bev.”

Eddie’s suit was wine red and Richie’s was a complimentary shade of green that he looked stupidly fuckable in. Eddie had picked it out for him a few months ago and had it tailored to his meticulous standards, and the only part of the process Richie had really engaged with was at the end of the last fitting when they felt each other up a little in the changing room.

They stood side-by-side after getting dressed and looked at their reflection together. Eddie caught Richie’s eyes in the mirror, the toothy, contented smile on his face, and felt a rush of affection for him in his chest that was so strong it was almost an ache.

“We look good, huh?”

“We do,” Eddie agreed. His throat was dry. He couldn’t look away from them, how they looked next to each other. They fit, they looked right together. Richie looked so handsome in a suit.

“I feel like I should warn you that I’m probably gonna cry a lot during this shindig,” Richie said.

Eddie blinked himself out of his thoughts. He smoothed a hand down Richie’s tie and watched the movement in their reflection, so natural, one of those small touches between them that it meant everything just to be able to do.

“I can’t believe you think you even have to tell me that,” he said.

“It just gets to me when I think about it.” Richie blew out a breath, shaking his head. “Remember little Haystack writing crappy poetry in his geography textbook? And look at him now. Turning all that crappy poetry into wedding vows.”

Eddie thought of their names inscribed on the kissing bridge hundreds of miles away. They were going to Maine together for Richie’s parents’ anniversary dinner in a few months, their first family event as a couple, and Eddie had insisted on driving out to see it before they left. It didn’t matter how out of the way it was. It was like a historically important monument you couldn’t pass up the chance to see with your own eyes: here was where Richie had carved a little place for them to exist in almost thirty years ago.

He looked at them in the mirror for another moment. Then he turned to Richie, placed his hands on the collar of his suit jacket, and smiled. It wasn’t scary to him, the idea of asking. Not even a little.

“Hey,” he said. “Will you marry me?”

Richie’s mouth fell open. His hands came up to squeeze wrinkles into the arms of Eddie’s suit jacket.

“Yes,” he said. “Of course. I’d marry you right now if it wouldn’t massively steal Ben and Bev's thunder.” One of his hands cupped Eddie’s cheek gently. Eddie could tell looking at him that he was on the cusp of crying. “Jesus, Eds. Are you really asking?”

Eddie nodded with almost aggressive insistence. “I’m really asking. I don’t - I didn’t plan this. I don’t have a ring or anything. I was just thinking about moving together, finding somewhere that’s ours, like you said, and it just seemed fucking stupid that I hadn’t asked you already.” He swallowed the lump in his throat. “I’d be happy anywhere if I was with you.”

Richie really was crying now. “I can’t fucking believe you.”

He leaned down to kiss Eddie. Eddie wrapped his arms around his neck and kept him there for as long as they could get away with without being late to the wedding, the sunlight from the window warm on his back, Richie’s kiss bright on his mouth.

Richie did cry during the ceremony, on and off from Ben’s vows until the very end, to the point that Mike reached behind Eddie just to pat him on the back. Eddie cried when he saw Bev, so happy looking she was glowing with it, and again when he turned and shared a red-eyed, smiling look with Stan from across the aisle.

Seeing their friends up there, beaming at each other, made it feel realer. It would be them next, their vows, their rings, their promises. As the officiant said and do you, Beverley Marsh, Eddie took Richie’s hand in his. He traced a line back and forth across Richie’s ring finger and Richie squeezed his hand back gently, every touch between them a transmission saying the same thing, over and over, that Eddie would never get tired of hearing.