Chapter Text
Richie is in the bathtub when his phone rings. Taking baths is something he does now, with fancy soaps and glittery bath bombs that swirl in the warm water around him as they fizzle and expand. He watches reality TV while in the tub, yelling at the Love Island contestants making bad decisions and starting stupid fights with each other. He sits there until the water gets cold and the skin of his fingertips shrivels up to the point that his phone doesn’t recognise his fingerprint when he tries to unlock it afterwards. Privately he calls it ‘embracing the gay lifestyle’ (which is probably offensive on several levels but he is gay – yeah, he’s gay, what of it – and so he can say shit like that). On the phone with Bev he calls it ‘self-care, baby’, since he hasn’t actually managed to come out to anybody. A few weeks later she sent him a package containing a collection of LUSH bath bombs and a suction mount for his iPad so that he can attach it to the wall rather than precariously propping it up on a chair next to the tub like some maniac.
He struggles to answer the call with damp fingers.
“Mikey!” he says cheerfully, his voice a little hoarse from disuse after hermitting for two days. By choice, obviously.
“Hey, man.” Mike sounds tired and serious.
“How is my favourite travel buddy?” Richie absentmindedly splashes the water with his free hand.
“I won’t tell Eddie that you said that,” Mike laughs. It is short-lived as he seems to remember whatever it is he is calling about. “Listen, Richie…”
Richie sits up a little in the tub. Serious phone calls from Mike have only ever led to bad things, and he doesn’t believe the universe will break that track record now.
“Are you in the bath right now?” Mike asks.
“Yeah, man! It’s a busy day at La Casa Tozier. I’ve got like, e-mails to read and stuff. No better place to do it.”
Mike doesn’t laugh. He is quiet for a little while.
“Bill called me last night,” he says eventually.
Richie’s fingers twitch, looking for something to fidget with. “Yeah? How is our dear Billiam?”
“He is getting divorced,” Mike says, rushed. Like he didn’t mean to say it like that.
“What?” Richie stops moving his hand through the water.
“Him and Audra, they… well. I’m sure he'll tell you himself.”
It isn’t as though Richie is surprised by this news. He knows just as well as any of the Losers that things have been difficult between the two, and they had been for a while. Richie has spent enough evenings with Bill getting progressively more drunk on his couch, telling him about some fight they had through hiccups, to know that this was going to happen one way or another.
What confuses him is not the divorce, but the fact that it is Mike telling him and not Bill. They live in the same city and everything. He saw him for breakfast just over a week ago. In fact, they had vague plans to go for lunch tomorrow.
“Not that I don’t appreciate hearing your lovely voice whenever you deign to contact lil’ old me, but shouldn’t I be speaking to Bill right now?” Richie says.
“There’s more to this,” Mike says and well, doesn’t that just sound ominous.
“... Okay? You’ve got me hooked.”
“I can’t go to Europe,” Mike says, like ripping off a bandaid.
Richie momentarily considers dropping his phone in the tub to kill it, and then he remembers that it is 2017 and phones are like, waterproof now. Steve Jobs might be dead, but Richie curses him regardless.
“What the fuck, man?” he says, a little too high pitched. “Is it you Bill is divorcing? Are you his lawyer? How are these two related in any way? You can’t just—”
“Bill needs me, Richie.” Mike’s voice is gentle but firm, like that makes any sense.
“Why does he need you, specifically? Is this some kind of martyr complex? I get that out of the two of us you are probably more qualified to help him with this, but there are like... therapists.” Richie frowns at the rubber duck floating along in the tub as he speaks. He pushes it down, drowning it. Then he lets it pop back up because he isn’t actually a serial killer in the making. “Bill has other friends, unlike some of us. Hell, Ben and Bev are rich as fuck and could probably afford to take a few weeks off to hold Bill’s hand through this.”
On the other end of the line Mike sighs. “Things are… different with me and Bill.”
Richie lets that hang between them. He turns the sentence over in his head, inspecting it from all angles to see if it might make sense in another light.
“Different how?” he finally asks.
Silence stretches out for a long moment, so long it makes his palms itch. Then Mike exhales loudly.
“I’m not sure how to explain it properly over the phone. Everything is still a bit unclear right now.”
“Yeah, no shit, Mike!”
“I’m going to LA on Tuesday to stay with him for a while. I’m really sorry it’s such short notice.”
Richie lets his head drop backwards and stares at the white ceiling above.
“Dude, what am I going to do for 3 months? I’ve got no gigs coming up, no media appearances. Everything's on hold.”
A pause. Then Mike says, “What are you talking about, man? Eddie is still going.”
And well, the thing is that Mike was meant to act as the buffer between him and Eddie. That was the entire reason Richie hadn’t pulled out when he found out that the only other Loser going was Eddie. Because spending three months with him, alone, sharing rooms and a car and bumping shoulders as they walked through some European city, Eddie sunburnt, wearing shorts, and complaining all the way, would be the guaranteed ruin of their friendship. Richie would ruin their friendship so good, and they would call the whole thing off after a week and go home, and they wouldn’t speak for a few months until maybe Eddie would check in on him and ask if things were cool between them, and Richie would send him a finger guns emoji and he would say yeah, everything was cool, and then things would keep being weird for a few years until maybe Richie settled for some guy named Josh or Andy or Dylan, who looked nothing like Eddie and who didn’t call him out on his bullshit like Eddie did, and then Eddie would breathe a sigh of relief knowing that Richie had gotten over him and things could go back to normal. And they would laugh about it a few years later, and Richie would go home to cry in the bathtub with a glass of wine like a depressed mother of four trying to cope with the fact her husband is a piece of shit.
Richie has worked hard to package his resurfaced feelings for Eddie fucking Kaspbrak into a neat little box in his head labelled ‘DANGER - DO NOT TOUCH’ and spends every day of his miserable life trying not to text Eddie, not to pine over him, not to let it get out of hand, not to fantasise about holding his hand like he did in middle school.
“Mike, I… Fuck, man,” he says, finally. “You know things are weird between me and Eddie.”
“Are they?” Mike asks. “Richie, I don’t think anyone thinks that but you.”
“You wouldn’t know!”
“I don’t think it’s as complicated as you are making it out to be. You don’t know everything,” he says. Cryptic bastard.
“I’m gonna go now,” Richie says.
“Okay. But Richie, don’t cancel the trip. Don't waste this.”
“Yeah, whatever,” he says and hangs up. He instantly feels like a little bitch for it.
He sends Mike a text saying ‘sorry for being a little bitch’.
Mike texts back ‘¯\_(ツ)_/¯’ and nothing else.
Richie spends an hour nervously pacing the length of his living room. His hair is almost dry by the time he finally works up the nerve to call Eddie. As soon as his phone is in his hand a wave of nausea hits him like a freight train and he has to sit down on the edge of his ugly, fire engine red couch.
He gives himself some time to breathe, in and out, and counts to 100 in his head. Then he picks up his phone again.
He stares at it for a moment and then shoves it into the gap between couch pillows and goes to hide in his bedroom for a while.
What would he even say? Would Eddie still want to go if it was just the two of them? As far as Richie is aware, Eddie didn’t know that Richie was coming when he agreed to go on this trip. The majority of the planning went through Mike. They had a group chat – the three of them – that Mike made back in February and Richie (hilariously) named ‘Gap Year Boyz’. Most of the chat consisted of Mike sending them links to Time Out articles and AirBnB listings, as well as the occasional ‘Can’t wait for this trip, guys!’. Yeah, right. One word from Bill and suddenly Mike is channeling that enthusiasm into whatever the hell their deal is.
The group chat’s photo is a generic tourist photo of three white women in front of the Eiffel Tower but Richie had (also hilariously) replaced their faces with badly cut out pictures of Eddie, Mike and himself. He laughs now, hysterically, as he thinks of just him and Eddie in Paris, eating croissants and drinking red wine underneath the moonlit Eiffel Tower on a mild summer’s evening. He wants to die. Because that is what will happen without Mike there. Richie will try to woo Eddie – a 40 year old straight man – with roses and sweet, buttery French pastries in the city of love.
He can’t go on this trip. He cannot go on a summer road trip through Europe with the only man who has ever made him crazy. The man whose bedside he sat by for a month in Derry, whispering gross, love-sick things and holding his hand like a prayer in the silent hospital room as he waited for him to wake up. The only man who has ever made him well and truly stupid. And Richie was not a smart man to begin with. He is fucked.
Somehow, he manages to trick his body into taking a panic nap by getting so worked up it simply shuts down on him. He wakes up three hours later, disoriented and with a mouth dryer than the Californian desert. He drags himself out of bed with great difficulty. At least four of his joints pop audibly.
When he finally digs up his phone from between the couch cushions after going for a piss and then gulping down half a liter of water from his fancy fridge water dispenser, he finds that he has 3 missed calls and several texts from Eddie, the Losers chat, and the Gap Year Boyz chat. His eye twitches.
He sits down on the couch and opens the Losers chat first because it seems like the safest option.
[From: ginger nut 3:08pm]
Watch this! LOL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zyhRIGdBTw
[From: Big Bill 3:14pm]
So funny…… Love it, Bev….. [laughing emoji]
[From: january embers 3:16]
Ha ha! [laughing emoji] Miss you, Bill [purple heart emoji]
Richie has a brief crisis about his age as he is once more confronted with the fact that his friends are middle aged and uncool. He doesn’t click the link, and instead he moves on to the Gap Year Boyz chat.
[From: Hot Single Librarians In Your Area 2:16pm]
Hey guys, I’ve sent you over all the booking confirmations and documents, check your email.
[From: Hot Single Librarians In Your Area 2:17pm]
@Eddie, you got the rental car details?
[From: eddie kASSpbrak 2:28pm]
Of course. Thanks, Mike.
[From: Hot Single Librarians In Your Area 2:33pm]
Great. Sorry again for the last minute cancellation. I’ll make it up to you guys somehow!
[From: eddie kASSpbrak 2:40pm]
It’s okay, Mike.
[From: eddie kASSpbrak 2:42pm]
I’ll try to come to LA at some point to see you and Bill.
Finally, Richie checks his private chat with Eddie.
[From: Eddie 2:03pm]
Just got off the phone with Mike.
[From: Eddie 2:08pm]
Hey asshole, call me back.
[From: Eddie 3:29pm]
I know for a fact that you live like a college student and have nothing going on at this time of day.
[From: Eddie 4:12pm]
Dickhead.
Richie checks the time. It is 4:48pm. He rubs a hand over his face and dials Eddie’s number before he can change his mind.
Eddie picks up after the second ring. He sounds out of breath.
“Richie,” he says and then nothing else. Richie can hear him faintly gasping for air but it sounds like he is holding the phone away from his face.
“Hola amigo,” Richie says. “Did I interrupt something?”
“What?” Eddie asks.
“You sound a little winded, buckaroo.”
“Oh, right.” There’s a pause. “I’m just on a run.”
Richie imagines him then, drenched in sweat and red in the face. Realistically he knows that there is no way in hell, but his brain still unhelpfully supplies him with the image of him in the stupid, red running shorts he wore when they were kids.
“Ah, right,” he says, slightly delayed. “Sorry, I was busy with the mixed gender orgy I hold every Saturday between 2pm and…” He checks the kitchen clock. “4:45pm. We just finished. That’s why I didn’t pick up the phone.”
Miraculously, Eddie huffs out a laugh despite the fact that not even Richie thought that one was funny.
“Sorry to interrupt,” Eddie says.
There is a moment of silence as Richie tries to think of how to broach the topic of— well, the obvious.
And then he says, “Listen, man, we don’t—” at the same time as Eddie says, “What time does—”
They both stop.
“You go first,” Richie says and cringes.
“What time does your flight get in on Thursday?” Eddie asks.
Richie makes a strangled sound.
“Uh, 5pm, I think? But Eddie...” He pauses. “I just mean, we don’t have to go.”
A beat. Then, “What the fuck, asshole?”
Richie throws his free hand up defensively, even though Eddie can’t see him. He opens his mouth to speak but Eddie has already kicked off and there is no stopping that particular avalanche.
“— you want to call off the entire thing just because Mike can’t go? You think it’s going to suck without him there? Jesus, Richie, you think we can’t have fucking fun without someone else there as our… our fluffer? I’ve taken three months off work for this shit, they’ve already hired a temp to cover me, some dude called Dave is moving into my apartment next weekend, and most of my shit is in storage. What do you want me to do, live in a hotel for three months like some fucking rich business man who cheated on his wife and got kicked out of the house but swears it’s only temporary? Fuck off!”
Richie can hear him breathing heavily down the phone just like he had when he first picked up. He sounds like he just ran a marathon. He swears that Eddie didn’t use to get winded this quickly. They must really be getting old.
“Didn’t you live in a hotel room for like a month after you left your wife?” Richie asks.
“Richard, I will literally kill you.”
“Yes, please.” Richie laughs. “Are you done?”
“That depends, are you going to stop being a dickhead?”
“Probably not. But let’s pretend for a sec.” At some point during Eddie’s speech he got up from the couch. He is now back to pacing the living room. “I’m not worried that we won’t have a good time, man.”
“Then what’s your problem?”
“I just thought you might not want to go with just me. This was yours and Mike’s thing first.” Richie walks into the kitchen, nervous energy plucking at him like he is a tightly wound guitar string. “I know you and him have been tight since the clown shit, and I just thought you might not want to… go without him,” he finishes lamely.
“Richie, this has been the only thing keeping me going since February,” Eddie says and Richie furrows his brows.
“That’s kind of tragic, dude,” he says. You know, like an asshole.
“Yeah, well, you try going through a life altering injury and a divorce within the span of a few months and let me know how fucking cheery you feel then,” Eddie snaps. “We are going on this trip. I’m picking you up at the airport on Thursday.”
Richie looks out of the kitchen window at the courtyard outside his apartment block. The elderly Indian woman from down the hall is walking her ridiculously tiny dog in the sweltering LA sun. He feels the ghost of a smile on his lips.
“Okay,” he says to Eddie.
“Okay,” Eddie says.
Richie thinks of his empty suitcase sitting on the floor besides his bed. He thinks about packing, and how he still needs to message Bill about lunch tomorrow so they can catch up before he goes, and how he needs to buy new earphones for the flight because he ruined his old ones by washing them accidentally. And suddenly, cautiously, excitement blossoms in the pit of his stomach, replacing the dread.
“I’ll see you on Thursday, Eds,” he says.
“Don’t call me that,” Eddie says, no bite to it. “I have to call the car rental company and amend the booking so it’s under my name instead of Mike’s.”
Richie hums and opens the fridge. It is mostly empty save for a 2-liter bottle of Coke Zero, some leftover Chinese takeaway from two nights ago, and a Tupperware container full of food he doesn't even remember making but he is too afraid of the smell to try and find out what's inside. He imagines what Eddie would say if he saw the state of it. Probably something about MSG and carcinogenic chemicals and how Coke Zero isn’t actually any better for you than regular Coke, and the acids in soda erode your enamel, Richie, wasn’t your dad a fucking dentist?
The real Eddie is also ranting in his ear, going on about AirBnB bookings and travel insurance. Richie knows he should listen but his thoughts drift back to running shorts and Eddie’s flushed face, and he lets himself have that for a moment. Because they’re going to Europe together. For three months. And that means Eddie in shorts, Eddie flushed and hot, Eddie in swimming trunks with his pinched face covered in sunscreen, and if Richie can’t handle fantasy Eddie then he might as well cancel his flights now because he sure as hell won’t be able to handle the real deal.
He takes the bottle of coke, opens it with one hand (a struggle) and takes a swig. It’s flat. He takes another sip anyway, suddenly thirsty.
“Hey man, I gotta go,” he says, interrupting Eddie’s stream of consciousness.
“— oh, right. The orgy,” Eddie says dryly.
Richie snorts. “Yeah, I gotta clean up after all that steamy sex in my living room.”
“Your living room? That’s so fucking unhygienic,” Eddie complains.
Richie imagines his nose wrinkling in disgust. It’s cute. “Chill, Eduardo, my couch hasn’t seen any action in like two years,” he says. “Me and Sonia usually do it in the kitchen nowadays, so—”
Eddie hangs up. Richie laughs alone in his kitchen.
Richie meets Bill the next day at their usual lunch spot, a small, family-run deli that serves the best hummus in town and is reasonably close to both of their apartments.
Bill arrives ten minutes late and frazzled, looking like a bit of a mess. It’s a refreshing role reversal.
“I’m sorry I’m late, I got caught up—”
“Hey, no excuses needed. I get it,” Richie says and he gets up to give him a hug. Because he does that now; he hugs people. He has people who want to hug him, too. And he can touch men in platonic ways because he understands the difference, the way Bill has never been, and will never be what Eddie is to him. They’re friends. Richie Tozier has friends now. Friends who aren’t just thinly veiled networking opportunities.
Bill slumps into the seat across from him with a big sigh.
“You look like shit,” Richie says, and he does. He looks like he hasn’t slept in days.
“Charming,” Bill says. His eyes crinkle as he smiles weakly. “I know I do, I have mirrors in my house. I even looked in one this morning.”
Richie takes a sip of his beer – ‘day-drinking, really?’ Eddie says in his head and wow, he really doesn’t have time to unpack that – and he gives Bill a sympathetic nod.
“I hear Mike is coming to visit you tomorrow,” he says, aiming for nonchalance and ending up somewhere a lot closer to ‘tense’.
Bill buries his face in his hands and says, muffled, “Fuck, Richie, this is such a mess.”
Richie reaches over to give him a quick pat on the head.
“Hey now, it sounds like things are going to get better from here on out,” he says. He is shit at this, at feelings, at comforting people. Especially when it comes to romantic relationships he always feels like he is severely under qualified to give any sort of advice, having never had a single successful dating experience in his life.
Bill lifts his head again after a minute and scratches his chin. Richie wants to reach out again and grab him by the shoulder, shake him until the explanation he is dying for comes tumbling out of him. Different how, he thinks, a little frantic. Things are different between you and Mike? How? Like they are different between Ben and Bev? Like ‘I am leaving my spouse for you’ different? Like two men who are not just friends but more than that, who are in love and who fuck? Different like that?
He doesn’t ask. Instead, he listens to Bill talk about how things between him and Audra have been falling apart for a long time, since before Derry, and how she deserves better than him anyway. And he talks about what his therapist said, how he can’t keep trying to fix something out of his control. He shouldn’t keep clinging to something that he has outgrown, or that has outgrown him.
All of Richie’s friends are in therapy now. That is what well-adjusted adults do when they survive severely fucked up events and relive their childhood trauma in the same weekend. Bev and Eddie were the first to get on board the therapist train and soon they started dropping words like ‘unhealthy coping mechanism’ and ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ in the group chat.
Bill was next and within weeks of his first appointment he was at this very deli telling Richie that he had to acknowledge and engage with his fears in order to overcome them. Personally, he thinks that facing and killing an evil alien clown for the second time in his life was enough ‘engaging with his fears’ until he was at least sixty years old, and he told Bill as much back then. Bill had sighed and said ‘Not all fears are that literal, man’ and Richie didn’t know what to do with that so they dropped it.
Richie doesn’t think he needs therapy. He doesn’t need to sit down and explain his deepest insecurities to some woman named Lisa who has immaculately painted blue nails, dangly gold earrings and a kind and patient smile, who says things like ‘And how does that make you feel, Richard?’ and ‘Maybe recreational drug use gives you a sense of control over your circumstances that you don’t otherwise feel; it gives you a choice’.
What he needs is long baths, 60 episodes of British reality TV, and to have meaningless sex with some guy who looks nothing like Eddie.
“I think Mike is going to stay for a while,” Bill says.
Richie blinks. “That’s good,” he says after a moment.
“Yeah, it is.”
“You shouldn’t go through this alone, my dude,” he says after a moment of struggling to come up with something to say.
Bill picks at the last bit of lettuce garnish left on his plate. At some point over the course of the last hour they have both had two beers, a grilled cheese each, and a plate of hummus and marinated olives between them.
“I think he might move in with me,” he says after a moment and his eyes are fond.
Richie’s mouth is dry. He takes a sip of his beer.
“Yeah?” he says dumbly. “Like, into your one bedroom apartment?”
Bill tilts his head to one side and looks at Richie intently, like he is trying to figure something out.
“Yes,” he says. “We’re going to see how it goes. But the past few months, things have changed. It’s different now, I think. More than it was before.”
There it is, then. There is the answer Richie so frantically wanted earlier. He swallows thickly and finishes his beer. His world view feels a little shaken, like maybe when he walks out of this deli there might be two suns above him in the sky instead of just the one.
“Cool,” he says, voice strained. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands, so he interlocks his fingers in front of himself on the table. He thinks of Eddie, all the way in New York City, and his palms itch.
“You okay, Richie?” Bill asks. Nothing but kind concern in his eyes, in the lines of his furrowed brows.
“Yeah, man,” he says and tries to smile. “Looks like soon it’ll just be me and Eddie in the Losers club, since the rest of you are moving on to greener pastures.” He sounds a little hysterical, even to his own ears.
Bill gives him a reassuring smile. Of course he does.
“I haven’t told Ben and Bev yet,” he says. “About me being bisexual, and the whole thing with me and Mike.”
Richie nods. The word bisexual flutters around inside his chest like an injured bird. Bill just came out to him and Richie said ‘cool’ like an asshole. He hasn’t said anything at all of value.
“Mike has talked to Eddie about it already, so he’s known for a while,” Bill continues.
“How did he take it?” Richie asks without thinking, and instantly wants to put the words back where they came from. What a stupid question.
Bill laughs, a little taken aback. “He’s fine with it, obviously,” he says. “Our friends aren’t bigots, man.”
He knocks Richie’s foot underneath the table.
“Course,” Richie mumbles. And then, “How long have you known?”
“That I’m bi, or that I like Mike?”
“Both, I guess.”
Bill hums. “There was a guy I liked back in college. Nothing ever happened, I think he was straight, but I guess that was when I knew.” He shrugs, like that is nothing. Like a boy can just like another boy in college and not think anything of it. Like they didn’t grow up in a backwater, homophobic town where two gay men were murdered literally last year. Like Richie didn’t spend his teenage years with the word ‘faggot’ practically engraved in the skin of his forehead.
“And Mike, well, that just kind of happened,” Bill goes on. “He was there for me after Derry last year. Helped me figure my shit out. We started talking a lot more and things just kind of clicked.”
Richie nods, like he gets it. Like he understands how easy it was.
The waitress, Claire, comes over to clear their empty plates and he orders another beer. They sit in silence while he tries desperately to find the words, any words.
Claire brings his beer and he takes a sip. He thinks about Connor Bowers at the arcade, and he thinks about Mateo, the bartender at the place Richie started doing stand-up in Chicago. He thinks about Trevor who used to come over sometimes to do cocaine with Richie and who fucked him on the fire engine red couch, pulling his hair and calling him ‘baby’.
But most of all he thinks about Eddie, and his fanny pack, and his spitfire mouth, and his red running shorts. Eddie, who threw a spear into ITs gaping, awful mouth to save Richie from the deadlights and got skewered as a result.
“I’m gay,” he says abruptly, before he can change his mind. He breaks out into a cold sweat and stares down at the table, waiting for— well, for something. He has no idea what.
“Oh man,” Bill says, and when Richie finally looks up he is smiling at him. “Good for you, Richie. Thank you for telling me.” And he reaches over and grabs his hand, squeezing it gently.
And that is it. Bill doesn’t expect anything else from him. He doesn’t ask who else knows, he doesn’t say that he already knew even though he must have, given the sheer force with which Richie projects his entire thing everywhere, and the sheer loudness of his stupid crush on Eddie.
But Bill says nothing like that, he just squeezes his hand and asks about how Richie has been, how he is getting on with packing, and what city he is most excited for in Europe. They hug when they say goodbye, and Richie promises to go for a drink with him and Mike on Wednesday before his flight, and that is truly it.
Despite thinking about little else for the next two days, Richie leaves packing to the last minute. He is half an hour late to drinks with Mike and Bill because he is frantically looking for his passport which he eventually finds at the bottom of his kitchen drawer otherwise containing nothing but fancy cutlery his mom gave him when he moved out and beer bottle caps that he thought were too cool to throw away. Sometimes it is hard being a 40 year old man who never mentally progressed past college.
He gives Mike a massive hug when he sees him. Bill gets a hug too, but slightly less enthusiastic because he saw him two days ago, whereas he hasn’t seen Mike since Derry. They spend most of the evening catching up, with Mike telling Richie about getting hit on by retired women in Florida, his trip to the Bahamas, and hitchhiking to Mexico. Richie doesn’t have much to update him on, but he manages to spin some parts of his miserable life the past few months into vaguely entertaining stories that have Bill and Mike in stitches.
A good chunk of the evening is also dedicated to Mike apologising for not being able to go to Europe, and Richie saying ‘It’s fine, honey pie, don’t worry’ in an increasingly more confusing accent.
At one point he returns from the bar to find them kissing and he promptly turns back to where he came from and spends a further ten minutes trying to strike up a conversation with the bartender, an older, bald man with face tattoos who clearly wants him dead.
He goes home that night feeling a little wobbly and wishing he wasn’t such a coward. He flops onto his bed and spends a few futile minutes trying to make a mental checklist of things he still needs to do in the morning before his flight. He sets 4 alarms (5am, 5:05am, 5:07am, 5:10am), texts Eddie, and passes out before he can muster up the energy to brush his teeth.
Richie nearly misses his flight. He is running through the airport like a maniac at 7:45am to the sweet soundtrack of his name being called out over the airport speakers. He has just spent half an hour in an excruciatingly slow security queue and is fairly hungover, so he really isn’t in the mood for this 6 hour flight or for interacting with anyone.
When he makes it to the gate with 4 minutes until the scheduled take-off time, the Delta Airline employee at the boarding desk looks like she wants to strangle him. She checks his passport and boarding card, makes a snide remark about his stand-up being misogynistic, and then ushers him onto the plane.
He spends his flight wedged between a woman who is drafting increasingly sociopathic sounding emails to the HR department of her company about some guy named Jerry whose only crime seems to be parking in her spot one too many times, and a man with what looks like severe flight anxiety who pops more Xanax than strictly safe before take-off and is bouncing his leg like his life depends on it, who, despite the Xanax, takes two hours to finally fall asleep. It is annoying as hell but at least reading this woman’s emails as she drafts them and being mad about the dude’s bouncing leg distracts him from the tight feeling in his chest and the way his palms are sweating.
He hasn’t seen Eddie in person since they said goodbye outside the security queue at Bangor Airport. Richie’s flight that day wasn’t until 6pm, but he still insisted on driving Eddie to the airport for his 1pm flight. When the time came, he hugged Eddie gently, mindful of his injury, and allowed himself to rest his cheek on the top of Eddie’s head and breathe in the subtle scent of his shampoo.
Since that day back in September, two months after everything went down in Derry and a month after Eddie woke up from the coma, he had only seen him as a pixelated shape in the corner of his laptop screen during their occasional Losers Club video calls, or in photographs that Bev sent them when her and Ben were in New York. One night, drunk Richie set one of these photos as his phone background in a fit of madness and then passed out on his couch. The next morning he nearly spent a long moment staring dumbly at his phone when he unlocked it, a grinning Eddie staring back at him, holding a shirt up that said ‘Happily single ☐ taken ☐ divorced ☑️’. He left it as his wallpaper for the rest of the day, and then eventually realised how pathetic that was and changed it back to a picture of him and Bill recreating the Lady and the Tramp spaghetti moment at a Michelin star restaurant.
Seeing him in the flesh in just a few hours could either be completely fine, or ruin Richie’s life. He isn’t sure what to prepare himself for, how he could prepare himself for that, and just hopes his friendship instinct will take over and he won’t propose on the spot. Not for the first time that day, he wishes that Mike hadn’t cancelled, Bill’s divorce be damned. With Mike there, Richie could follow his script of interacting with his platonic childhood friend. If Mike hugged Eddie on arrival Richie would have done the same. If Mike went for the cool, casual handshake and shoulder clap, Richie would have done the same. If Mike joked with Eddie about his chest injury, Richie would have known that was cool to do. If Mike didn’t mention it at all out of consideration for his feelings, Richie wouldn’t have brought it up either.
Without Mike’s handy guidance on how to interact with someone you have strictly platonic feelings for and don’t want to bang Richie is going to be thrown directly onto a minefield where any wrong move could lead to his entire friendship with Eddie blowing up in his face. Once again, he fearfully thinks about his future boyfriend Josh-Andy-Dylan and their underwhelming romantic and sexual relationship.
Maybe he should have just called this trip off. Take the coward’s way out, like he usually does. After what Eddie said on the phone on Sunday, he can at least pretend that he is going through with it for Eddie’s sake and not because he is lonely and misses him so much and wants desperately to spend three months with him. Not because he has nothing better to do. Not because he has been looking forward to this since the day Mike pitched the idea to him.
He manages to get a fitful two hours of sleep, head bent at an awkward angle so as to not accidentally drop it on Karen’s shoulder next to him. He isn’t sure his career could survive the lawsuit, if the sheer ferocity of her email drafts to HR are anything to go by.
Somewhere above Indiana he jerks awake and spends the rest of the flight trying to focus on an episode of How Did This Get Made, and not thinking about Eddie.