Archive of Our Own

The house is very big. 

It’s what Richie has noticed each time he’s come here—first to tour it, then to move in. Three unnecessary stories and a basement. The kind of wobbly glass in the windows that throws his reflection into distorted shapes. 

It’s big and it’s empty and it’s fucking old. 

“I just think this is ridiculous,” Richie says, standing in the center of his barren living room with a wasteland of cardboard boxes stacked around his feet. He presses his phone to his ear and then immediately regrets it when he hears Stan sigh at him across the line. “And I can hear that beautiful wrinkly brain of yours forming opinions over there, Stanley, so save it, baby, would you? Spare me.”

“I won’t tell you my opinion if you don’t want me to, Richie,” Stan says. He sounds long-suffering. Could just be the static. Probably isn’t. “But I’ll put you on the phone with Patty and you know she won’t hold back. So it’s your choice.”

Richie’s turn to sigh. He loves Stan’s wife, he really does, but for all her soft smiles and quiet voice, her honesty is brutal enough to strip him open. 

“Fine,” Richie says. He glances around himself for a moment, looking for a place to sit, but gives up and goes out to the front porch. The granite step is damp with the thick, foggy air that’s been prevalent in Derry so far since Richie’s arrived, but he settles there anyway. “Lay it on me.”

“You need a break, Richie,” Stan says, and fuck, Richie wasn’t prepared for this : the kindness in Stan’s tone, the real care. “You need to take some time for yourself. Relax a little. Enjoy your life.”

Richie’s free hand has wound itself tightly up into the lining of his hoodie pocket as Stan speaks, and he makes himself let go. Staring out at the brown, dewy grass stretched down the hill before him, Richie is grateful for the things his friend is too kind to say. 

You can’t afford to break down onstage like that again. You need to learn how to do something other than that shitty standup, the kind that makes you feel rotten inside. You need to stop having an identity crisis fifteen years after everybody else is done with theirs. 

Do better. 

“A change of pace will be good,” Stan adds, when Richie has been quiet too long. “And a change of scenery.”

“You all have me taking in the sea air like an ill maiden,” Richie says. 

“Not quite sea,” Stan says dryly. “River, maybe. Forest.”

Forest indeed. The trees behind Richie’s new house are dark and rain-damp, not quite leafless in the early-fall weather, but getting there. There are trees all around this little, quiet town. 

It is nothing like L.A. 

Maybe Stan is right. But when the wind kicks up and blows a cluster of dead leaves across Richie’s porch, gusts its way down his spine like a long-fingered hand, Richie finds that hard to believe. 

*

It was his agent’s idea to move out here. 

“I think you need to distance yourself,” he’d said, instead of firing Richie immediately, which is nice, Richie supposes. “Take some time to write something new.”

Richie almost wishes he had been fired. Sitting here on his bed, laptop balancing on his knees, staring down at a variation of the same mom joke he tells every night—if he’d been fired he wouldn’t have to go through all this again. If he’d been fired he could’ve moved out of his tiny apartment on his own terms. Escaped to fucking Alaska and fished for snow crabs with a couple of buff sailors for the rest of his days. 

Never have had to distill the entirety of his pathetic existence into a couple of one-liners that make drunk people laugh. 

Richie shuts his laptop. 

The house around him clenches around the silence. It pushes in its walls until the sound of Richie’s breath touches every shadowed corner, every dusty baseboard. It crushes him small. 

He falls asleep with his heart beating a little too fast: halfway scared and much too lonely, and a rhythm in his chest making a bruise of his bones. 

*

He’s dreaming. That’s what he tells himself. He’s dreaming, and his house is big and empty and rings with quiet, and that’s why Richie wakes up in the small hours of the morning and there is a man standing by his bed. 

He’s small, in the sort of way that most people who stand next to Richie are. His hair is slicked sideways over his head, parted politely. His white shirt, while smudged with something dark in the shape of handprints, is tucked neatly into his sturdy jeans. His eyes are very large, and very steadily fixed upon Richie’s face. 

His feet don’t touch the ground. 

“Fuck,” Richie gasps, heart pounding, heart pounding. He flails a hand out and grabs his glasses of the nightstand, jamming them onto his face and squinting up at the man. “Who the fuck—am I being robbed?”

The man’s eyes—improbably—get larger. He looks… well. Pissed off. Which is ridiculous, because this is Richie’s fucking house and it is three in the morning.    

“You can see me?” the man asks. 

That's a bad sign. Richie may be the dumbest guy who ever moved to a creepy town by himself at the age of thirty-five, but he still knows that’s a bad sign. 

Richie knows he is not being robbed. Richie says, anyway, “Yes I can fucking see you, and we’ve been face-to-face long enough that I could pick you out of a lineup.” His voice only shakes a little. “So. Don’t try anything.”

The man frowns, eyes still very much on Richie. He bobs a bit where he stands—hovers? What the fuck —and doesn’t seem to realize he’s doing it. 

This is it, Richie thinks. I’ve lost it. I’ve had a heart attack in my sleep and now I’m spending my last minutes hallucinating. 

“God,” sighs the man. “You’re worse than the last people who lived here.”

It probably says something about Richie’s self esteem that that hurts a bit. But seriously. Worse than a whole family? That shit stings. 

“Hey,” says Richie. “Um. I’m freaking out a little right now so if you could tone down the insults—”

“ You’re freaking out?” The man makes a strange sort of chopping gesture in Richie’s direction, as if so overcome with incredulity that his limbs can’t possibly stay still, and his frown deepens. “Nobody’s been able to see me for eighty years and you’re freaking out? Jesus. Jesus christ.”

Richie’s blood roars in his ears, echoing and loud. He says, “Are you. Um. A ghost?”

The man looks at Richie as if he has truly never met a person more dense. The air around him flickers slightly; disturbances in the quality. Ripples on a pond. 

“Have you ever met anybody living who could float like this?”

Richie laughs. He can’t help it: it’s either laugh or scream, and he certainly knows which he prefers. Still, the sound comes out shaky, tangled up in his breath. “No,” he says. “No, I don’t suppose I have.”

“So,” says the man. He loses a bit of his angry edge and, very briefly, the image of him dims. “Therefore, ghost.”

For a man who is dead, he’s nice to look at. Richie likes the shape of his shoulders and the small, displeased line of his mouth. 

What the fuck! Richie screams at himself, keeping the alarm as internal as possible. 

“So, um,” he says, and tripping all over himself but he figures he gets a fucking pass, “uh. Why can I… see you?”

Eighty years the man had said. That’s a long time to be invisible. 

For the first time tonight, Richie’s guest is the one to seem lost. The frown grows to include the space between his eyebrows; folds up into a little crease there, and stays. “I don’t know,” he says, and his voice sounds small. 

“Oh,” murmurs Richie. His hands are still sweaty where they grip his sheets. “I’m sorry.”

The man shrugs. “Nothing you can do about it.”

Another laugh, this time a little stronger. “I guess not.”

Between them, the house is quiet, and quiet, and quiet. 

“Sorry,” Richie says again, “I just—am not sure how to proceed in this situation. Like, literally nothing has equipped me for this.”

The man looks surprised, or impressed, or something—something that makes an arch of his eyebrows, that makes him drift a few inches closer to Richie’s bed. 

That same wind that Richie felt outside blows through the room. Richie shivers. Backs up as subtly as he can, holding his blankets protectively over his middle bits. 

“What’s your name?” asks the man. 

“Richie Tozier,” Richie answers, and then wonders if maybe he should have second thoughts over giving his personal information to a ghost. Oh fucking well, apparently. “And you are?”

“Eddie Kaspbrak.” 

It is said carefully, like maybe there would be a downside to giving Richie his full name, like Richie could possibly do anything to a man who is already dead. It’s weirdly endearing. 

“Eddie Spaghetti,” Richie says, nonsensical and a little breathless. 

“No,” Eddie says immediately. “What the fuck.”

“Spaghetti Man. Eds. Eds. I like it,” Richie says wildly. “It suits you. Can you sort of… hey Eds, can you not watch me while I sleep?”

Eddie, who is staring at Richie like he’s the one who’s just seen a ghost, startles a bit. “Right,” he says, and drifts down a few inches, until his feet bump gently against the floor. He’s wearing a quite sensible pair of work boots. “Sure thing.”

“Thanks,” Richie says, and he’s in the process of opening his great big mouth and saying some more stupid things when Eddie very suddenly fades from view. 

Richie blinks at the darkness left around him. The silence of the room. 

The cold spot in the air where Eddie just was. 

“I,” Richie announces to the cardboard boxes piled up like an audience around him, “am losing my mind.” 

He takes his glasses off. 

He lays down. 

He doesn’t go to sleep for a long time. 

*

Morning, and Richie has firmly talked himself into the consensus that last night was the product of a trippy stress dream when he walks into his kitchen to see Eddie Kaspbrak sitting on the counter. 

“Oh goddamn,” Richie says. 

Eddie looks up. “You can’t be annoyed,” he says. “It’s my house.”

The box labeled KITCHEN is sitting open on the floor, and Eddie is currently floating a spatula and a silicone whisk that Richie has never used a few inches in front of him. He doesn’t spare Richie more than a glance: his tongue is poked out slightly between pink lips, brow furrowed in concentration as he makes the utensils move in an easy circle through the air. 

“I’m not annoyed,” Richie says, and it’s strangely true: out of all the emotions he’s currently experiencing, annoyance isn’t one of them. Baffled, maybe. Absolutely gobsmacked. Definitely bemused. 

Also resigned. It figures, he thinks. Figures that he’d be the unlucky sonofabitch to end up with a ghost in his big spooky pity house. 

Eddie lets Richie’s things fall neatly back into their box. He flicks his hand and it refolds itself, and then he extends his legs and hops down off the counter. 

Face-to-face like this—here, in Richie’s kitchen, with the blue-gray morning coming in through the curtainless windows on a wave—it’s hard to believe that Eddie isn’t as real as Richie himself. His feet are even on the floor right now, and there’s something… something more substantial about him this morning. Richie can still see straight through his torso, but Eddie’s face is easy to rest his eyes upon.

“Are you scared?” Eddie asks him. He has his hands in his pockets, but the line of his shoulders is tense. Richie gets the feeling that Eddie is usually slightly tense. “Since I’m dead.”

He should be. Absolutely Richie should be terrified, and catching the next plane back to L.A. as soon as possible. 

“You know what, Eds,” Richie says. “Call me crazy, but I’m really not.”

Richie would not previously have guessed that ghosts could blush (the no blood thing) but there really isn’t any other way to describe the color Eddie’s cheeks take on. It’s a vivid, angry kind of blush, not delicately pink, and Richie is charmed. 

“You are,” Eddie says. He’s frowning extremely meanly, probably to make up for the flush. “Crazy, I mean. Or just dumb.” 

Richie touches his own face, feels the spread of his smile beneath his palm. “Oh baby, talk dirty to me.” 

“What if I possess you?” Eddie asks. “That’s scary.”

Richie tilts his head. His bare feet are cold on the tiled floor. “Is that something you can do?”

Eddie huffs at him and then disappears. 

“Didn’t think so!” Richie calls to the empty air, and goes to dig his coffee machine out. 

He wonders why he isn’t more horrified about all of this as his coffee brews, sitting on the lip of his counter because it’s his house and he also doesn’t have chairs in here yet. Maybe he’s in shock—but no, Richie’s been in shock before (much more recently than he likes) and this is never how it had felt. 

That had felt strangely calm; as if he had to be calm or he’d shatter into a thousand un-pick-up-able pieces. 

He isn’t calm now, this isn’t calm, his heart still beats a little too quick when he remembers that he’s got a dead roommate—but he isn’t… upset. 

Eddie still hasn’t shown back up by the time Richie’s coffee is finished, so Richie takes his mug and his phone out onto the front porch and sits down on the damp front steps once more. 

“Hello, Beverly,” he says when she answers. He thinks: you’re the first living person I’ve talked to in twelve hours. He wants to laugh, but doesn’t. “How are you on this fine morning?”

“You sound chipper,” she says. There’s a hint of caution in her tone that wouldn’t have been there two months ago, before Richie lost his shit, before— “How’s the house?”

“Haunted,” Richie says. He squints out across his yard, against the light that catches on a car passing on the road below and tosses itself into his eyes. “Big.”

The thing about Richie is that he regularly says stuff that has no basis in reality, so Bev doesn’t pick up on the truth in those words. He’s not sure if he’s grateful or not. “Think you’ll like it?” she asks. 

“Think I’ll have to,” Richie answers. 

Bev is quiet. “Rich,” she says softly. “All I want is for you to be happy. It’s all any of us want. If you really hate it there you can come live with Ben and I, we’ve got the room. Or any of the other Losers—you know we’d take you in a heartbeat. We just want you to be ok.”

“Bevvy,” he says, “honey, I know.” His eyes sting a little. He works his fingers up beneath the lenses of glasses and swipes at them, glad that nobody’s here to see. Well. Almost nobody. “But you have to shut up because I’m sitting on the porch in my bathrobe tearing up like a dumbass and it’s not even eight am. God, all my friends make me emotional. It’s awful.”

She laughs at him and the mood shifts, something heavy lifting away. Richie loves her. Richie loves them all. 

*

Derry is small enough that Richie can walk there on foot, reaching the grocery store before he even breaks a sweat. 

The wind feels good on his skin, tastes good when he opens his mouth and inhales. Cool and clean on the back of his tongue. 

He gets what he needs quickly. A carton of eggs, a gallon of milk. Laundry detergent. A couple boxes of pasta. 

Eddie Spaghetti he thinks to himself, alone in an aisle while the lights flicker neon over his head. He wonders if Eddie lived in Derry before he died. He wonders if Eddie shopped in this store.

Stupid thought. Eighty years, Eddie had said. Richie can’t imagine him here, in his old-fashioned clothes with his hair slicked back buying bread off these sticky metal shelves.  

“You’re new around here,” says the woman ringing him up. 

It’s utterly without preamble. Richie laughs a little, on instinct, but quickly quiets down when she sees he isn't smiling. 

“Just moved in,” Richie answers. “I live in the big house up on the hill.”

Something blank and careful happens in her eyes. She scans his frozen pizza mechanically. “The Kaspbrak house,” she says. No inflection. She doesn’t wait for confirmation. “Treating you well?”

“Everything’s just peachy.”

“Hm.” A pause. The scanner beeps. “I don’t suppose the realtor told you it was haunted?”

Oh, so they’re doing this then. 

“She did not,” Richie says mildly. He hands the woman his card. “Anything you should fill me in on?”

He earns a very slight smile, and it feels like an achievement. Christ. Everybody he’s met in this fucking town is grumpy as hell. 

“The Kaspbraks lived and died in that house,” the cashier says. She shrugs. “Never been in there myself, but nobody who moves in ever lasts long. Spooky, they say. Noises in the pipes, things tossed around the living room. They wake up in the morning and their furniture is in a different place.”

Richie tries not to laugh a second time. He feels like he’s been plucked from his old life and dropped right on the set of a badly-written horror flick. Spooky . Jesus. 

“A ghost with an eye for interior design,” Richie says. “Terrifying.”

“You just watch yourself,” the woman says. “Wouldn’t want to end up with more than you bargained for.”

*

Eddie shows up at Richie’s side when he reaches the base of the hill, already running his mouth. 

“Look,” he says, “I thought I could make it two days but I really don’t think I can. Are you ever gonna put your stuff away? Because all those cardboard boxes just sitting around in an already damp house is really unhealthy, it’s going to damage the air quality and also it looks like shit—”

“Spaghetti Man,” Richie interrupts. He hikes his tote bag a little further up his shoulder, and avoids the slickest cobbless so he doesn’t bust his ass falling down the hill. “I hate to be insensitive, but you literally can’t breathe. How is this an issue for you.”

Eddie uses his big Disney eyes in a way perfectly calibrated to make Richie feel like the scum of the earth. 

“Sorry,” Richie says immediately, and feels his own face heat, “yeah, definitely crossed a line there. Sorry. I’m an idiot.”

“It’s not good for you, either,” Eddie says a little stiffly. “And you are breathing.”

“Yeah,” Richie says. He chuckles softly. The wind blows a cluster of leaves by them, and one passes through Eddie’s foot like he’s made of air. “I guess so.”

“I just…” Eddie looks frustrated, a knot of a frown between his eyebrows, but it seems more internal than Richie’s witnessed so far. Like it’s directed inside. “I can’t go any further than the base of the hill. I’m stuck here forever. And I guess… after a while you get used to things looking a certain way.”

Richie smiles at him. “The lady at the grocery store told me you had a thing for interior design.”

Eddie splutters. “I—what?”

“Yeah!” Richie has the urge to nudge his arm, to jostle him like he would a friend. He firmly does not do this. “She said ‘Eddie Kaspbrak is a real picky guy who likes his house looking nice as hell and somebody should’ve warned you about him.’ And I said ‘he’s a fancy bitch but I love him’ and then I left.”

“You don’t—” Eddie stops. He’s scowls at Richie. Richie thinks he’s adorable, and then feels like an entire insane person. “You don’t even know me.”

“Love at first sight, Eddie darling,” says Richie. 

“Please,” says Eddie, “just put the goddamn boxes away.”

“Bossy, bossy,” Richie sighs, rolling his eyes as he takes the steps two at a time. He unlocks the door and holds it for Eddie, feeling gallant even though Eddie can probably just materialize himself through. “Will my life have no peace?”

The air swells with cold as Eddie brushes by him—not like cold was added, but like all the warmth has been pulled out.  

Richie doesn’t let himself shiver. 

Eddie turns around once they’re both inside, but he doesn’t quite meet Richie’s eyes. His hands have woven themselves together in front of his thighs. “Sorry,” he says. It’s abrupt and too loud. Richie doesn’t understand where this sudden self-consciousness is coming from. “I’ll try to be less picky. I mean—it’s your fucking house too, you paid for it, and you didn’t sign up for a dead roommate—”

“Hey,” Richie murmurs. Softer than he’d meant to be, gentler. He grips the handles of his bag. “Eds. It’s ok.”

“Not my name,” says Eddie like a reflex. He isn’t scowling anymore. He watches Richie, careful, hesitant. “I won’t bother you as much. It just… gets lonely sometimes.”

God. It must. Richie couldn’t do it: couldn’t exist entirely on his own for eighty years, invisible, unknowable. The only one like himself. 

He thinks about Eddie wandering silently through the narrow halls of this house, the wide open rooms. Alone even when others lived here. 

It pulls something sideways in his chest. 

“Really, Eds,” Richie says. The outline of Richie’s boxes is clear through Eddie’s torso, clear through the place where his heart should be. “I’m… I’m lonely all the time, and I’m visible to everybody. Way more visible than most people are.” He swallows tightly, and then he smiles again, smaller this time, more real. “Honestly, Spagheds, I think I’ll appreciate the company.”

“Ok,” says Eddie, and for the first time since Richie’s known him, he smiles. Richie thinks oh. Oh no. “Ok. I… good.”

“Good,” Richie says softly. 

Eddie disappears after a few moments. Richie is left with the image of that smile. 

Richie puts his fucking shit away. 

*

It takes him the better part of a week, but eventually Richie is fully moved into the house. 

It still doesn’t feel like a home. Too big and too empty. Too much space for one person, let alone two— 

Because there are emphatically two people living here. 

Eddie isn’t shy—he upholds his promise not to watch Richie sleep, which Richie finds nice of him, but that’s about where his disinclination to hover around Richie stops. It isn’t rare for Richie to come downstairs in the morning and find Eddie sitting at the table or perched on the counter; not rare for Eddie to appear at Richie’s side at the base of the hill when he’s walking home, or show up on the front porch and poke nosily at the groceries Richie brings home so he can judge him half-heartedly. 

Richie’s sure he looks like an idiot to any cars that might be passing by, sitting there on his front steps laughing at the air. He doesn’t let it stop him. If there’s one thing breaking down onstage in front of dozens of people does for a guy it’s increase his threshold for foolish shit he’s willing to do in public. 

One unseasonably-warm afternoon in early November Richie heads to the woods in his backyard with a gift Mike got him a couple years ago. 

He smiles to himself as he hangs it up. There’s no way Eddie’ll be able to resist this—it’s exactly the kind of thing he pretends is very stupid for Richie to be so excited about but unsubtly enjoys just as much as Richie does, if not more since he probably hasn’t seen one since he was alive. 

Sure enough, Richie is just climbing in when Eddie shows up at his side, eyebrows lifted. 

Richie has gotten used to the way Eddie appears: it’s not actually as abrupt as he’d thought at first. There are hints if Richie really looks. The air warps a little, gets a little colder before Eddie filters in and takes on form. He comes in softly now, cooling Richie’s side with his nearness. 

“Hey there, Eds,” Richie grins. He leans back and the trees creak a little; Eddie’s eyes dart up, swift, and then back to Richie’s face with strange-muffled worry. 

“Richie,” says Eddie. “What. Why.”

“Hammock, Eddie my love,” Richie says. He crosses his ankles neatly over themselves and then folds his hands over his belly, tilting his chin up so he can look Eddie fully in the eyes. “Today is a day for relaxing.”

Eddie is swell, but he’s got no pokerface to speak of. It’s clear when he gazes at the notebook tucked in neat beneath Richie’s thighs, those eyebrows rocketing even higher. “Relaxing,” he says. “Sure.”

“Well, shit, Eds,” he says. “The grind of capitalism never stops, and I’m no exception to that rule. Gotta get that cash, baby.”

“I thought you were supposed to be taking a break,” Eddie says severely. He moves a little closer to the hammock, lifting a hand to run it along the edge but pulling back at the last second. He is very good at holding Richie’s gaze. It makes Richie’s skin hot, and he doesn’t know why. “Relaxing.”

“Geez,” Richie says. There is a clench of something fist-sized and tight in his throat, and he swallows around it. “You gotta stop tapping my calls, Spaghetti.”

“I don’t tap your calls,” Eddie says. He’s floating a little, just a foot or so off the ground to put him at Richie’s eye-level. “You tell me everything after you’re done. I agree with Stan.”

Richie clutches his chest. “Jesus,” he says. “Oh good god. Fuck. I cannot believe this.”

“What?” Eddie is trying to frown but there’s a laugh coming through at the same time and it all ends up in a strange, airy sort of grin that Richie feels like a touch. “You’re allowed to take care of yourself.”

“Eddie please,” Richie says, breathless, pressing the backs of his palms to his cheeks. “Stop. I hate this. I hate this so bad.” 

“Just don’t write this afternoon,” Eddie says, “and I’ll stop talking about it.”

“I would do anything for you to stop talking about it,” Richie says, “forever and ever and ever,” and sinks down into the hammock while Eddie laughs at him softly in the background. 

They stay like that for a while. Richie doesn’t have his phone on him—but he’s still got his eyes closed anyway, face tipped up toward the watery sun that peeks down on them from the slate gray sky, and he doesn’t really mind. 

It’s nice. Sitting here with Eddie in the mostly-quiet, nothing but the sound of the breeze and Eddie’s occasional wordless humming to hear. 

He must drift off. When he opens his eyes again it’s almost dusk, and his mind feels sleep-heavy and slow. 

Eddie is still there. Not, Richie smiles to see, watching him sleep. 

No. He’s stretched out, though, almost like he’s got his own invisible hammock right next to Richie’s, his head down by Richie’s feet and his feet up by Richie’s head, his body a gentle bow in the air. 

He looks relaxed, not like he has to hold himself up. It’s ghost physics or something. Richie thinks, I wish you could climb in here with me, and Eddie is opening his own eyes before Richie has time to examine that thought. 

Eddie laughs at him when their eyes meet and Richie doesn’t know why but it makes him smile. “Your hair’s all messed up,” Eddie says. “Fucking Sasquatch.”

“How the fuck do you know who Sasquatch is?” Richie manages, laughing so suddenly and so forcefully that he half sits up, his hand on his abdomen. “Eddie what the hell? Aren’t you from the forties or something?”

“I’ve been on the Internet, ” Eddie says incredulously. 

Richie is losing his mind. He is absolutely losing his entire mind, here in his backyard with his ghost friend talking about Sasquatch. He says “What— how —”

“I don’t know how, fuckface,” Eddie snaps, but he’s laughing too. Richie watches the dimple in his cheek, bold and deep and lovely. Actually, now that Richie thinks about it, Eddie seems more corporeal than usual. More vibrant. There is a marked difference between him and the air. “I’ve always been able to poke around on there, ever since laptops were invented and people started bringing them here when they moved in. I know about shit, Richie, god.”

Richie’s laughing too hard to answer. He pictures Eddie Kaspbrak sitting cross-legged on his bed doing a deep-dive on Reddit to look at fake Sasquatch photos. The image brings tears to his eyes. 

“Plus I died in the forties,” Eddie says. He shifts in the air, lowering himself until his boots make gentle contact with the leaf-strewn ground below. The wind blows his coldness Richie’s way; Richie shivers. “I was born in 1905.”

This sobers Richie a little. Tones his laugh down to a quiet smile. 

He doesn’t like thinking about Eddie dying. Doesn’t like wondering how it had happened. Wondering why he’s still here. 

“Jesus, Spaghetti,” Richie says, aiming for the joke but falling a bit short of the mark. “You’re old. ”

“Still look better than you,” Eddie mutters. He grins, small, tucked in the corner of his mouth, and his dimple comes back. 

“Yeah,” Richie says. “Yeah.”

*

Eddie likes to “help” Richie with dinner. 

It’s… not actually very helpful at all. He’s a small guy but he’s somehow able to take up a lot of space with his flailing gestures and his tendency to float household objects a foot in front of him until Richie grabs them out of the air. Mostly Eddie sits on the counter and turns the oven on and off from across the room. 

Richie likes it. It makes his chest go warm, lights it up like a fucking Christmas tree. 

“I’m surprised you can cook,” says Eddie one day, his elbows propped up on his knees and his hands clasped in front of him. The pose makes his forearms stand out nicely. Richie looks away, the back of his neck hot. 

“Hey, uh, fuck you,” Richie says good-naturedly. “My dad wouldn’t’ve let me move out without learning how to cook at least something.”

“Wasn’t your dad a dentist?”

“Sure was, Spaghetti Man,” Richie says, and he’s oddly touched that Eddie remembers that extraneous, seemingly unimportant detail about his life. There goes that warm place again. “He’s a tooth guy. He appreciates food that’ll go easy on your chompers.”

Eddie rolls his eyes broadly, but he’s smiling. Just a little. 

“Terrible,” says Eddie. “You say terrible things.”

Richie tosses the chicken in his wok, adding a little soy sauce. He’s no Guy Fieri, but he can make a mean stir fry, if he does say so himself. Went would be proud.  

“It’s all part of my charm, Eds,” he says, and he notices when Eddie doesn’t deny it. 

He notices it so fucking hard he can’t make himself say anything. 

“I don’t remember my dad that well,” Eddie says quietly. 

Richie goes still. Eddie hardly ever talks about his life: it feels important for Richie to shut up for once in his fucking miserable existence and listen. It feels like a gift that he’s allowed to do so. 

Richie understands that he should be sensitive about this. Richie says, “Pa not around much?” and promptly wishes he could stir fry his whole fucking head. 

“You are an entire bitch,” Eddie says mildly. “He died when I was little.”

“Oh,” Richie says with his big flapping stupid-stupid- dumb fucking mouth. “I’m, um, sorry.”

“ Jeeee sus,” Eddie drawls. “Don’t have a hernia, Rich.”

Face burning, Richie glances at him over the rim of his glasses. Eddie is swinging his feet slightly, and his eyes are round and dark and unwavering where they meet Richie’s. There is a smug sort of smile on those lips. A smug sort of smile that suggests he could punch Richie in the face if he wanted to, but he’s gonna refrain. 

Richie thinks, you are so fucking hot, and then he wants to leap into the oven. 

“You know what,” Richie says. “You know what.”

“Huh-uh,” Eddie says. “Enlighten me.”

“No!” Richie says. “I don’t think I will! Freedom of speech means freedom of silence, Eddie darling! Fuck!”

“That is,” says Eddie, “entirely not true.”

Richie eats chicken right out of the wok to shut himself up, and doesn’t even regret it when he burns the inside of his mouth. 

Later they’re sitting on the couch watching a shitty comedy that is nevertheless probably funnier than anything Richie’s ever said while Richie eats straight out of the wok again, much to Eddie’s disgust. 

“Sometimes I wake up in the morning,” Eddie says loudly, “and think ‘today I will be nice to Richie because he is my friend.’ And then you do shit like this, and I think ‘I will kill this motherfucker in his sleep.’”

“Aw, Eds,” Richie says. He smiles at him, telling himself to ignore how genuine his reaction actually is. “I’m your friend?”

Eddie goes red again, that brilliant, aggressive shade of red. It delights Richie. Richie is delighted. 

“Well,” says Eddie. He squirms a bit, but he doesn’t look away from Richie. “Well. Yeah. I think—do you think so?”

“Yeah, Eds,” Richie says. His voice is quiet, and he knows they both notice it: Richie Tozier is never quiet when he can help it. This means something. Richie has the bizarre feeling that he’s going to cry. “I know so.”

“Ok,” says Eddie. Richie watches him smile and then immediately force that smile down into something flat and straight and composed. Richie wishes he wouldn’t. “Thank you.”

“You don’t have to thank me, Eds,” Richie says fondly. Sitting here in the low light, Eddie looks just as real as Richie does. Eddie looks touchable. 

“I know,” says Eddie. Grumpy. He stares at Richie’s television, and the picture dances in his pupils. Touchable, touchable, touchable. “I just want to.”

“Ok,” Richie echoes. “Well then you’re welcome.” 

He thinks, I just want to. 

*

Richie calls Stan from town the next day, sitting on a bench by the pond. 

“Everything ok?” Stan asks as soon as he picks up. Usually that kind of easy care would warm Richie up, but today it sours something at the back of his throat. Today something is wrong. 

“Stan,” Richie says, and he knows he’s blowing this all out of proportion, he knows he’s being ridiculous, he knows the panicked sort of waver in his voice probably just gave Stan three gray hairs, but he can’t help it. He bounces his leg on the cold hard bench. “My house is haunted.”

Stan is quiet for a moment. When he speaks, his voice is measured and calm as it ever is, and the relief of that makes Richie’s eyes slip closed. “Alright,” Stan says. “Are you scared?”

What a good fucking question. Richie laughs, and even to himself it sounds wild.

“No,” he says. “He’s actually quite delightful. The ghost, I mean. His name is Eddie.”

“Eddie,” Stan says flatly. “I see. Do you think there’s a point in this story that would be more rational to start from?”

Richie considers this. “Yes,” he says. “I woke up the night after I moved in and Spaghetti was floating by my bed.”

Stan says, wearily, “ Spaghetti? ” 

“Eddie Spaghetti,” Richie says. “Eds. Spagheds. The Spaghetti Man. The grumpy ghost who lives with me and is my friend and I think is hot because I’m a big gay idiot.”

Stan’s next pause is very long, and Richie has his eyes shut like a wince now, afraid of what he’ll be told. Even here, observed only by a few busy ducks, his face burns. 

“You never make things easy for yourself, do you, Rich?” Stan says at last. He sighs, and Richie feels chastened, yet still a little warm because Stan is listening to him and not calling him crazy and hanging up like he should. “Alright. I’m going to try to get through this conversation without spiralling over the fact that ghosts are apparently real. I’m sure you’ve done enough spiralling for the both of us.”

It’s really fucking cold outside today. Richie tucks his chin down in the collar of his jacket. 

“Oh baby have I spiralled.” Richie spiralled so hard that he’s sure he only slept a handful of minutes last night. Richie spiralled so hard that, when Eddie had appeared in his kitchen this morning, Richie hadn’t quite been able to meet his eyes. 

He doesn’t think he’ll be able to forget about the confused little frown Eddie had given him. 

Richie swallows tightly. Fixes his eyes on the ducks. 

“So you think a ghost is hot,” Stan says, and Richie hangs on to the quiet rationality with which he says those words like they’re a bouey and he’s just been tossed off a ship. “That’s not the end of the world. You think John Mulaney is hot and he’s just as unattainable.”

“First of all I told you that in confidence,” Richie says, “so I hope Peppermint Patty isn’t listening in. Second of all—” and here he leans forward in his seat even though Stan isn’t with him, gripping the edge of the bench tightly with his free hand, “John Mulaney is alive, so in the world of people it is physically possible to attain, he at least ranks.”

“This is true.” Stan is using his processing voice. One of the ducks dips down low beneath the murky surface of the pond, its hind legs sticking up like flags. “I have to ask an uncomfortable question.”

“I couldn’t be less comfortable already, Staniel,” Richie mutters. “Fire away.”

“‘Kay. Are you upset about this because, a) your house is haunted, b) your house is haunted by a ghost that you think is hot and that’s a lot to grapple with, or, c) your house is haunted by a ghost that you think is hot and wish was attainable because you like him and you’re upset that he’s dead?”

“Fuck,” Richie says weakly. 

“Look,” Stan says. “I know you aren’t gonna want to hear this, but I really think that you should just consider going on a date. With someone who… has a physical form.”

Richie makes a string of sounds that don’t sound anything like words, no matter how hard he tries. He scowls at the ducks, and the expression makes him think of Eddie which doesn’t help things at all. 

“I know,” Stan says, “I know. Just consider it.”

“Fine,” Richie lies tightly. “I’ll consider it.”

Richie must sound upset enough that Stan lets up on him. “In the meantime,” Stan says, “tell me more about Eddie.” 

*

“How’re the Kaspbraks treating you?” asks the woman from the store when Richie strolls up to the checkout line. 

“Oh, it’s just the one,” Richie says. He smiles at her with what his publicist likes to call his ‘used car salesman smile,’ whatever the fuck that means. “He’s pretty calm,” Richie lies. “Polite. Keeps to himself.”

The woman cocks an eyebrow. Richie glances at her nametag this time—Linda. Figures. “No Mrs. Kaspbrak?”

Richie nearly drops a can of olives on his foot. 

“Linda,” he says. “Are you asking me if the ghost in my house is single?” 

She laughs at him. He lets her, and then he collects his groceries and speedwalks home, fast enough that there’s a bit of sweat at his hairline by the time Eddie shows up at his side. 

Richie stops walking, turning around to look Eddie right in the eyes.

Immediately he remembers why he hadn’t had the strength to do it this morning. Eddie’s got that sort of gaze: the one that slips in, knife-sharp, between Richie’s tender exposed ribs and shanks him. 

“Eds,” Richie says as pleasantly as he can manage. “Linda told me you have a wife. I’m heartbroken. Distraught. How could you hurt me this way? You, the love of my life, the man I get out of bed for—”

Eddie’s strawberry face, his fierce, angry frowns. God. “What—what the fuck, Richie,” he says. His hands are curled up tight at his thighs. “Who the fuck is Linda?”

“Grocery store,” Richie says, waving a hand in the air like he’s brushing the words aside. “Wife? You?”

Richie feels like somebody just pushed him out of a plane, like he’s free-falling a thousand miles above the rocky ground and he’s about to be impaled by a pine tree or something.

“No,” Eddie says. It’s firm. Unshakeable. “Hell no. That’s—absolutely no.”

“Oh,” Richie says. It’s an interesting sensation—all of the breath that had previously been outside his body rushes back in on one big gasp. “Well Linda’s fucking misinformed, then. Mrs. Kaspbrak my ass .”

“Richard,” Eddie says. His mouth is a perfect flat line. The pinnacles of his cheekbones are still blush-red. “I lived here with my mom.”

Richie says again, “Oh,” and then, louder, “ Oh. ”

“I took care of her until she died,” Eddie says flatly. His eyebrows are furrowed down over his straight nose, his arms crossed over his chest. He’s smaller than Richie, but when he stands like that it doesn’t seem so. 

“Well shit,” Richie says. He wonders how long it would take him to scamper on back to town and drown himself in the duck pond. “I’m an insensitive fuck.”

“Yeah,” Eddie says. He shifts slightly on his feet, and there’s tension in the tight bundle of nerves that makes up his body. “I wouldn’t have, um. Wouldn’t’ve been the kinda guy with a wife, anyway.”

It takes Richie an embarrassingly long time to get the deeper meaning of that sentence, but when he does, it hits him like a train. 

He feels his eyes bug open. Feels his jaw drop. 

Eddie is gay, Richie thinks, and the words trip a switch in the back of his brain that sets of a shock of white noise through his body, all the way down all four of his gangly limbs. 

It sort of feels like Richie’s hands aren’t his own. His tongue, either. Through a mouth of cotton he says, “Wife no husband yes?”

“No, dick, it was the forties,” Eddie snaps. He isn’t quite looking at Richie: his gaze is fixed unerringly on a point over Richie’s left ear, wide-eyed and slightly manic-looking. He shrugs. The movement is jerky. “I couldn’t have.”

Richie wants to reach out. “But you wanted to,” he says quietly. 

Eddie’s eyes flick to him, and then away. “Yeah,” he murmurs. 

Richie is going to cry, maybe, or stretch out his hand and touch Eddie’s wrist even though it’ll burn him with cold. “I’m gay,” he manages. 

“Yeah, Rich,” Eddie says again, and this time there’s a very slight smile on his lips. “I fucking know. You wouldn’t shut up about wanting to suck off Dev Patel yesterday.”

“That man could break my spine and I’d say thank you,” Richie says automatically, not really thinking about it. His brain is running on autopilot. Eddie is gay Eddie is gay EddieisgayEddieisgayEddie— 

Eddie rolls his eyes. It’s a gesture Richie is becoming familiar with. “You’ve told me,” he says. 

“So we’re both gay,” Richie says. “Richie and Eddie are gay. Trashmouth and Spaghetti are two gay roomies making it work in Maine. We are gay men. Homosexuals, if you will.”

“Richie shut up,” Eddie says wearily. 

They’ve made it to the porch. Richie sits down heavily on the front step, grocery bag landing next to him, and Eddie sits down too. 

Richie looks at their legs stretched out next to each other. Richie’s, long and hairy, and Eddie’s, covered in sturdy, eighty-year-old ectoplasm parading as jeans. 

Eddie is gay. 

Richie needs to call Stan again. 

“Is the gay thing the reason for the mom thing?” Richie asks. “Because I totally get it dude, I’d rather stay in my mom’s house my entire life than have to face the rest of this shit.”

He flaps a hand around. Shit meaning: standing in front of a crowd of people pretending like people’s moms are hot. Shit meaning: kissing one girl freshman year and having a panic attack so intense that when you get back to your dorm that you miss all your lectures the next day. Shit meaning: coming out to a group of your closest friends at thirty-five and not surprising any of them but still feeling like you’re carving out a piece of your insides and offering it to them on a fucking plate anyway.

Probably not the same stuff Eddie would’ve had to go through. 

Eddie doesn’t laugh, which isn’t unusual. Eddie also doesn’t scowl at him or call him stupid, either, which means something is definitely wrong. 

Richie shifts a little closer on the step. Eddie is freezing, but Richie does it anyway. 

“No,” Eddie says. “The mom thing was…” He is very still, staring down at the dying grass. “She didn’t like me being away from her. She was sick a lot, and, uh. I took care of her, of course, she was my fucking mom, but it made her paranoid. Protective.”

“That sucks, Eds,” Richie says gently. He doesn’t know what to do. He wants to ask Eddie a thousand questions: he wants to mine Eddie’s brain, extract everything and eat it up until Richie knows him inside and out. That is just… a very crazy thing to say, though. So he flounders. “She’s not… hanging around here?”

Eddie laughs a little bit, dry and breathy, and shoots a look at Richie. Sideways and flashing. “Hell no,” he says. “Ma lived twenty years after I died, all alone up here without me. Turns out she was fine, I guess. Didn’t ever really need anybody takin’ care of her anyway. I worked as a mechanic downtown and my boss’s family would cook for her a couple times a week once I was gone, shit like that.” He shrugs stiffly. “Just wanted me to stay with her. She didn’t have anything to stick around for after she died.”

“So she lied to you?” Richie tries to keep his voice level, tries to keep this shattering anger at a woman he never even knew from sneaking in. He doesn’t know if Eddie would appreciate him saying what he really wants to say. “Made all that up just to control you?”

Another look; it lingers a bit this time. “Yeah,” Eddie says. “She was a bitch.”

“Oh-ho!” Richie yells. He would shove Eddie’s shoulder, a friendly nudge, if his hand wouldn’t go through him. He threads his fingers together; keep his hands in his lap. “Say that shit, Eduardo!” 

Eddie’s face is red, but he looks firm, too, resolute in what he’s just said. Richie wonders if it’s the first time he’s said it aloud to anyone other than himself. “You’re such an idiot,” Eddie mutters, and Richie doesn’t think it’s too crazy of him to think it sounds fond. 

“Maybe so, Eds,” Richie says. “Maybe so. But I’m proud of you anyway.”

It must surprise Eddie. He looks straight at Richie, his eyes big and taken aback. Slowly, he smiles. 

Richie has a fucking crush on him. 

Christ. 

“You had something to stick around for, though?” Richie asks, bringing the conversation back around to a less mortifying place. 

“Oh,” Eddie says. He won’t look away, so therefore Richie can’t. “I guess so. Taking me a long time to figure out what it is, though.”

“Hm,” Richie murmurs, tipping his head. He’s so close to Eddie that he’s holding back shivers beneath the combination of Eddie’s lack of body heat and the crisp November air. “Anything I can do to help?”

That smile goes soft around the edges; Richie’s heart takes a leap into his throat. “Don’t think so, Rich,” Eddie murmurs. “But I’ll let you know.”

“You do that Eds.” Richie’s chest aches. “You do that.”

*

Steve (agent) 

Hey richie. Any progress on new set 

Richie

writing my magnum opus over here baby

*

Richie hasn’t written anything. 

He’s been out here for nearly a month now, and every time he picks up his notebook or opens a new document on his computer he has to drop everything to go hurl. 

“I think the problem is,” Richie says to Eddie one morning, his laptop blinking emptily up at him, “that I’ve finally run out of tit jokes.”

Eddie looks unimpressed. “Have you considered… not making them?”

They’re sitting in the breakfast nook, because this is the kind of house that has a fucking breakfast nook, and the sunlight streams in clear and cold through the windows that surround them, lighting the space up white-gold. 

Richie looks at Eddie. He can’t stop doing that today. 

Richie can’t see through him anymore. 

He keeps this to himself. It feels cruel, somehow, to bring this up to Eddie, although Richie can’t put a finger on why. Richie says, “What.”

“Not making them,” Eddie repeats. There’s a cup of coffee steaming in front of him even though he can’t drink it, made by Richie on instinct. Eddie’s hands are wrapped around it. “There are plenty of other body parts you could joke about.”

Richie laughs wryly. “Trust me, Eds, that is not the case for Trashmouth.”

Eddie is looking at him levelly, halfway between the steam and the sunlight. “It’s the case for Richie, though,” he says. 

They aren’t talking about tit jokes anymore. Richie’s hands are shaking—embarrassing—so he sits on them to keep them still. 

“Eds,” he says. “Eddie.” And he can’t say anything else. 

Eddie uncurls one of those hands from around his mug and stretches it across the table, stopping with his fingertips just a breath from grazing Richie’s sleeve. “I’ve watched some of your standup,” he says, his voice still soft. “It’s shitty.”

Richie stares at him. And then he bursts into laughter. 

“You’re funnier than me,” Richie says breathlessly. “Eds, you are the most hilarious person I’ve ever met.”

“I don’t really feel like you’re the metric you should be measuring comedy against,” Eddie grumbles, but he turns his head away to smile and Richie catches it like a star. 

Richie wants to—Richie wants— 

“It’s just not you, ” Eddie says. “If I didn’t know you, maybe I’d laugh.”

God, that’s sweet of him. “Eddie baby I appreciate that,” Richie says, a little ragged with the way he can’t quite stop giggling, “but you don’t strike me as the kind of fella that’d think masturbation jokes are funny.”

“Some of ‘em are,” Eddie says. He frowns. “Just not the ones where you’re talking about masturbating to women.”

“That unlikely, huh,” Richie muses. 

“Well,” says Eddie. The corner of his mouth slides up, his dimple showing full-force. “Yeah.”

Richie’s thought about it. Of course he has: thought about opening himself up down the middle and spilling his guts all across the stage, using feet of his intestines to write out I AM FUCKING GAY and making jokes about wanting to bottom for Brad Pitt while the whole audience looks all the way inside of him to the inner-workings of pulse and bone. Of course he’s thought about it. 

But people might not laugh. He doesn’t think he could cut back skin and sinew like that for people not to laugh. 

“I don’t know, Eddie,” Richie says, “I don’t, I don’t fucking know.”

Eddie’s smile. The line of his neck. “Nobody does.”

Nobody does. 

*

It’s a Wednesday, and when Richie checks the mail there’s a postcard from Bill and Mike tucked in between the things he’ll throw away. 

Richie sits down right there on the curb to read it. 

HELLO FROM ARIZONA! says the front of the card. There’s a bright orange desert in the back, shaded with pink. 

“Hello, Arizona,” Richie murmurs. He flips over the card. 

Hi Richie! 

Next stop on Bill and Mikey’s Big Tour of America—Arizona! He likes the desert and I like him. 

“Disgusting,” Richie says out loud, “how gay of you,” and smiles and smiles. 

We saw a dog that looked like you the other day. Big head. You should check the group chat more often, Rich. We miss you!

Hope you like your new house even if it’s haunted by a hot ghost. 

Love you,

Mike and Bill

They’ve both signed their names, but the rest of the card is in Mike’s looping handwriting. Bill’s drawn a strange, bad-looking dog in the corner, smiling wide, tongue lolling, head comically large. 

Richie pulls his phone out of his back pocket and snaps a picture of the postcard, sending it to the chat that he does check too infrequently.

Richie

[IMG]

gay 

Mikey

Hehe you betcha 

Big Bill

Scroll up to see dog 

Richie

i saw the dog and i’m fucking flattered 

Stan the Man

Yeah it seemed like a compliment to me

Handsome Haystack 

I think you’re cuter than the dog, Richie

Madame Beverly 

ben i am sitting RIGHT next to you 

Handsome Haystack 

You’re cuter than both of them🥰

Madame Beverly

🥰

Richie

no heteros in my fucking group chat

Peppermint Patty

None of us are heteros, some of us are just in hetero relationships 

Stan the Man

Yeah fucking WATCH IT

By the way Richie how is your hot roommate 

Richie 

fuck off staniel that’s my business 

Stan the Man 

Then you shouldn’t have told all of us about him 

Richie is still grinning when he gets inside. 

Eddie is on the couch doing something probably harmful to Richie’s laptop. Almost like an instinct, he smiles when he sees Richie. “What’s got you laughing?” he asks. 

“Stan,” Richie says, dropping down beside Eddie. He sinks down into his cushions and tips his head against the backrest so he can keep Eddie’s face in view. “Being an asshole.”

“He’s your best friend, isn’t he?”

“Stan The Man Uris is the love of my life,” Richie says, stretching out his arms. 

Eddie says, quietly, “Oh.”

The room goes still. 

Richie’s arms fall down to his sides. Richie is going to explode. Richie is going to rocket right up into the sun. “The platonic love of my life,” he says, and doesn’t know what he’s doing, and doesn’t know what he’s doing. 

Eddie is watching him, watching him. He says, “I’d like to meet your friends.”

“Mike and Bill sent a postcard,” Richie says, and hands it over, and thinks again, he likes the desert, and I like him. 

*

It’s raining when Richie wakes up, a slow clinging drizzle that shrouds the woodline out his window in fog. 

He wraps his blanket around his shoulders and stumbles downstairs, feeling sleepy and slow. His socked feet skid on the hardwood as he slips his way into the kitchen. 

Eddie is there, standing in front of the coffee machine with a frown of concentration between his eyebrows. With a start, Richie realizes that it’s on: bubbling away, dripping down into the pot. 

He wants to say something but he’s not sure he can. There’s a lump of something making his throat tight, making his chest warm and unsteady. 

Eddie smiles when he meets Richie’s eyes, self-satisfied and very clearly proud. “I fucking did it,” he says, pointing at the machine. “I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to figure this thing out but I got it this morning.”

“You’re gaining powers right before my eyes,” Richie says. His voice comes out slightly unsteady, and he hopes it can be attributed to having just woken up. He sniffs dramatically. “Ah, how time flies. They grow up so fast.”

Eddie rolls his eyes, but he doesn’t stop smiling. He moves to the side as Richie pours them both a cup. 

“Wanna sit on the porch?” Richie asks him. 

Eddie’s eyebrows lift. He glances dubiously out the window and then back at Richie. 

“I can drag a couple chairs out there,” Richie says, warming up to it now. “We can sit back by the door under the roof so you won’t get wet, Spagheds.”

Eddie chews his bottom lip when he’s making a decision: worries it between small white teeth, leaving pressure marks behind. 

“Fine,” he says. “But if any rain blows in we’re going back inside.”

“Hell yeah!” Richie says, pumping the fist that isn’t holding his coffee, and makes quick work of taking two of his ugly IKEA kitchen chairs outside. 

“We should get rocking chairs,” Richie says once they’re settled. He’s still got his blanket around his shoulders, his coffee between his palms: the rain and the time of year are making it cold, but Eddie’s making it colder. “And then we can sit out here and wave at the neighbors like old people.” 

Eddie is smiling at him a little when Richie turns to look, absent-minded and small. “Nobody can see me, though,” he says. “They’d just see you. A crazy guy on our front porch with an extra chair.”

“Maybe people can see you, Eds. You ever think of that? I’m the—holy shit, ” Richie says, interrupting himself as the full scope of his realization hits him. “I’m the only one who’s had the chance to see you, but maybe other people actually can? Eddie! We need to test this!”

“I dunno, Rich.” Eddie is frowning his internal sort of frown. Richie settles down. “Who would we even test it on?”

“Um… the fucking mailman or something.”

“Richie, I’m not going to give the mailman a stroke just to see if I’m visible,” Eddie says. 

“Why would you give him a stroke?” Richie leans in slightly. There’s about a foot of space between their chairs, which is on purpose. “He’ll just think I’ve got a friend over.”

Eddie says, “Richie I’m a ghost, ” with a snap in his voice. 

Here we go, Richie thinks. “You don’t,” says Richie, “look like one anymore.”

Eddie stares. 

“I mean.” Richie doesn’t know why he’s fumbling. His heart beats at the base of his throat. “You’re. You’ve got… skin.” 

Harder. Is the way Eddie stares. 

“I can’t see through you anymore and you don’t really float and also you’re all colorful,” Richie says, and then he snaps his mouth shut. 

“Ok…” Eddie says slowly. “By colorful do you mean… I’m not fucking gray and stuff?”

You look like I could touch you. 

“ Yes, ” says Richie. 

“Oh,” says Eddie. “Neat.” He looks down at his own hand. “That’s how I’ve always looked to myself. Even when other people definitely couldn't see me. Real, I mean. So that’s good to know.”

Richie thinks about Eddie, invisible and alone in the house he’d always lived in, wondering why eyes passed through him like glass. He’s so glad it’s different now—and he can’t help but wonder why. 

“Your mom couldn’t even see you?” Richie asks. “Not when she was still alive?”

Eddie shakes his head. “She—I think she knew I was there, sometimes. Sometimes, when I’d have all this anger and didn’t know where to put it, and I’d go make loud noises in the pipes or the air vents.” He shrugs. “She wasn’t scared, but that wasn’t really what I was going for. She was mad too, I think. Mad that she let go of me long enough for me to die.”

Eddie looks out into the rain, eyes slightly unfocused with a memory. Richie watches his chest rise and fall. Eddie always breathes, even though he doesn’t need to anymore. 

“I never told you,” Eddie says suddenly, “did I?”

Richie could reach out and lay his hand on the slender turn of Eddie’s wrist. He could. “Told me what, Eds?” he murmurs. 

Eddie looks at him. “How I died.”

Richie can’t speak again. He shakes his head this time. 

Eddie’s coffee mug is sitting on the arm of his chair; he wraps his fingers around it even though he can’t hold on, and his knuckles make a bumpy line. “You know I was a mechanic,” he says, and waits for Richie’s nod. Eddie’s got grease-smudges on his shirt, a fact that he’s bemoaned many times to Richie. He hates having to spend eternity in dirty clothes. “I was walking home from work one night—I always walked, just like you—except it was foggy that night, and I was tired, not looking where I was going.” Eddie pauses. He’s gazing out at the woods again, and his knuckles are white with pressure. “A car hit me at the base of the hill. I don’t remember anything else.”

Richie doesn’t realize he’s silently crying until his glasses go misty, until he touches his cheek and his fingertips come away wet. He wants to hug Eddie. He wants to hug Eddie so badly that the restraint of it makes him ache. “The base of the hill,” he murmurs. “Where you meet me on my way home.”

Eddie nods. Richie watches his throat bob as he swallows, and watches the point of his cheeks go dusky. Eddie flickers that dark-wide gaze at Richie, and it sticks, and it stays. “I like to watch out for you,” he says softly. 

Richie says, “Eddie. Eddie. ”

Eddie moves, and they meet in the middle, fingers over fingers, and Eddie is piercing cold, a nothing-weight in the center of Richie’s palm. 

*

On Thanksgiving the Losers Skype each other, and Richie sits on his couch and grins and grins as he takes in the pixelated images of the people he loves best, varying camera quality be damned. 

Eddie sits at the kitchen table. He can see Richie through the living room doorway. 

When Richie looks up, Eddie meets his eye, and Eddie smiles. 

He feels watched over. 

A good thing. 

“I wish we could have met up,” Richie says, interrupting the choppy flow of chatter and laughter. It’s uncharacteristically frank of him; he panics, and fixes it with a joke. “Bill, last night your mom told me to tell you she misses you.”

“Beep beep,” Bill says wearily as everyone laughs, but even he can’t keep the grin off of his face. He and Mike are sitting in their car, faces squished up close to fit in the same screen. “Jesus Christ.”

“I wish so too, Richie,” Patty says from her and Stan’s square. He’s leaning his head on her shoulder. “I miss seeing you. I miss all of you.”

In the kitchen Eddie watches his own hands, clasped tightly on the tabletop. 

They hang up after a while, after their usual bout of minute-long goodbyes. Richie closes his laptop. 

He heads into the kitchen. 

Eddie looks up as Richie fills the doorway, smiling when their eyes meet. There’s something tense between his eyebrows, something nervous that Richie hasn’t seen on Eddie’s face for weeks; Richie drops into the chair right next to him, propping his chin up on his hands. 

“Eddie baby,” he says. The light isn’t on in the kitchen; Eddie is lit only by the setting sun in through the window next to him, lighting him up orange and pink and gold. He looks like Mike and Bill’s postcard. He likes the desert, and I like him. “Eddie. Eds.”

Eddie laughs soundlessly, his chest rising and falling beneath that shirt that looks so soft to touch. “Richie,” Eddie says in response. “Sweetheart. Rich.”

Oh, god. Richie wasn’t prepared for that. His heart is swinging in his chest, a pendulum on a narrow golden chain. He feels his face flush, and his tongue go thick and clumsy in his mouth. 

Eddie laughs again, warmly, his eyes like a summer night beneath sloping eyebrows. His hands are clasped in front of him on the table and his forearms are limned in the waning sunlight, catching Richie’s gaze in luminouos relief. 

“You make me crazy, Eddie, darling,” Richie says unsteadily. He is being too honest. His words bruise the air, but it’s a sweet-aching bruise. One that makes Eddie’s eyes go half-lidded and dusky where they watch him. “You make—you make me lose my head. Eds. My love.”

He doesn’t know what’s happening. He doesn’t know if Eddie can parse the honesty out of the usual deluge of jokes Richie subjects him too, the usual wash of ribbing pet names and bold, broad declarations. He just knows that this, at least, is true. 

Eddie’s gaze roams Richie’s face languidly, taking stock of everything he sees there. Everything, Richie thinks, and his thoughts are a landmine, his heart is a tripwire.  

“That’s no good,” Eddie murmurs. His voice is molasses. It curls between them, sweet and slow and inevitable. This has all been inevitable. Everything from the moment Richie woke up to see Eddie at his bed to this moment, here, now. “What’re you gonna do about it, Rich?”

There’s a challenge to the words, but it isn’t the kind that Eddie wants him to compete in. It’s like that look in the kitchen, all those weeks ago: Eddie could do anything to Richie, and Richie would let him. Eddie could look at Richie any way he wanted to, and Richie would do nothing to stop him. 

Richie says, “Nothing, nothing. Keep on breathing. Tell some jokes. Let you. Wanna watch a movie?”

This is the moment where Eddie would kiss him, if he could. They both know it. 

Eddie says, “Sure, Richie.”

They sit too closely on the couch, Richie layered under all the living room blankets so he can stay warm with Eddie at his side. He settles on A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving because it’s what he used to watch as a kid with his parents and he’s feeling tender and battered and small now, desperate for something, and he props his head up so he can keep Eddie in view. 

Richie must doze off at some point. The next time he opens his eyes the world is pleasantly dull, blurred by the absence of his glasses, and Eddie has turned off the television. 

“Rich,” Eddie murmurs. There’s a shock of cold on Richie’s shoulder—Eddie’s palm. He’s shaking Richie awake, touching him like Richie is made of glass. “Richie. Go to bed, honey, you’re killin’ your back.”

Richie blinks up at him, watching the shapes of Eddie’s face assemble themselves into something recognizable. The straight slope of his nose, the curve of his lips, his round, moon-wide eyes. Eddie’s eyelashes are so long. Richie’s never noticed before. 

“Your mom killed my back last night,” Richie mumbles, making arguably the worst joke of his entire life just to see Eddie’s huffy little sigh, the broad roll of his eyes. Dozy and half-asleep, Richie decides he would make a hundred of those terrible jokes. A thousand. As many as it takes. “Aw, Eds, c’mon…”

“Get up,” Eddie says. He’s removed his hand—he knows how cold he is, Richie thinks, knows that even the slightest touch makes Richie’s skin smart with frost—but his gaze is no less urging. “You won’t even be able to walk tomorrow if you don’t, old man.”

“I cannot fucking believe you’re calling me old,” Richie says, but he drags himself up to standing anyway. 

Richie sways there on the ball of his feet in the center of the room. He wants to pitch forward. Wants wind his arms around a small waist and notch his chin over a shoulder and hold, and let himself be held. 

“Night, Eds,” Richie says instead. There’s a catch in his chest. 

“Goodnight, Richie,” Eddie says. He’s still standing at the foot of the stairs when Richie closes his door. 

*

Saturday afternoon there’s a knock on the door. 

“Fuck,” Richie says. He’s in the middle of mixing a batch of rice krispie treats—much to Eddie’s judgement—and there’s marshmallow all over his hands. He grabs the dish towel off of the oven handle and wipes at his hands, leaving pink fuzz caught in the sticky mess. “Just a minute!”

Eddie is absent as Richie goes to the door, but he doesn’t really notice. His hands look like he just strangled the goddamn Michelin Man—or, wait, he’s not the one made of marshmallow, is he? That’s the Stay Puft guy, and fuck, now there’s marshmallow on the doorknob— 

“Surprise!”

Richie drops his towel. 

They’re all here. Stan and Patty and Bill and Mike and Bev and Ben. All standing here on Richie’s front porch, smiling so big that Richie feels like he’s staring straight into the sun. 

“What the fuck, ” Richie says, and launches himself forward. 

They catch him. Of course they do: steadying hands on his shoulders, his back, around his hips. Richie’s face is in the crook of someone’s neck; Richie’s smile is pressed up against someone’s forearm. 

“This is so rude of you guys, like, what the hell, barging in on a guy unannounced, didn’t anybody teach you any manners—”

“Shut the fuck up, Richie,” Stan says warmly, “I can hear you crying.”

They move into the house eventually, in a tangle of limbs, and Riche shuts the front door and then herds them into the living room where they all collapse onto his assortment of mismatched furniture. 

Richie’s chest is glowing warm as an ember. Wedged between Bev and Patty on the couch, one of each of their arms hooked around his shoulders, he says, “So you all just fucking lied to me? You looked me in the eye on Thursday when I was baring my soul and said, ‘haha, oops, nope, sorry Richie! See you in a couple goddamn months or whatever!’ and were just fine with it?”

Stan says, “Yes.”

Bev says, “We know you like surprises, Richie. You would’ve gotten too worked up if you knew we were coming and done something unhinged like rented a yatch.”

“That is so specific,” Ben says. 

“And so likely,” Bev rejoins. 

“Yeah,” says Richie. His eyes are still wet and he can’t stop beaming, smile so wide it splits his cheeks. “I mean, yeah.”

“Plus if you ever read the groupchat,” Mike says, “then you literally could have seen us plan this.”

Richie feels his eyes go wide. “ What. ”

“Yeah,” says Bill. “We talked about it everyday for about a week. Eddie’s the one who set it it up, you know.”

Richie goes still. He thinks of Eddie, conspicuously missing when Richie went to answer the door. He thinks of Eddie on Richie’s laptop on and on his phone—just fooling around, Richie had thought. 

Apparently fucking not. 

Richie can’t talk. He looks around the room, not subtle in any stretch of the imagination, craning his neck to see into the kitchen—but Eddie isn’t there. He meets Stan’s eyes across the room. 

“He texted us right from your phone, Rich,” Stan says, and he’s smirking, but Richie can tell Stan sees how overwhelmed Richie feels. “I seriously can’t believe you never noticed. He told us you wouldn’t, though, so we listened to him.”

“Oh my god,” Richie says; it’s breathless. He can’t help it. 

“We’d love to meet him, Richie,” Patty says, squeezing his arm. 

“Oh,” Richie says, heart tripping up the collum of his throat, “oh, god, I dunno if he—I mean, I’m sure he’d love that too, but I’ll need to ask—”

“Richie,” says Eddie, and he’s in the doorway now. He’s in the doorway, his hands tucked into his pockets, looking stiff and nervous and lovely. He meets Richie’s gaze. Smiles, very small. “It’s fine.”  

Time fucking slows down as Richie waits for somebody to acknowledge Eddie other than him. Please see him, Richie thinks, his thoughts racing, please see him, please, please, please. 

“Eddie!” says Ben, breaking the silence. Richie sags with relief; he watches a little of the tension seep out of Eddie’s shoulders and dissapate around him. “It’s so nice to meet you!”

Richie looks at this friends. They are all beaming at Eddie, every one of them. Richie could cry. 

“You should teach Richie to text,” Bev says. 

“I’ve tried. It’s stupid,” Eddie says. His smile widens a bit as he looks at her. “He’s like an old person.”

“Eddie that is very fucking ironic of you to say!” Richie says. He’s still having trouble catching his breath. His brain says Eddie, Eddie, Eddie. 

“Hey,” says Eddie. “Rude.”

“Richie is completely technologically challenged,” Stan says. “Sometimes I text him to ask if he’s ever seen a movie and then he calls me and talks for three hours without answering the question.”

“We’ve heard a lot about you, Eddie,” says Mike, being the lovely man he is and pressing a pause on the Tozier Roast Session. “Thanks for making sure Richie takes care of himself.”

Unbidden, Richie thinks of that morning on the porch: I like to watch out for you. 

Richie’s heart is thumping. He misses Eddie’s answer under the blood rushing in his ears, the way his breath has gone quick and desperate. He wants to launch himself across the room toward Eddie. 

He doesn’t think he has a crush on Eddie anymore. 

“You planned this,” Richie says. His voice sounds too brittle. Too soft. 

Eddie looks at him. His shoulders are a little stiff, his eyes are a little wide, but he’s smiling. “Yeah,” he says. 

Richie swallows tightly. “For—for me.”

“Rich,” says Eddie. The edges of his eyes go soft. Richie is fizzling out in the deep-down of him. “Yes.”

“Oh,” says Richie, small, and then, “hey, Eds?”

Eddie rolls his eyes. It’s achingly fond. Everybody knows. “Yes, Richie?”

Richie smiles. Tremulous on the edges. “They can see you.”

*

Richie shows them around the house because that’s what you’re supposed to do when your friends haven’t seen where you live yet. He doesn’t ask Eddie to stay out loud, but Eddie meets his eyes when Richie starts to move, and Richie waggles his eyebrows at him until he sighs softly and falls in step at his side. 

“It’s really Eddie’s house,” Richie says. They’re in the mudroom, having taken turns peering outside to look at the hammock that’s still strung up outside. “I mean, I’m paying for it or whatever, but like. He never moved out, so. It’s his.”

“You’re renting from me,” Eddie says with a grin. Eddie’s not a soft man—he’s too bright and he’s too loud, always this close close to smiling or yelling, a tip of the scale—but right now, as close to Richie as he has to be so they all fit in this small room, Richie knows that this is better. Glass-sharp-fire-warm. “And I’m not gettin’ any of the perks.”

“You’re getting a helluva roommate,” Richie says. He can feel every one of his friends watching the wideness of smile. There is a small-tender space the size of a fist opening up like a pocket beneath his ribs. His aching drips there. “That should be enough to satisfy you.”

Eddie doesn’t answer. Stan says, “Jesus, Richie, you're fucking insufferable, I can’t believe Eddie hasn’t kicked you out yet,” and Eddie doesn’t move back from Richie, doesn’t move back in a way that feels almost like a touch. 

They make pizza when dinner time swings around, when the sun is wending its way below the woodline. 

“So we don’t have enough bedrooms,” Richie says, dumping his congealed mess of long-abandoned rice krispie mix into the garbage and talking over his shoulder. “Which I’m sure you noticed. But I can sleep on the couch and a couple of you can take my room—”

“Oh, we prepared for this, too,” Bev says from where she stands at the counter beside Richie, slathering an obscene amount of sauce onto her circle of dough. “We’ve got a couple rooms in that hotel in town—”

“The one called Hotel,” Bill interrupts. “Which isn’t o-o-ominous at all.”

“Jesus,” Eddie mutters. “That place still exists?”

“Oh god,” Stan says, “should we cancel? Are we about to get bedbugs or something?”

“If you get bedbugs it won’t be from Hotel,” Eddie fires back, “It’ll be from that goddamn eyesore of a couch that Richie dug out of the garbage and put in our living room.”

Our living room. “You told me it wasn’t the worst couch you’ve ever seen,” Richie says over the throb of his heart. 

Eddie meets his eyes, dark and round. “I’ve been alive for over a hundred years,” he says. “Do you know how many fucking couches I’ve had to look at?”

“Uh,” says Richie. “A lot.”

Eddie is leaning back against the counter, his legs crossed at the ankle, his arms crossed over his chest. “A lot,” he says. 

Richie can barely breathe past the swell of feeling in his throat. He lets his friends fill up the room with their cacophony of laughter and tripping words the way they always do, lets himself lean back into the net of those sounds: oh you, Richie thinks, you, and they hold him up, but it’s Eddie he’s looking at. 

They all get along so well. That’s a special kind of knife in Richie’s softness, twisting bitterly. Eddie fits right in next to them like they were all raised in the same place. It’s impossible to distinguish him from the rest of them. 

Except for one thing. 

Everybody but Eddie eats, shoved tight around the kitchen table elbow-to-elbow the way they used to in college, piled in Stan and Richie’s dorm. The pizza is better now, but the company is all Richie has ever wanted. And then some. 

Stan helps Richie clear up when they’re done while everyone else moves to the living room. 

Richie can feel his eyes on the side of his face. He focuses on turning on the tap with fumbling hands, scrubbing at the plates that he doesn’t really need to wash right now. 

“He’s really great, Richie,” says Stan. The words are quiet, but they slam the base of Richie’s spine anyway. “Even better than he seemed over text. Just like you told me he was.”

Richie has to move his hands slowly, has to grip the plate tightly so it doesn’t slip out of his soapy fingers and shatter in the sink. “Well,” he says, too loudly. “Well he’s from the fucking forties, he probably texts like he’s writing a religious manifesto.”

“Nobody wrote manifestos in the forties,” Stan says. His voice is still much too gentle, which is unbearable. 

“I’m not a fucking historian,” Richie snaps. 

Stan is quiet. Richie hates himself then, a little. He wants to say sorry, but this mouth won’t make the right shapes without trembling in a small way. 

“Richie,” Stan says again, somehow even softer, taking the plate from Richie’s hands and drying it with a cloth. “Just be careful.”

“Stan,” Richie says, laughing in a way that is so far from mirthful it’s almost embarrassing, “I am way past the point of being careful.”

The sadness on Stan’s face is too much to bear. Richie squeezes his eyes closed. 

“Oh,” Stan says quietly. “Oh Richie.”

He puts down the plate. He pulls Richie down until Richie’s head rests in the curve of his shoulder and they stand that way for a while. 

*

The Losers leave for the night when darkness hangs cool and consuming around the house, promising to be back tomorrow. 

Richie and Eddie sit side-by-side on the front step and watch them trail down the hill to their small parade of sensible cars. 

It is quiet as they drive away. Richie looks until the last headlight blinks away, and then he keeps looking. 

Eddie is very close to him. Maybe it’s something about the air, but right now, he doesn’t make Richie cold. 

Softly and slowly, Eddie breathes in. 

“I would have loved you as much as they do,” he says finally. His voice and his exhale are unsteady. “If I’d been allowed to know you. I think—I would’ve made sure you were never lonely a day in your life.” 

Richie closes his eyes, tight. It’s darker in here. 

“Maybe not more,” Eddie whispers to him. “Different, though. Sweetheart, I would have…”

Richie has to reach out. He knows there will be nothing—worse than nothing, a smart of cold across his palm and empty air—but he can’t help it, he can’t help it. He thinks Eddie, Eddie, Eddie, the same way that he always does, and he stretches out his hand blindly. 

Warmth. Something solid. A quiet little gasp. 

Richie’s eyes fly open but he’s crying too hard, tears clogging up the space behind his glasses, and he can’t see. “Eddie,” he breathes, reaching again, scrabbling around until he finds a warm firm hand to clutch in his. “Eddie, what—”

“God,” Eddie breathes. He grabs at Richie’s hand, and then his forearm, and then his shoulders, and the grip has weight to it, and Richie is shaking all the way down to his core. “Richie? Can you feel me?”

Richie laughs, something choked, made up of too much air. “Yeah, I can feel you, Eds,” he says. He is leaning into him, his knees pressed into the slim line of Eddie’s thigh, touching in as many places as he can be. He makes a sound like a sob, and forgets to be embarrassed. “I can feel you, I can feel—how? Eds?”

“I don’t know,” Eddie says, and he’s leaning into Richie, too: he has a hand curled around Richie’s cheek, and he reaches up with with his thumb to wipe the tears away from Richie’s eyes. “I don’t have a fucking clue.”

Richie laughs again. He can’t help it. He blinks heavily, vision clearing, and Eddie is smiling at him with almost startling warmth, his own eyes nearly as wet as Richie’s. His lashes stick together in long, dark clumps, featherlike and elagent. 

Eddie is alive. Eddie is alive. Eddie is alive. 

“Eddie,” Richie says, bald and barren and desperate enough that he shakes again. Somehow he has a hand on Eddie’s chest, right over that soft white shirt, right over the place where Eddie’s heart races with fervent, fervid vigor. Alive, alive, alive. “Eds, Eddie Spaghetti, I fucking love you. I’m in love with you,” he says wildly. “Just thought you should know.”

“I do,” Eddie murmurs, smiling, smiling, “I know, Rich,” and, fingers woven into the curls at the nape of Richie’s neck, he pulls Richie toward his mouth. 

It can’t be very good for Eddie—Richie is still crying, a steady stream he can’t hope to stop because once he gets going there’s no holding back, and his cheeks are wet, and he can taste it on his own lips—but Richie doesn’t think he’s ever felt anything so fucking good. Eddie’s mouth is soft and warm on his, and the way he tilts Richie’s head back how he wants it makes Richie go dizzy.  

“Wowza” Richie whispers, wobbly, into the space between them. “Wowza wowza wowza. ”

Eddie pulls back very slightly, just enough that he can shoot that lovely mean scowl straight into Richie’s face like a tractor beam. “Actually I just decided that I don’t want to ever kiss you again—”

Richie says, laughing, crying a little, “No, no, no—” and he ducks in, kissing the frown beneath Eddie’s eyebrows that he’s loved since the beginning.   

Eddie melts against him. He tilts his head so he can place a kiss on the hinge of Richie’s jaw—it’s soft, it’s real—and then the corner of his mouth, and then square on his lips, where he lingers. 

“No,” he murmurs. The drag of his mouth on Richie’s sends a beam of heat through Richie’s gut like a forest fire. “I’m a fuckin’ liar. You could make a tit joke right and I’d still kiss you.”

Richie wants to fuse himself with Eddie. Richie wants to open Eddie up and crawl inside of him, tuck himself in safe and secure and never be parted from him again. 

“Titties,” says Richie, and then, “God, I can’t think. I—you’re real, Spaghetti.” 

“I’m gonna let that slide,” Eddie murmurs into Richie’s skin, “because I love you.”

Richie goes still. 

“Oh,” says Eddie. He won’t stop touching Richie—shoulders and neck and cheeks and jaw and hair—like maybe it thrills him, too. His voice is quiet between them. “You didn’t know?”

“I’m a big stupid idiot,” Richie says, and kisses Eddie’s dimple when it makes an appearance. “And I love you, I love you.”

“You’re terrible,” Eddie says. He smiles. It curls around Richie’s ribcage, warm and close. “I love you, too.”

*

Summer

“If this breaks and I shatter my ass,” Eddie says, “I am leaving you for the mailman.”

They’re in the hammock, layered over each other even though it’s burning hot outside, the air a living, quivering thing. Eddie’s arm is slung around Richie’s waist, his leg woven between Richie’s, his mouth pressed against Richie’s sweaty neck; if the hammock breaks it will be Richie’s ass that shatters. 

Richie says, “And I’ll respect your decision because I’m a good boyfriend but just know that I would spend the rest of my days here, wasting away until I was nothing but a husk of the man I once was, pining for you until I drew my last breath.”

“And I’d be getting it on with Eric the mailman,” Eddie says cheerfully. His lips brush Richie’s pulse-point when he speaks. “Living my best life.”

Richie smiles into Eddie’s hair. “It’s what you deserve.”

Eddie huffs a laugh into his collarbone. 

They’re quiet for a while, swaying gently in the summer breeze. There’s things, Eddie keeps insisting, they should be doing instead—namely packing for their trip to meet the Losers in North Carolina for a week, which they’re leaving for tomorrow—but Richie managed to convince him to take a break. He’s inordinately proud of himself. 

Eddie kisses Richie’s neck after a moment, gentle and languid. “You excited, baby?”

“Yeah,” Richie says. His own voice has gone low and dazed, warmed by the sun. Warmed by Eddie. Eyes closed, head tipped back. He runs his fingers up the bumps of Eddie’s spine. “A little nervous. Not for seeing them—for after.” 

After. After, when Richie’s tour starts. After, when he’ll be gone for two months traveling around the country coming out to strangers with the first set of jokes he’s actually felt good about in… his whole fucking life. If you want to quantify it. 

Eddie lifts himself up on one elbow so he can look down at Richie, blocking out the sun with his dear, frowning face. The hand on Richie’s chest rubs a gentle circle. “I hope you’re excited for that, too.”

“I am,” Richie says, and it’s true. He’s excited to finally be himself. He’s excited to do what he loves again. He’s just nervous. “I don’t wanna leave you for that long, though.”

“I don’t want that either,” Eddie says. He tugs on Richie’s hair very gently, because he’s a terrifically weird man and he likes to. “I’m gonna miss you.”

“Oh! Oh shit! You’ve got a fucking crush on me!” Richie says. He’s smiling so wide that his jaw hurts. “Embarrassing.”

“Oh, yeah, laugh it up,” Eddie says, rolling his eyes. He pokes Richie in the chest and the resumes his gentle rub. “I bare my soul to you and this is the thanks I get?”  

“I fucking love you, Eds,” Richie says, hooking his arm around Eddie’s neck and pulling him back down. 

“Don’t fucking call me that, asshole,” Eddie says. He kisses Richie’s chin. “I love you too.”

The hammock sways. Later, they will shuffle back inside, and Richie will stuff everything into one suitcase, and Eddie will unpack and re-pack it all in twice the amount of time. Right now, they rest.