Um-
Eddie Munson slapping your clit with his hand after you've squirted.
He loves the mess it makes and the way your cum goes everywhere, he knows you're overstimulated and loves how you begin to convulse when any more contact occurs to your pussy.
Eddie rolls his hips as he fucks you slowly.
He’s fucking you like he has all the time in the world. His plump lips form an O as he watches you underneath him.
With each slow stroke you can practically feel every vein on his cock. When he’s fully seated you swear you can feel him in your lungs.
He has you chanting a single word over and over as he loves you.
please please please
“What do you need, baby?” he coos in your ear. “What do you want, the moon? Fuck, the way your pussy is hugging my dick, I’ll get you whatever you fucking want.”
His tempo doesn’t change, you feel like a live wire.
“You, please I just need you.”
Hi, I'm MJ! She/her, '03 baby, Aquarius—
MARVEL
Bucky Barnes x Reader: Through Sea Mist and Shadows (Series) ONGOING
SUPERNATURAL
Dean Winchester x Reader: Anniversary (One-shot)
ARCANE
Silco x Reader: I Trust You (One-shot)
HOGWARTS LEGACY
Sebastian Sallow x Reader: Winter Warmth (Drabble)
ugh i'm melting
as a kid i was so scared of my parents splitting up, what if roan learns someone in her class’ parents are divorcing and it sends her spiralling thinking she’d never see reader again?
thank you jade 💛
thank you for requesting lovely ♡ eddie and roan (almost) stepmom!reader, 2k
"Yeah, I got the expensive kind," you're saying, phone sandwiched between your ear and your shoulder, a knife held loosely in your hand. "I don't wanna make it wrong."
Roan can vaguely hear the rumble of her Uncle's voice on the other side giving reassurances.
You scrape the blade of the knife against the cutting board. "I know. I know, Wayne, I swear, just… I hardly ever make him dinner and this is our last anniversary before we get married, and– I know. Sorry, that's– I know, you don't mind, it's just–"
Roan attaches herself to your hip like an octopus, looking up at you as you look down. You smile at her, putting your knife flat to stroke her hair.
"She's right here," you say, "she's helping me… okay. Thanks, Wayne, you're the best. See you tomorrow. Alright, I will. Bye."
You put your hand behind Roan's shoulder and walk her with you to the phone. As soon as you've hung it back on the hook, you scoop her up to hold against your chest, even if she's getting longer and longer every day. "Hey, babe. Uncle Wayne says he loves you and he missed you today. He wants to make you dinner tomorrow, so we'll find your nice blue dress tonight and put it in the wash."
Roan flops her face against your neck. "I love him too."
"He knows." You press your cheek to hers briefly. "Okay, you wanna sit on the top with me and I'll finish making today's dinner?"
Roan's happy to sit on the counter and swing her legs as you finish making the pot pie. It's one of Eddie's favourites because his mom used to make it a couple of times a month, and so it's one of Roan's favourites, her lips quirked with excitement as you chop onions, carrots and celery into small pieces for the frying pan.
"I love the carrots," she says.
"Yeah?" You uncap the cooking oil to pour a generous splash into the pan. "Want me to put extra in? I don't mind."
Roan nods enthusiastically. "Yes!"
She's happy watching you cook at first, but she gets quieter as you finish up. By the time the pie is in the oven she's picking at her little nails, shards of polish in her lap like powdered sugar.
"You okay?" you ask, wiping your hands clean. She shrugs. You shrug back. "What's that mean?"
"I'm thinking."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah." Roan pokes her toes into your thigh.
"Well, daddy's home soon, but you know you can tell me."
"Mm," she hums, holding out her hand. You don't take it, folding her into your arms for a hug instead.
It would usually make her feel better, but Roan feels ten times worse as you soften your tone to a less cheerful murmur, "Got another tummy ache?"
"Not that."
"What is it?" you ask.
She hides her face in your shoulder, pert nose to your soft shirt.
"You don't have to tell me," you whisper. "Sorry. I'm not trying to pressure you, I promise, I just love you." You turn saccharine again, patting her back as you dote excitedly into the top of her head. "Love you love you love you!" You punctuate with a kiss, and Roan starts crying.
—
Eddie's startled but not too worried to get home to the sound of Roan crying. She certainly cries less and less now that she's getting older, but children cry so often that he doesn't think it's worth panicking over.
He can hear you already on the case as he peels out of his sweaty coat and boots. "That's not going to happen," you comfort, voice bouncing off of kitchen tile, the hum of the oven like a baseboard. "It's hard to believe me, but it won't. Me and daddy are super happy."
His eyebrows rise of their own accord. "Hello?" he asks, moving down the hallway and into your bright kitchen.
Roan sits in the shadow of a corner cabinet, hunched over her knees with her face held up by defeated hands, tears wetting her rosy cheeks. You stand in front of her with your hand on shoulder, bent to her eye-level, glancing sideways at him momentarily before you say, "Look, dad's home. He's gonna say the exact same thing as me, I swear. Should we ask him?"
Eddie takes the mantle by your side, quick to rub the tears from Roan's cheek with his pinky. His hands aren't clean enough for anything more. "What's wrong?" he asks.
"Nothing," Roan says, her voice strangled by a big sob.
"Babe!" Eddie laughs, half-hearted. "I can see something's super wrong. I might be a dumb boy, but I know when my girl's upset, don't I?"
"You're not a dumb boy," Roan says.
"Oh. Thank you, Ro."
"You're a dumb man."
"Very funny." He combs unruly coils of dark hair behind her ear, finger following down the curve to her shoulder. "Quick, tell me what's wrong. Just tell me. Rip it off like a bandaid."
"It's silly," Roan murmurs.
"Says who?"
"Says me."
"Oh," Eddie says, giving you a look to make sure it's alright before he monopolises her attention. You raise your hands with a small smile, as if to say, Please. "Come here, me. I'm gonna have to squeeze this out of you, huh?"
He leans back, shifting her weight against his hip, arm stretched over the breadth of her back. He's not smug, but it does bring a satisfaction to see how swiftly she calms down once he's holding her. It's a familiar picture, Eddie with his lips to her forehead, a crease between his brow just like Uncle Wayne's as he rubs her back, and Roan, a mirror image of her father, palpable relief in her hands as they tangle in his hair. Less familiar but getting there is you at their side, your cheek on Eddie's shoulder and your hand on his elbow.
"What's it gonna take to let me in on the secret?" he asks. He's making a spoiled child accidentally, always bribing and bartering for good behaviour.
"Nothing…" Her mumbling tickles his cheek as she shifts around. "I'm worry‐ing," —her voice skips over the word, like a hiccup— "about something because of Stacy."
"Oh yeah? What did Stacy do?"
"She said her mom, um, her mom said she's getting a divorce. That Stacy won't see her dad again, and it'll just be her and her mom."
Eddie doesn't judge people much. He can't imagine caring about other people's divorces when Roan was born from a fling and pretty much left on his doorstep —circumstances don't determine your kid's happiness alone. He does worry for Stacy, and his poor empathetic little girl.
"That's terrible, bubby," Eddie placates, patting her back.
"It's– well, it's– I'm…" Roan huffs.
"Whatever you tell me is fine, promise. No grounding, no telling off."
"I know, daddy, it's just hard to say."
Eddie feels himself physically melt.
He leans back against the kitchen counter and shifts her against his stomach. His arms burn with the effort of keeping her secured to him, and he's not loving her sad tone —the quicker he finds out what's wrong, the better. He peeks over her head at you for hints.
You're uncomfortable, shifting from one foot to the other like your feet hurt.
"What?" he asks you.
You clear your throat. "I think she's worried about me. If something happened between us, she's worried she won't see me again."
Eddie would like to think after two years of loving his daughter, watching her grow, and all together being a cherished and irreplaceable part of her life and her support system, that you'd find it impossible to leave her. Even if you left Eddie, you wouldn't leave Ro. He knows that. But only two years… he knows you'd love Roan even if he screws things up, but he can't promise her that things would be the same, because they wouldn't be.
That's not what she's asking, though.
"What, you think you won't see Y/N anymore?' Eddie murmurs, rubbing her back.
"She's not my full mom," Roan whispers.
Eddie reaches past Roan to squeeze your elbow. "You know, that doesn't matter, honey. And after the wedding–"
"You call me mom for a reason, right?" you cut him off.
Roan lifts her head from Eddie's. "Yeah."
"Okay, so, say me and dad get married, and then by some impossibility we realise we can't stay married, will you love me less?"
"No," Roan says with a pout.
"I wouldn't love you any less, either. I didn't know I could love someone this much 'til I met you," you say, voice scratchy like you're talking past gravel. "So things would change, but not how much I love you. I'd still see you."
You sound tentative. Eddie's way less hesitant. "Of course you'd still see each other. Babe, if me and mom break up it'll be because I did something stupid, so you'd see her every time I tried to apologise." He grins at you. "How long do you think it would take you to forgive me?"
"Depends on what you did." You smile fondly. "Probably not long, Munson."
"I have a weird feeling we're gonna last."
Roan sniffles. "I just don't want mom to move away," she says.
You and Eddie have already spoken about this. Serious but not sombre, on your backs in bed. You're not just marrying me, Eddie'd said, terrified of how much he wanted you to say certain things, and how you might not say them at all. This isn't just a promise to me. I know how much I'm asking from you, it's not a small thing. I won't blame you if you can't say yes, but this is… she's my world.
I already said yes. And I knew what I was saying yes to, you'd replied, holding your hand up above you, the two of you staring in wonder at the ring on your marriage finger. I promise, Eds. I won't let either of you down.
"Where do you think I'm going, princess? Me and dad are so happy. I'm staying right here stuck to his hip for the rest of time, but only if you're gonna stick to mine." You duck your head to touch your noses together briefly. "I'm not going anywhere."
"Promise?"
"Promise you." He swears you're twisting your engagement ring, but he can't quite see. "Can I have her?" you ask.
"Sure. My noodle arms are about to snap anyway."
"Noodle arms," you repeat, stealing Ro from him smoothly. "Yeah, right."
He flexes appreciatively at your comment.
Roan snuggles up to your neck, little face in the curve of it, her arms curling around you. You hold her tight and bend back under her weight, an arm against her thighs and another behind the small of her back, hand twisted up to brush her curls.
"Love you," you say softly. You're smiling like you've got everything you ever wanted. "Maybe if me and daddy break up I can just take you with me."
"Yeah!" Roan says with a gasp.
Eddie rolls his eyes. "Whatever, girls. Neither of you can cook, you know that? Maybe tonight you guys can practise your new life together by not eating the dinner I'm gonna cook." Time to lighten the mood, lest Roan spend a special night lethargic.
You beam at him. "I already made dinner. Happy anniversary, handsome."
You exchanged gifts and kisses already that morning before work, but Eddie's happy to accept another quick kiss over Ro's shoulder. He dots one on his daughter's cheek to keep things fair.
"Lucky us, huh?" he says to Ro.
He's not strictly talking about dinner, and it's cheesy, but you light up like a Christmas tree. "Lucky me."
Eddie Munson x fem!reader [3.5k] more smut with your favourite friend with benefits. slow and soft eddie, a little teasing. PART ONE
You managed maybe twenty seconds of reprieve before your body was screaming at you for more. For Eddie, for the boy, for his touch, for his-
“Kiss,” you murmured, voice still breathy, lifting your face to his, nose nudging his cheek and you felt the way it lifted as he smiled. “Kiss me, please? Really want you to k-”
You didn’t mean to sound so fucking needy, so absolutely wrecked with desperatation. But Eddie must’ve heard it in the way you spoke, felt it in the way your hands clung to the slope of his shoulder, because he was moving down into you without a second thought.
His mouth slanted over your own with the same messy greediness you felt. You were still completely naked, sheets bundled underneath you, Eddie’s jeans pushed to the bare skin of your thighs and it made you ache.
How could you still want him so badly after he’d already made you come? You were still vibrating, body buzzing from the flick of his tongue and the feel of his fingers sliding in and out of you.
But then the boy slid one hand into your hair, held you to him so he could kiss you senseless, tongue licking over your own again and again and again. His other hand traced the lines of you, from the dip in your waist to the curve of your hip, hand skimming down to cup your ass, squeeze the flesh there and pull you into him.
You could feel how hard he was, thick and hot against your thigh, trapped beneath denim and god, the way he was grinding himself into you was maddening.
You couldn’t stop kissing him though, revelling in the way it left you both breathless, more and more desperate for the other, noses pressed to cheeks, your hands tugging at his curls until he groaned into your mouth, let you swallow his sounds and keep them for yourself.
“Eddie,” you whimpered, back arching off of the bed, into his frame, trying your best to wrap yourself around him “Eddie.”
“I know- fuck,” Eddie’s voice was shot, low and rough, dripping in need and he smelled like smoke and sex and something that was entirely him. “S’alright, sweetheart, Christ, I know.”
You were pushing him back then, eyes a little wide, hair a mess and your hands on his bare chest. You tried your best to coax him backwards and the boy let you, went soft for you and let you manhandle him to where you wanted because fucking hell, Eddie Munson would throw himself into traffic for you if you asked.
So you got him on his knees on the bed, followed him to do the same and you let out an almost watery laugh at the way he didn’t let go of you, not once. He kept a wide hand on your waist, fingers splayed comically large over your ribcage, your back and all he could do was stare down at you, taking in every detail, every line, every freckle and scar.
“You’re so fuckin’ pretty,” he whispered, catching your mouth once more, making you both both cling to the other as your swayed on the mattress, kissing like you’d never been allowed to before.
And perhaps you hadn’t, not like this. Alone with the boy in a bed that smelled like him, in the dark of his room with no one else to worry about. Hands dragging over naked skin, new places to touch, to see, to kiss and taste.
“Prettiest girl I’ve ever seen,” Eddie was still running his mouth as he kissed you, catching every soft sigh and whine you gave him with a push of his lips to yours. “What you doin’ with a guy like me, huh?”
It was a rhetorical question, you knew that. The boy was mumbling, almost to himself, eyes closed, lips smoothing over your jaw, totally lost in you. But you felt the need to answer him, to show him why you were with him.
Your hands found the waistband of his jeans, fingers a little shaky as you tugged at it, popping the button and messing with his zipper, a little noise of indignation stuck in your throat when it didn’t budge as easily as you wanted. And then you were pawing at him, hands roaming over the ink on his chest, lips pushed back to his and you were whining, his name tumbling from your lips over and over again.
“Hey, hey,” Eddie was catching you, hand cupping your chin, pulling back enough to look you in the eye and he felt like he’d been punched in the gut at all the emotions he found there. Need, want, a heavy dose of something fond, something more. “Sweetheart, s’fine, I know. C’mere for me.”
He took your hands in his, let them drag slow down his chest, over the lines of his hips, the soft of his stomach and he unzipped his jeans with your fingers curled between his own. Everything seemed to slow then, right back down like before, like he was reminding you that you had all the time in the world. Eddie pressed sweet little kisses to your face, peppered them over the apples of your cheeks, open mouthed presses to the corner of your mouth, the angle of your jaw.
“S’that what you want?” He kept your hand in his own, hissed when he brought it to rub over the hard outline of his dick, twitching beneath his boxers. Your fingers curled around it, thick and heavy in your hand and Eddie squeezed your palm around it with his own, groaning. “You want this, baby?”
You nodded, eyes clenched shut as he pressed his forehead to your own, crowding into you with your joined hands still tugging at his cock through his underwear. The boy was panting, needy noises coming from his lips and you couldn’t believe the way your cunt was aching again, a dull throb that you were desperate to make go away.
“Eddie,” you whined and your heart stuttered when he whispered your name back, his free hand curling around your waist to hold you closer to him.
“Shit, I need- I need to be inside you, sweetheart,” he gasped out, jaw slack and parted lips ghosting over your cheek in a lazy kiss. “Fuckin’ desperate for you, please.”
You don’t know how it happened, how Eddie ended up beneath you, back against his headboard that rattled a little too loudly. But you were curling your fingers into his jeans, tugging them down his hips, taking his boxers with them until his cock spring free and slapped against his stomach. You were a mess of limbs, huffs of laughter and kiss swollen smiles as Eddie yanked off his socks as you tried to wrestle the denim down his legs at the same time, both of you completely naked before the other for the first time.
You took a second to take him in, all of him. New tattoos that appeared from under clothes, dark swirls of ink that curled over his skin. He was lean, trim waist, subtle lines of muscle that wrapped around his arms, his thighs.
He looked nervous as you sat between his spread legs, hands smoothing across his thighs as you leaned into him. Eddie could help but drop his stare to your tits for a second or two, nipples peaked and grazing across his own chest as you moved against him.
You caught his lips in a sweet kiss, your voice sticky and soft with affection as you told him, “you’re so pretty, Eddie.”
You couldn’t see, not from the way you were sucking a nice bruise into his neck, but Eddie had the sheets fisted in his hands at your words, your voice. He sighed, let his head fall back and his jaw go slack, tilting himself this way and that so you could bite and suck at his throat.
You felt him swallow, a harsh bob of his Adam’s apple as you kissed over it. He sighed, soft, melting under your touch and his hands caught your waist as you moved yourself to perch on his lap. Your thighs spread over his own, your bare cunt sliding slick and warm over the hard length of him.
He twitched, you moaned, he held you a little tighter.
“Yeah?” He asked you, voice higher and breathier than you’d heard it before.
You grinned, nodding, the graze of your lips following the line of his jaw, stubble catching on your tongue as you flicked it out a little dirty at the space under his ear. You mimicked his words from earlier, hurting your own heart with how true they were.
“Prettiest thing I’ve ever seen,” you whispered.
Eddie grinned, Eddie blushed, shaking his head at you as he smiled all soft, sticky fondness catching at his throat as he cupped the back of your neck and tugged you into him.
“C’mere, you.”
Another kiss, sloven and lazy, one that stirred up heat in your stomach, made you grind against him with a whine. He didn’t get a chance to pull away as you wrapped your hand around his dick, pumping him once, twice, before you raised yourself up a little, and sunk back down.
Eddie’s fingers were bruises on your hips, grabbing at you as his tip nudged at your cunt, slick and warm, a slow slide of you as you went down down down.
You took him inch by inch, gasping at each bit of stretch, eyes watery and on his own as he watched you, pupils blown, jaw hanging slack.
“Jesus fuckin’ christ,” he moaned, the sound ripping out of him in a stutter. You were both panting, chests heaving as you took him all, sitting pretty in his lap with his cock seated fully inside of you. “Oh, good girl, good fucking girl.”
You gasped, didn’t dare move, because you were already clenching around him and you could feel the way the boy’s cock was twitching inside of you, his head thrown back at the way you were tightening up at the feel of him.
It was too much, the stretch, the ache, the feeling of being so full.
“Eds, Eddie,” god, you sounded close to tears, too overwhelmed by it all. “I can’t, s’too good, already close, don’t wanna- fuck, not yet-”
The boy was petting at you, hands brushing over your thighs, your shoulders, cradling your cheeks in his palms as he kissed over your lips. He made soft noises, nudged at your jaw with his nose so you’d move your head back for him to kiss a line across your throat.
“You’re alright, sweetheart, yeah?” Eddie cooed, voice full of awe and heat for you. “I’ve got you. S’okay, gonna take it real slow for me, aren’t you?”
You mewled, made a little whining noise for him, because fucking hell, that’s all you could do. His cock was throbbing inside of you, his thighs already a mess with you and you couldn’t help but rock a little, hips moving over Eddie’s and making him grunt.
“Yeah, jus’ like that, hmm?” Eddie nodded, eyelids drooping with pleasure. “Can I watch you? Huh? You gonna let me watch you fuck yourself on a my cock, like a good little girl?”
You were nodding, small hands gripping around the boy’s board shoulders and you realised then and there that you’d do absolutely anything Eddie asked. His voice made your toes curl, singing with praise, thick with adoration.
“Shit, yeah,” you told him, eyes squeezing shut as he chanted his hips up a little, nudged somewhere deep inside of you. “Yeah, please, you can watch me, I can do that.”
You were babbling, a mess, back arching for him to touch more of you and Eddie obliged, one hand smoothing down the curve of your tummy, the other flicking fingers over your nipples, twisting and pulling a little rough when he felt you get wetter for him.
His lips were at your ear when he whispered, mouth warm on the shell of it, “remember, sweetheart, nice n’ slow for me, yeah?”
You nodded, all words gone as you started to move your hips. Eddie kept his hands on you, fingers splayed wide over the tops of your thighs, thumbs pressing into the crease that separated them from your cunt, just gently sliding over the spread of your folds as you rocked back and forth over his cock.
You barely lifted yourself off of him, just rolling yourself over and over, hips grinding down onto him as the boy groaned his praise to you. And every time you got too eager, Eddie tutted, wrapped a large hand around your neck and brought you to his lips, kissing you sweetly and murmuring about how you needed to take your time.
It eventually got too much, just like you knew it would, like Eddie hoped it would. ‘Cause you were whimpering, begging, petting at the boy as your eyes turned wet and you could hardly keep your legs from shaking anymore.
He gave in then, barely able to keep himself together, harder than ever as his cock sat deep inside you, throbbing for release. So he shushed you with a soft coo, gathered you in his arms and let you fall into his chest. He kissed you desperate, kissed you greedy and then his hands were roaming you back, clutching you right and finally, finally, finally he was rutting up into you.
Eddie’s eyes were on yours as he snapped his hips into yours, holding onto the curve of your ass to gain some purchase, he slack and lids hooded. He was babbling nonsense, words sticky sweet and filthy as his cock started a fast, hot slide in and out of you.
“Babybabybaby,” Eddie groaned, his hands everywhere at once, like he couldn’t get enough of you. “Fucking Christ, that’s it, fuckin’ bounce on me sweetheart, you got it, you got it, shit.”
You keened as you grabbed back at his hair, curls fisted in your fingers and Eddie grinned at your touch, like he knew you couldn’t help yourself. You scratched at his scalp, sighed at the way his lashes fluttered with it and you did as he asked, indulged him by lifting yourself off his cock, just enough to feel utterly empty before dropping yourself back down.
It made Eddie swear, head thrown back, bumping against his wall but he didn’t care, just encouraged you to do it again and again and again and again until-
“Sweetheart, m’gonna come, tell me you’re close, tell me what you need please, c’mon baby, tell me.”
Your hand was shaking as you grabbed Eddie’s, dragging it between your legs so he could thumb at your clit; rough, sloppy circles that did exactly what you needed it to do.
You pressed your face to the crook of his neck as you came, your entire body rigid against his as Eddie continued to fuck his hips up into you, the boy gasping at how tight you got around him, his arms wrapping themselves around you to hold you to him.
Another few thrusts, one, two, and Eddie was falling apart underneath you, clutching at your jaw so he could press his mouth to yours, lips parted as he moaned and whispered against you, a barely there kiss.
Minutes passed before either of you spoke, before either of you moved. Happy to stay curled against each other, still in Eddie’s lap, his slowly softening cock still nestled between your legs and you were messy and sticky, but fuck, you didn’t care.
You lay lines of kisses across his shoulder, nose nudging soft at his neck whilst the boy drew shapes over your back, his touch bringing goosebumps across your skin. And when you eventually cooled down, your body growing sore and a different ache set in, Eddie helped you shuffle from his lap, tutting in sympathy when you whined at the way he slipped out of you, every part of your body too sensitive.
“Sorry, sweetheart,” he whispered and he left you with a quick kiss to your forehead as he pulled on a pair of sweats he found on the floor, coming back with a warm washcloth and a large glass of water.
You let him clean you up as well as he could, shared his drink with him until your chest stopped heaving and you felt like your throat could form words. Reality seemed to hit, and you were suddenly so aware that you were in the boy’s room, in his bed, naked and flushed and so, so satisfied.
But you didn’t know what this was, if it had changed, if this was still the same. If you and Eddie were still the same. Because sex had always been sex but there was something different in the way he was looking at you, with your clothes on his floor and his hand smoothing back your hair so he could kiss over your eyelids, down your cheek to your jaw.
You didn’t think he wanted you to leave, he wasn’t acting like it, wasn’t rushing you but god, female insecurity seeped in and tugged at your bones, making you feel hollow and unsure.
You moved as if to find your clothes, not getting very far before Eddie pulled a large shirt out of his drawer, handing it to you with a shy smile and hopeful eyes. You weren’t sure who was happier when you accepted it, the boy’s eyes following the movement of it as you dragged it over your head, lips twisted when you realised it smelled like him.
“So, uh,” Eddie cleared his throat, stood near his bedroom door and crossed his arms self consciously. He was still shirtless, muscles flexing, tattoos shifting over skin. “Did you mean it? Earlier? About you, me… all night?”
Your stomach flipped, tumbled, like someone had lit a sparkler inside of you.
“S’okay if you’ve got somewhere to be,” he told you, a hand reaching up to tug at a curl, a telltale sign of his nerves. “I can drive you home or-”
“I don’t have anywhere to be, Eds,” you replied, voice more shy than he’d ever heard it.
“-or we could order a pizza or somethin’.”
You looked up to find him smiling, that smile you loved, slow and soft and wide, the kind that made his eyes seem warmer, like honey.
“Yeah?”
He shrugged, moving back into the room. He toed at your bra, grinning. “Yeah.”
“That sounds like a date, Munson,” you gasped, all faux shock and drama and god, Eddie adored you for it.
He was back on the bed with you, a warm hand curling around your ankle where you’d stretched your sore legs out. His thumb rubbed over you, like he was trying to soothe his own nerves as well as your own.
“It does, doesn’t it?” Eddie scrunched his nose, acted confused and like he wasn’t sure what he was saying. But his heart was hammering and he wondered if you could hear the way it rattled his bones, if you could see the relief on his face when you didn’t immediately get up to find your shoes. “S’weird.”
“What’s the ‘or something’ part?” You asked him, smiling as he moved closer, like he’d finally realised you weren’t going anywhere.
He took your legs in his hands, brought them over to rest across his own and looked at you through messy curls. Another smile, cheekier this time.
“Maybe a movie, on the couch,” his voice was so soft. “Could act a fool and make a move, y’know how it is.”
You laughed, a bright burst of sound that made his heart happy because you were still in his bed without any underwear and he’d came inside of you only minutes before.
“You’re ridiculous,” you told him, and Jesus, you could hear the sticky fondness in your voice, could feel the soft way you were looking at him.
“You’re still here, though,” Eddie answered and he sounded like he was in awe of the fact. He tapped out a guitar riff over your calf, smiled when you hugged out a laugh and blushed for him.
Your hand caught his easily, big and wide in your own but he let you curl your fingers around his, let you pull him a little closer still and you loved the way his eyes fluttered closed when you leaned in to kiss him
“I told you,” you pretended to huff, an affectionate roll of your eyes only softened by another kiss to the boy’s lips. “You’ve got me all night, if you want.”
Eddie smiled, beamed, cheeks rosy, eyes bright and he nodded. His throat bobbed like he was swallowing back emotion he didn’t expect and he cleared his throat and his pretty face in the crook of your neck when he answered:
“Yeah, I want to.”
Eddie Munson x fem!reader[6.7k] just smut, really. soft, sweet eddie, who finally gets a chance to take you home. a friends with benefits situation.
Eddie Munson was a really good kisser. He was really good at eating you out too. He had nice hands, big, heavy, with guitar string scars that felt rough and lovely on your bare skin. He liked it when you tugged his curls, he liked it even better when you got a little loud.
He fucking loved it when you told him what to do.
You weren’t sure how your situation with the boy started, but it had been a few months now.. He went from a pretty face you knew in school, to a friend of Steve’s, introduced to you at a party. Then there was a rolled joint offered to you in the woods behind school, shoulders bumping, eyes interested, laughter exchanged.
Knowing eyes gazing over the other by the lockers, the offer of a ride home one day when it rained and didn’t stop. It went from there, more looks, heated and heavy, a hand on a knee, fingers that brushed back hair.
And then you were on his lap, dress gathered in one of Eddie’s hands as he held it out of his way so he could watch the way his cock slid in and out of you. He was noisy, encouraging you to do the same with low, rough moans and teeth that nipped at your jaw, your neck.
That was it, an addiction that needed to be fed, kisses that you couldn’t really go without for more than a day or two and after the last bell rang, you found his van in the school parking lot. Eddie could never make it further than past the old sports fields, pulling over somewhere private so he could get his hands on you, needy and greedy and all consuming.
It’s where you found yourself now, parked behind the old building that used to house the soccer teams changing rooms, hidden from view from the school, its students, the main roads. You were comfy in Eddie’s lap, a familiar weight on his thighs, your skirt already rucked up around your hips.
His lips were that maddening touch of soft, slow, fast, deep, lazy, needy, teeth, tongue, fuck, god.
It turned heated fast, the same way it always did and it was fine, it was good. It always was. It didn’t matter if Eddie had you in his lap for five hours or five minutes, the boy always made you come. He had a way of making it creep up on you, hard and fast, eyes rolling, white flashes of heat rippling through your body and then there were stars. Stars everywhere.
The boy kissed constellations onto your lips, dripping gold dust over your skin.
He had his hands under your skirt, palms squeezing at the flesh of your ass, kneading each cheek in a way that made your skin prickle with heat ‘cause he was spreading you over his thighs and it that made you feel real fucking dirty.
You were breathless, hands in his curls, pulling him closer, eyes fluttering at the way he sucked another bruise you couldn’t explain onto your neck.
You felt close enough to fall apart without him even touching you, underwear still on, lace slick and wet already, but Jesus Christ, he hadn’t put his hands on you yet. Not really. You were a livewire, body electric, the air around you both buzzing.
It wouldn’t last long when you were both like this, pent up from not seeing each other for five days, school and homework and jobs and hellfire meetings keeping you apart. And well, a five minute fuck wasn’t going to do. No, not anymore.
So you pushed at his chest, firm enough that his head fell back onto the headrest and Eddie’s hair was a mess and his brown eyes were wide. He was staring, chest heaving, palms still squeezing at the curve of your ass, fingers grazing over the lace edges of your underwear.
"Slow down," you tell him, voice a whisper.
You were sure you heard him whine, a pretty noise that got stuck at the back of his throat. You plucked the chain that lay there, shiny against his collar bones, and you twisted it between your fingers. It was sinful the way you used it to pull him a little closer again, nose brushing against the bridge of his own, lips hovering just out of reach.
He could’ve moved him he wanted to, surged forward and took control, kissed the commands right off your lips. But he didn’t.
“You can have me all night, if you want."
He whined, whimpered. You heard it that time.
"Be a little soft about it, huh? Nice and slow, for me, please?"
And then Eddie was nodding, eyes turning to burnt caramel, hooded and staring at you. His jaw was slack, lips parted and glossy from your kisses and suddenly his hands were skimming over your thighs, climbing up to hold at your waist instead. He touched you a little softer, sweeter than before and it made your stomach twist.
Fingers tucked your hair behind your ear, his heavy gaze taking in every feature, like he’d suddenly been told he could have you forever, like he wanted to commit you to memory in case you changed your mind.
Then he was kissing you again, slower like you asked, like he’d never kissed you before. Sweet and soft, his mouth a gentle push against your own and you so desperately wanted to lick into him, to tug on his pretty hair and make him grunt into you but that’s not what you asked for.
So you let Eddie set the pace, sighed into him, wriggled in his lap when he sucked the curve of your bottom lip between his own, and god were you going to regret this?
He tasted sweet, like the blue raspberry jolly rancher you’d seen Lucas hand him in the hallway, a little smoky underneath it, entirely like Eddie. He took his time with you, did as you asked him and the way he slowly curled his tongue around yours made your legs tingle, your heart skip a beat before racing a little faster than before.
His hand found your face, curving at your jaw, his thumb on your chin and he tap, tap, tapped at it until you let Eddie drag your mouth open a little more, whining when it resulted in him licking into you a little deeper.
He pulled away quicker than you would’ve liked, smiling all pretty at you when you gazed at him wide eyed. But then Eddie was nodding at the passenger seat, giving your ass a cute little smack.
“C’mon, sweetheart, seat belt on.”
You let his chain fall from your fingers, unsure you understood. But Eddie was surprisingly strong, wide hands clutching at your waist to lift you back over the console, dropping you a little clumsily onto the seat next to him.
“Eddie?” your voice was soft, a little worried, like maybe you’d crossed a line you weren’t sure the boy had.
But he was starting the engine, the van rumbling underneath you and then he was gazing over at you, bottom lip sucked between his teeth and god, he looked sinful, he looked like he wanted to eat you up. You’d let him, without hesitation.
“You said I could have you all night, yeah?” Eddie prompted, big eyes shining earnestly, his voice so sincere, like he couldn’t quite believe you’d told him such a thing. “Did you mean it?”
You nodded, suddenly shy and then Eddie was smiling, that wide, slow stretch of his lips that made you feel so many things. The van started moving, the boy tsked and nodded to your belt again, which you quickly pulled across your lap.
“Okay,” he nodded too, final in his decision. “Let’s go back to mine then, sweetheart.”
—————
You hadn’t been to Eddie’s before, not really. You knew which trailer was his, had seen in across from Max’s when you dropped her off with Steve, waved shyly and with warm cheeks when you saw the curly headed boy out of the front window.
You knew enough to realise his uncle Wayne was out, the older man’s car gone from the grassy makeshift drive. The park was quiet when Eddie parked up, making a noise of protest when you went to open the door for yourself. So you sat still, smiled hidden between pressed lips as you watched him bounce around the front of the van.
He opened your door with a shy grin, bright eyes and a hand that was ready to clasp your own. Eddie helped you down, wet grass brushing your ankles and it felt like a storm was coming with the way the air was buzzing.
Maybe it was just you and Eddie. Maybe it was just anticipation.
He opened the door to the trailer for you too, unusually quiet as his fingertips found the small of your back, guiding you inside the small house that was much cosier than you expected. It smelled a little smoky, like coffee and boyish cologne.
And then Eddie was rocking on the balls of his feet, fidgeting and pulling at a curl as he watched you take in his home.
“D’you, uh, want a drink or-?”
You turned, smiling soft like you wanted to show him you weren’t judging anything about the trailer. How could you? It was all Eddie.
“Do I not get to see your room, Munson?”
Eddie looked like he had all the air punched out of his lungs. The curl he’d pulled to brush against his mouth sprung back, his hands dropping to his sides as his eyes went wide.
He cleared his throat, nodding, giving a little bow and a wave of his arm, showing you down the narrow hallway. It was sweet, you thought, the way he was acting. Like he hadn’t been balls deep inside you countless times, as if he didn’t know the exact way you liked his fingers on your clit.
So you grinned at him, walked down the hall with your hands clasped coyly behind your back and you knew he was watching you, he always was. You could feel his eyes on you, a familiar burn that tickled your skin.
Eddie’s room was exactly like him, dark and warm, a little messy, littered with music posters, guitars on the walls, amps piled in the corner. His bed was unmade, pillows squint and sheets rumbled but they looked surprisingly fresh, the smell of laundry detergent, cologne and little smoke taking up space in the air.
You knew you’d asked for slow, for soft, for the boy to take his time with you. But suddenly you didn’t know what to do now you had Eddie all alone, all to yourself. Maybe for the whole night. The thought made you swallow hard and you were overcome, overwhelmed with how the boy was surrounding you without even touching you.
You never usually get Eddie for more than half an hour, a full sixty minutes at most, if you decided you could afford to be a little late for work that day. You never got to pull more than his belt off of him, jeans shucked down his thighs just enough for his cock to spring free. Likewise, you were confined to shirts and pulled up skirts, underwear hanging off one ankle or pushed to the side, Eddie’s fingers quick and concise against you.
So you huffed out a little laugh, nervous, but Eddie was smiling down at you and you liked the way the pulse in his neck jumped when you grabbed his hands and pushed him backwards to his bed. The backs of his knees hit the mattress and he let you nudge him down to sit, playing pretend with you, as if he couldn’t easily overpower you if he wanted.
He leaned back, weight spread on the palms of his hands as he looked up at you, silver chain and big, brown eyes shining in the low light that came through the crack of his closed curtains.
“What’re you up to, trouble?”
You shrugged, playing coy, lips twisted into a pretty smile you tried to hide but then your hands were toying with the buttons on your shirt, your cardigan long lost to the floor of Eddie’s van. But the boy was enraptured, gaze trained on the way your fingers were popping each button, trailing downdowndown, until the soft material hung open and your lilac bra was on show.
It wasn’t anything fancy, soft cotton triangles with ring straps and god, you knew for a fact that your light green underwear certainly didn’t match. But looking at Eddie, you had the realisation that he probably would care, no, not at all. ‘Cause his eyes were wide and his lips were parted, sitting the most still you’d ever seen him.
There wasn’t any music, just the quiet sounds of the town outside, the hum of a generator, the chirp of some birds nearby in a tear, the wind rushing softly over the metal roof. Eddie’s soft breathing, a little choked noise he caught in the back of his throat when you let your shirt slip off your shoulders, let it pool at your feet.
You toed off your shoes, eyes on Eddie’s the whole time and you wondered if this is what he imagined, what he thought about because all of sudden you were only in your skirt and bra and it was the most bare skin he’d seen on you.
Was your tummy too soft? Were your boobs too small? Did he see the scar on your bicep from when you fell over when you were five?
“Christ, you’re perfect,” he breathed out, eyes trailing over every inch of you. “So fuckin’ pretty.”
You flushed, cheeks and chest warm under his gaze but you didn’t stop, didn’t want to. Your fingers hooked into the band of your skirt, teased along the edges of it and you grinned when Eddie swore again, under his breath, hands fisting the comforter in a way that made your own breath hitch.
“Yeah?” you asked, blinking prettily, looking at the boy from under your lashes, fingers still slipped underneath the waist of your skirt. “Y’think so?”
You were playing up, you knew that, Eddie knew that. Neither of you cared though, because Eddie was grinning, nodding as he let out a low whistle.
“Prettiest little thing I’ve ever seen.”
You lit up at his words, cheeks rosy, lip tucked between your teeth to hide your grin but Eddie was still smiling enough for both of you. You rewarded him by putting on a little show, body turned to the side so you could pop your ass out a little, arch your back real nice and slide your skirt down your hips all slow.
You didn’t let go of the material until you smoothed it down your thighs, letting it fall to the floor once it reached your knees and you were bent over for him. Nice and slow, you eased back up, almost scared to look at the boy who’d been hidden behind the mess of your hair as you eased your skirt off. But when you stood back up, pushed your hair back and pressed your thumb nervously to your lips, you saw how the boy looked a little wild.
A little wrecked.
“Fuck, sweetheart,” Eddie breathed, sitting up to catch your hands in his, coaxing you to stand between his knees. He licked his lips, smoothed his palms over the dip in your waist and drew a line up your stomach with the tip of his nose. “Look at you.”
He certainly was, taking his time to gaze over every part of you, hands following suit, fingers trailing across the soft curve of your stomach, snapping the lace edge of your underwear against your hip. He pressed a kiss to your sternum, an open mouthed and lazy drag of his mouth over the swell of your breast.
“Y’wanna tell me what you want? Hmm?”
Your eyes fluttered closed at the feel of the boy so close, all this new bare skin for him to explore. His hands were so big, wide and warm and rough, scratching lovely at your waist, over the tops of your thighs, his mouth trailing down until his tongue licked at the edge of your underwear, flicking a little dirty at the cute little bow there.
“Eddie,” you didn’t mean to whine, not already. Your hands clutched at his shoulders, disappointingly still covered by his shirt but you felt a little unsteady, dizzy. “Told you what I wanted.”
You felt rather than saw his smile, pressed to your tummy and you let out a sharp gasp when his hands spun you, catching you when you turned, facing the other way so his nose was pressed to the curve of your spine.
You suddenly felt a lot more naked than before.
He tutted, close enough to you that you felt his lips move against you, his curls tickling the curve of your ass, his hands keeping you between his knees.
“Wanna hear it again, sweet thing,” a kiss, on the dimple of your lower back, another on the lace edge of your underwear. You squirmed. “That alright?”
You let out the breath you’d been holding, hands making fists by your sides and uncurling your hands again and again, at a loss with what to do with them because you’d never not been facing Eddie, tucked into his lap, able to watch him gasp and curse for you, fingers tangled in his hair.
He seemed to notice this, caught your hands in his own and soothed this thumb over your palms.
“This okay?” he asked you and the boy peered up to see your head tilted back, eyes closed, lips parted, chest heaving. You nodded and he smiled. “Yeah, baby? Lemme hear you?”
“Yeah, Eddie,” you murmured. “S’good.”
He rewarded you with a kiss to your hand, planted where his thumb was and then his mouth was trailing along your arm, lips pressed to the sensitive skin inside the crook of your elbow and he didn’t stop until his teeth were catching on the clasp of your bra.
He fingered the band, ghosted a touch over the metal hooks and you were gasping, nodding again so he didn’t have to ask permission and the flimsy fabric was soon joining the rest of your clothes on Eddie Munson’s bedroom floor.
Fuck.
“Pretty girl,” he cooed, “my sweet little thing, huh?”
Your heart stuttered over the possessive remark, your thighs rubbing together because you were still standing facing away from the boy and he wasn’t touching you where you wanted him to.
You couldn’t see what he was doing, couldn’t guess his next move and when you groaned and tried to spin back around, Eddie ah ah ah’d and gave your hip a little tap.
“You’ve not answered my question,” he tried to sound scolding, but he was sweet enough to kiss the spot he’d given you a little smack. “Gonna tell me what you want? Comin’ into my bedroom and givin’ me a little show? Then you can’t even tell me what you want me to do with you?”
He traced a line down your spine, tucked his index finger into the edge of your underwear, rings cold against your skin and he pulled the elastic back until it snapped back against you. You jumped, whimpered, pushed your ass further into his wide hands.
“C’mon now trouble, what did you tell me in the van, huh? You were so bossy then, what happened to that girl? Got you all fucked out already?” Eddie laughed, not meanly, but unkind enough to make your toes curl. “Hardly touched you, sweetheart, Christ.”
You loved and hated the way the boy could run his mouth, in and out of the bedroom. He could have you wet with just his mouth at your ear, spinning tales of exactly what he was going to do with you when he got you alone, sneaking away from your locker before anyone else had a chance to spot you both. Eddie was loud, brash, too confident, dramatic to boot. He was dirty, unashamed, hot with it, teasing.
You loved it.
But the boy couldn’t fucking handle it when you gave it back to him.
“Eddie.”
Another cooing noise, almost sympathetic, but you knew him better than that. “Yeah, baby?”
“Want you to take care of me,” your voice was sticky soft, sweet like honey, just as easy to get stuck in. “Can you do that? Please?”
You heard his breath hitch, a hard swallow, a wrecked sigh he tried to hide.
“Want you to take your time with me,” your hands found his, small on top of large, but you were the one taking control. You smoothed them up your hips, along the ridges of your ribs until both rough hands were cupping at your tits and you were lowering yourself into his lap. “Be nice to me, slow and sweet, baby.”
He was already hard against you, the length of him sitting stiff between your ass cheeks and you knew for a fact he’d been that way since the van. He’d admit it to you too, completely unashamedly letting you know the effect you had on him.
Eddie liked to take your hand in his, cup his hard dick through his jeans and whisper to you, asking you if you knew what you did to him.
So you stole his move, brought your joined hands to the heat of your lace covered cunt and leant back into his chest, his chin hooking over your shoulder so he could watch. His eyes were dark, almost black, hooded and staring through the line of his lashes.
“Fuck.”
You nodded as if you were agreeing with him, coaxing one of his fingers to draw a line up the length of your folds, gathering enough slick under the lace that it stuck to you, showing off every outline of you for Eddie to see.
“Eddie,” you couldn’t manage more than a whisper, but your lips found his ear under his messy curls easily, your head thrown back onto his shoulder. “Feel that? You’ve got me so wet.”
“Fucking, Christ, sweetheart.” He moaned, loud and wanting, his other hand grabbing a little roughly at your thigh, hooking it over his knee so he could spread you wider for him. “You’re gonna kill me.”
You pouted. “That’s no good to me.”
He huffed out a laugh, fingers kneading into the soft of your thigh as he kept you open for him. You let go of his other hand, happy to lay slack against him, propped up by his solid chest, arms holding you in as he touched and touched and touched.
“Like this?” He whispered, his finger tracing up and down, up and down through your folds, bumping against your clit on every pass. He was impossibly slow with it, gentle and soft, a maddening tease that had you pushing the tips of your toes into his carpet so you could try and chase the friction of his touch. “Slow like this, sweetheart?”
You nodded, eyes clenched shut, mewling and then his middle and index finger were swiping over your bottom lip, tapping until you opened.
“Suck,” he told you. “Good girl, hmm?”
If your eyes rolled to the back of your head, he didn’t see from the way he sat behind you. But you did as you were asked - no, told - laving your tongue under his fingers, enjoying the slight weight of them in your mouth, the cool silver of his rings at your lips, whining when he took them away from you, slicker than before.
But then his hand was down the front of your underwear and his fingers were sliding through you. You keened, squeaked at the sudden touch and tried to clamp your thighs around his wrist but Eddie was shushing you, soft noises in your ear as his other hand held your thigh, spreading you back open for him.
“Shh, shh, sweetheart,” Eddie quietened you, “y’okay? I’ve got you, can I touch you, baby? Yeah? Gonna squeeze that pretty cunt around my fingers?”
You were nodding frantically, hips thrust out to him in offering, desperate to feel a little more full than you were.
“Eddie, please.”
He was the same boy as always, running his mouth, talking to you dirty, hands knowing every inch of you. He was just slower with it, softer, like you’d asked. It turned him into something you’d never seen before, this quieter version of himself. Just as cocky, just as eager to please, but Jesus fucking Christ, his touch was making you dizzy and the way he was whispering to you all soft made you want to cry.
He was bordering on mean with it, a little condescending, hands petting at you to try and get you to settle.
“Baby, c’mon, sit nice,” he tsked, grinning at the way you were wriggling on his lap. If the grind of your ass against his hard dick was doing anything to him, he did well not to show it. “I know, I know, just a greedy little thing, aren’t you?”
And then his palm was running flat down the front of you, spreading your folds so the heel of his palm could grind against your clit as he slipped two fingers into you. It was all so easy with you wet you were, the slick sounds of your cunt almost as embarrassing as the ones falling from your mouth.
“I’ve got you,” he murmured low, lips against your ear. Your head was thrown back, laying against his shoulders and at his words, you cried out and pressed your face into his curls. You couldn’t do anything but let him fuck his fingers into you, a slow, wet drag in and out, in and out, in and out. “That’s it, sweet little thing, look at you.”
But then it wasn’t deep enough, it wasn’t fast enough and Eddie was still wearing far too many clothes, and suddenly, you were starting to regret everything you’d asked of the boy.
Your hands reached up, finding his curls, fingers twisting in the soft strands as your nails scratched against his scalp and you rugged, moaning for more.
Eddie stopped. Let go of your thigh and slid his hand out from your underwear, dragging wet and warmth up your tummy as he did so. You whined and you heard him laugh, a soft huff into your neck before he kissed your shoulder and patted your hip to make you stand up.
You climbed from his lap, a little unsteady on your feet because the maddening push and pull of his fingers had made you dizzy, white spots floating in your vision and you turned to him with a pout.
“Eddie, what the fu-”
But then he was pulling off his shirt, hands gripping the back of his collar to rip it over his head and it joined your clothes on his floor. He popped the button of his jeans but didn’t do much else, groaning slightly at the small relief it brought him as he palmed his hard cock through his boxers.
“On the bed, baby,” he nodded to the space beside him, a pile of pillows that probably smelled like him and when you let yourself crawl into them, you found out you were right. “Good girl.”
He laughed when your fingers curled into fists, an honest to god visceral reaction to his words.
Then he was moving over you, kneeling between your spread legs and crowding into you. It was a familiar sight, if not for the fact that you were horizontal this time. Nose to nose with the boy, lips within reach, big, brown eyes staring hotly back at you.
So you did what you always done, pushed your hands greedily into his hair and arched up to him, tugging a little when he didn’t comply and suddenly it felt like a fucking month had passed since Eddie had kissed you.
You whined, and you couldn’t deny you sounded like a brat. “Eddie!”
His hands wrapped around your wrists, gently pulling your fingers from his curls. He tutted, tried to look disappointed but he was hiding his smile by biting at his lip and then, fuck, he gathered both of your hands in one of his and pinned them to the pillow above your head.
“Sweetheart,” he cooed softly, “you said you wanted me to take my time with you.” He leaned down to press a kiss to your cheek, so close to where you wanted him. “Nice and slow, is that not what you said?”
You whimpered, turned your head to chase his lips with your own but he was pulling back just slightly. His hold on you was strong enough that you could pull away, couldn’t get close enough and the realisation made you moan out.
“C’mon pretty girl, that’s what you asked for, right? For me to take my time?” Another kiss, under the line of your jaw this time, his lips parted and wet and warm. “Can’t do that if you’re gonna yank at my hair, hmm? Like a dirty little thing? Can’t have that.”
A kiss again, anywhere but your lips, his mouth trailing over your throat, a sweet peck pressed to your chin. You wanted to cry, eyes glassy, overwhelmed at all the soft, lovely touches he was giving you, all whilst he had you pinned and pressed down underneath him.
“Baby,” Eddie tutted, eyes on yours, watching the way wetness brimmed at your lash line, threatening to spill over when you gave him a watery smile. “Baby, too much? Y’alright?”
You could feel the way his hand around your wrist let up, slackening just a little but you were crying out, a babble of noise that had him raising his brows and you were nodding furiously.
“M’good, Eddie, so good,” you could hardly catch a breath. What the fuck had he done to you? “Want this, want you.”
That seemed to appease him, his hand pushing yours back down into the pillows and he smiled, all lovely just for you, dimple showing. “Yeah? You do? Oh, good girl, what d’you want, huh?”
Another fucking kiss, the cutest little peck, right by the corner of your lips. He knew what you wanted, he was just being a dick about it.
“A kiss,” you huffed, shivering when his chest dragged across yours, the hang of his chain coke against your tits, a moan bubbling in your throat when he deliberately let it graze and catch against a peaked nipple.
“That’s all?” Eddie asked you, “better make it a good one for my girl then.”
His girl.
You didn’t have time to process that before he was on you, free hand curving around your jaw, thumb on your chin to tug at your mouth, licking into you almost immediately. It was like he’d went too long without it too, like not kissing you was the worst thing imaginable because it had been at least half an hour since he had his mouth on yours and well, that just wouldn’t fucking do.
He kissed you like he missed you, like someone was going to take you away from him, mouth and hands greedy on you, tongue curling around yours. His lips were always soft, so impossibly soft and every stroke of his tongue over yours made you whine, hands flexing in his hold because holy shit, you wanted to grab and scratch and pull at him for making you feel so damn good.
You were gasping against him when he pulled away, eyes still glassy, lips swollen and rosy and Eddie’s hand was getting greedy, trailing down your sides to hook into your underwear, pulling at them until they slid down your hips.
His nose nudged yours to grab your attention, unable to help himself when you pressed another, quick, sweet kiss to your still parted lips.
“You listening’ sweetheart?”
You nodded, blinking up at him.
“There’s my girl,” Eddie cooed, “good, ‘cause I need you to keep your hands up here for me, ‘kay?”
You whined, ready to argue back but then Eddie was pulling off lace from around your ankles and kissing his way down your naked body, hands bracketing your hips, curls tickling your stomach.
You clenched down on nothing.
He was eye level with your cunt, eyes shining, lips smirking as he pushed at your thighs, spreading you out in front of him, grinning when you wiggled against his palms.
“Nuhuh,” he told you, “let me see you, yeah?”
He’d never done this before, was never able to, with the logistics of a quickie in the front of his van. Sure, you’d gone down on him before, a much easier task over the console, his dick heavy on the flat of your tongue and Eddie always promised you that next time, he’d return the favour, get you spread out in back but, well.
Next time would come and you’d be too pent up and he’d be too impatient and before you both knew it you’d be sinking down on his cock in the driver's seat of the van, bouncing up and down whilst Eddie could only watch, fucked out in minutes at the sight of you.
So this? Eddie blowing warm air over your already hot cunt? This was new.
“So pretty,” he told you, voice awed. “Can I taste you baby? Would you like that?”
You couldn’t do anything but whimper, moans catching in your throat until they came out like needy little gasps and it took everything you had to follow Eddie’s orders and keep your hands to yourself. You fisted them in his pillow, gripped on tight because his lips were ghosting over your folds, butterfly kisses pressed to the outside of you, the tip of his tongue peeking out between his lips like he couldn’t help himself.
“Don’t know how long I’ve wanted to do this,” he groaned, hips rutting into the bed as he palmed at your ass, tugging you down the bed so he could settle himself closer to you. “Could just eat you up, pretty girl.”
His tongue was swiping through you before you could answer, before you could beg. And despite the way he was grinding himself down into the bed, Eddie took his time with you, licked through your folds real slow with the flat of his tongue, pushing the soft of it over your clit at the end.
He kept you spread wide, hands on the inside of your thighs, fingers splayed over you, thumbs pulling gently at your folds so he could push you open for him. His nose hit your clit when his tongue dipped inside of you, and fucking hell, Eddie was moaning almost as loud as you were, his lips wet with you, getting himself messy as he sucked and kissed his way across your cunt.
“Can’t get enough of you,” the boy groaned into your thigh, kissing the soft skin there too, a reminder of how fucking sweet he was. “Christ, sweetheart, look at you, so pretty, all fucked out, huh? Look at those eyes, fucking hell.”
He was babbling, talking sweet in between licks, dirty flicks of his tongue that had your stomach clenching, your chest heaving. You were pushed onto your elbows to watch, a move that Eddie had given you in trouble for because your hands were still twisted in his sheets, kept to yourself.
Your eyes were glassy, tears pooling at the corners, kissing your lashes that couldn’t stop fluttering at every kiss he gave you clit, every soft suck. You were sure you looked a mess, wrecked, ruined. Hair a riot, cheeks blooming with heat, lips still swollen and slick from his kisses and when Eddie slid one finger, two fingers back inside of you, you fell back with a wail.
You were close, so close already, the thickness of his digits dragging in and out of your cunt was enough to throw you onto the edge but then the boy smiled against your stomach and dipped his head back down. His lips wrapped around your clit and suckled, soft and gentle, enough to keep you hanging.
“Can feel you,” Eddie whispered, placing soft, quick kisses around your folds, across your tummy, one on your hip bone, followed by a scrape of his teeth. “Can feel you gettin’ tight around me, sweetheart. S’fucking hot, so fuckin’ hot.”
The boy sounded as wrecked as you felt, his voice shot, lips slick with you as you looked back down the length of your stretched out frame, eyes rolling at the sight of him between your thighs. He was watching you, brown eyes dark and hooded as he held your gaze and licked back over your clit.
“Oh, fucking hell,” you moaned, “Eddie, Eddie, Eddie-”
“That’s it baby,” he encouraged, wrist twisting, fingers moving in and out of you a little faster. His rings weren’t cold anymore, but you could feel the hard nudge of them against your cunt, the feeling making you clench down. “Christ, that’s it, yeah, you gonna come for me?”
You couldn’t help it, not anymore.
You grabbed at Eddie’s hair as your back arched, pushing your hips further into him, his fingers reaching places inside of you that had you seeing fucking stars. You tugged at his curls, unable to stop yourself but Eddie groaned at your toughness, letting you pull him into you, his hips rutting against the bed as he hooked his digits up and rubbed, tongue circling around your clit relentlessly at the same time.
You broke, shattered, fell apart, cried out. Your eyes clenched shut, your body curling in on itself as you clamped your thighs around Eddie’s poor head, his mouth still sucking and kissing over you as you came.
And then you were whimpering, patting at the mess of curls you’d created on his head, trying to shimmy away from the overstimulation and Eddie took pity, dragging himself up your bottom, laying kisses on your damp skin as he went.
He was grinning when he reached your face, kissing your neck to let you catch your breath, looking entirely proud of himself. You shined at the drag of his denim jeans over the inside of your thighs, laughed weakly when Eddie snorted at your shivers.
Then he was pushing himself up on his elbows to hover over you, a palm smoothing back the hair that was clinging to your forehead. He looked down at you with eyes that were shining, so full of affection and fondness and something that it made your heart ache, made fresh tears spring to the corners of your eyes again and you huffed out a watery sigh.
“That good, huh?“ Eddie asked smugly, smiling when you nodded, still a little dazed. He thumbed at your mouth, squished at the soft of your cheeks with his fingers and rubbed his nose against yours. “Gimme a kiss, sweetheart.“
You obliged happily, humming a pretty sound against his lips when Eddie kissed you soft and sweet, his mouth a gentle slide over your own.
“Love your little noises,” he whispered, kissing you between words. “Sound so fucking cute when you’re coming for me.”
Your body burned at his words, another ache creeping across your cunt and despite the way he’d made you fall apart, you wanted nothing more than Eddie to be buried to the hilt inside of you.
“Eds,” you whispered, hand palming at the front of his jeans, groaning when you felt him straining against the denim, the hardest he’d ever been. “Let me help you.”
But he took your hand in his, kissed your palm before you could feel the sting of rejection and he was crowding you back into his pillows, curls falling in a curtain on either sideed of you, lips back on your neck.
“Give yourself a second, sweetheart,” he mumbled. “You said it yourself, I’ve got you all night.”
PART TWO
i am 100000% obsessed with this and need part two more than i need air
Best friends since middle school, you tell Eddie everything, which is why he's so surprised to find out you've been keeping a secret —you’re hearing a voice whenever you're home alone. He’s always had a thing for the fantastical but he can't believe in ghosts, and the longer you insist on it, the more worried he becomes. This would be bad enough if Eddie didn’t have a secret too, and it threatens to change everything between you. [22k]
fem!reader, best friends to lovers slow-burn, mutual pining, eddie is infatuated with you, idiots in love, paranormal activity/au, heavy hurt/comfort, angst, fluff and affection, wayne is uncle of the year every year, ghost-hunting
cw assumed auditory hallucinations, talk of mental health, surrounding worry and circumstances, mentioned mental illness stigma, recreational drug use mention, prescription drugs, grief
my endless gratitude and thank yous to @h-ness1944 and @mrcylvsu for their sensitivity beta reads and for answering my questions so many moons ago, I'm very, very thankful for all that hard work, and all the time and energy you both spent!
˚ʚ♡ɞ˚
Eddie's desk fan is on the fritz. It twists back and forth with a weak metallic clicking sound that promises eventual electrocution but for now provides momentary relief. Even the nights have been hell lately. No matter how many windows he and Wayne open, the air at home stays thick with humidity.
Sweat shines on his brow and collar. He refuses to tie his hair back, and each hour it grows more and more uncomfortable.
"Are you sure you don't wanna come and lie up here?" he asks, shifting reluctantly to peer over the side of the bed.
You're laying on the floor of his room, just as sweaty but half as unhappy. You've abandoned a book to your left, having declared the weather too much to concentrate through.
"Our body heat will mingle."
"The fan is really helping," he argues lightly. "If you die on my floor Wayne won't ever let it go. Just come up here."
You mumble something he doesn't hear and pull your shirt from your chest. You attempt to fan yourself with the thin, clinging fabric. It doesn't work, but it does expose the soft hill of your abdomen to his guilty eyes. His mouth dries up.
"It's getting late," he says. He's not trying to get rid of you, promise, but now he's thinking about your body heat mingling and why it wouldn't be such a bad thing, and he doesn't want to. "I'll drive you home, yeah?"
"In a minute," you agree, looking as if you have no intention of moving.
You turn your face to the side, eyes closed, lashes skimming the delicate skin of your under eye. Eddie sits up and rakes his greasy hair away from his face. He'll drop you home, take a cold shower for purely heat related reasons, and hopefully sleep through the night. It's a very unlikely outcome, but a man can dream.
"Come on. We'll roll the windows down and go really fast."
"Eddie," you chastise.
"Moderately fast."
His sleeveless tank top gets caught as he leans down to try and flick you. Eddie can only ever forgive his fourteen year old self for maiming perfectly good vintage in times like these. A completely unnecessary culling of an entire wardrobe's worth of sleeves, but when the weather gets bad for a few heady weeks every summer, he remembers the reasoning behind it.
He's stripped of all his clunky jewellery for now, adorned only in the dark ink of his multiplying tattoos. His most recent addition is an artist's rendition of the Eye of Sauron, blinking up at him from beneath his volley of bats. Still sick, he thinks to himself smugly.
You've pulled yourself into a sitting position with your arms crossed over the bed, your hand stretched out to touch his plaid pyjama bottoms. You're in a nearly matching pair; when Eddie called you to hang out earlier you'd turned him down, citing a reluctance to change. He'd promised to pick you up in his own pyjamas, and you've been lying on his floor since then.
You're the laziest kids this side of the Wabash river, Wayne'd said, looking over your limp bodies with a smile.
The other side, too, Eddie popped back. Will you put those chicken wings in the oven for us, please?
Eddie's not a monster, the wings were pre-prepared. Any other day he'd correct his uncle, say, hey, we haven't been kids for years, but the heat makes him feel gross and sometimes you just want your dad to make you dinner. (Sometimes Eddie's just lazy, also.)
"Eds?" you murmur.
He lets his hands fall away from his hair where he'd been scratching mindlessly and turns to you. He's lethargic, feels like he's turning his head through molasses. "What, sweetheart?"
Years of being friends lends an easy affection. His pet names are purely platonic. Or they used to be. Either way, you aren't perturbed.
"Can I sleep over?"
He usually says yes to that question immediately. But again, the thought of your sweaty body curled into his with your hands breaching a friendly gap to curl over his waist like they tend to do fills his stomach with dread.
His little crush is making him a bad friend, he decides. He will always, first and foremost, be your friend.
"Of course you can." He rubs his mouth. Feigning casualness. "How come?"
You peel out of your fatigue and get on your knees. The extra height is all you need to finally grab his legs, smiling sheepishly. Eddie won't judge you for almost anything and you know that, so it's gotta be outlandish.
"I think…" You tap his kneecap. "Okay, laugh at me if you need to, but I'm pretty sure my house is haunted."
"Like, by a ghost?"
"What else?" you ask, laughing good-naturedly.
"Why do you think it's haunted, superstar?"
You drop your face onto his thigh, giving him a disjointed hug. He hugs you back for as long as the heat will allow it, a handful of stolen seconds with his hand over your back.
"I swear, sometimes, I can hear someone talking."
That's… scarier than he imagined. "Shit, I thought you were gonna say a coat fell off the hanger, or the light in your bathroom started flickering again."
"It has," you admit, your mouth pressed to his thigh. "But it's just the bulb."
He pushes you off of him, your voice sending vibrations through places he'd prefer it didn't, and you fall back with a half-hearted stab at melodrama.
"Oof," you say, straight-faced.
"You really think it's a ghost?" he asks.
"No. I don't know. I won't believe in ghosts until I see one, and I haven't seen one, but if it were a ghost, this is the type of behaviour I'd expect from it. So I guess I do. Does that make sense?"
"Sure." He doesn't know. "What does it say?"
"Here's the bit where you won't believe me."
You smile at him from your spot on the floor. Your hand curls out, like a tight budded flower coming to bloom.
"She asks about you," you say quietly. "It's pretty much all she says."
"Who?"
"The ghost."
"She's a she?"
"Sounds kind of like one."
"Come sit up here with me."
Eddie knows his voice has gone hard and weird, but he can't help it. He understands that he doesn't understand anything, that the world is large and works in mysterious ways, but he wouldn't forgive himself if he took this lightly. You sound so convinced — it makes him feel ill.
Because Eddie doesn't believe in ghosts.
You climb up onto the bed in front of him and he doesn't take your hand. He should. You won’t meet his eyes, a sign that you're slightly embarrassed. It's not what he meant to do.
"What does she say?” he probes.
You go teasing and shiny, a glimmer in your eye. "I know you don't believe me, Eddie."
"Who says I don't believe you? I just need you to explain."
"She says…" You laugh. "Okay, she says stuff like, 'Eddie is okay?'"
Eddie stares at you.
"I was going to tell you–"
"When?" he demands.
"I'm telling you right now!"
"How long have you been hearing voices?"
You climb up on knees to wrap your arms around his head. "You think I'm delusional," you say, a loving murmur in his ear.
He grabs your waist. Unsurprisingly, hugging you doesn't make him nearly as electric as he'd worried. It feels the same as it always has, like hugging his best friend. Loving the smell of your hair is new, but everything else stays the same.
"I don't think you’re delusional, I don't, I just– if I told you the same thing."
You pull away, and his hand comes to rest atop the curve of your hip. "I'd believe you," you say.
"I believe that you believe there's someone talking to you about me. Uh… if it is a ghost haunting your house, why's she talking about me?"
You take his hands off of your waist, squeezing his fingers together in your palms. "Don't know. I tried asking but she never answers, and last night…"
Eddie stands up.
"Where are you going?"
"We gotta let Wayne know you're staying and he's about to fall asleep, and I want a cigarette, and you need something to drink."
"I don't want a beer."
"No," he says. When he says to drink, he really means something cold to sip on. He's hoping to grab you back from… whatever it is you're going. "Soda, apple juice, drink what you want."
He fiddles with the drawstrings on his pants, waiting for you to join him at the doorway. You stay sitting on his bed. He doesn't know what your face means.
"Hey, you still have to tell me about it. I want to know, swear to god. We have all night." He holds out his hand. Wiggles his fingers at you. "I'll let you paint my nails again too, like a real girls night."
That grabs your attention. You slide off of the bed and take his hand, shrieking as he yanks you ten miles an hour down the skinny hallway and into the living room. Wayne's got the sofa bed out already, his padded roll-up mattress laid out over the springs and a sheet stretched corner to corner.
"Hey, kids," he says, fluffing one of his pillows. He chucks it at the top of the mattress. "Home time?"
"Can I stay over, Mr. Munson?" you ask.
Wayne rolls his eyes. You once spent eight days here with no breaks sometime in the summer of 1987 and he hadn't batted an eye. Eddie made sure it was truly alright with Wayne, of course, and you'd done your share of housework. Point is, both Munson's find your asking to stay unnecessary.
"I'll make pancakes in the morning," you add.
"Oh, in that case." Wayne throws his blanket out over the bed and sits on top of it. "By all means, kid, stay over. Tell your guardian."
"Can't. In Santa Barbara."
"Ah, then I have to insist you stay," he says, laying down with a huff.
Eddie passes him the TV remote. "She's a big girl, Wayne." You're well past the age of parental supervision.
Wayne answers with a grumbling sound that means, hey, you can keep talking to me but there's no guarantee I'll answer.
"I won't be annoying, promise," you say.
Wayne grunts again.
"That's old man talk for I know you won't," Eddie translates.
You nod, glad to have permission, and meander into the kitchen. "Can I–"
"Yes!" Eddie and Wayne call simultaneously.
Wayne laughs to himself in that pleased gruff way he's good at and tucks his arms behind his head. He's wearing one of Eddie's t-shirts. They've been the same size since Eddie was seventeen, something both Munson's utilise when laundry day is approaching but not quite upon them.
"Lighter?"
Wayne scrunches his eyes in displeasure. "By the sink."
"Thanks." For some reason, Eddie doesn't leave. He stays standing by the TV, listening to the voice of a late-night talk show chuckle through a joke about some scandal.
When Eddie was younger, he'd get into bed beside Wayne and watch TV until his eyes hurt. Too young to have stopped needing comfort and too old to know how to ask for it, he'd drift down the snug hallway into the living room and Wayne would usually be asleep or almost there. Eddie would stand by the TV hesitantly, and if he was sleeping Wayne must've been able to feel it, a new parents instinct or something, because he'd soon wake, and if he wasn't he'd look at Eddie like he'd been waiting for him. Like Eddie was running late.
His teenage years were almost solely defined by bad dreams and TV with Wayne. On the good nights, Eddie would go back to bed. On the bad nights, heartache would swallow him whole. Well, almost whole. His cheek would rest on Wayne's shoulder as the night went on. Miraculous and ordinary at once. That's the only bit of him that didn't hurt.
Pain emaciates the good from his memory, but it can't erase the comfort of watching TV with someone who loved him when they didn't have to.
Wayne pretends to chop Eddie in the stomach. Eddie laughs and dodges out of his path.
"Gotta be faster than that," Eddie taunts.
"Don't chain smoke," Wayne says.
"We won't be up long." Eddie's lying. He can't imagine that either of you will be getting an early night tonight considering the nature of your confession. What he means is, you won't be keeping Wayne up, and Eddie won't smoke more than what's wise.
Wayne hums.
You're in the kitchen screwing the lid back on a gallon of apple juice, your cup a quarter filled. You're like that. Won't ever take more than you need.
"One for me?" he asks.
"I figured now all your taste buds are dead, you wouldn't want any."
"Ha-ha," he says. The kitchen is unusually clean. "Shit, stop cleaning my house. Good god."
You pull one of his jackets off of the seat of one of the kitchen table's chairs and shake it out. "So I can sleep here, eat here, but cleaning is where you draw the line. I like it."
Eddie grabs the lighter from beside the sink in one hand and your wrist in the other, pulling you away from the table before you can start organising their mail and through the back door.
It's still sticky-hot out and the steps are warm to the touch as the two of you sit down hip to hip. He pulls the stiff pack of cigarettes from his pants pocket and hands them to you. Your hand is already waiting. You peel off the plastic and tap the pack against your chest. You like doing it, arguing that it makes you feel like you're Chelsea Marino in Glory Days, all dark smiles and indulgent self-loathing.
You open the pack, tug out a lone cigarette, and pass it to him.
"You're like a pez dispenser," Eddie says, putting the butt of the cigarette between his lips.
"You little freak."
He laughs and almost drops his cig. Wayne's heavy zippo struggles to light, low on gas.
"Loser can't even light a cigarette."
"Who put two dimes in you?" he asks, thrilled by your negging.
He takes a sharp inhale as the end of the cigarette finally lights, the heat tickling his throat until it burns the way he needs it to.
"Somebody must've," you say.
"Reckon we can tip you upside down and get something to eat?" he asks through an exhale of smoke, tapping ash into the small egg cup to his left that's been serving as an ashtray for as long as he's been smoking. It used to be yellow. Every now and again he washes it and sees the old chicken paint underneath. "Too late for cooking."
"Are you hungry?" you ask genuinely. "I told you we should've had more than just wings."
"It was too hot to eat hot stuff. It's still too hot. Tomorrow, we should go to Bradley's and get stuff for sandwiches."
Eddie waits for your answer. "I'm sick of PB and J, Eds," or "Yes! And a pitcher for sweet tea, my captain." You don't say anything, your face turned up to the sky and your eyes closed, soaking in the heat.
He has half a mind to go get a spray bottle and douse you before you collapse.
"What's going on with you?" he asks.
"I'm just thinking."
"Think out loud. Don't be fucking selfish."
"I'm not sure you wanna hear it."
He puts his cigarette in the eggcup ashtray half-smoked, ribbons of white curling up into the shimmering summer heat. Any other time he'd lounge back and let the nicotine course through his system, a momentary relief against the winding tightness that comes with being so hot, and so worried about you.
"If I ask you how you've been feeling lately, could you answer me?" he asks. "Without assuming I don't believe you. Don't get mad, just tell me."
You drop your shoulder against his. "I feel fine, I think. You know me, I– I worry too much, and work is overwhelming. If you took me to a doctor, he'd probably prescribe me ambien and a week in a dark room, but. I really don't think I'm making this up."
"I don't think you'd know," he says. Isn't that the deal? If you're having a hallucination of some kind, it would likely sound and feel real enough to trick you in some capacity.
"Trust me," you say. Your hair brushes against the top of his damp arm. He can't smell good, but you don't say a thing about it.
"I do." Eddie turns his head to take another drag. He blows the smoke as far from you as he can manage. "Tell me about last night," he says, eyes on the weather worn plating of the trailer. "What happened?"
If you're not messing with him, your ghost has been talking to you for a while now. Something happened last night to scare you in a way you hadn't been before.
He fights his rising nausea with a final drag on his cigarette. You stop leaning on him, hands back in your lap as you tell the story.
"I was listening to the stereo real loud while I did laundry. I don't know if I was trying to, you know, block it out if she started talking, I'm not stupid, I– I know it could be all in my head. I don't think it is, but I'm not stupid. I went down to the basement to swap the load out in the dryer, and while I was down there…"
You look like you don't know how to explain it. Eddie bites his cheek.
"She wrote me something," you say finally. "In my notebook, the one you got me for Christmas. She said hello."
"I could've written it," he says. "I don't remember, maybe I left you a message in it knowing you'd find it."
"Did you come in and take it off the shelf, too?" you ask gently. "Eddie, I know your handwriting. I'm not making this up."
He sighs, rubs his face with both hands, the smell of smoke and salt ingrained in the lines of his palms. He gives himself a long five seconds scrubbing at his stubbly jaw and wishing it was colder, then he shoots up onto his feet and pulls open the door.
"Early night," he says decisively. "If you're still sure there's a ghost in the morning, I'll come over. See if she'll talk to me too. How does that sound?"
You hold your hand out. Eddie takes it, hoisting you up.
"It sounds like you need a better strategy for getting girls to go to bed with you."
"It's working, isn't it?"
"Loser."
—
You wake up to Eddie tapping your shoulder.
"Come on, sweetheart," he says quietly, his voice rough as hewn stone. "I made you pancakes."
It's as if you're submerged at the bottom of a shallow pool. Sound and heat and sunlight reach you, but it's dull. It takes you a second to understand what Eddie's saying, and why his thumb is rubbing into your shoulder.
"Come on," he says again, "'fore they get cold."
You blink. Blink blink blink. Your throat hurts and you have a bad taste in your mouth. Your eyes feel like somebody flicked sand at you while you slept, gritty and dry. You kick the thin blanket away from you, a long day of writhing in the heat yesterday having turned you to sludge, your limbs limp and uncooperative.
Eddie's frowning at you when you look up.
"Want me to get you a rag?" he asks.
"No, I'll wash my face." Your words string together like toffee melted between them and hardened again while you weren't looking. "Oh," you murmur, wincing as you set your feet on the ground. "My back really hurts. Did you push me out of bed last night?"
"You slept like a log. Same position all night." He reaches for you, but his hand wavers. He must change his mind.
Eddie leaves the door wide open as he leaves. The radio is on, and a song he secretly loves but won't admit to wars with the sound of sizzling oil. If you strain, you can hear him humming. You get closer and dip into the bathroom, the door open so you can listen to Eddie sing the chorus.
Dance with me, I want to be your partner, can't you see? The music is just starting.
He doesn't sing well, really. It's a light, high-pitched rendition. He isn't trying. He feels comfortable enough around you to be unapologetically mediocre, and it's somehow sweeter than if he had a voice like Larry Hoppen.
You wash your face with handfuls of cold water, your lips tasting of salt as it drips down your nose to your neck, rogue rivulets of run-off seeping into your rolled sleeves.
The heat broke overnight. A light rain patters soundlessly against the windows, and the back door has been propped open in the kitchen to let in the smell of fresh churned earth. Petrichor.
You pat your tacky face dry. Eddie turns to the sound, and you nod at Wayne's empty seat.
"Where's your uncle?" you ask.
"He wanted to get epoxy and a fresh roll of duct tape in case we spring another leak. The rain was pretty bad last night, I think he's worried it'll rot the ceiling. I don't know. Don't worry, I made him something first."
You sit down and let Eddie serve you a stack of pancakes. The ones on the very top are piping hot. You slather them in butter and maple syrup as he sits down next to you, a plate of his own in hand.
"How's your back?" he asks. He's being too soft with you.
"I saw a ghost, Eds, I'm not dying." You slice down the pancakes with the side of your fork, attempting to act unbothered. "Worst case scenario, I'm schizophrenic."
Eddie sits down in the chair next to yours. It's a small table but there's ample room. His proximity is a choice. "Worst case scenario, you're being targeted by an evil demon, but schizophrenia could also be really bad," he says. "S'why I'm worried."
"Eddie." You put down your fork, swallowing a half-chewed mouthful roughly. "Hey. If it's my head, I'll go to the doctor and I'll let them take care of it and everything will be fine." You have no way of knowing if what you're saying is true. Mental illness isn't easy. You're just saying what you think he needs to hear without outright lying. "I'll take the meds and you'll be there for me. But I'm fine. And you're being weird."
"You're trying to piss me off."
A little. Pissed is better than anxious. You'd rather give him something to glare at than a reason to twist himself into knots. "You're easily riled," you jest.
His eyebrows rise. He eats his pancakes and you your own, the wrinkled knees of your pyjamas rubbing against one another as he jigs his leg along to the song on the radio. The rain starts to worsen, fat droplets slapping the screen door like the thwack of a bullet. From your seat, you can see the sky dark with grey clouds, the sun a long forgotten foe. The humidity has been cut in half, which is to say bad but not unbearable. Last night, if you'd been awake to feel it, the rain would've been warm in your palm. Getting up to close the door now, you nudge the ajar screen wide with your foot, letting some of the rain lash your arms and face.
You sigh at the chilly coldness of each blessed drop.
"Heatwave from hell is finally over."
"Thank fuck for that. Let's hope it's miserably cold for weeks," Eddie says.
It's mid September —summer has said goodbye with one last fierce kiss. By October, you'll be wrapping yourselves up in throw blankets on the couch on the porch, or hiding inside with Wayne's special pasta (buttered noodles and green pesto for the 'brave') watching slashers on Eddie's blurry TV. The humidity will be nothing but a gross memory.
You wash your plates and Eddie lets you shower first. You have your own shampoo in the corner, and a rose scented body wash Eddie buys but doesn't use (but it isn't for you, idiot, why would he buy you something so expensive? He got it by mistake). You could draw the cracks in their shower tiles with your eyes closed, and the condensation that clings to the cold water pipe, that's how many times you've been in here. You finish quickly, dry quicker, and pull fresh clothes over your still-clammy skin.
You tap Eddie in. He's somehow even faster than you were, and you swap places in his room. While he's changing, you dry the bathroom walls with a towel as soon as he's out, knowing the small room has a propensity for dampness.
"Stop cleaning my fucking house," he says when you traipse back into his room, his head hanging upside down as he towel dries his curls.
You forgo your usual explanations and tell the truth. "I know you're perfectly capable. I like helping, that's all."
"I know. Ugh, you suck. Do you have any deodorant?"
You grin and pull your deodorant out of your bag, a new-ish stick of Teen Spirit. Eddie sees it and sighs, obviously unprepared to smell like Pink Crush for the rest of the day. "I have like, half an inch left of Caribbean Cool. Coconut?" you offer.
He goes with the coconut scent. The wall of privacy between you has eroded to a scrap of paper after so long living in each other's laps, but you feel guilty for looking at him, the shifting muscle beneath the skin of his arms and chest stealing your focus. If Eddie were to see you without your shirt, you doubt he'd find himself anywhere near as distracted. He'd look if you let him because that's the way he is, unaffected by simple intimacies, but when you tell him to face the door it doesn’t aggrieve him. Most of the time he’s already averted his eyes.
"Gotta add that to the list of shit we need. Have you seen my shoes?"
"Your white sneakers are in the hallway. One of your converse is under the bed, but it's hard to say about the other." You swallow a sudden lump. "Are we going shirtless?"
Eddie does not go shirtless. He pulls a shirt on that thankfully has sleeves, and then a zip up hoodie under his leather jacket. You didn't think to bring a coat yourself due to the extreme baking temperature of the day before. You're lucky you had clean clothes here, considering you hadn't intended to spend the night. Or, not lucky, loved. One of the Munson’s has washed what you’ve left behind.
You have a momentary lapse as Eddie puts his shoes on, trekking into the bathroom to look in the mirror. It's no secret that you aren't pretty. You can make a good effort, and you keep it classy, stay clean, but you aren't pretty, not by your own opinion.
Eddie knows everything about you (nearly). He knows you don't think much of yourself. And a younger version of him had comforted you as earnestly as an awkward teenage boy could manage, but these days he goes for the root of the problem. He still tells you that you're pretty occasionally, or rather, "Looking good, babe," but not today.
"Hey." Eddie looks you up and down. "What's wrong?"
"I look stupid." You glance at your legs. Why does everything look so weird on you?
He hooks his arm through yours and starts to drag you down the hallway to the front door, sideways like two crabs. "No."
"Yeah, I do, and people are gonna think I do, too."
"Who cares what other people think?" And there's grown-up Eddie's rhetoric, Who gives a fuck what other people think?
"Me," you say.
You understand exactly what it is he's trying to do: free you from the anxiety of overthinking. It doesn't work as often as you wish it would, but he gives it a good go.
"No, you don't. We don't care what other people think because it doesn't affect us." He doesn't make light, exactly, but his eyes are bright and his smile is sweet as he opens the front door and gestures for you to go down first. Rain and wind are quick to kiss at your naked arms.
"What if they all think I'm some sort of slob?"
"Then they'd be wrong. It's okay for people to be wrong about us. That's their problem." More familiar argument. It actually does make you feel better, despite hearing it a hundred times before. "People are wrong all the time."
Eddie follows you down the first step and turns away to lock the door.
"Like you and my ghost," you say, trying to steer the conversation from your moment of weakness and into happy territory again. "You don't think she's real."
"Baby, I'd love it if you proved me wrong with that one." He jogs down the rest of the steps, knowing it’ll give you a conniption, the wet metal a death trap waiting to happen. “Go! Get in the van!”
You scramble across the grass and the curved pathway to the drive where the van is parked and yank open the passenger door with all your strength. The handle is notorious for sticking shut. When nothing happens, Eddie curses up a storm as he clambers into the driver's seat and over the console to force it open, giving it a good old-fashioned kick from the inside. It flies into your waiting hands and you rush up the step into the front of the van away from the rain that’s growing heavier and heavier by the hour.
“Well, glad I didn’t waste time letting it dry,” Eddie says, wringing his hair out over his lap. It only drips two or three drops, but it’s funny all the same. The top of his head shines like a dark halo. “About the ghost. Do you really believe in them?”
“You asked me last night–”
“I know, but last night you said you wouldn’t believe in one unless you saw it, and then proceeded to talk about it like it was real.”
“I’m agnostic about ghosts.”
“Oh, yeah?” he asks. He sticks the key in the ignition and turns it until the engine groans to life. The van was old when he got it. Now it’s super old.
“No. What’s agnostic mean?” you ask.
“We’ll buy a dictionary.”
“I kind of believe in ghosts. I believe in my ghost. If I ever see one, I’ll believe in all the ghosts. Shit, I sound stupid.”
“No, you don’t– you don’t! It’s okay to not know, I wasn’t trying to interrogate you about your personal beliefs.” He is a very responsible driver these days. He keeps his eyes on the road. His hand, however, strays to your arm. “You’re not stupid, superstar.”
“Don’t,” you plead. Superstar is a nickname that stuck despite your vehement disagreement with its origin and further usage. “It makes you sound like an old dad and I’m the son who just got benched at little league. Again.”
You stand as much as your seatbelt will allow and dig out the purse from the butt pocket of your jeans. “I’ll get gas.”
“Way too personal for our relationship.”
Bad, overused joke.
Eddie doesn’t want you to pay for gas, the same way he doesn’t want you paying for takeout or birthday presents. He hates ‘handouts’ —it took you a while to convince him that gas money isn’t a handout, it’s you trying to keep things fair. You know how it feels to need the money and not want to ask for it, so you put him in a position where he never has to ask.
Things are easier now. You’re not in high school anymore. Work doesn’t pay as well as you want it to, but it’s enough to get by, especially while you’re living in your childhood home with only partial bills to pay. Eddie isn’t hurting for money either. That’s something to be grateful for.
Eddie pulls into the gas station. He won’t let you pump while the wind is whipping, but you sprint into the gas station and trawl the fridge for the biggest drinks, sticking two cans of iced tea under your arm. The cold immediately eats into your naked skin. You jog to the counter to pay.
“Pump two, please,” you say, putting your cans down.
“Twelve dollars.”
You frown. Eddie only put ten dollars on the pump. Well, deducting your two cans of iced tea at 99 cents each, ten dollars and two cents. What an asshole.
You hold out a twenty dollar bill with a smile, and look out the window as you wait for your change. The rain is too heavy to see him, but you imagine Eddie drumming the wheel of the van with both hands. You shiver out a thanks as your change hits your palm, dropping it into your purse with your best receipts. There’s one for bowling (a triple defeat, Eddie a secret master), one for two whole frozen cheesecakes you’d eaten in bed a month ago with double-sized dessert spoons, a couple for Hawk theatre; Back to the Future II, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Ghostbusters II (‘89 was a great year for sequels). All your best memories printed on thermal paper.
“Holy shit I’m so cold,” you squeak, prying open the door without the aid of Eddie’s kick.
“You’re soaked, you fool. You want to go home first for a sweater?”
You close the door behind you and drop the iced tea into the console, grimacing at the great clang they make. Your seatbelt snaps into place around your soft middle, and without ceremony you’re back on the road for your original mission.
“No sweaters, Bradley’s. Stupid to double back.” You look at him from the corner of your eye. “I think we should get frozen pizza and extra toppings to put on them. And fries, obviously, and dessert.” The ghost won’t care. Probably.
“You forgot the side salad.”
“Forgot,” you say, laughing. “Why yes I did.”
“Dessert,” Eddie says, his turn now to make some decisions. “I want a slurpee real bad right now, so I’m thinking we buy a bag of ice for your food processor and get some syrup.”
“We could go get slurpees,” you say encouragingly. If that’s what he wants, why not?
“We have shit to do,” he says, smiling so much his dimples peek out. “Ghosts to convene with, notebooks to analyse. Feasts to prepare.” He looks deeply speculative. You assume he’s thinking about the maybe-ghost, but he says, “Why are we getting frozen pizza? They have those pre-packaged ones now that are basically fresh.”
“They taste the same.”
“Liar, the bottom of the frozen ones go soggy and the cheese burns on the crust. You know that I’m right, don’t give me dish.”
“Aren’t you always?”
Eddie has a horrible tendency to be right about things. Maybe that's why you hadn't told him about the ghost for so long, because you'd wanted to handle it yourself without his explanatory assurances. You’re the worrier and he’s the one who always sets it straight.
What if I make a fool of myself? you've asked him once.
I’ll make one of myself, too.
What if they fire me?
We’ll get you a new job with me cleaning up after idiots.
What if it never goes away?
It will.
What if body snatchers get us while we’re sleeping?
That one made him smile. The fondest upturn of a pretty mouth, not an expression you often see. Then they get us, he’d said, whispering across the pillows, face only partially visible in the struggling light of the TV. It’ll be awesome. Me and you. No brains, no worries. Just lettuce heads forever.
You watch him beating along to a song you aren’t privy to against the wheel. He hadn’t seemed to mind the idea of losing his mind with you back then. He doesn’t believe you now, but that’s because he hasn’t heard her voice. The whistling wind warping itself into coherent syllables. Reaching for you, a dark slice of sound.
Eddie… has… a secret…
You look at your lap, tamping down a shudder at the sensation of ice riding your spine.
Don’t we all?
—
Eddie feels you’ve been overly relaxed about the situation at hand. He doesn’t want to back you into a box and declare a health crisis, but he’s been thinking up possible illnesses while you weigh the pros and cons of pizza toppings in case he has to take you to see someone. He’s not sure how gas lines work but he’s sure a quick phone call to the Munson landline could clear it up for him. Perhaps the most effective test of all for carbon monoxide poisoning would be to subject himself to the same circumstances. He’ll spend a few days at home with you and see how he feels afterward. If push comes to shove he’ll light a match and see what catches.
On the inside, Eddie’s panicking about your mental health and, admittedly, the slim reality of a supernatural presence. On the outside, he’s playing along with your unconcerned dinner plans and aimless chatter. If you want to pretend that today is the same as any other day, he's prepared to let you. He won’t do the same, but he won’t discourage you, either.
You cut through one of the home aisles toward the front of the store with a heavy basket on your elbow, Eddie hot on your heels. He grabs a pocket dictionary from the display to his left and hurries to keep up with you.
You’re shivering. “I really didn’t think it would rain,” you say.
Eddie looks past the registers to the glass doors at the front of the store where rain pelts with a force bordering on stormy weather. If it gets much worse than this, he'll insist you both go back to Munson headquarters and hunker up to wait it out.
“The weather,” Eddie mumbles, unlike himself. “Are we expecting a storm? Maybe we should grab a cart and get some basics. Crate of water.”
“Okay, we can do that. Are you worried?”
“Kind of.”
He meets your eyes. He loves your eyes. He knows you don’t. You're not insecure in a way he feels he can fix —if he can fix any of it. It’s like you dissociate, for lack of a better word, from the things you can’t love. You don’t look in the mirror, won’t let him take photographs of you. You don’t say it. You call yourself stupid, weird, silly. Never ugly.
But he knows.
And now this whole ghost business. Eddie needs to think of something he can say to you that will inspire a better level of honesty going forward.
“How long have you been speaking to the ghost?” he asks.
You grin at a conveniently abandoned shopping cart at the end of the aisle and slide toward it on squealing shoes. You look around broadly for an owner, and when they don’t appear you place your basket in the stomach of it. The only thing remaining from whoever used it beforehand is a small tray of four cupcakes.
“Four. One for you, three for me,” you say, ignoring his question with a smug giggle.
Eddie loves you in a way not many people can love someone else, the kind of love that takes years of patience and acceptance and sweetness to take root, kind of love you only feel after seeing someone at their best, worst, and weirdest — memories come thick and fast whenever he thinks about the sheer years you’ve spent together, seeds of affection long germinated and rearing to grow. You, throwing up behind a Denny’s with sick in your hair, crying so hard you couldn’t catch your breath, and when you could, asking him if he wouldn’t mind buying you a new t-shirt to wear in the car as though you were some dastardly imposition, and not his sick best friend. You, on top of the world, surrounded by people who loved you with a birthday cake in front of you, eyes brighter than the blinking flames of each dripping candle. You, in pyjamas too tight, too loose, old or brand new with your hair up, down, washed, and greasy, your lips chapped, bruised then healed, parted against one of his pillows as you slept, as you yawned, as you laughed, talked. No matter what you’re wearing, saying or doing, you, in his bed, completely at home.
Eddie has a thousand images of you in his head and they all fight to play again, like a VHS on constant rewind, or a movie with duplicated film, double, triple exposed. Before even an inkling of a crush had ever come around, he loved you. That's why it doesn’t really matter that he can’t kiss you. He can’t imagine loving you more than this.
Sometimes, sometimes… you put your leg over his and your thigh spreads out across the top of his, and he has to beg himself not to want to touch you. He wonders if you’d mind. Eddie thinks about asking so often it turns into its own fantasy. He knows what cadence his voice would take, the exact grit and warmth, his hand waiting on your knee and aching to inch downward.
You pull him from his sickly introspection with a poke. Your fingernail dents his shirt precisely atop a small beauty mark. He doesn’t know if you know what you’re doing, if you’ve seen his naked chest enough times to realise that there’s a mole right there an inch shy of his belly button, if you’d ever looked at him in so much detail.
“Transmission incoming,” you say, your fingers flattening over his abdomen, your palm hovering apart. Like the pole of an opposite magnet, it refuses to connect. “Chirp. Houston, we’ve been attempting to connect with Astronaut Munson. He is unresponsive. Let us know when you make contact again.” You smile at him ruefully. “Damn moon keeps dropping signal.”
“Sorry… Astronaut Munson? Do they call astronauts astronauts? I thought it was commander.”
“I don’t know, Eddie, I haven’t brushed up on NASA related job titles lately.” Your deadpan wanes, replaced with a genuine concern. “Are you okay? You really did get lost.”
“I’m just thinking about, you know– Your ghost,” he lies. The ghost should be his highest concern, and for the most part it is, but he’d let his attention get pulled along by other things.
That’s the thing about love. It feels much more important in the moment than anything else, even when it shouldn’t.
“You’re super worried about the ghost.”
“It is an uber worrying ghost.”
“‘Cause she talks?” you ask.
“Well, yeah. Most of the time you just get, like, blurs on night vision cameras or the general malignant presence of the thing. Not words.” Not questions concerning your best friend.
“Casper talks and he’s gorgeous,” you say. “A true sweetheart.”
“Doesn’t Casper have to protect Lucy from his evil ghost uncles?”
“Who the fuck is Lucy?”
“The girl. Lucy and Johnny.”
“Bonnie?”
“Oh. That sounds right. But her name doesn’t matter,” Eddie insists. “My point was that the bad ghosts outweigh the good three to one. That’s more than half, you realise.”
“His name is Casper the Friendly Ghost,” you say, shrugging. Eddie hopes you know where it is in the store you’re going to. He hasn’t looked away from your face for the last twenty minutes. “It’s in the name.”
“But your ghost isn’t Casper,” Eddie says.
“No. My ghost isn’t Casper, but she hasn’t tried to kill me. She would have written something threatening in my notebook or knocked all the books off of my shelf if she were evil.”
Eddie frowns. You’ve steered him around the store like you’ve never been here before, changing your mind after turns to go down the opposite aisle, murmuring about bottled water. He reaches for your hand on the shopping cart rail and can’t resist squeezing it as he pulls it away.
“I got it,” he says.
He swears that your expression flickers. Worry breaking through the closed shutters of your blasé.
You’re not so chatty as you follow him toward the back of Bradley’s where they keep the big jugs of water. He grabs one, thinks back to the bad weather and grabs another. It’s unlikely that you’ll need them, but Eddie would rather be safe than sorry. “Do you have a lamp?” he asks. “An oil lamp? Or a flashlight?”
“I have a flashlight,” you confirm. “Is it really so bad? Uh, I don’t wanna ask again, but I– maybe I could–”
Eddie wants to pull your face into his chest. He thinks about it. Would he have hugged you like that a year ago, before the butterflies and the late nights daring to think of the dough of your thighs or the column of your throat when you tip your head back? He might’ve. It would mean something different, but he might’ve.
He throws an arm around your shoulder and gives you a good shake. “What is wrong with you? If it gets any worse, you’re staying with me. I’m only asking about a flashlight in case we have one of those worst case scenarios and get stuck in your haunted house. I refuse to die like the jocks in a b-rated horror.”
“The jocks or the whore? Isn’t it the girl who sleeps around that gets murdered in the dark?” you ask.
“Super unfair. I sleep around, do I deserve to die?” he asks, dropping his arm.
You mime stabbing him in the gut. Everyone's so violent.
Eddie is amazingly unharmed as he gets you to the register. You try to fight him on who’s paying, but you’re an idiot who insisted on getting gas. It’s the leverage he needs to win. Out of Bradley’s and back into the rain with grocery bags double bagged, you run for the van and thrust the spoils of your shopping trip in the passenger seat footwell. Eddie opens the side door to lug the water jugs inside and you take the cart back to the front of the store against his wishes.
He waits for you to be in arms reach and gets back in the van. You’re soaked to the bone. He’s cold in three layers, so you must be freezing. He shrugs off his sopping wet leather jacket and then the zip hoodie underneath, draping the zip hoodie over your lap and chest and then rushing to put his leather jacket on again.
“Thank you, good sir,” you laugh.
He’s already fiddling with the air conditioning. Heat bursts from the left vent but not the right, leaving you in a cold bubble. “Shit, I’m sorry, the right vent’s still busted. Ol’ Beauville keeps letting us down.”
“Don’t hate on the Beauville!” you scold through chattering teeth.
“You're dying,” he says. “Hold on, I’m gonna do ninety.”
“Do not speed!”
You get to the road outside of your place without any hydroplaning. You live on a regular American street in a two-story semi-detached house not too far from Hawkins High school with your guardian, who isn’t home very often. It has three bedrooms, one bathroom, and a lot of white walls. You often lament that the house doesn’t really feel like your own, and punctuate with a giddy laugh he doesn’t understand but adores nonetheless.
Eddie parks his van on the long gravel driveway as close to the house as he can get it and ushers you inside with your keys. You’re cold enough to listen without complaint.
He puts the groceries in the kitchen on the countertops and kicks off his shoes, intending on putting them away when he’s sure you aren’t in any danger of hypothermia. He kicks off his shoes by the door, locks it tight, and starts up the carpeted stairs to your room.
He’s not surprised to find you half-naked, but overfamiliar, affectionate friendship doesn’t necessarily mean you like being seen. He averts his gaze from your naked legs and tries desperately to think about anything but underwear. The more he tries not to think about them, the worse it gets.
“Hey,” he says, covering his eyes so you know he isn’t perving, “our horror flick just got dirty.”
“Yikes,” you say. “Don’t look.”
“I’m not, I’m not. You could’ve closed the door. You know, spare me a guilty conscience.” Then, because he just can’t help himself, “When did you start wearing fancy panties?”
“Fuck off, Eddie,” you laugh.
“Do I have to make the switch to tighty whities?”
“Our underwear choices do not concern one another.” You trek toward him. He peeks through two spread fingers and finds you thankfully reclothed in dry sweatpants and a sweater soft with age. “I thought tighty whities hurt your–” You raise your eyebrows.
He regrets being honest with you when you were teenagers. A little secrecy might help repaint him in your mind as less of a huge loser. You could possibly find him attractive if you weren't privy to the numerous embarrassments that make up his life, he thinks.
He chokes on his own tongue and dies right there in your bedroom. “Why do you remember shit like that?”
“Same reason you keep a heat pack in your room in case I get all crampy,” you say.
You give him one of your sick smiles —you have to know what you’re doing, you have to— and drape your arms over his shoulders, nearly knocking him down with the sudden addition of your weight. He, stunned, plants a foot behind himself so you don’t both trip and fall on your asses.
The plane of your back beckons beneath your sweater. What he’d give to slip a hand under the hem to explore the ridge of your shoulder blade with his fingertips.
A quiet ensues. Your hug turns from a joking attempt to push him around a bit to a real one. He steel-arms your waist, tightening them around you three times in quick succession, nose buried in your hair to steal a deep breath.
“This where the ghost talks to you?” he asks, looking over your head into the chaos of your room. It’s not dirty, but it isn’t tidy, either.
You sigh too much like a moan for his sanity and stand up tall, your hands trailing down his chest unthinkingly as you follow his gaze. “Yeah. I don’t know if we’ll hear her over the rain. It has to be really quiet.”
“What are you doing? Experiments?” he asks. He sounds as distracted by it all as he feels.
“No. Something I noticed, is all.”
“I don’t get why you didn’t tell me the first time it happened,” he confesses, voice dropping to a murmur.
“Um… remember senior year, you kept missing class because you had all those doctors appointments?” You smile sheepishly. “‘N’ you didn’t tell me about it until after you knew you were okay?”
During his first senior year, Eddie found a small cyst in his arm. Small compared to other cysts, large in his arm. He worried it was malicious, or rather Wayne worried and Eddie didn’t know what he thought about it until after they’d cut it out. It had been a thankfully speedy affair in a doctors office they couldn’t afford. Eddie didn’t tell you about it until he’d been all stitched up and tested — he tried, but then he would imagine the look on your face when he did, and it made him feel like his intestines had learned to jump rope.
He still remembers when he finally told you, the split second between, “a tumour,” and “but it’s not cancer.” The relief on your face. The shock of upset tears it caused.
“I guess I was trying to be good to you,” you say, shrugging and starting down the stairs.
Eddie follows. “If something like that happened again to me, god forbid,” —he dips into a melodramatic voice, scared of the sombre mood that’s descended— “I wouldn’t keep it to myself. I’d make it your problem instantly.”
Every now and then, Wayne will lean over the back of Eddie’s chair at the breakfast table and grab an arm, feeling for a tiny bump that hasn’t come back. You’d done the same in your own way: you wrote ‘check for lesions :D’ on a piece of paper and taped it to his bedroom doorway. It fell off ages ago, but he occasionally gets déjà vu as he leaves the room. And as he walks down the hallway, he’ll roll up his sleeve and check that there's nothing there.
Eddie didn’t tell you senior year. A lingering abandonment issue, maybe, ‘cause Dad didn’t stay when things got hard, who cares? He doesn’t think about that shit anymore. Figures the mark it left was enough. But these days, he’d tell you if he found a lump in his arm, or a ghost in his room. Your scribbled note made sure of that.
"Are you listening to me?" he asks.
"You'd make it my problem," you provide. "Tell me something I don't know."
He grabs you by the shoulders at the bottom of the stairs and blows into your ear.
With the lights on and the radio at a low volume, the rain outside doesn't seem nearly as imposing. The kitchen is small with a long strip light above that gives the room a near clinical white cast, the countertops shining clean, not a plate in the sink. It's evident how much time you don't spend here. No photos on the fridge, no salt or pepper shakers on the table. Where Eddie and Wayne have their insane mug collection made up of states and hours and way too much money in some cases, you have four black coffee mugs in a tower stack by the seldom used machine. Where they have a corkboard of photographs, Polaroids and printouts from Walmart off of rinky-dink digital cameras, you have one photo on the wall, a professionally done portrait of you from the day you graduated and Eddie, unfortunately, did not.
Eddie's grad pictures are much less robotic. Too much eyeliner but just enough you, he has his arm thrown over your shoulders in the back of a grungy restaurant, his smile blisteringly bright. He might as well have written 'Thank Fuck' across his forehead. There's another one of him and Hellfire Club at the time, blurry with the flash making him pale as snow. You and Wayne had been trying to make the camera focus, twin scowls on your faces. Eddie's expression was one of pure joy.
He tried to make up for your shitty grad pics by celebrating your first job with a pack of Polaroids. You'd looked adorably strange in the uniform, so young but so done with his shit, eighteen and exhausted. He keeps one in his room in the bottom of the box with all his rings and chains. If you ever found it, he'd think about drowning himself.
Your appointment with a ghost waits until after dinner. You pull your frozen pizzas out of their boxes and put them in the oven (you don't preheat, which Eddie thinks is a questionable choice, but he'd help you get away with murder). While they defrost and start to cook, you slice and dice your extra toppings on the wooden chopping board beside the stovetop. He stands there with his hands washed and nothing to do. Just watches you cut up jalapeños for him and thinks about how he's going to take care of you if the ghost doesn't speak up. Does he tell your guardian? You're an adult. All your healthcare would be private and confidential. Could he tell Wayne? Would that be a betrayal?
"Check the pizzas?" You scrape the seeds out of a jalapeño, eyes pinched in concentration.
Eddie doesn't know if he can eat. You aren't as out of it as you were at the store, but you aren't fully present. A song you love plays on the radio and it's like you don't hear it.
He pulls the pizzas from the oven. He makes a smiley face out of pepperoni and jalapeños, earning half as big a smile as he thought he would from you in response.
Together, you clean the small mess you made. The pizzas brown. When they're done you take them out, cut them up, plate them, and carry them up to your room on a tray with a two litre bottle of sprite and two plastic cups. Eddie changes into a pair of his pyjama pants that you keep at the bottom of your dresser before he sits on your bed, wide-eyed when he sees how many slices you've managed in his absence.
"Nobody's gonna take it away from you," he teases lightly.
"Can't be too careful 'round you," you say, dropping a crust onto his plate. It's his favourite part.
"Thought you wanted fries?"
"And I thought you wanted a side salad."
"I wanted snow cone syrup," he says, shrugging.
He considers offering to go make you some fries anyway, but he takes a big bite of pizza and it tastes so good he forgets about it. Eddie doesn't know nothing about nothing, but if he had a say, he'd make it so that he and you could spend the rest of your lives doing this, meaningless jabbering over greasy food. It's not a good idea —you need vegetables that aren't on pizza, and fresh grains, and who knows what else to stay healthy— but Eddie's never claimed he had them. He wants this.
He gets it most of the time, but he's selfish. He wants it every night. He loves Wayne but he wants to come home to you, or to have you come home to him, in a space that you decorated, a life that you made. He wants a dog and a pet fish and, in five years or ten or never, a baby if it's what you want too. A front door lined with three pairs of shoes.
He also wants a limousine that takes him from place to place and a room full of thousand dollar guitars. A man can dream.
The first port of call for any dream is making sure you're okay. Let the ghostly stakeout begin.
Sated and sick at once, Eddie puts your empty tray on the dresser and goes to turn on the TV. "She won't talk if the TV's on," you interrupt.
"Ugh. Any chance she likes the stereo?"
You slouch down where you'd been sitting and shake your head. Your jaw goes soft, eyes softer when you smile. "It's not all bad. She doesn't care how loud you turn a page."
Eddie can't be with you every second of the day, the same way you can't be with him. There are shifts to take, shifts to cover, dungeons to pilfer and dragons to slay. You have your job, your other friends (none as handsome as he is), your hobbies. How often are you home alone, talking to ghosts?
He stands by your bookshelf, eyes skipping over the titles in slight disinterest.
"Hey," he asks, "where's your notebook? I wanna see her handwriting."
"I left it on the top shelf."
Eddie stares. There are a few other notebooks and sketchbooks aligned here, but not the one you'd described.
"You sure?" he asks.
"I left it right there,” you say with a yawn.
Eddie looks at you from over his shoulder. You’re tired. He figures he can see the notebook later, and offer you some remedial comfort now. Anything to wipe the frown off of your face.
He grabs a book off of your shelf at random and cracks it open. You love being read to. You'd beg and beg him growing up, and he'd almost always oblige.
"Can I read aloud, or does she hate that too?" he asks, turning away from your shelf.
"I've never tried it."
"I'll do it quietly?"
"Sure," you say, a tired but pleased smile on your lips. "I've read that one before."
"Should I get a different one?"
"No, it's good. It's the one I told you about with the demons who eat stars."
"The dirty one?" he asks, dropping like a stone near the top of your bed, the blankets under his hip warm from the residual heat of the pizza plates.
"It's not dirty. There's one scene toward the end where they get handsy, no graphic detail."
"And by no graphic detail, you mean…"
"No graphic detail," you repeat. It's awful how funny you find each other.
"Not even, like… hand stuff?"
"Do you want there to be hand stuff?"
"With the demons?"
You devolve into giggles, the kind that start slow and thicken into a giddy sort of breathlessness, your head supported by the headboard. Eddie looks up at you in awe.
"I could be into that," Eddie furthers, stretching your laughter as long as it will go. "Are they the kind that look like people but with extra arms or wings or something?"
"You'd like that, huh? Extra arms?"
"I wouldn't be opposed to extra arms."
"Gross," you cheer through another wave of laughter. "I don't wanna think about it."
Eddie looks to the book's first page and tamps down a grimace. You don't wanna think about him in that sort of position.
Eddie, excluding any extra appendages, thinks of you like that more than he should. Never when you're near, not if he can help it, but at night when the hot shower water beating down against his back can be shaped into the vague sensation of a body behind him, he thinks of your chest. Your hands. Or in the early mornings, when he's writhed into a contortionist’s ball and the streaking sunlight through the curtains is kissing his abdomen, he imagines it's your leg thrown across his hip, with your face turned into his chest.
Fuck, it kills him, because he knows what the real thing feels like. He's had you clinging to his waist on colder nights, and he's been under your hands. Tipsy, free with your touches, he's felt the breadth of your palms cupping his cheeks.
You're pretty, you'd told him, as you love to tell him when you've been drinking, but you need a haircut.
He never would've let you kiss him in that state, but he kids himself into thinking you wanted to. It was only booze doing what booze does.
"Read to me, serf," you demand.
Eddie clears his throat.
"The enemy is close," Eddie reads, "and the lane is overrun. Sympathy for the second kind had felt natural to Mellissa once, but now that she sees the sharp angling of their shoulders in the dawn light, she aches with hatred…"
The novel isn't bad. It isn't Eddie's favourite; the tone falls flat, and the main character's actions aren't fed by any particular emotion. Its first arc is formulaic, and soon the hero's forced to answer the call. You evidently find his rehashing tedious, as your head tips toward his head, and you wriggle your way down to his shoulder amicably.
"Don't fall asleep," he says.
"It's your whispering."
"I don't want to disturb the ghost."
"Okay." You start to pick at your nails, little scratches against the cuticle. "I won't fall asleep."
—
Your snores aren't gentle. You're a human being and Eddie doesn't expect you to breathe like a princess, but the wheeze is concerning.
He waits for you to settle down, easing your head onto the pillow. Your airway clears, and your snoring quietens to the same ambient level as the rain hitting the window outside. He feels your head for a temperature carefully. Back of his hand, fingers curled in so his ring can't startle you, he tries to gauge if you're running a fever.
It isn't normal for you to cat nap in the middle of the day, but the sun is occluded by dark clouds and the rain blots out what's left, leaving the bedroom in darkness, and you'd been warm and fed and Eddie had been doing something monotonous. It makes sense that you'd drifted off. Eddie wishes he felt tired too, so he could slide down under the sheets with you and curl a hand around your wrist.
He lies on his back, arms crossed over his chest, straining his ears for the sound of a voice.
I swear, sometimes, I can hear someone talking.
You have a vent in your room, and perhaps a couple of late nights after your shifts had you mistaking a groaning foundation or the wind for a whisper. That's a thing, right? People hear something in the wind. Fatigue has your mind playing tricks on you. Eddie should go to the library and see if they have anything to do with sleep deprivation.
It's no fun listening for ghosts. Eddie's shoulders and upper back begin to feel tense. The feeling travels lower, a snaking ache that wraps around each vertebrae. Even his tailbone hurts.
He shifts onto his side and stares at your closed eyes. He blows a breath at you to watch your lashes flutter like tufts of grass in the breeze.
Your breaths are like a metronome. He syncs his to yours for kicks, just listening. When you're both asleep, does your breath sync on its own? How do your bodies react to each other? Eddie has woken up to your arms around him or your body halfway across the bed, leg falling out from under the covers. You're irregular, where he has a tendency to grab at you while he's knocked out. He doesn't wrap his arms around you so much as hold you in his hands. His fingers curl in the hem of your t-shirts or bracelet your bicep. If he falls asleep with an arm above your head, he'll occasionally wake to find his hand at the top of it, your hair mussed.
He must be stroking it in his sleep.
Or maybe you're frizzy.
No shame in frizziness. Eddie's frizzy more often than not. Curly hair is hard to take care of and he has a lot of it. God knows it was worse before he started seeing that hairdresser in the city who makes magic happen with her thinning shears.
Your lips part.
Thunder cracks outside.
Eddie lifts his head to look out of the window in surprise. Summer days have come to pass and sunset comes earlier in the day, fractals of light bouncing between the violent rain. In an hour or two, it will be pitch black outside.
He should call Wayne and see what's happening. How he is, and if he thinks Eddie should come home and bring you, too.
Eddie clambers off of the bed, careful not to wake you. He slides across your hardwood floor and takes the empty dinner tray with him down the spongy carpeting of your stairs, back to hardwood in the hallway, and finally onto the freezing cold linoleum of your kitchen.
He locates the source of chill quickly. The window in front of the sink has unlatched. It's the thing you call him over for most; when you want to hang out you go to Eddie's, when the window won't close Eddie comes here.
His shirt hikes as he leans against the sink, his abdomen pressed to the cold countertop as he yanks the window and twists the handle the wrong way, goosebumps climbing his arms. It groans in resistance, but Eddie knows from experience that it’ll stay closed for a while.
He takes the liberty of turning your thermostat up as he waits for Wayne to answer the phone, coiled cord pulled taut.
Wayne isn't too bothered by the weather, "It's not a hurricane. A storm, sure– you'll be fine. But by all means, come home if you're scared."
"I'm not scared, jerk, I'm concerned."
He winds the cord around his arm, leaning in when Wayne's voice is hard to hear like it'll make a difference.
"...might go out," Wayne's saying, "call me, or call around Roger's… get back to… warm."
"Where the fuck are you? I can't hear a thing you're saying."
"Don't cuss at me. I'm with Roger, that's why I said to call Roger if I don't answer, he has that new pool table…" Anything Wayne says after that is garbled, like he has a hand pressed over his mouth.
“I thought Roger had a broken leg?” Eddie says. “How’s he getting around?”
“He hops. I left money in the bread bin for you, did you see it?”
“No, I didn’t see it. Wayne, we’ve talked about this before, I’m working. I appreciate it, I do, but I don’t need you giving me money.”
Whatever Wayne says at first gets eaten by static. Eddie doesn’t know if it’s your phone or the Munson’s. He doesn’t need to hear what Wayne’s saying to get the general gist of it. “…water bill..”
This again? Eddie paid the water bill. He thought he’d be allowed to do that, considering he uses the majority of the water, but it’s been a great point of contention between them.
“I’m sorry!” he says. “If I knew it would bother you so bad I wouldn’t have done it. But I don’t want it back, I’m not a kid anymore, half the time you don’t let me pay for groceries–”
“This might shock you, son, but I’ve been paying for you to eat for a decade. I ever complained? No, ‘cause it’s my job, and I don’t want you thinking any…” the words scratch out. Eddie guesses what he’s saying.
The broken phone is starting to irritate him.
He holds in his argument. Call it respect, love, whatever you want. “I’m not saying that! Listen,” —Eddie laughs to himself, words wrought with it like bubbles— “you’re senile.”
“You weasel–” The phone gives up. Whooshing air is all Eddie hears.
"I can't deal with this. I love you, I'll see you tomorrow, okay?" Eddie asks, rubbing the space between his eyebrows.
"Yeah, love you too, kid. Eddie–"
He doesn't catch the end of Wayne's sentence. The line goes dead. He pulls the shiny receiver from his ear and frowns at it.
Wayne was probably just telling Roger and the guys what Eddie was up to. Or what he thinks Eddie's up to, at least. Eddie told him via note that you wanted help rearranging your bedroom furniture. A small lie, but he didn't want to expose you to any outward judgement until he's sure himself what's going on.
Eddie hangs the phone on the hook. He grabs your plates, throwing the meagre leftovers in the trash and dumping the plates in the sink. He turns on the hot faucet and grabs a sponge and the dish soap and gets to work cleaning. It takes him all of five minutes, and he's oh so smug about being a decent person that he doesn't notice the chill.
He dries the plates and puts them in the cabinet across the room with his back to the sink. The dishes clatter together loudly, like a gunshot in the silence. He winces internally and tries to be gentler closing the cabinet door.
The hum of the kitchen light catches his attention. He looks up, unsurprised to find a bug crawling inside of the plastic covering that shields the long bulb. A moth, Eddie thinks, it's fuzz silhouetted in shadow. He doesn't really like moths, but he also doesn't wanna watch one die.
The rain seems worse when he turns off the light. Your kitchen faces out into the backyard, and through the night Eddie can see the house that's behind yours with its porch lights on. It turns the rain to quicksilver, and provides just enough illumination for Eddie to look up at the kitchen light and know what he's doing.
He drags a chair to the middle of the room and steps onto it. It's disturbingly slippery. Thankfully, Eddie doesn't plan on doing any acrobatics. He reaches up to the warm plastic light covering and feels along for the ridges to pry it off. One ridge clicks off, and another. He leans precariously toward the other side and feels for the third and forth ridge when thunder rumbles outside, and somewhere in the distance lightning flashes.
Eddie flinches but doesn't fall. "Fuck," he mumbles. Pussy.
The plastic falls into his hands and Eddie climbs off of the chair as quickly as he can. It's too hot to handle, banging against the kitchen table as he chucks it down. He'd turned off the light thinking the plastic would cool down fast, and he’d been proven very wrong.
"Shit," he mumbles some more. Your neighbour's porch light turns off, leaving him in total darkness.
Eddie’s hand aches from his mild burn. It's like whenever he has to wash the frying pan at home, he forgets that while cold water might cool the pan itself, the slim piece of metal that connects the dish to the handle stays hot. He's burned himself so many times on that fucker–
Lightning flashes again.
There's someone standing in your yard.
The second he notices the figure, it lunges left.
Eddie stands frozen on the spot, unsure if he should approach the window to get a better look, or if he should move backward and away from the potential harm.
He takes a step forward. Mind in a numb state of thoughtlessness, he walks to your sink and stands there silently, looking into the grass and trees for any hint of irregular movement.
Tree branches rail in the wind and rain. Eddie leans further forward.
A third flash of lighting comes, and it must have struck close by, as the light it gives off is long and bright. He gets a clear look at the yard and the image of his own reflection in the glass. No dark figure in the tall grass toward the fence, no heinous murderer trying the back door.
It’s dark again. Eddie puts a hand over the racing pulse of his heart. Fuck, he thinks. I’m seeing things. He’s on edge ‘cause of your fucking ghost, and it’s not your fault but he wonders if maybe loving you is making him tired. He regrets it as soon as he thinks it, what does that even mean? He’s loved you for years. It has never felt like a chore. But… tired. He’s tired. Pining for someone you already have, just not in the way that you want, is exhausting. It’s not your fault and it doesn’t change the fact that he’s exhausted. Today has been a long day.
He scrubs his eyes with his palms until they burn and lifts his head.
There’s a girl on the other side of the glass.
Eddie startles, startles again when he realises she’s not on the other side at all, she’s behind him, outfitted in white like an apparition, like an angel. She’s inside the house, ten feet away in the doorway.
His neck cracks with the force of his turn.
“Sorry,” you say, taking a step back into the hall. “I thought you heard me.”
“Oh, shit.”
You’ve turned the light on in the hall. Eddie turns back to the window and sees your reflection again, no angels and no apparitions. You’re just a girl.
He half turns and gets stuck like that, hand braced against his eyes, torso pitching forward. “Shit,” he mutters.
“Are you okay?”
Eddie laughs. “You surprised me. I’m fine,” he assures you, though he takes his time standing at full height. How can such a small scare feel like a marathon? “Creep, who fucking does that?”
“You were totally spaced, dude, don’t blame me,” you say, holding your hands up in mock surrender.
“I do blame you. I hope you feel blamed. Fucking fuck, that got me.”
“I wasn’t being quiet. I yelled. You didn’t hear me?”
He can’t stop the dubiety that warps his face. “No? What’s your definition of yelling? ‘Eddie?’” he imitates you, tossing his own name into the dark kitchen. “Unbelievable.”
“What were you looking at?” you ask, nodding at the window.
“Lightning.”
“That why you’re in the dark? Or have I interrupted something?”
“‘M moonlighting as a serial killer.” He grins at you. “Got me.”
You lean against the wall next to the light switch and turn it on, exposing the chair shy of his leg and the plastic cover from your light on the table.
“What the–”
“I’m doing a good deed. Or, I was. There was a moth at one point."
You help Eddie clip the light back into place. He climbs back on the chair and you hug his legs to make sure he doesn’t fall either way, arms encircling his thighs and your face pressed comfortably to his stomach. Your cheek flush with the naked stretch of his stomach, his shirt hiked up as he struggles to finish what he started, he explains the moth, who, for lack of an escape, has probably found a home in your curtains or your coat rack. You laugh at his softness.
Back upstairs, you won’t let him read to you again, and the ghost monitoring continues on. Eventually, you both get bored and turn on the TV. Eddie forgets his fright, you forget your haunted house, and the night ends. You fall asleep against his shoulder, drool leaking from the corner of your mouth. He pushes you gently down into your pillow, and goes to brush his teeth with a snort.
Eddie wakes in the morning with a crick in his neck. He feels better, having slept. All his monstrous yearning has fizzled out overnight, and he’s glad to find that the damp circle of dribble under your cheek isn’t cute, it’s gross. (Okay, it’s a little cute. He’s only human.)
The window brags an end to the extreme weather. Rain nor shine reaches through your drapes; the morning looks mundane. He kicks your shin ‘by accident’ and waits for you to rouse, keeping a safe distance. He doesn’t wanna get his morning breath all over you. That would be inhumane.
“Ouch,” you croak.
“It wasn’t that hard.” His voice is as rough as yours.
“Not your kick,” you moan. “My throat.”
“You’ve been drooling again.”
You cover your face sluggishly and your pinky must feel the wet spot staining your pillow.
“It’s embarrassing.” You dig your heels in at the bottom of the bed and pull your head off of the pillow so you can grab it and throw it out of view. Once it’s bashed against your mirror with a concerning glass sound, you pull the blankets over your face and sigh. “I’ll be here forever, if you need me.”
“Could be worse,” he says lightly. “Imagine waking up with a stiffy.”
“Did you–?” you ask, like you’re terrified to know but couldn’t not inquire.
“No, but I have. You know I have.”
“True. That is… unfortunately awkward.”
“‘Xactly. Don’t feel weird about your spit.”
You don’t feel as bad as you pretend. Sure, it’s embarrassing. So is puking in your lap at the movies, or ripping your pants climbing over the fence into the woods by Forest Hills, or getting fired after two weeks from the Palace Arcade because the manager didn’t like your ‘general demeanour and/or presence’, all of which he’s done and you’ve been a witness to. He thinks you might be impervious to humiliation as long as you’re together.
Eddie pulls the blankets over his head, pleased that the morning light reaches you even here. You’re curled on your side underneath them, bleary eyes meeting his from across the small stretch of mattress. You hadn’t touched him once while you slept.
“I don’t remember falling asleep,” you say quietly.
“We watched Poltergeist. You fell asleep with twenty minutes left.”
“Can you blame me? Snore.”
“You wanted to watch it.”
“It’s the only movie I own that has a ghost.”
You share a silent look. Eddie tries to keep a straight face and ultimately fails, his laugh roaring. You join in, half reluctant and half delirious in your fatigue. Your sleep-swollen eyes close like you can’t keep them open anymore.
He stays under the sheets stealing looks at you for as long as he can, despite the building, smothering warmth. The day passes with much of the same.
—
When you first started working at Leaven, Eddie called you a traitor. He said you’d made it impossible for him to show his face in Bradley’s. He’d been joking — the prices at Leaven are ridiculous, and completely out of the average joe’s budget. Bradley’s remains your go to for everything. He’s come around these days — he likes the fancy soups and admits Leaven’s has the best fresh fruit.
Despite the rich old women who frequent and make your workdays… less than ideal, you like working at Leaven. Your days consist almost exclusively of stacking shelves, but occasionally they chuck you on checkout and you get to sit in a padded chair for ten hours. You’re basically living the American dream.
Working here has introduced a special brand of monotony to your life. It’s very, very quiet, and that’s how you like it. But there’s something to be said for noise, for Eddie and Wayne’s noise specifically. You like going there after work to shock your body back into the real world. Here’s sound. Here’s life. Here’s love.
You’re scanning a bag of ‘holistic’ lemons when you notice Eddie lingering toward the front of the store a mere twenty feet away. You don’t wave at him, lest your customer think they aren’t the sparkling apple of your eye and report you to the manager, but you nod jerkily, hoping he takes it for ‘I see you’. He smiles and points his thumb toward the store’s cafe.
When your arms are numb from another twenty minutes of scanning and typing in coupon codes for people who don’t need coupons, you shut down your register and lock it all tight. You take your lunch break early, and thankfully there’s nobody in the cafe to yell at you for being unprofessional.
You waltz over to Eddie sitting at the back next to the huge glass windows and prop your lunch bag against the coke bottle he’s opened. “Hello, handsome,” you say.
“Hey, beautiful.”
“You want half of a turkey sandwich?”
He beams at you, kicking your chair out so you can sit. “Nooo, I brought you a hot dog.”
“Oh, gross. Give it to me right now.”
You know he made it at home before he’s even pulled the foil wrapped package from his bag. Eddie makes the best hot dogs ever. Fancy brioche buns, caramelised onions and a mixture of sauces on the world's worst meat. They make you queasy and they might be one of your favourite foods. You open it, delighting in its retained heat.
His wrist is shiny. You put your hotdog down to grab his arm and bring it closer to your face. He’s wearing a simple tennis chain with black gems like a rich girl. “What is this?” you murmur, pleased to see him wearing something nice.
“You like that? It was thirty four dollars from a magazine.”
“I love it. What’s the occasion?”
“My mom’s birthday.” He fishes his own hotdog from his bag and slaps it down in front of yours. You take a huge bite, and can’t answer him when he asks, “Is that really weird, buying myself something when it’s a day about her?”
You steal a swig of his coke and wince the entire time. “Sorry.” You cough. “No, that’s not weird, Eddie. Wanting to buy yourself something nice is a good way of dealing with a shitty day. A day that makes you feel shitty,” you amend.
“Maybe I should’ve got her a big bouquet of flowers or something.”
“You can still get her flowers.”
“Yeah.”
You take another bite of your hot dog and slip away to get a bottle of water from the cafe. You feel like an asshole for not hugging him. When you return Eddie’s already polished off his hot dog, and has moved onto one half of your turkey sandwich.
“Are you gonna be weird about it if I hug you?” you ask him genuinely.
“No.” He puts down the sandwich. “I don’t know. Maybe. I want one, though.”
You wipe your hands in a napkin showfully before approaching his chair. You slide a knee next to his thigh and wrap your arms around his head, a hand between his shoulder blades and the other pulling his face to your chest. You have to slouch. It's not entirely comfortable but it doesn't feel awkward, so you take the win.
"I'm sorry, Eddie," you say quietly. You think about kissing his head.
"Me too."
There's a moment in there where you feel a nasty emotion brewing, sadness and much worse. You know that the gutted pain aching through you right now is nothing compared to what Eddie feels. That loss.
It must feel so, so heavy.
You pet his neck affectionately. Your nose dips into his hair, the tip touching his scalp. Your hands come up, like trying to hold water as it trickles between your fingers, Eddie's slipping. You grapple to keep him with you.
"I love you," you say honestly. He's your best friend.
Eddie pats your back. "I love you too, loser."
"You're my best friend."
I would fucking think so, he'd say.
"You're mine," he says.
You smile and give him a good squeeze. When you pull away he doesn't look as odd as he had, relaxing against the hard-backed wood of the cafe chair as he tucks his hair behind his ear. He holds your gaze without any weight to it. You sit in your own uncomfortable chair and lean forward to compensate for the space between you, like two slanting trees in the wind, parallel but untouching.
"It's a really nice bracelet," you say.
"She'd like it, I think."
You don't know anything about Eddie's mom. She isn't someone he's ever been able to talk about with you. You can't remember the photographs you'd seen once upon a time, but you remember having the distinct thought that Eddie looked more like her than his dad or his uncle Wayne. She'd been beautiful, and her life couldn't be more starkly mourned.
"I'm sure she would. It's pretty."
His mouth wobbles. You're horrified for a moment, thinking he might burst into tears, but it's laughter he's chasing, and his little giggle is like a beam of sunlight. "Sorry," he says. Laughter doesn't seem like a good enough word to describe the sounds he's making, such understated, small curls of sound. Fleeting, golden. "She would've liked you, too. She would've loved you."
"That's a good thing?" you check, cautious that he might be on the precipice of a nervous breakdown.
"Yeah, that's a good thing. Is it ever bad? To be loved?" he asks.
He's teasing, but it feels like he's asking you something else.
"You could be a stalker, with that logic."
And there you go, ruining a moment with a shitty joke because you're too much of a coward to ask questions when you don't know the answer.
Eddie grabs his coke, tipping his head back as he says, "Who says I'm not a stalker already?"
Funny how the subtext of a conversation can contain magnitudes for one party and not the other. You worry you're in love with your best friend. He sips at coke and threatens perversion.
"You're definitely a stalker. You couldn't wait a couple hours to see me tonight?"
"I didn't realise I would be seeing you tonight," Eddie says, lifting his brows.
"Oh. I asked, didn't I?"
Eddie shakes his head. "Are you sure? I don't remember you asking, babe, I'm supposed to go play at Gareth's."
Babe is his funniest pet name, in your opinion. It doesn't suit you, or him, but it feels good anyhow. Like you're a babe, supermodel pretty for TV or magazine spreads, long legs and not a single wrinkle that isn't marring the paper itself.
"Bummer for me," you say lightly. "What are you doing, Dio tributes again?"
"Don't say tributes like that, like we're out sacrificing goats in studded jackets."
"That's a good image." You laugh. "That's funny."
"I don't know. He wanted to try something he wrote. Invited Jeff and Jamison. Band's back together."
"I'll get out my t-shirts."
You have all the corny classics; I'm with the band; I'm with the guitarist; a Corroded Coffin faux tour shirt, different Hawkins locations written in typeset sharpie on the back. When you made it, Eddie had been wearing the t-shirt and the ink leaked through. He had 'Lover's Lake, Nov 18' between his shoulder blades and 'The Hideout, May 22' over his tailbone for a week. By day three the words had become illegible but you'd known them anyway, in the same way you knew the dots between the letters H and I were freckles rather than ink spots. You've always looked at him more than you should.
"I could cancel."
You and Eddie experience the natural ups and downs of friendship, or rather the ebb and flow. You know you come back together eventually if you get too far apart, and there hasn't been a time since you met him where you were worried about the permanence of your relationship. You're human, and you get insecure about it anyway, but then he says stuff like that and you're confronted with how close you are. He puts you first. He has other friends, other healthy friendships and a life outside of you, but you still get to be a huge and important part of the majority, and that is more than enough. (It should be more than enough. Some days it is.)
"Now why would you do a thing like that?" you ask, sarcastic but soft. "You know they sound shit without you."
"I don't like knowing you're alone."
"I'm not lonely," you say. Truth or lie.
"That's not what I said." Eddie's eyes narrow.
"It's stupid to worry about me, I always lock the doors. I lock the windows, even the ones upstairs. I don't think I'm gonna fall victim to a home invasion anytime soon."
"I don't think many people think they're gonna be in home invasions until their homes actually get invaded. And it's not really what I'm worried about."
"Do you ever think that we worry too much?"
"Yes. We worry constantly. It's, like, our parasitic relationship with each other."
"Like a tapeworm," you agree solemnly.
"Exactly. I'm your tapeworm. And I'm worried about you."
"Can tapeworms worry?" you ask.
Eddie kicks you mildly. "I don't know? I don't think tapeworms have a level of consciousness beyond what's needed for them to survive. They probably think about eating and parasitizing and that's it. Don't make me ask, please."
You take a pull of your drink to prolong the inevitable. "Ask about what?"
"Your ghost."
"Ah."
Eddie waits.
You sigh again. "Look, I don't even know if she is a ghost, I probably just imagined it."
He pulls himself forward and there's the weight you'd be waiting for, sternness marked into his face one feature at a time. "Liar."
"What?"
"You're lying. You don't think you imagined it." He looks you up and down. “You think I don't know when you're lying?"
"I'm not lying," you lie.
"You are. I know you are," he says, smiling despite the point he's making. "I know what you look like when you do."
"What do I look like?"
"I can't tell you, you might change it, and then I won't know when I'm supposed to look out for you 'cause you never tell me anything."
"I don't want to talk about the ghost."
"Why not?"
"Because you don't believe me," you say too loudly.
Eddie reaches across the table but doesn't touch your hand. He puts his palm down and leans ever forward, says, "Hey, I do."
"No, you don't, you think there's something happening to me."
"What would you think, if it were me?" he asks, frustration seeping in. "Try and see it from how I'm seeing it."
"If it were you'd I'd believe you because you needed me to."
You cringe at yourself and veer back into your chair, shoving your hands between your thighs and clamping your legs closed. Your fingers turn numb.
Eddie doesn't look shocked, exactly. Surprised that you're talking to him unkindly, sure, and concerned.
This whole situation is ill-fated, you know that. What good can come of a ghost? Hooks from the past. "I never should have told you," you say quietly.
"Did you tell me?" Eddie asks, speaking with an anger that forms each word like a cut, clean and hurting. "You won't tell me anything. You tell me she talks to you, that she asks you about me. But you won't say what she says, exactly, and you have nothing to show for it. Your notebook conveniently disappeared. I can’t hear her."
He thinks you're making it up.
Fuck. He thinks you're making it up. Eddie thinks you're lying to him, and while it hurts like a sharp kick to the solar plexus, a flooring, winding pain, it's the embarrassment that has tears glowing along your last line. If he really believes you'd make something up like this for attention, what does he think of you? That you're some silly leech clinging to him through bad lies? That you're bored? That this is a game you're playing with him?
Your heart beats hard enough that you can feel it in your chest. Your hands shake with anger and hurt at once, your leg bouncing under the table in an attempt to keep the rush of it at bay. You look at Eddie with your lips parted, trying to say what you mean and not what you feel. You want to say something scathing, and you don't want to be cruel, and these are two facts existing at the same time.
Eddie has other ideas. He sees your eyes turn glassy, he must, because his anger drains and he turns sorry and soft. It reminds you of a different moment like a film cell played overtop, of a younger, remorseful him. The expression he makes when he's just popped you in the mouth wrestling, or burned behind your ear with the hair iron. An accident.
"I'm sorry," he says. Sheepish, gentle, sincere, embarrassed, too many threads of emotion to summarise with one word. "Sweetheart, I'm sorry. Don't cry."
"Fuck off," you mumble, looking down at your bouncing leg. You push your hand against it, forcing it to lay still.
"I didn't mean it."
"Stop, Eddie."
"I'm just hurt you're not telling me everything and I'm acting like an asshole 'cause I'm a big baby," he says, two shades from frantic.
A tear rolls down your cheek. You thought for sure you'd escaped them, but it had already welled, and with nowhere to go it races down your cheek. You paw at it and hope he won't see it.
He does.
Eddie's chair screeches across the floor as he stands up. You know he'll hug you before he's touched you. Same way you know he's freaking out on the inside, allergic to girl tears.
His hands take to your shoulders, hesitating there, and one slides behind your neck so his forearm presses against both shoulder blades. His lips ghost warmly over your forehead as he leans in. His other hand meanders, braceleting the top of your arm and running downward before swiftly changing paths to flatten out against the small of your back.
"I'm sorry," he mumbles, rubbing your back.
His tender hug exacerbates the hurt, like an exsanguination. You cry as quietly as you can manage and Eddie feels it under his hands, the two of you condensed at the back of an empty room. You forget where you are, what you're wearing, what you've been fighting about. What he said. You realise how badly you'd needed him to comfort you lately, and hate yourself for giving in.
He shushes you so quietly you think you might have imagined it.
Or maybe it was your ghost.
"I'm sorry," he says, his breath kissing your scalp. "I'm a dick."
"It's fine," you say. You despise yourself for how weak you sound.
"It's not fine."
"I wanted to stay because it's getting worse," you tell him. You don't mean to.
"Okay. Okay. Then you'll stay. It's no biggie."
"It's worse," you say, turning your face into his chest.
You're shaking hard. Eddie can't make it stop no matter how tightly he holds you.
"I'm sorry," he says again.
He doesn't have to be. If he was acting out, fine. If he does or doesn't believe you, fine. You don't need him to see ghosts, or apologise that he can't.
"I just didn't want to do it by myself," you confess, at the very pit of pathetic. You hope he won't hear. Your growing panic about the ghost is a secret you hadn’t meant to tell.
Eddie pulls away. He looks down at you, and if he wanted to he could kiss you, his lips are that close, but he widens the distance. He takes your face into his hands, calluses rough against your tacky cheeks.
"You think I'm gonna let you? I know I'm fucking it up royally right now, I know I'm an asshole, but I'm not fucking going anywhere, okay? Don't worry. Don't worry about it." He drops his hands to your shoulders. "I'm your parasite, right? Do you know how hard it is to get rid of a parasite? Sometimes they have to pull them out, and they're excruciatingly long, it's a process you don't wanna go through–"
You laugh wetly. Eddie promptly stops talking about parasites.
"Forgive me?" he asks.
You nod on automatic. Of course you do.
"I swear she's real," you say, rubbing your forehead with the meat of your thumb. You think she’s real, but the truth is that you just don’t know. You amend quickly, "I swear I'm not lying. I am hearing someone… even if she's not real."
Eddie frowns. "I know. I believe you."
That's when the real trouble begins.
—
Eddie wants to hold your hand desperately. You're wearing your nicest dress, split hem sewn with infinite care, and your dress shoes with the tiny heels. He doesn't get to see you like this very often, and he wishes it were a better occasion.
You've had your hair down at the hair stylists in the city, you're wearing concealer. You've done everything you can to look presentable. You look beautiful. He hopes you know that, at least.
You heave a sigh. You're as anxious as Eddie is to get this over with.
“You remember Hawk?” he asks you.
“Jack 'Hawk'?” you ask.
“Yeah, Hawk.”
“He’d come around for green?” you ask.
“Yeah, that’s the one. Alright. So, when you were on vacation last summer, Hawk knocked on the door, I answered. I’m straight, right? Haven’t sold anything in years, no plans on selling again. But Jack barrels up the steps and starts going on like I promised him something. I said, dude, I don't deal anymore, and could you possibly shut the fuck up? Wayne’s inside making milkshakes. Blender on, couldn’t hear us but I’m sweating bullets.
“Jack, fucker, starts begging.” Eddie leans into your shoulder, hushed. “He’s saying c’mon Munson, I know you got some, don’t you have a personal stash? I’m desperate.” He picks a piece of hair off of your sleeve. “I didn’t, obviously, and I told him that but he’s not listening to me, he’s getting all wild-eyed and fucking wound like he needs the hard shit. I’m just trying to get rid of him at that point, I don’t know if he was tweaking but he looked like he was going to hit me and I wasn’t interested in fighting.” He laughs, encouraging a smile from you. “Wayne’s inside making milkshakes. Full fat with vanilla extract– I’m not about to take a trip to Hawkins General.”
“What did you do?” you ask.
“I said to him, even if I did you wouldn’t be getting anything, asshole, and pushed him toward the steps, you know? It felt good, standing up for myself.”
“And he left?”
“No, he fucking hit me straight in the dick. Can you imagine that? Junk shot on my own front door.”
You gasp with giggly indignation, hanging on his every word now. Eddie knows he’s taken you out of your head, even if it’s temporary.
“He hit you in the dick,” —you whisper ‘dick’ like it’s insidious within these four walls— “‘cause he wanted pot? You should’ve pushed him off of the porch.”
“I would’ve but he fucking winded me.” He starts laughing again, your giggles contagious though you try to smother them with your hand. “It’s funny now, but it wasn’t funny at the time.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“He was five foot one. I’ve never felt that humble in my life, I told Wayne I was coming down with something and had the worst afternoon nap ever. Didn’t even get my milkshake.”
“No,” you mumble sympathetically. Your eyes widen. “Eds, I’m sorry, that’s not funny. He assaulted you–”
Eddie waves his hand at you. “He got in a cheap shot. I was fine. I’ll still have kids.”
You snort, “Thanks for the information.”
“I got him back for it, anyway.”
He pretends like that’s the end of that, like the story doesn’t go on and he has nothing to tell you. You wait raptly for him to explain but he gloats, knowing you're hooked.
You elbow him.
“What?” he asks. “Oh, you wanna know how I got revenge? You’re evil.”
“Less shame and more story,” you say.
“Alright. Are you ready? Here’s where it gets complicated.
“I’m at The Hideout listening to that new band that blazed through here a couple of months ago, Board Growth, or something? They’re incredible, the booze is cold, I’m tipsy and Gareth owes me anyway, I’m putting it all on his tab and he, seemingly, isn’t noticing. It’s great. Better if you hadn’t been on vacation again, what the fuck, but it’s good.
“And there he is. It’s the fucking Hawk. He’s looking down his nose at these young girls smooth-talking them. Or, he’s trying to smooth talk them, but it’s like watching a worm flirt with a praying mantis, okay, we all know who’s gonna lose.” Eddie’s knee rests against yours, your hand is on his thigh, he’s losing the thread of his story fast under the smell of your perfume and hair oil. “I knock back the rest of my drink, slick my hair like I’m James Dean and, in all my drunken intelligence, decide that this is the perfect moment for me to get him back.”
“I wasn’t on vacation.”
“What?”
“I only went once.” You’d gone for two days with some old friends. He remembers now, and rushes to fix the story.
“Why didn’t you come, then?” he asks, flipping the script. “You’re such a flake.”
“I don’t know, I don’t know when this was.”
“Stop bailing on me and ruining my stories,” he says, teasing.
“Okay, you’re hopped up on liquid courage and about to hit Jack in the dick,” you prompt.
“Right! I stroll up to Hawk and he’s instantly wriggly like the worm of a guy he is, and I say, hey Hawk, how’s it hanging?
“Maybe he’s just that stupid or maybe he thinks I’m putting out the olive branch but he actually starts telling me how he’s doing, and I’m looking at these girls as if to say, can you believe this guy? I cut him off, and I’m a loser, I’m not half as cool as I think I am but again I’m slightly incredibly inebriated. I’m making bad decisions.”
“Where’s your cafeteria bravado?” you ask.
“It’s worse than that. Imagine me at my most insufferable. I smile at the girls and I lean into Jack’s space, I’m laughing, I feel bad about what I’m gonna say before I’ve said it but I say it anyways. I lean right into his ear and tell him at full volume how sorry I was to hear about his recent bout of syphilis. I’m just so glad they caught it in time, man,” he says, imitating a past self.
You open your mouth. “And,’ Eddie says, jumping to finish, “so happy you could keep most of it, buddy.”
“Eddie…”
“I’m a bad person.”
“No,” you mumble, hiding your smile on his shoulder, your forehead a hair’s width from his chin. You’d laugh a storm any other day to make him feel good, whether you think he’s funny or not, but today all you can manage is a hand on his leg. “You’re not a bad person, he deserved it… fucking hit you…”
The story isn’t true.
He made it up. Right here right now. He just spent five good minutes of your lives spinning an outrageously awful story with poor jokes and one glaring plot hole, for what?
This is hard. Making you cry, begging you to see what a doctor has to say, playing grown up in a grown ups body. Eddie thought you’d get to be kids forever. He never imagined what would come after school, and then suddenly it is after, and everything’s an ugly boring mess except for you (and Wayne, god bless), and now you’re sick. The waiting room you’re in, the road here, the look on your face when he told you what he wanted from you. It’s all… heartbreakingly monotonous.
One doctor's appointment, he whispered across pillows. Late and neither of you asleep. The sound of cicadas outside and Wayne’s deep snore a room away.
You nodded and closed your eyes, and you didn’t say another word all night.
What’s the worth in a made up story? What good will it do? You have to see the doctor eventually. Distraction, Eddie thinks pleadingly. Relief. He just wants to give you as much relief as he can from what’s happening with the only thing he feels he has —his quick mouth.
He stares at your hand on his thigh. He wills himself to raise his own and put it on top of yours. He channels his thoughts, like this is telekinesis and not his own body, move. Move your hand, he says to himself.
It's a millimetre out of his pocket when they call your name.
You shoot up like a stalk and smile at the nurse who's come to collect you. You don't look jittery anymore, but there's a distinct doe in the headlights look about you as Eddie watches you trail down the hallway into the doctor's office. You look back at him three times, and each time is a whip.
As soon as the door closes, he bends forward in his chair and heaves a sickly sigh. His nausea has him coughing into his hand and praying he doesn't throw up here. If they want you to go somewhere today, like a pharmacy for temporary medication, or the emergency room for a CAT scan, he can't be covered in his own vomit.
A child babbles across the room. Eddie peeks at her through his fingers. She's pale with dark hair, much like Eddie himself, and her mom is the same. The kid's mom doesn't look like Eddie's mom besides that, but seeing her here in a hospital makes it impossible not to think of her. She's been on his mind so much lately. Her birthday is at the end of the month, and it isn't the same —she'd been in hospital for three brutally short days— but you're being here is like peeling the scab off of a wound he thought healed years ago.
Mom was everything. She was willowy and beautiful and tough as a board. She was smart, she knew everything; how to make microwave pizza taste gourmet, how to make whistles out of blades of grass, how to make a bad day feel brand new.
He wished he could say that he has her every detail committed. The cruellest, most terrifying thing about the people we love is that they aren't permanent, not their life and not what they leave behind. Over time, his mom has turned from an aching spear of love to a dappling of sunlight through the branches of an old tree — scattered. Beautiful and impossible and a thousand pieces in his memory, slowly fading over time.
There'll come a day where Eddie can't remember her. He knows that. He knows his frame of reference for who she was will reduce down to her photographs, and the nearly empty bottle of her perfume under his bed.
Eddie is haunted by her absence everyday.
There is no corporeal apparition of her at his shoulder, no cool chill running down his spine, but he's haunted all the same. It's why he won't accept your ghost. It's why he can't. He knows what it feels like to have someone with him who isn't really here, and he won't let you suffer through the same thing. He'll protect you from this, from her.
Even if it means he has to take you to doctors offices an hour out of town. If he has to bargain for it, and make you cry at work, and– and fucking drive this wedge between you, he'll do it.
He needs you to be okay.
He can't think about his mom anymore. He loves her, he misses her, but if he thinks about her too much he won't be able to stand up.
Eddie sits up, takes a lungful of air in, and waits. He senses you as you come back down the hall, grateful for your dry cheeks, and your small, small smile. Tiny but irrefutably there.
He stands up and holds out his hand. You don't take it, but you walk into his side so your hips are pressed together and he falls into step with you.
"So…" he says.
"She asked if I was getting enough sleep," you say, "and I told her I was. I explained everything to her like I promised I would, even– even… I told her everything. And um, she seemed very open."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah, she– OK." You frown.
"Listen, you don't have to tell me if you don't want to. I know I practically forced you to come, but it's still your life, and you can have privacy from me–"
"It's not that. I just don't want to cry in here."
He puts his hand on your shoulder, his arm folded against your shoulder. You don't speak until you're out of the doctor's office and weaving through people as you walk toward the parking lot.
"She thinks I'm having auditory hallucinations. And that it could be an initial symptom of schizophrenia, or something else. She said it usually starts around my age, and–"
"Hey, it's okay," he says, though internally he feels as distressed as you're beginning to look, horrified by your crumpling chin and wringing hands. "It's okay. You don't have to say it if it's going to upset you."
"It might not be anything," you say, shaking your head. "She said the human brain is complicated, and sometimes stuff like this just happens. She wants to, uh," —your voice twists up very high— "see me again after I've had some sleep to see if it's persisting."
Eddie nods. He's fucking glad that the doctor took you seriously, grateful for her advice and her reluctance to misdiagnose you with something. It's not as though Eddie wants you to be experiencing hallucinations. But he thinks you are, and he needs help looking after you if that’s the case.
"Did she prescribe anything?" he asks.
"A week's worth of ambien. She didn't really want to, but I told her about, you know, you coming over to make sure I'm okay, and I know that was because of the gh–" You bite your lip. You're shaking like a leaf. "Well, she thought it was you making sure I'm not an insomniac. Which I'm not."
"I'm really proud of you," he says quietly. "I know you don't want this to be happening. I get it, I promise. I don't want it either, but this is a good thing."
He can see you regaining some composure. You smile a little, and you offer him your prescription paper. "You know it only costs seven dollars for seven ambien?"
"I could get you some for free."
Your laugh startles him. "No, I don't think so."
"I'm not offering. Just saying. I know a guy."
"No, you knew a guy who knows a guy who could get me something ridiculous, like a percocet."
"I'd never give you anything like that."
"I know." You come to a halt. The cloudy weather paints you in shadow. "I'm sorry this is happening."
"You're what?" He doesn't let you answer moving to stand in front of you. "Why would you apologise for this?"
"Because it's my head," you say stiffly.
"You didn't want this to happen. And– and it might not be happening at all. You'll try the ambien, and you'll take care of yourself, and we'll go from there. I wasn't trying to scare you… I wish I could brush it off, you know? I wish I could believe that you…" He takes you in. Your skirt and jacket are swaying in the cold wind. You look one sharp shove from falling over. "I get that it isn't like me, to not believe in the fantasy–"
You save him from his miserable attempt at placating you.
"I know."
He licks his lips.
"I love you," Eddie says as he starts toward the van again. "Let's go fill your prescription, and then I'll get you whatever you want to eat."
"Boys are so weird about I love you," you say, following. The light behind your eyes makes your teasing worth it. "You say it like you chewed on it first. Struggled to get that one out, did you?"
It's not your best insult. Neither of you are exactly on form.
"Just so hard to say it to you."
You take what you perceive to be an insult on the chin. Only Eddie knows there's a sliver of truth in what he's said.
You generously let him help you into the passenger seat. He's hopeful that your mood's improved until that wretched frown worms its way across your pretty mouth once again. You wait for him to round the hood and start the van before you explain yourself.
"There's a support group. For anybody who's, um, hearing voices. Schizophrenics, manic depressives…"
"Is that something you want to go to?"
"I don't know. Can I be honest with you?"
"Yeah. Absolutely."
"I don't know if I believe that it isn't real. I know that's the point. The definition of hallucination is, uh… an experience involving the apparent perception of something not present, and so… it makes sense. My ghost isn't there, even if I think she is, so I must be hallucinating, but Eddie," —you shrink in on yourself— "I have this feeling that won't go away."
He loves you. You're terrified.
He's already guessed what you're going to ask for.
"Can we try again? Please? I'll take the meds and I'll go to the support group, but in the meantime, could you please come back and just– just listen. Maybe it takes a while for her to talk to someone else." You scrub your face. "Fuck. I sound fucking crazy."
Eddie squeezes the wheel. "Don't say that. Don't say it like you've done something wrong. You didn't do anything wrong."
People say crazy but they mean sick. They ridicule what they can't understand.
He doesn't understand, but he wants to. He says, "If you want me to, we'll try again. I'll come over."
You look up from your palms. He notices almost habitually that they're smaller than his. When you were young teenagers there'd been a short period of time where you'd been the taller one, with bigger hands and a bigger smile. Lately, you've seemed small.
"Really?" you ask hopefully.
"You came here 'cause I asked you to. It was hard for you." He turns his eyes to the road and turns the key until the Beauville's engine is thrumming with life. "I'd do a lot of shit for you, superstar. Like, anything. If you need me to keep trying then I will. And you'll–"
"I'll keep trying too," you promise.
It's all he can ask for.
—
The sky is all kinds of grey. It stretches like a sheet from one corner of your eye to the other, darker toward each limit of your vision, a gradual decay into colourlessness toward the very top where the sun fights hardest to burst through an impossible expanse of clouds. They seem thick as marshmallo, but where they begin is hard to decipher.
Your eyes feel sore. You imagine a hand reaching for you, hitting you, pressing its cold knuckles to each bruised eye socket to calm the raging ache behind them. You hadn't expected to feel this way. It isn't the first time you have, but to feel so intensely unreal while there's someone still with you is new. You lean your weight against the sill and let your arms swing from the open window ledge, knuckles scraping the scratchy brick of the house's exterior walls, instantly chilled by the weather.
A black band of birds burst across the sky somewhere leftwards. The pitch and tumble with no discernible formation. They're too far to hear. You imagine the flap of wings, their buoyed cawing, screeching to one another as they swim between pylon cables and their brothers spread wings.
"What kind of birds do you think they are?" Eddie asks.
You feel his weight settle into the ottoman beside you. You'd dragged it to the window with tired arms. You haven't felt up to anything since you got home, though Eddie's promise should've restored a little hope. He's going to keep trying to meet your ghost. You'll have to hope you don't get worse before that.
You know, starkly, that you aren't having auditory hallucinations. You know, starkly, that your ghost had written to you in your missing notebook.
But maybe that's the nature of your hallucination. A night bent over the pocket dictionary had ended as this one begins, with the crushing realisation that you cannot trust what you know. To put it plainly, you're afraid that you're mentally unwell. Terrified of how it’s going to change your life, the people in it.
Eddie's afraid too.
Your orange bottle of pills glares like a flame to your right where it stands waiting for you on the nightstand. Eddie's made up your bed for the two of you. He could sleep in the guest room, and he never has.
"I don't know," you say hoarsely. Your voice sounds as you feel, like something has its hooks in you, and it's dragging you down, down…
"They're too big to be pigeons."
"They're too dark. They're crows," you guess, tracing an outlier as he skirts the crowd of his family and spirals up into the air.
Like a party trick, you expect him to disappear, or explode, or rocket up into the cotton clouds and out of view. He slows as he falls, and then he dives back toward the main swarm of birds as they migrate toward the horizon.
There's a feeling brewing in you that you don't like.
If you can't trust your own perception. If real isn't real. If you need someone to sit beside you and distinguish real from fake, if… if you're sick.
If you're sick, what does that mean?
You search for something in the air to hold onto.
Eddie hums softly, his hand pushing out into the static as he points toward the glowing clouds. "Sun's going down slow."
You raise your hand and wrap it around his. It isn't enough. You force your fingers between the gaps of his, just a little longer, thicker, solid, and lock him in. He feels real. That's the key. As far as you know, hallucinations don't carry that far. Bugs crawling over your skin and through the strands of your hair, an itch you can't scratch, a drop of rain from a concrete ceiling, the brain can recreate these things. But the exact width of Eddie's palm or the feeling of his calluses against your loveline, your lifeline, and the heartbeat that bumps against the meat of your thumb when you focus, that's impossible. That's a level of precision the human brain can't find.
Right?
Eddie curls his thumb around yours. You can feel his gaze on your cheek like a breath blown between parted lips. You turn toward him, and you catalogue every little mar or mark, every fine hair. His wrinkles, his textured jaw. The strands of a fallen curl come apart near his eye, grown out bangs kissing the highest point of his cheek.
You're panicking. There's a thumping behind your eyes.
"I don't know if you look right," you say.
"I look very right. I'm extremely handsome," he says.
You hold his hand out of the window, worried you'll drop it, and it'll fall.
If Eddie were at home tucked into his double bed a mile away, she would've talked to you by now. Your breath shortens as the meaning behind that thought solidifies.
She only comes when you're alone. Why do you think that is?
She's not real.
Is that how it works? Can hallucinations, auditory, visual, or otherwise, take place in the company of others? You know next to nothing. Maybe they aren’t so common with loved ones standing guard.
You push your head out of the window again and look down at the flat, dying grass in the backyard, a yellowing carpet of bluegrass. Bluegrass is prominent because it can grow anywhere, like mould. With all the rain these past few days, the grass should've livened into a plush and solid green, like the lawns in the southern side of Hawkins where the rich people lavish in sprinklers and gardeners alike. It remains rumpled.
Eddie rubs the back of your hand. It's far from the closest you've ever been. There have been nights you spent unawares in his arms, waking with your face tucked into his neck, so embarrassed you couldn't look at him afterward. But it's the most intimate touch you've ever endured. The whorls of his fingerprint embossing itself into your hand, a quarter circle that doesn't cease. Time feels brief and unsteady.
Eddie must realise you're having a bad moment. He shuffles closer to you, your arms twined, his hair tickling your shoulders. It snaps you back, in a way, with its softness.
"Let's go to bed," he says when the sky's more charcoal than light.
You're cold. You follow. You latch your hand in his and he doesn't say a word, closing and locking your window with one hand, pulling the sheets of your bed back deftly for you to climb in. You slide across to the outermost side and he follows, leaning over you to pull the sheets to your chin.
He stays hovering there.
He holds very still.
"Everything's going to be okay," he whispers.
"What if it isn't?"
"It will be, you…" he trails off. He keeps your hand in his, but he plants his elbow on the other side of you, like a lover about to share sweet nothings, his face so, so close. "You'll be okay, no matter what happens."
"I wish she'd told me more," you say.
"The doctor?" He draws a small, careful line across your cheek with his index finger. "Sweetheart, we'll find out everything there is to find."
"I want to know how scared I should be. Because this feels like torture."
"You don't have to be scared." Eddie smiles, and as far as you can tell, though you're having trouble trusting yourself, it's one of his genuine smiles. "Why do you think I'm here, huh? It's not to watch as something bad happens."
You lift your chin. He's too close to look at both eyes at once: you have to choose, and you can't. Your irises dance back and forth between them, shuddering in indecision.
"You'll look after me," you say, not a question.
He turns his hand, stroking down the length of your cheek with the backs of his fingers. They feel much softer than the undersides, the flat of his nails like silk. Your eyes burn as you free your hand from his, hoping he'll be kind with that one, too.
"I'll look after you."
You tuck your hands behind the trim of his waist and, knowing you shouldn't, let them feed into his shirt. You draw a shaking line through the downy soft blanketing the small of his back until your finger is skipping up the jutting bumps of his spine. It's like climbing a staircase by touch alone. You wonder if anyone else had ever done this to him, if they ever wanted to, and if he'd let them.
Eddie releases a breath. Warmth feathers along your skin.
His hand strokes down to your neck, resting at your collar. Half a second and his petting returns, the side of his thumb brushing your soft jawline tenderly.
He must feel you swallow. His pupils travel down the whites of his eyes like the steady descent of the setting sun.
"I can't," he says softly.
Can't what? you want to ask. You don't know if you should. You know the answer, but does he?
"You're not all here," he says, hand paused. He cups your cheek, holds you in place. You hadn't been moving. "But when you are, I could. I could."
"I don't know if I…" you drift off. How can you explain it to him? I don't know if I'll feel better any time soon.
His eyes move sideways, as if the instruction for your reassurance lay somewhere in the apple of your cheek.
You don't want him to kiss you if it's a fixative meant to soothe your rampant nerves. You want him to kiss you for a hundred reasons, but that's not one of them. You're not sure he wants to kiss you beyond that.
He would, you realise. Kiss you, if he thought you wanted it badly enough. That's a lot of power to have over someone, more than you want over him, and you can't ask him to. You look away from his eyes and search upward, trembling hands and the starts of your forearms pressed to his back, hiking his shirt up one inch at a time.
He sits up agonisingly slowly, in the same way the sky has fallen from light to dusk; inchingly, so as to escape notice, until suddenly you can't feel the emanating heat of his chest against yours anymore, and the only light inside of your room is a yellow band sliced by the ajar door.
Your hands fall back. One under the sheets, one over. Eddie sits where you lay, his hands at the crook of your elbows. He gives symmetrical, superficial massages to each.
The life has been sapped from you, as if it were tied to the sun sunk beyond the horizon. A brutal fatigue sets in.
"You should take your ambien," he murmurs.
"Okay."
The eye tattooed on his arm seems to follow you as he reaches for your seven dollar bottle. He twists off the cap and shakes a single pill out for you, and you watch as the lines of his arms start to blur.
You take your pill, lying firmly in the middle of your pillow, and wonder if now would be an appropriate time to burst into panicked tears.
"I'll look after you," Eddie repeats after a while. Or maybe he doesn't. The weight of the day and the helping kick of your medication pulls you under. He lays down next to you carefully, his hand searching under the covers for yours.
And there, standing in the corner of the room, is your ghost. Real. Stunningly, terrifyingly real.
You can’t open your mouth wide enough to warn him.
˚ʚ♡ɞ˚
end of part one! thank you so much for reading, I really hope that you enjoyed! this was my baby and such a labour of love in April and I’m so happy now to share it :D if you have the time, please consider reblogging, it means so much to me and I’d love to know your thoughts on the story so far <3<3
I am NOT going to stop thinking about this
i doubt it helps, but i also think eddie is the type to try to be respectful at a family holiday party but ultimately end up wanting to fuck you in a guest room or finger you in a closet at the very least 🫠
Hahahahaha this made it so much worse in the best possible way, I love you anon.
Eddie Munson x Fem!reader
Note: I wrote most of this in my childhood bedroom while visiting home for thanksgiving. So this got very real, guys Lmao
Warnings: NSFW, 18+ ONLY!, teasing, dirty talk, pet names (Princess, bad girl, baby girl), alcohol consumption, oral sex (m receiving), PIV sex / unprotected sex, hand job, cum eating, semi public sex? (Your family is in the same house at the time)
Eddie Munson never thought he’d find himself at a holiday party straight out of a fucking Norman Rockwell painting, but then again he’d never thought he’d meet someone like you. Someone funny and kind and intelligent while simultaneously cool as hell and hot as hell. You’re everything he’d never let himself hope for, and he’s nothing like what he believes you deserve. Not that you listen to him when he voices his fears over not being good enough for you.
“Stop fidgeting, Eddie. This isn’t a big deal,” you whisper to him as the two of you stand on your door step. You pry open his tense fist to hold his hand in yours and he takes a deep breath, looking down at your smile. “They’re gonna love you.”
“Yeah but what if…what if they don’t?” Eddie mumbles. His brow is furrowed and his lips pout and all you want to do is kiss his frown away. But you know there’s no time for that. So you shake your head and squeeze his hand.
“I love you, so that’s all that matters,” you reassure him. “But this conversation is silly because they’re gonna love you.”
And you’re right. Of course. How could people not love Eddie? Especially people who loved you and who wanted to see you happy. And Eddie makes you the happiest you’ve ever been, and that just radiates off you when you walk into the room, proud to show off your boyfriend.
Eddie’s rough around the edges when you first meet him, sure. But he’s gone to great lengths to appear even more presentable than usual tonight, wearing a clean black button down and black jeans that don’t even have any holes in the knees. Before long, and exactly as you knew would happen, Eddie’s regaling your extended family with stories about his friends back in Hawkins and about life on tour as an up snd coming musician.
It’s pretty late by the time things start winding down. The dinner’s long done, your parents have gone to sleep and most of the older family members have puttered off with leftovers in tow. That’s just left you and Eddie with the crowd closer to your age - and amalgamation of cousins and friends of the family in their early to mid twenties. You all play a few rounds of board games and a few glasses of wine deep, Eddie starts looking way more appetizing than the holiday dinner.
You stare at him over your wine glass as one of your cousins prattle’s on about some drama going on at her job. But you can barely hear her because you’re watching Eddie pal around with Josh, your neighbor who you’d crushed on growing up. Next to Eddie, neighbor boy is absolutely nothing, an observation you make silently and with pride. Your boyfriend has an easy air to him, lounging back against the couch as he speaks, legs spread wide and casual. He looks completely at ease, comfortable in his spread out position. If you weren’t still in front of family you’d walk right over there and straddle him there and then. You lick your lips and silently hate him for the way he’s done absolutely nothing and yet has fully managed to get you salivating from afar. It’s unfair.
You couldn’t possibly know, however, just how much you’ve been driving him crazy all night. Bending over to pick things up in your tight little party dress. Munching on appetizers behind your red lips, licking your fingers clean of any crumbs or sauce. Pushing up against him when the two of you passed through narrow hallways and through crowded parts of the house.
He’s been working so hard not to pop an erection in this, the most inappropriate of venues, that he’s spent the last half hour practically avoiding you. When he looks up from his conversation with your boring neighbor, however, just to find you fucking him with your eyes from across the room, he thinks he’s going to combust.
You notice him frown when you finally catch his eye, but you don’t care enough to wonder what’s bothering him. Instead you wink at him - making his jaw drop - before raising your arms in a theatrical stretch with a matching dramatic yawn.
“God, I’m beat. Got a long drive home tomorrow,” you say to nobody in particular. Friends and family try to protest but you jump up and haul Eddie along after you, dragging him out the door.
When you finally make it to your childhood bedroom, you push Eddie towards the bed and lock the door all in one swift motion. You’ve kicked off your shoes and you’re reaching for the zipper of your dress before Eddie’s grabbing at your hips to stop you.
“What in the world are you doing?” he asks through gritted teeth, panic in his eyes. He’s sitting on your bed with you standing in front of him, his hands holding your wrists motionless to halt your effort to disrobe.
“I…I’m trying to get naked. And you should be doing the same,” you reply. Confused by the question in the first place. Eddie gazes up at you with. Wide eyes.
“But your family is like…right outside.”
“So?” you ask, now genuinely confused.
“And you’re tryna…you want to…”
“Fuck. I wanna fuck you. What’s the problem?” You let out an incredulous laugh. His grip loosens on your wrists so you circle your arms around his neck, massaging his shoulders. He seems to grapple for words so you continue to speak. “I don’t get it. You fuck me with my roommates in the next room all the time!”
“First of all, Nancy and Robin have made us listen to them having sex all the time and you know it,” he huffs immediately, but then returns to looking stressed. “And I’m friend with them. I don’t need to impress them…”
Your heart flips at the sentiment but you shake your head.
“You don’t need to impress anyone here either,” you argue, but Eddie’s having none of it. He springs to his feet in front of you, gripping your waist to pull you against him.
“That’s not fucking true and you know it, Princess.” He runs an aggravated hand through his curly hair. “I’m a freak. Your family wants - at least they should want - someone better for you than—,”
“Shut up. Shut up shut up,” you hiss, smacking his chest lightly with your open palm. “Nobody here knows your reputation from Hawkins, and even if they did, it wouldn’t matter because I’m fucking head over heels for you. You got that?”
“Yes ma’am,” Eddie says weakly, the ghost of a smile starting to curl at the corners of his mouth at how worked up you got all of us sudden.
“Now,” you say definitively, taking a step back to put your hands on your hips and take a deep breath. “I had three glasses of wine and I’m feeling…” you cast about for the right word and not being able to remember the word ‘horny’ you say the next best thing you can think of “…frisky. So you’re going to shut up and fuck me, snd you’re going to like it. Understand.”
Eddie looks dumbfounded, gazing at you with a mix of adoration, awe, and humor. He nods emphatically and you take another shuddering breath.
“Ok good. Help me take my clothes off.”
You expect him to crowd you. To throw you on the bed and rip off your dress and be on you so fast you barely see him coming.
Instead he walks over to you slowly, his eyes dark and lips pulled into a small smile. He steps around you to find the zipper you’d struggle with, lips finding the back of your neck as he pushes the zip all the way down to the curve of your lower back. He kisses his way over your shoulder as he pushes the fabric down and off your body. You shiver under his lips and the cool air you’re now exposed to. His hands find the front clasp of your bra - after making a pitstop to squeeze your breasts - and soon your bra joins your dress on the floor.
Eddie mouths at the side of your throat now as his hands grope every square inch he can reach, the bulge in his jeans pressing into your ass through the thin fabric of your panties.
It’s Heaven. Or close. The only thing is that it is noticeably, deafeningly quiet.
“W-why - oh. Why aren’t you saying anything?” you mumble out. Eddie chuckles against your skin and hips at your ear lobe.
“Told me to shut up,” he whispers. His hand slides forward to cup your mound and you swallow a moan.
“Oh so now you listen to what I tell you,” you bristle. Eddie’s chuckle vibrates through you again and you grind back against him intentionally. You grab his hand and shove it into your panties, no longer satisfied being touched through the fabric.
“I forgot. My baby’s feeling…frisky.” His voice is low and rich with amusement and sensuality. You huff but don’t protest because his big, thick fingers are finally where you wanted them all night. Swirling through your slick, his middle finger prodding at your entrance but not yet pushing in.
You try to step forward to urge him toward the bed, but Eddie pushes you to the side, his free hand coming to brace up against the wall in front of you.
“Not so fast. That bed is squeaky as hell,” he mutters between kisses to your shoulder.
“Well yeah. It’s almost as old as me,” you say, rolling your eyes.
“Yeah, and you squeak under me all the time too, Princess.” You go to roll your eyes again at his cocky tone but the quickly roll back into your head as he shoves not one but two fingers into your tight heat. You let out a high pitched squeal that you do your best to smother with your hand and he laughs. “See? What did I tell you?”
You don’t say anything at first because you’re so lost in the feeling of finally getting what you want. Eddie leans his weight against you as he picks up momentum with his hand, and you find your front getting pressed up against the wall.
“Needed you aaaaaall fucking day, Princess. You’re absolutely infuriating,” Eddie says raggedly into the back of your neck. His fingers hook up and you gasp at the added pleasure.
“How am I - oh god. In…infuriating?” you barely manage to ask in response.
“Tried to be on my best behavior. But you had to prance around looking like a fucking wet dream, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t do anything…” you try to argue, but Eddie snaps the waistband of your panties, stretched out as they are from his fingering, and you flinch.
“Oh yeah? Then why did I know the color of your panties by the time we started dinner?”
He’s right of course. You’d been intentionally finding reasons to bend over in front of him, or cross and uncross your legs in front of him - anything to draw his attention between your thighs. As if his attention was ever anywhere else to begin with.
“Wanted to make me slip up, huh? Wanted me to drag you into the bathroom in the middle of dinner and fuck your brains out?”
“Yes!” you gasp, though you’re less sure that you’re affirming his statement and more sure that your orgasm is fast approaching. “Oh fuck, Eddie.”
“Bend over,” he says suddenly. His voice is more demanding than usual and a thrill runs up your spine. He steps back and gives you room, which you use to shuffle a bit to the side and lean over, bracing your palms against the seat of an old wicker chair you’ve had in your room since elementary school. With your ass up, you half worry that Eddie will forget where you are and spank you loudly, but he seems to remember and opts to grope you instead. He slides your panties to your ankles and you step out of them, widening your stance in a way that has him humming appreciatively behind you.
You steal a glance over your shoulder to confirm the suspicion that he is, in fact, fisting his hard cock, staring at your ready pussy and lining himself up.
“You play the good girl so well, but you’re just a bad girl for me, isn’t that right Princess?” Eddie asks as he pushes the tip of his cock in a circle around your aching entrance. You whine at the fact that he’s not yet inside you, trying to push back to make him slide in. Eddie laughs and grips you by your hips, hauling them higher and making your knees shake. “Look at you. Not even listening because you want my cock that bad.”
You toss a glare over your shoulder at him.
“Eddie if you don’t get inside me right - fuck!” You hiss through your teeth when he slides all the way into you at once. One hand slides down the small of your back, up your spine, to grip solidly at the back of your neck as he wastes absolutely no time getting a good pace going.
The slap of skin on skin ringing out in your small childhood bedroom is absolutely obscene, as are the whimpers that spill out of you despite your best efforts.
“Eddie…so fucking - oh!”
You’re trying to tell him how good he’s making you feel, but you’re sure he’s able to gather that from the way you’re completely unable to finish your statement. Eddie’s chuckle vibrates into your body and you reach back one hand to clutch at his where it holds you at your hip.
“Feels good, baby? Hm?” he asks, almost mockingly but you can’t muster enough energy to reply in any way aside from genuine.
“Feels so good, Eds,” you whimper. Despite his teasing, the way you’re scrabbling to make contact with him tugs at his heartstrings. He lifts his hand up from your hip enough to grab your reaching one.
“Christ, even when you’re a bad girl, you’re still so fucking sweet,” he mumbles, leaning down over you to press bruising kisses to your back and shoulders. You pant beneath him and relish in the additional contact.
“Eddie…mmm Eddie. So full.”
“Fuck. You can’t say shit like that when you haven’t cum yet, princess. I’m only fucking human, I’m gonna fucking blow.”
“Good! Give it to me,” you whine out, and Eddie pretty much loses it.
“Ok, come here my lil greedy baby,” Eddie says gruffly, though not without humor. He pulls out of you - and he has to shush you when you whine in protest - before hauling you around so that he’s sitting on your wicker chair and sliding you into his lap.
“Fucking yes. Oh my god yes.” You’re practically crying now as Eddie gets straight to bouncing you up and down on his cock. You cling to him, your fingers tightening in his wild curly hair as you breathe heavily and gaze at him with unfocused eyes.
“You’re just a horny little mess, aren’t you?” Eddie chuckles darkly. You nod and grip at his shoulders so the leverage let’s you help him move you up and down on his lap. Eddie kisses at the hollow at the base of your throat before looking back into your hazy eyes. “Hey. You with me?” He lightly taps your cheek with his palm when you don’t respond, so far gone in pleasure.
“Y-yeah?” you hiccup. Since you’re bouncing enough on your own shaking thighs, Eddie’s able to slide a free hand from the meat of your hips down to start playing at your clit. So you’re even farther gone now.
“Did you bring any turtlenecks in that little suitcase of yours?” Eddie asks you and your brow knits on what he finds to be a cute little scrunch as you struggle to comprehend the question.
“Yeah I brought one—oh my fucking god…”
Before you’d even finished answering his question, Eddie’s sucking and nipping at the skin of your throat. An action he knows can send you over the edge.
And it does.
You cum in a burst of pleasure that has you rocking against Eddie desperately, clinging to him as you do your best to keep him inside you at the deepest point for as long as possible.
Eddie, to his credit, let’s you do what you want with him. He holds your face in his hands and presses your foreheads together, nodding at your quiet moans.
“There it is. That’s what you wanted, sweet girl? That’s it.”
He’s patient as you come down from your high, but it’s his dick that twitches expectantly inside you which reminds you he still has to cum.
You do your best to start bouncing again, but your legs are shaky. Eddie laughs and stills you, his big hands on your waist, and you grumble.
“Shhh don’t worry about that. It’s good enough just hold you,” he reassures you. You look at him with bleary, pleasure soaked eyes.
“No. You need to cum, too,” you insist. Eddie shrugs, clearly content.
“Having my dick deep inside you is enough of a win, Princess,” he says with a chuckle.
But you’re having none of it. You struggle to your feet and then slide down to the floor in front of him to settle down on your knees. Eddie’s eye go wide and you grip his wet cock, fisting up and down on his lap.
“In high school I wouldn’t even listen to songs with dirty lyrics. Now my boyfriend’s dick is out while he sits on my reading chair in my childhood bedroom,” you observe irreverently with a laugh. Eddie joins in, though his laugh is more strained the longer you jerk him off.
“That’s what I was saying. Everyone thinks you’re so innocent. And yet here you are - just got your brains fucked out and now you’re on your knees for me.”
As if to punctuate and prove his statement, you lean forward and swallow him whole, your cheeks hollowing to create a tantalizing amount of suction,
“Oh mother of - fuck!” Eddie whispers harshly. You bob up and down on his cock without preamble. You could tell how close he was from the near steady stream of pre-cum that leaked from his tip.
Your hands knead into his thighs as you take him deeper and deeper, being careful not to gag too loudly when his spongey head hits the back of your throat.
“Fuck, Princess. That’s…oh god that’s…”
He’s rendered even more speechless when you grab his hand and place it on the back of your head, pressing down to indicate that you’d like him to control your movements. Something you’d never done with previous lovers. Only Eddie.
Eddie curses under his breath and blinks rapidly before doing as you’ve asked him to do - guiding you up and down on his cock by his grip on the back of your head. His cock pushes deep into your throat and Eddie’s eyes roll back into his skull.
“Jesus H. Christ you’re such a bad girl, letting me do this right now. Such a bad fucking girl.” He’s rambling at this point and you love it. You snake a hand between your thighs and begin playing with your clit as he fucks your throat. Overwhelmed by the feeling of him using you and the nature of his words.
When he lets you pull back to finally breath, you choke and sputter before speaking up, voice wrecked.
“Like being a bad girl for you, Eds,” you moan against his balls, jerking his spit and slick soaked cock with your hand. Eddie’s sure he won’t survive this and closes his eyes against the intense pleasure conjured up by the image of you before him.
“God, you get so messy for me, Princess. You know I love that.” You nod frantically and that’s when he notices your other hand has disappeared between your legs, touching yourself. He bites his lip to smother his groan. “Were you really touching yourself while choking on my dick, baby?”
You nod again with wide, doe eyes.
“I wanna cum again,” you say simply, brow knitting together from the way you toy with your clit feverishly. “But I want you to cum, too.”
“Baby girl, you keep looking at me and touching me like that, I’m gonna cum any second.”
Your breath speeds up and so does your finger on your clit. Your fist moves faster up and down his cock and you know he’s close, so you scootch up even closer between his spread thighs.
“Where d’you wanna cum, Eddie?” you ask. “My face? My tongue? My tits?” You model each option for him, turning your head to offer your cheek, sticking out your tongue, and shimmying your naked chest to make your breasts bounce.
“Oh shit oh shit…” Is all Eddie can say as his eyes zero in on your tits. His abdomen seizes and you deliver a handful more expert tugs, angling his cock towards your chest just in time. His white cum paints your tits just as your own second orgasm takes over, making your spasm a bit and concave into yourself.
It’s another minute or two before either of you move, your hand finally stilling and letting go of his softening cock. Eddie slumps back against the chair and rubs his eyes harshly with the heels of his hands before gazing back down at your messy figure.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Princess…” he mutters low. You simply grin at him, gathering the cum on your tits and placing it in your mouth with a happy hum.
“Thanks for my present, Eddie,” you say in a lilting voice and Eddie rolls his eyes at you, reaching down to haul you up off the floor and into his lap.
“If anyone in your family heard that and decides they don’t like me because someone couldn’t keep it in her pants…” he grumbles the threat half heartedly, contradicting his own tone by kissing your throat. Right on the fresh bruise that you will definitely need to cover with a turtleneck tomorrow. You giggle and cling to him.
“Nobody heard it. And besides, isn’t keeping me happy the most important thing?” you ask cheekily. Eddie laughs, a little closer to full volume this time, and crushes you to his chest.
“You happy, Princess?” he asks a beat later. Despite the volume of his laugh, the question comes out quieter. As if he’s not 100% certain what your answer will be. You pull back and take his face in your hands so you can imbue your response with all the strength you can muster after being fucked so good.
“I’m absurdly happy, Eddie Munson. And you better be, too, because I don’t plan on giving this up any time soon.”
He kisses you stupid in response, finally deciding the squeaky bed will have to do and hauling you over to start getting ready for sleep.
~*~
The next morning over coffee, eggs, and toast you get to witness yet again just how much your boyfriend has charmed your family and friends. They hang on his every word, laugh at his jokes, and ask him questions. And you know they aren’t just being nice, because they’ve never been this nice to any guy you’ve brought home before.
Watching Eddie regale some of your cousins with a particularly silly story from his latest small town tour, the sun hits him just right as it filters through the kitchen window. He’s back lit, haloing his hair and making him look particularly handsome. Your heart swells and you can’t take the yearning adoration that fills you to the brim.
To offset the achingly sweet emotions swirling within you, you have to do something silly. When Eddie looks at you over someone’s shoulder, you mouth “you’re fucking hot” at him and his face lights up in a massive grin, shaking his head. He mouths back -
“You’re bad.”
~*~
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literally in love
you get upset when eddie's friends think you're clingy. he sets you straight with some unbridled affection. requested here. fem!reader, 2.6k
˚ʚ♡ɞ˚
The diner is bustling with life and smells alike, people in their summer jackets eager to sit down and dig into a plate of greasy, fatty meats. You're just as excited, your fingers curled into Eddie's sleeve and following his lead as he weaves between a gaggle of kids playing between the bar and the booths.
"Sorry, sir," a young girl says to him, springing out of his path.
"That's okay," he says, leaning back to squint at you curiously, "Do I look like a sir?" he asks you.
Pale faced, dark-haired, the remnants of last night's eyeliner clinging to his bottom lashes, you can't say you'd look at Eddie and think, Sir. Pretty boy extraordinaire with a rather inviting smile, absolutely.
"I think so, sir," you say.
Eddie laughs at you, pressing a hand behind your shoulders to move you along. His friend Gareth waves from a booth tucked in a corner under a white sconce. Jamison sits to his left, and Margaret to his right. You feel a little skip in your pulse at the sight —they intimidate you, and you want desperately for them to like you, only you never know what to say.
"Hey," Eddie says as you approach the booth. He pushes you gently to encourage you into the seat first. "How's it going? Did we order?"
"We were waiting for you. They said we have to go up to the bar when we're ready."
"We're late, I get it. Where's Jeff?"
"He went to the bathroom, like, ten minutes ago," Jamison says with a sigh, climbing to his feet. "I'll go see if he's alright."
"He's fine. Maggie, are you coming to order?" Gareth says, getting up with him.
"Yes, finally!" she says.
The relative chaos of your arrival has you hesitating in your seat. Margaret left her purse and her jacket on the table, and Jamison his keys.
"You okay to stay here while I order?" Eddie asks.
You'd much prefer Eddie order for you, but you don't want to be sitting here by yourself if Jamison and Jeff come back before him. You won't know what to say. It won't be their fault. You'll make things awkward for everyone.
You stand up again, shedding your jacket as you do. No one's gonna steal anyone's stuff, the bar is too close. "I'll come with you."
Eddie slots your fingers together easily, grinning, "Lucky me."
His friends order first and return to the booth soon after. You and Eddie get cut by a cranky looking old lady but neither of you say anything, nowhere to be and no reason to mind. He tells you about the guitar he's been repairing at work and you listen adoringly, in love with the shape of his lips and how he says every word. He's a great storyteller.
A new friend appears once you've ordered.
"Hey, Eddie!" one of the waiters says, appearing from the kitchen with a tray of drinks and fries in hand. "Man, I've been trying to get a hold of you all week. The string on my daughter's guitar flew off, nearly blinded her in the process, would you be able to fix that for me? I'll pay you for your time."
Eddie waves it off. "It'll only take five minutes, you can drop by whenever I'm home. Why do they keep splitting like that, is she messing with the pegs?"
"She definitely is. Can I get your number? Macey washed my pants without emptying the pockets."
There's a mad scramble for a pen. You have one in your jacket because Eddie's always looking for one, but your jacket is back in the booth. You promise to make a hasty return and set off for it, glad to see Jeff's alright, standing at the table likely waiting for you and Eddie to get back rather than move your things. You like Jeff most out of everyone. With the whole group collected you know he won't drag you into conversation.
"She's a bit… much," Gareth's saying.
"How can she be a bit much? She doesn't say a lot," Maggie says.
You frown. You're the only other she.
"Not like that, just– the touching and stuff. She's always grabbing onto him like a toddler. I don't think I could stand it."
"You don't have to stand it," Jeff says. "She's Eddie's girl."
"Clearly."
"Gareth, when was the last time you got laid?" Maggie asks, flicking a hair tie at him, to his annoyance. "You're being bitter. They fucking love each other, man, it's nice."
"It is a little tiny bit too much sometimes," Jamison says.
You wince. You know it's a matter of seconds before one of them turns to see you standing there. Is it worse to turn around or to approach?
You walk up to the table just as Gareth says, "Yes! Thank you man, she's too–"
He cuts off when he sees you with a cough.
"Who?" you ask, full well knowing it's you. Honestly, you're shy but you still get mad, you kind of want him to own up and say it while you're there, and at the same time you're hoping against hope they'll lie.
Thankfully, they pretend it was about someone else.
"Nobody," Maggie says.
"Some girl at the library," Jamison says.
You lean past Jeff with as sunny an apology as you can manage to grab the pen from your jacket. "Eddie," you say by way of explanation, holding the pen up with a shrug.
You walk away quicker than you should. It's obvious you've overheard. There's a thump and a, "Nice fucking job, loser."
Eddie's deep in conversation as you offer the pen. He takes it without stopping, but he makes sure he kisses your cheek.
"I'm gonna go to the bathroom, okay?" you say.
"I'll be right there, sweetheart."
To get to the bathroom you have to walk past the booth again. With the hurt feeling pounding between your ears and what you suspect might be all eyes on you, you make for one of the two doors. The summer sun and the dry Hawkins heat hits you immediately, a second layering of smothering to wrap around the first. You walk around a rainbow chalk hopscotch and into the shade of the smoking shelter, hands at your collar, breathing hard.
Don't cry, you think firmly. Don't cry. They'll know if you do and that's twice as embarrassing as walking out. Imagine how embarrassed Eddie will feel if you cause a scene.
You sit on the little perch in the shelter and stare at the floor. There's nowhere to look that isn't stingingly bright, the sun in the white-blue sky glaring down on you and the sidewalk bleached a blinding ivory. You close your eyes against it. Your shoulders hunch in protectively. Your hands find their way to your face.
Like a toddler, Gareth said. You press your fingertips into your eyes, fighting against the ache. Is that true? Are you childish in how much you rely on Eddie? You take his hand and his arm, you catch onto his clothes when you're worried, you step behind him when you're overwhelmed.
"Shit," you whisper.
The breeze washing over you does little to cool you down. You must sit there for a handful of minutes, worried and nauseous.
"Hey," Eddie says gently. You flinch despite his best efforts not to startle you.
He looks tall outlined by the sun.
"You okay?" he asks.
"I just wanted some fresh air," you say.
He raises his brows slightly. "That why Gareth just apologised to me?"
You wince as he sits down. All of you wants to sag into his side, but a small voice tells you not to. You stay ramrod straight, hands pressed flat and clammy to your knees.
Eddie gives your elbow a rub. His thumb digs into soft skin and the harder suggestion of cartilage and bone before sliding up. He uses touch often to convey silent reassurement. This seems to say, I don't know what happened, but I'm here.
"I'm fine. We can go back inside," you say, attempting to fool him.
"There's no rush." His voice tips to a low, rough register. He's keyed in to your upset, no doubt about it. "It's a nice day, babe."
He gives you a minute. The small feathering of clouds skirts one edge of the horizon to the other, the shadow of the diner stretching tall as the sun lazes down. You push the worst of your feelings from your mind. It's easy to do with such an unshakeable support at your side, his fingers curling down to your forearm, vying for a hand to hold.
"I heard your friends talking about me. It wasn't all nice," you confess.
"Assholes."
You glance at his face. He has a crease between his brows.
"Well, mostly Gareth. He said that I… act like a kid. A toddler, that I'm too much, at least for him to stand. And don't get me wrong, Eds, I'm not thrilled that they were talking about me, but I guess I…" You take a short breath and look away from him. "I hate that it's true."
"You can be mad when people talk shit. I'm mad," he says. "He said you're like a toddler?" He shuffles closer to you on the bench. "Babe, it's not true, okay? You're not too much. Fuck, we're here to hang out and they can't wait ten minutes to run their mouths–"
"It wasn't like that, it was just Gareth." Gareth's always been the selfish friend.
"He doesn't get a pass for saying something shitty 'cos he's always shitty. I brought you here," —you peek at him, recognising upset in his tone even when it's the barest inkling— "knowing you didn't really want to come because you get so nervous," —he sounds pained for you— "I fucking told him to leave you alone. I said we wouldn't come around if he didn't stop being a mood killer."
You worry at your bottom lip. "Maybe that's kind of his point, Eds. You have to look out for me. You had to ask someone to be nice to me 'cos I can't handle it–"
"You don't have to handle it. The people around you should be nice to you. This isn't high school, you don't have to put up with it, and I told him that." Eddie grabs your arm with the hand that isn't tangled in yours and turns you to face him. "I'm sorry," he says, almost a murmur, "I didn't invite you today to have you humiliated."
You're feeling a little mortified by the passion of his feelings. He's mad at the wrong person, isn't he? "Why are you sorry? I'm the one who clings to you."
"I want you to." Eddie holds your eyes, brown and big and imploring you to listen, the starts of his brows sewing together. "I'm sorry because it's not fair. And because Gareth was a dick to you. And for getting mad." He smiles at you ruefully. "I'm being a dick, too."
"In what world?"
Eddie leans in slowly, giving you enough time to close your eyes as his nose bumps into yours, encouraging your head up to allow for a kiss. He kisses twice, a third time, pulling away to rub your bottom lip.
"Are you really upset?" he asks softly.
You know whatever answer you give him is one he's okay with.
"I feel so embarrassed," you say. "They knew that I overheard them. Now I feel like I'll be constantly worried about how much I'm touching you."
"Well, that's their problem. That doesn't say shit about you," Eddie says, wrinkling his nose.
"I'm really not too much?" you ask. He can likely hear how desperate you are for a kind answer, your throat burning with the effort it takes to stave off tears.
"You've never been too much. I'm the too-much one. You wouldn't even hold my hand when we first started dating, you remember that? We'd go to the movies and you'd get so flustered when I bought your ticket." Eddie's arms wrap around your waist, the breeze ruffling his sweet curls and sending gusts of his smell your way. You're a goner, dropping your face into his shoulder. "Do you remember that?" he asks again, his face slipping down to yours as he hugs you close. "The first time we went to the Hawk together, I went first, and I don't know why you thought you'd have to buy your own ticket but you got all quiet when I got yours, too. I loved that. You know what I loved even more than that?"
You smile, knowing he's going to say something lovely. "What?" you ask.
"I loved how proud you were to sit down with me. You wouldn't hold my hand but you'd put your cheek on my shoulder just like this."
Eddie rubs the tip of his nose against your temple. "I love how much you want to be near me," he says. "It's not childish, is it? If being closer to me makes you feel better, there's nothing wrong with that. Gareth's just jealous 'cos he isn't getting laid."
"That's what Maggie said." You laugh.
"Maggie's a good one. She makes Gareth bearable, kind of."
You feel the stretch of his back under your hands. Your head is pounding from the sudden rush of big emotions, your tongue dry and throat aching, but you don't have a lick of urgency to get up and go back in.
"He's such a dick," you whisper.
Eddie laughs, patting your back. "Such a fucking dick."
"I can't help being a loser and wanting to hug you so much," you say. You're joking now, but it's true all the same.
"I tempt the untemptable," he says agreeably.
You laugh and lift up a bit to hug him harder, your face pressing into his neck.
"You're not a loser," he says more seriously. "You know that, right? What Gareth said, it's not okay, but there's no accounting for idiocy." Eddie sits back on the bench, taking your forearms into his hands for some more soft massaging. "He can think whatever he likes, I'm not the government, but he was wrong, and also it's rude and, again, super shitty of him to do that here. So with your blessing I'm gonna punch him in the face."
"Nooooo," you murmur.
"Very soft no. Taking it for a yes."
"Eddie, you can't hit Gareth."
"He should watch his mouth, then."
You reach up for a second hug. You love that he prioritised how you felt, as well as how eager he is to stick up for you —how mad he is on your behalf.
"He's trying to take this away from me," Eddie says, leaning back under your weight, arms crossing behind your spine. He looks up at you like you've stolen his breath, lips parted and teeth peeking out with his smile.
"Do you really want to punch him?" you ask. You sound very fond.
"I hate that he made you feel bad about yourself. And he irritates me."
"But…"
Eddie hums like he's thinking for a moment. "No, I definitely still want to hit him."
You tuck a curl away from his cheek tenderly. "Thanks for wanting to defend my honour, Eds," you say.
"I'm on your side through everything." He looks ridiculously pretty saying such a ridiculously lovely thing. "That's how we work, right? You're on my side too?"
Your face flushes with heat. "Of course I am, baby."
"Good. Unrelated to our previous conversation, how much money do you have, roughly? In case I need financial aid in the coming days." He drops his voice to a whisper, "How much even is bail lately?"
You cup his cheek. "We can't afford it," you whisper back.
"Typical."
˚ʚ♡ɞ˚
thank you for reading!♡
slightly mean eddie if you feel so inclined 🥹🫶 like stern kinda like how you do “mean sirius”. i just think him slightly bossing r around or being stern with her is 😍🫶
SMUT 18+ ONLY MDNI (cw: p in v, hard/mean dom!eddie, mostly just rough touches and bossing r around, some degradation, stoplight, all consensual) | fem!reader | 1.2k words
Eddie leans back, looking a tenuous mixture of unimpressed and sympathetic. "Baby, stop hiding."
You sit with your legs spread over his legs, face pointed resolutely at the happy trail that climbs clumsily up the centre of his abdomen. "I'm not," you say, though you can't lift your gaze to prove him wrong.
"How are you feeling?" he asks, bringing a hand to your cheek to force your head up. You smile weakly.
"Good."
"Yeah? You know all your alerts still? What colour is this?"
"I don't forget them." You let your legs spread wider, hissing as you sink down further on the splitting girth of his cock. "Green."
As soon as he knows you're okay he gets mean, a subtle cruelty, squeezing your cheek in a too-tight grip. "What did I say before? Stop hiding."
You straighten your back, hips moving in messy, slow circles and hands braced against his trim waist. You lift your head and try your best to stay up, even when the head of his cock taps into your spongy soft spot and sends a round of pleasure-shocked chills through your abdomen.
You quiver happily.
"You liked that?" he pulls his arms down from behind his head to grab your waist, pushing you down hard into his thighs.
His cock kisses your soft spot again and you feel yourself tipping forward. "Sit up, doll. Up. Wanna see you, wanna see that face you make when I stretch you out."
He lifts his hips and you gasp. "That's the one," he says, grinning.
"Too big," you whisper, so full you can't breathe right. You're sensitive to every shift, every drag of his cock, the curve of his shaft as he digs into the pulp of your walls.
"Say again," he says, pulling your hips into him.
"It's too big, Eds. I don't think I can take it."
He stares up at you assessingly. You wilt slightly under his gaze, your eyes half-lidded and lashes heavy with unshed tears.
His pinky finger is cool as he strokes down the hill of your soft cheek. "Baby, I know how much you can take." He drops his hand abruptly. "So take it."
He fucks up into you until you're panting, clinging to his waist and wanting desperately to bury yourself in his chest. Every time you try he pushes you back, his annoyed gaze lighting a fire in the pit of your stomach. You try to fuck him how he likes it with your hips rolling, almost bouncing over his length, but the stimulation is overwhelming.
"Please," you say, hands sliding behind his naked back. "Please, please, Eddie."
He tilts his head to one side. "You're so fucking clingy. Come here," he says, opening his arms with a well-acted reluctance.
You melt into him, always so relieved to garner his affection. His hands are sweet, roving up and down the length of your back in sweeping lines that soothe you like you'd wanted. "Green," you whisper before he can ask.
He stifles a chuckle, nuzzling his face into the side of yours. "You're really fucking tight. Do you need something?" he asks.
You think about it. "Can you touch me?"
"Try and relax for me, okay?" he asks, hand already moving to the place where your bodies meet, thick fingers searching for the little bead of your clit. He pushes the pad of his thumb into it and draws slow circles. "If you want to take a break, we can do that."
"I'm okay. Do you-" You gasp as he hits the right spot. "Do you want a break, baby?"
"No. A break from moulding this sweet cunt? As if." He rolls his eyes, a burning amusement slowly changing to smugness, to mocking. "Why, do you think I need one?"
You swallow dryly at the character he's become and shake your head. "No, I just-"
"Just what? Think you know better than me?"
"I just thought-"
He laughs darkly. "Ah, and that's where you're going wrong, sweet thing. I don't need you to think about anything besides this," he gives you two sharp thrusts. You wrap your arms tight around his neck, crushing dark curls to your nose. He smells like he always does; cedarwood, a heady cologne sticks to his skin.
You clamp down around him without thinking and listen to him hiss. "That's it, that's it. Fuck. Guess there's some sense in here after all," he says, lips to your forehead.
Your thighs tighten around him and he's more than perceptive, focusing his efforts on your clit, chasing your climax with tight circles.
"You gonna ask me?"
You take a big breath. "Can I cum?"
He squeezes you tight to his chest and his skin is everywhere, touching you all over, his hands and his arms and his chest, his thighs and his cock rocking into you, as close as he can be. You gasp for air as your high approaches.
"Be polite."
"Please," you say quickly, quiet but forceful as you remember yourself. "Eddie, please can I? Please, please-" You squeeze your eyes shut and shy away from his touch, worried you'll cum before he says you can.
He takes pity. "Go on, sweetheart."
Everything dissolves. The coil snaps and you really can't breath, biting down on your index finger to stop from squealing in his ear. He pushes you through it, doesn't stop touching until you're over the crest of it and panting again.
"Good job," he says, and you know he's done playing mean before he says, "Blue. Very blue. How are you feeling?" Blue – I want to keep fucking you, but I don't want to play mean anymore.
You pull back and feel weak, slouched in his lap, his cock still hard as stone inside you. You do an experimental little bounce. "Blue."
He beams and you do too, laughing under your breath as you lean down for a kiss. His lips are inviting: so soft, sweet, a short fall from tentative. You brush the hair away from his face as you pull back and take in his cheeks, pink with blush and damp with a sheen of sweat.
"You're blushing!" you say, ecstatic.
He groans, covering his face with both hands as he says, "Fuck off, you tease. This is all your fault. You don't know how fucking cute you look trying to climb all over me. How hard it is to push you away."
You curl your fingers around his wrist and pull them away, pressing a kiss to the back of his hands before letting them drop. "Thanks, Eddie. For playing games with me."
He blinks. "I like them just as much as you do."
"I like you."
"Wait, do you have a crush on me?" he asks suspiciously.
You burst into laughter. Eddie joins in, though it's strangled as he shifts beneath you. You realise then how close he is to his own release, his chest rising fast.
"Got more than a crush on you, Munson. I'll show you, if you like?" you ask, working your hips.
His eyes close as his head drops back into the couch cushion. Neck bared, you watch his throat bob. He moans and it's haunting, you'll be thinking about it all day, a wicked exhale coloured by the deep rasp of his voice.
"Want me to show you, baby?"
"Please," he says.
STRANGER THINGS
❛❛ ICE ❜❜ - Steve Harrington
“Knock them dead.” - Eddie Munson x Fem!reader
𝐁𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐤𝐟𝐚𝐬𝐭 time is the best time to eat! -> ೃ⁀➷ 𝐄𝐝𝐝𝐢𝐞 𝐌𝐮𝐧𝐬𝐨𝐧 𝐱 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫
You and Eddie have a fantastic date.
𝐄𝐯𝐞𝐧 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐧𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭, 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐛𝐞 𝐛𝐲 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐬𝐢𝐝𝐞.
“𝐀𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐥𝐬 𝐑𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐓𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐬" pt 1
Date Night - Eddie Munson x Fem!reader
Eddie with black dancer s/o Hip Hop , Modern ect. And her struggles of being a black dancer
"Knock them dead."
Eddie Munson x Black!Reader
Author note: Hopefully, you enjoyed this, and sorry if this wasn't what you wanted also; I didn't know what you mean by modern, so my bad, I gave it a little bit of a twist yk; hopefully, this to your liking. (sorry for the long wait)
𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐦𝐞: Fluff and bits of angst(?)
𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐝𝐬: 936
*ೃ༄ You danced for hours, and your feet became sore, blisters forming on your feet; practicing for your debut show, you couldn't mess it up, not with the chance you got from the table.
Sweat poured from your body; you refused to give up; it wasn't in your will; you were going to master it and not even caring that your legs were going to collapse on you.
Your coils bouncing from your sudden moveth,
Your reflection bounced off the mirrors, mimicking your moveth, music booming from the boombox, and your shoes were almost worn out.
This was your chance to enter stardom, and you let anyone take that light from you, not on your watch, dreaming of being an idol of girls like you, of looking up to you as an inspiration, breaking the wall and barriers of socially and racial segregation.
Tired..that was the only thing in your mind, but you weren't going to rest; you heard the door open, and that was the only time you stopped and looked to see who it was in the studio.
You turned off the music and went to the door.
Eddie; he was standing there holding the water bottle you accidentally left while rushing to the studio.
"What are you doing here, ed?" you walked to him; even though your legs might just stop, you endured it.
"I'm here to give this back to you, Y/N." Eddie handed back your water bottle; you took it from his hand.
"Thanks!" there was a pause; it was a bit awkward, "Well, uh, it seems that you worked up a sweat," Eddie said; you chuckled at his comment, "I guess so,"
Another pause came in, "Well, uh, I going to head back-" you reached for his hand.
"N-no, please stay, Eddie, with me here in the studio." you pulled him back.
"Is everything okay, Y/N" Eddie gently cupped your face; when he said that to you, you tried to keep yourself composed, but even you those words hit something inside of you, some sort of vulnerable, turned you into a crying mess.
Tears stained your face, rolling down your cheeks; you couldn't keep them in anymore; you couldn't hide your problems, especially when you were in them.
"I-I'm sorry," you muttered; Eddie didn't even respond to you; he hugged you, your face gently hitting his face, your salty tears staining his shirt.
Your heavy breathing echoed the room; Eddie hugged you tightly and kissed your head, "You know, can talk me, Y/N,"
"It's just I don't feel good enough and don't I'm strong enough to endure everything that is going on, E-Eddie, I'm sorry-" your sentence was cut off by Eddie kissing you with reassurance, "I know you're trying your best, Y/N, but don't over exert yourself trying, okay... your too important to me" Eddie hugged you tightly.
After that was a comfortable silence, "You should rest; you look like you are tired, babe."
"No, I have to," Eddie's finger pressed to your lips to motion you to stop talking, "Nonsense, some rest won't hurt you, Y/N."
"I guess so," you muttered.
You left the studio with Eddie and went to his trailer; you were currently on his bed laying on his lay, him playing with your hair, as you voiced your problems to him; he was a really understanding guy, and you were thanking god that you met him, and he was your own boyfriend, people were wrong about him being a freak, he's just a guy getting through life.
"I-i feel like I won't do good at all." you looked up to see his face.
"Babe, you're the Y/N Sinclair, you can do anything you want, and I believe in what you do" Eddie held your face and nuzzled it.
"Thank you, Ed, for being with me" you got up from his lap and hugged him enjoying his warmth and presence, wishing you could stay like that together with him.
╰┈➤ A Few days later
It is the day of your recital. The day you were practicing your ass for, the day to show them all what you can do.
You were in your costume, breathing in and out, a bit hesitant about the outcome.
Fiddling your thumbs, thinking about everything, your heart was beating out of your chest, butterflies in your stomach.
You opened the curtain slightly, looking at the people in the crowd and the judges; seeing your family made you feel better, but you were still anxious.
You felt a sudden tap on your shoulders; you flinched to see it was Eddie, but how did he get backstage.
"Eddie, you scared me" you rush to hug him; you were glad he was here, there to support you.
"You thought I would miss your dance performance, princess" he hugged you back and kissed your face.
"I'm so glad you're here, Ed!" you smiled with glee.
"2 mins to showtime, Y/N," one of the directors yelled.
With Eddie here, you were less anxious than before, but you had to perform; you were tense.
Eddie held your face; you were looking at him, "Y/n, you're going to do great, and I know you're going to do great, and rock that fucking dance floor." Eddie kissed you on the forehead and looked at you.
You looked at him with awe, taken back at his words, "I will," before you walk to your position.
"..And Y/N," he yelled at you; you glanced back at him
"Knock them dead," he smiled; it seems you just needed that boost to surge your confidence.
This was definitely going to be a core memory.
🍳 𝐁𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐤𝐟𝐚𝐬𝐭 time is the best time to eat! -> ೃ⁀➷ 𝐄𝐝𝐝𝐢𝐞 𝐌𝐮𝐧𝐬𝐨𝐧 𝐱 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫
𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐦𝐞: Fluff
𝐒𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐲: Eddie makes breakfast for you, but it had to go south.
𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐝𝐬: 498
。⋆୨୧˚ Isn't breakfast the best time to eat food? Well, to you, it was the best, but you didn't want to make it because you were too busy drooling in your sleep and ruffling in your cozy sheets next to your boyfriend, Eddie; how adorable!
。⋆୨୧˚ Well, Eddie was pretty awake than you; even though he can't cook as well as you doesn't mean he can't make breakfast for you. He went to the kitchen with a bright mindset to make you the perfect breakfast; he even got a cookbook to cook with, the ingredients, and the measurements.
。⋆୨୧˚ The only thing Eddie can't mess with while cooking or baking is muffins; he was going to a batch of chocolate chip muffins for you. Cups of flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, milk, vegetable oil, white sugar & brown sugar, and the rising star chocolate chips!
。⋆୨୧˚ The batter was done, but now the hard part was not letting the muffins burn; even though it was a simple task, Eddie was not taking the risk, especially when it came to you. he waited there, looking right at the oven, not even taking a look back. Still, soon he got bored and went to listen to music & read some magazine on his bands.
。⋆୨୧˚ "Beep, Beep, Beep." that was the sound of the oven, done baking the muffins, but Eddie was too in the zone to realize that the muffins were ready.
。⋆୨୧˚ You were lying there, so comfortable in Eddie's bed; nothing could make you get up from your wonderful slumber except the smell of smoke, which made you puzzled. You shot up from the bed and walked to the area of the smoke. 'What the hell is the first thing in your mind? You were still sleepy, though, so your moveth was pretty slow.
。⋆୨୧˚ "Uh, Eddie, did you put anything in the oven!" you yelled, then you saw Eddie running straight towards the kitchen, opening the oven, inviting more smoke to cover everything. When he brought out the muffins, they were pitch black and on fire, "Shit!".
。⋆୨୧˚ Well, when you saw that fire, you ran straight to the fire extinguisher and squeezed down the fire extinguisher, but unlucky for Eddie, he was in the splash zone and got sprayed; he and the muffins were covered in foam, but the muffin wasn't on fire at least!
。⋆୨୧˚ "Surprise?" Eddie said while turning to you; you just raised your eyebrow at his comment.
。⋆୨୧˚ "Not to be mean, Ed, but remind me never to let you cook again." you looked at the charcoal muffins; Eddie shameful nodded at the compromise, "I'm sorry, Y/N, I just tried to make breakfast for you, and I got bored then the burnt the muffins, I-im just really sorr-" soon he was cut off by you kissing him.
。⋆୨୧˚ "I know you tried your best, Eddie but try to leave the heavy lifting to me" you squished his face, "Anyways, are you hungry?"
ੈ✩‧₊˚ 𝐒𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐲: You and Eddie have a fantastic date.
ੈ✩‧₊˚ 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐦𝐞: Fluff
ੈ✩‧₊˚𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐝𝐬: 920
Today was a great day, especially when you went to school; surprising, you even got a free cupcake from one of the prep kids.
But classes were boring as always, but something else brightened your day your boyfriend of 6 months asked on a date; you were thrilled when he asked; you were practically jumping in the hallways.
You couldn't wait; your feet were tapping on the floor impatiently, glancing back at the clock, waiting for your class to end finally. When I tell you when the bell rings, you grab your backpack and books, rush to your locker, and rush straight towards that door.
First one there, you had to get home immediately to get ready, but you had to wait for your sibling because you were on babysitter patrol; since then, did you become Steve Harrington? Here is slow, especially Erica talking to her little friends.
"Erica Sinclair! can you please get in this car" you yelled at her.
"Your not the boss of me" she turned to you crossing her embarrassed, yelling at her in front of her friends.
"Yes, am I, little girl. Now get in the damn car." you were getting irritated at her actions, but thank God she got into the car, or you were about to erupt.
The car drive was as silent as ever, and as soon as you got into the shower to freshen up, you needed to relax; who doesn't like to have a good shower. Now you were at your vanity, doing your makeup, and you decided to do a natural look with a little fountain, some bronzer, blush, mascara, eyeliner, and eyeshadow.
After you were done the look, you opened your closest to introduce an option, an option of clothing to miss and match together. You wear a white shirt, a frog-themed sweater your grandma knit for you, and denim pants.
You added some gold bangles, a necklace, and green earrings. After you were done, you admired yourself in the mirror, and you looked like a celebrity in all your glory. You fluff up your hair and fix up your hair. Then, a noise came from your window, and outside was your lover boy. You felt like you were on cloud 9.
You quickly ran downstairs just to be caught by your little sister, Erica.
"Y\N, where are you going at this time" Erica crossed her arms.
"None of your business, Erica" you looked back and her while getting your coat from the closet.
"It probably with that boy, Eddie munson," Erica roared, catching your brother's attention.
"Wait, your dating Eddie; why did nobody tell me this!" Lucas exclaimed.
"I don't need you to be questioning me; now, if guys could please get out of business, I would be happier." you smiled.
"Well, it's hard to not be in your business when you have a diary" Erica rolled her eyes
"WAIT, YOU READ MY DIARY" you stop putting on your jacket, making it droop on the side.
"Well, not only me but Lucas read it also"
"Erica...."
"You too, Lucas!!" You stared at them in disbelief, " You know I'll deal with you when I get home," fixing up your jacket and opening the door to see him outside.
"Well, hello, gorgeous," he smiles at you,
"Well, you look charming as always, Eddie," as you hugged him, "Shall we, princess" Eddie gently grabbed your hand and kissed it.
"We shall," you giggles at the sudden action, flushed someone might say.
Then after you and Eddie got into his van and went to a diner called 'ROSIES,' the diner was lovely; you and Eddie sat in the corner of the diner, you know, the "romantic side," one will say. Although it was a bit awkward, you guys held a good conversation, but it was going well.
Soon the waitress scrolled away; here to take your guy's order; well, to you, she was a bit sketchy, but she was rubbing up on Eddie. You didn't want to admit it, but you were jealous, A, because her tone totally changed when it came to you ordering.
Well, I might as well sauce up the problem; you gladly ordered chicken nuggets and fries; I know, childish, but you were a picky eater. That was the only thing that looked appealing.
"How mature," the waitress made a snark remark that almost got you at your seat but let's keep it classy.
You just smiled at her; after that, there was awkward tension between you and Eddie until Eddie broke the silence.
"How do you like it?"
"Like what?"
"The date" he exclaimed
"I like it; thanks for taking me out!" You smiled at him.
"It's really no problem" he brushed it off like he didn't care, but deep down, you knew he cared.
Soon your conversation was cut off by the waitress with your food. The food was good as expected, and the conservation held up through the whole date.
After the date, you guys hung out at a park; it was fun, swinging on the swing set, going down the slide, and going on the monkey bars. Needless to say, the whole date was terrific, especially when you are with Eddie.
But soon, it ended; Eddie drove you back home, and you kissed him before you departed. Thankfully your parents weren't home yet, but you see Lucas and his friends on the couch staring at you, and before you can escape it, they start bombarding you with questions; how fun. :D
☆ 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐦𝐞: 𝐀𝐧𝐠𝐬𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐅𝐥𝐮𝐟𝐟
☆ 𝐒𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐲: 𝐄𝐯𝐞𝐧 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐧𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭, 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐛𝐞 𝐛𝐲 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐬𝐢𝐝𝐞. (Let's pretend that Vecna died.)
☆ Words : 1,229
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What they called the Upside is what you call a hell hold; right now, you were with Eddie and Dustin; you guys were inside the upside-down version of Eddie's trailer, back to back, holding homemade versions of weapons.
Spears and shields, you would think of never thought of this predicament, especially if it involved your siblings; you should have never admitted to this.
But now, you guys were scared out of your boots, waiting for the time of the human-eating, probably starving bats were outside, finding a way inside.
You really thought it was clear, and rested your tensed-up shoulder, they found a way to the vent on the roof. They were starving, there were hissing, all you ran towards the vent and started stabbing them with your spears.
"Why did I admit to this" you groan in regret.
"..I have no idea," Eddie muttered
You looked at him, annoyed at his answer,
"..Aren't you my boyfriend? Shouldn't you be giving me reasons I came at least!" you grumbled, looking away from him.
"Can't you think for yourself, Y/N? You are a big girl now!" he smiled at you.
"Are you calling me fat?" crossing your arms.
After what he said, you guys started arguing, like if it wasn't enough, you were in the world of monsters.
"Uh, guys!" Dustin whispered and yelled.
You and Eddie were still arguing and ignoring Dustin; it made you angry at the fact he had the nerve to say that.
"GUYS!" Dustin yelled out, which caught your and Eddie's attention,,
"What!" you guys said in sync.
"A-are there any more vents or openings in here" Dustin stuttered, looking around.
"Shit," Eddie grumbled and ran to the nearest vent, but it was too late, the bats were flooding into the room.
The next thing you hear is a loud slam from the door, "We need to go." Eddie yelled
The next thing you can remember is being near the gate to the human world(?); Dustin was the first to climb the binding rope, then it was your turn; you did hesitate; something inside you felt like something terrible was going to happen.
"Please don't do anything stupid, Eddie," you told him and climbed the rope, landing on the mattress. You looked up at the gate and anxiously waited for Eddie; something was etched on Dustin's face.
"...Eddie!" you yelled,
"Eddie, what are you doing?" Dustin yelled
He never came down; the next thing you heard made your heart drop.
"I'm going to buy us some time" he yelled out
"..Is he serious."
Dustin had a scared look on his face, "Dustin, can you pass me a chair" you yelled.
"What are you doing? ....What do I tell Lucas if you don't make it back."
"Don't question me, boy, pass me the damn chair" you looked at him with a piss-off expression.
He complied with your request, and you jumped into that shitty hell hold. '..And I told him not to do anything fucking stupid." you grumbled,
The fall wasn't too good, you landed on your legs if it wasn't the worse thing ever. You didn't see Eddie anywhere, this worried you.
If this wasn't the worse thing, the bats had to be the worse thing, they were there too. You ran outside and close the door so fast, that a cheetah would be jealous.
You looked around, couldn't see anything but you did see something missing, a bike. 'He didn't, not on my watch", you started running faster than you did before, faster than you did track, faster than you could ever think your body could move.
Thank the heaven above that he was still alive but wasn't doing too good. You didn't stop running though, even if you were in heat of danger you just need to stop him from this suicidal task.
You pacing yourself, and run to Eddie, pushing him over from getting his head removed.
"What the hell was that Eddie" you yelled at him.
He didn't answer you or didn't seem too interested in what you had to say, "..Did you know what you just did, Eddie. Your head almost fucking came off, you have cuts everywhere" you screamed letting your anger out.
That must have been the final straw for him because he came with the same energy.
"You know what I did, I have been running my whole fucking life, Y/N. I just wanted to seek some time of redemption I was looking for my whole, life at least not dying a fucking coward for once" he yelled, you have never seen this side of Eddie, the angry side.
Tears slowly stain your face, "Y-you could have died, you know that" you yelled in anger.
"Y-you could have died", "Eddie...I won't know what to do without you, ed" you caress his face.
"..Y/N.."
"..I'm sorry" Eddie dejected
"You shouldn't be; I should be sorry.", Soon, you and Eddie shared a passionately kiss. But the danger wasn't cleared at least yet. The enemy was near.
"We gotta go, Eddie," you whispered; you ripped off a piece of your shirt and wrapped it onto Eddie's wound, "This will hurt" you pressed the fabric onto his wound, at least stopping the blood flow.
You hauled him onto your back and held onto his legs, trying to run but couldn't because damn, who knew he weight that much. You managed to get him back to the trailer, but the hardest part for getting him out.
"Dustin can you catch something heavy" you yelled out the gate
"I guess so, why"
"Just get prepared"
You got Eddie's body into the human world; now it's just you.
To summarize, you both managed to make it alive; you did have to hesitate to get him to hospital with the allegations of him being a satanist, but you had to you couldn't see him in pain.
☆ Time Skip
To summarize, Eddie lived even with the wound on his stomach; Eddie made an arrest for the counts of Chrissy's death and the deaths of others but managed to be not guilty of the counts of murder throughout Hawkins. He also beat the satanist allegations and rumors around Hawkins and earned compensations in the law of justice, it seems too good to be accurate, but you were happy to see Eddie not having to hide. The good part is that you and Eddie got to graduate from Hawkins. Eddie's career as being rockstar flourished, and his band became a lot popular, gaining a lot of fans. Needless you were happy.
You went to college, and Eddie didn't, but he still supported your life choices.
☆ 5 years later
You and Eddie decided to move out of Hawkins to go to California and move into a Spanish Mediterranean architecture home. The future for you and Eddie was bright; you guys spend all your time together when he is not on tour. You guys really enjoyed hangout and being together.
Needless to say, you were thrilled Eddie popped the question and proposed to you. You had a small, little cute wedding. Then, not even a week later, you got pregnant and had beautiful twins, one boy, one girl.
It felt like a dream to live with the love of your life; you guys were like partners in crime, two peas in a pod, and most special soulmates. :D
_______________________________________________
"𝐀𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐥𝐬 𝐑𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐓𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐬" 𝐄𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝟏
𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐦𝐞 : 𝐀𝐧𝐠𝐬𝐭
𝐒𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐲- 𝐘𝐨𝐮 𝐝𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐰𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐚 𝐥𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐨 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐛𝐞𝐥𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐦𝐞𝐚𝐧𝐬 𝐚 𝐥𝐨𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐲𝐨𝐮, 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐟𝐞𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐚 𝐥𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐧𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝.
𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐝𝐬 : 368
It was really year, Eddie.
86' like you said, the year you finally would have graduated, but I would have never thought of it of your death. Instead, I remember it as if it was a memory haunting me.
My eyes were puffy...red, from crying. At the moment, I was praying for at least anyone, any person, any god, to save you from the grasp of death.
I was hugging you, pressing you to my chest, hoping at least the warmth of my body could cause, so what cure you. I yelled for help, but nobody could hear me in this hell.
Dustin was there. I could also see tears falling from his face, from seeing his own idol dying just for saving a town, A town that hated you, A TOWN THAT WANTED YOU DEAD.
I didn't understand then, but maybe this is the redemption you seek now. Hopefully, you are looking or walking towards the pearly gates.
You deserved it being a hero, but you should have just run; maybe you'd still be alive by now. Even steve told you not to be a hero, but you did, and your sacrifices would not be vain.
Vecna isn't dead as I hope. I wanted that bastard dead. He should be destroyed, just to know that he escapes like pussy he is. So many people are moving away from Hawkins, especially about the allegations and the rumors about the town.
I'm spending my spring break helping around the town, especially after the massive earthquake. I hope you know Eddie that I miss. I miss you a lot, and I know you wouldn't want to see me crying, but the pain is too much to bear without you being here.
..and I will love you even the rest of my life, even if you are not physically there, I know you are watching me with your white, fluffy, cute wings too, but I just miss your hugs, smile, and your metal personality.
Hopefully, you won't get lonely over there, and I really miss you, just please don't forget me.
From your darling,
Y/N
✝ After reading the letter, you took a red rose and placed it on his grave.
Oh the pain..
✧・゚: 𝐖𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠: 𝐍𝐨𝐧𝐞, 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐟𝐥𝐮𝐟𝐟 :𝐃 ✿
✧・゚: 𝐄𝐝𝐝𝐢𝐞 𝐱 𝐁𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐤!𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫 ✿
______________________________________________________________
You were in your room getting ready for your date, laying down all your cute clothes and jewelry.
You wanted to look good but too good, yet also chic but not too stylish, just something that expresses you, because anything you wear outside express how you live and act.
You even got your legs shaved and got a mani-pedi.
Soon you were interrupted by your irritating sister, Erica. Always in your business like it was the wild west.
"Y/N, where are you going" Erica questioned you,
"Why is where I'm going, your concern?" you looked back at her.
"...Because mom and dad left the house and told me that you have babysit me, and Lucas is going to do some stupid thing with his nerd friends.."
"What" you gasp
"That's totally unfair," you complained.
"Well, life isn't fair, ain' it," your little sister blabbed out.
Before you could even hear what she said, you ran down the hallway away from your room and went towards Lucas. You didn't even knock. You just bust open that door.
"What the heck Y/N" Lucas yelled out
"Lucas..my little brother Lucas, for a love of a sister, can yo-" you were soon cut off,
"No"
"What do you mean no? I barely said anything."
"What you were about to say is for me to babysit Erica, and I will not"
"Please, Lucas, it's just one time. I will promise to repay you back."
"50 bucks"
"50 bucks for a one-time thing?"
"take or leave it"
"How about 15?"
Soon a long debate about how much money you have to pay Lucas to occur, and you guys finally got to agree on how much money you would pay, it was 25 bucks.
You finally got to properly get ready now, without any disturbances or that when you thought, then you heard rocks hitting your window.
You opened your window, annoyed by who was attacking your window, only to find out it was your boyfriend, Eddie.
Eyes brighten up with joy to your boyfriend, and how convenient it of him to come just on time, you rushed downstairs and went outside to see your date.
Eddie decided to have a picnic date with you. It was cute and elaborately planned. It was a fun time. You had your picnic in a field of flowers, the area was beautiful, and you got to make some flower crowns for yourself and Eddie.
The moment you had with Eddie was everything, you really wished you could stay like that forever, but sadly all good things shall come to an end.
You were dropped off by Eddie, and you couldn't just leave him without giving him a kiss, which you did and not even 5 seconds later you were reprimanded by your parents. :D
Why are people talking about how Eddie would have a breeding kink like bro can't even graduate. 💀
38 years ago today, Eddie Munson lost his absolute mind listening to this album for the first time.
I believe in Eddie & his guitar supremacy 。◕‿◕。
Not only was death in his first name but his last name too-
F this, F that, F everything
Eddie stans seeing Joseph Quinn bts video be like:
🙃
How can anyone go "he's Satan, he's the Devil, he's blah blah blah." When Eddie literally is this!!! Your honor, he is adorable.
Whenever someone calls Eddie a freak, I want to hug him and tell him that everything is ok. Like how you calm down a startled puppy 👉👈
Eddie headcanon -
Eddie is named after Eddie Van Halen. It would make sense right? When Eddie's mother was pregnant with him, she listened to Eddie Van Halen and he loved it. That gave her the idea to name him Eddie..
Not to be a slut but I wonder how shirtless Eddie would look? I kinda want to see all his tattoos.... 😏
Eddie has the softest lips, eyes, and face. You don't get to change my mind. I mean, just look at him. 😍