Chapter Text
Eddie’s mouth still tastes like blood. He’s pretty sure it’s all in his head, since he definitely swallowed some quarry water on his way in, and before that were the sewers and the choking dust of the collapsing house. Plenty of other revolting flavors to cover it up, but he swears that the taste still lingers. It makes his own mouth feel repellent and alien.
The others are sprawled out on the muddy weed-choked shore in various poses of exhaustion. The only exception is Richie, who is still waist-deep in the greenish water, frowning down at the broken glasses in his hand. His soggy black t-shirt wilts against his body. He hasn’t shaved since yesterday morning at least, and his stubble is coming in rough and more gray than not. With his glasses off, the hollows under his eyes seem more pronounced. He looks tired, and old, and somehow more like a stranger than he did in the Jade two days ago when Eddie saw him for the first time in more than twenty years.
Like the rest of them, he’s rinsed the worst of the grime off, but there’s still blood crusted under his nose, in a thin crescent drying dark over his upper lip. Eddie scrapes his tongue against his teeth, shuddering at the raw-meat sensation of it, and looks away.
Richie hasn’t really said anything to him, but he hasn’t really said much to anyone else, either, so Eddie doesn’t know whether or not he should take it personally. He’s so tired right now that it feels like a perfectly good and reasonable idea to just shut his eyes and take a nap right here on the bank, still drenched in greywater and whatever noxious soup of heavy metals and microbes is in the quarry water. His fucking cheek is still bleeding.
So maybe it is blood after all. His own blood, and not Richie’s. That would make more sense, actually.
“I think,” he mumbles finally. “I think I should probably go to the walk-in.”
It takes a while for any of them to respond, and then Mike says, “Oh, right, your cheek.”
It’s not actually a funny thing to say, but Eddie finds himself laughing anyway, a thin, mildly hysterical giggle. “Right. I don’t know what I’m even doing swimming in all this shit—do you guys know what’s in here?”
Bev starts laughing quietly without lifting her head from where it’s pillowed against Ben’s thigh. His fingers are stroking through her grimy hair with a tenderness that almost hurts to see. Eddie doesn’t know when the hell that happened, although admittedly he’s been kind of fucking distracted by his own likely impending demise. Among other things.
“I’m sorry,” she says finally. “I knew you’d hate this.”
“I do,” Eddie says. “I do hate this. It’s so unsanitary, and I already have an open wound, and—”
There’s a splash, and he looks up in time to see Richie lean down toward the water, swearing softly under his breath.
“Sorry,” he says when he realizes that they’re looking at him. He swipes a hand over his wet face. “Dropped my glasses.”
“I hate to say it, but it didn’t look like they were really fixable,” Mike says. Richie clears his throat, then barks out an odd, sharp fragment of a laugh.
“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. I have a spare set back at—at the Town House, so—anyway. Are we gonna go get Eddie stitched up, or what? Because I could really go for a shower and a fucking nap right now.”
He doesn’t quite look at Eddie as he says it. There’s something strangely brittle about him right now that makes Eddie’s shoulders hunch in sympathetic anxiety.
“Yeah,” Mike says, and unfolds painfully onto his feet, reaching down to pull Bill up as well. Ben helps Bev up.
“I need to call my wife,” Stan adds. “Mike, if you want to take Eddie, I can give everybody else a ride back to the Town House.”
“Sounds good to me,” Mike says. “Eddie?”
“Yeah, okay.” Eddie pauses, and realizes belatedly that he’s waiting for Richie to jump in with a comment or a joke, or—something. But Richie is just slogging toward the shore, head down, water sluicing off of him. He seems lumbering, slump-shouldered and slow: like he’s weighted down with more than simple exhaustion.
“You okay?” Eddie asks, once Richie is close enough that he can do it quietly. Richie gives him a sidelong look without quite making eye-contact.
“Yeah, man. I’m fine. Just—fucking tired. Mildly traumatized. Covered in shit-water. Other than that—”
“God, please don’t remind me,” Eddie sighs with a shudder. “I keep having to remind myself that it’s not actually a good idea to bathe in bleach. I’m going to have to burn these clothes.”
Richie snorts laughter as they fall into step behind the others, heading back toward the cars, and the knot in Eddie’s gut eases just a little.
Mike has a couple of blankets in the back of his car, fortunately, so they’re not dripping their general disgustingness into the upholstery during the ten-minute drive to Derry’s one walk-in clinic. It passes mostly in silence; Mike’s car radio is set to NPR, but he turns it off after a few minutes of Mara Liasson’s campaign trail interviews, and Eddie is both relieved and unnerved by the silence.
Soon enough, he’ll hug Mike and thank him and apologize for leaving him alone all this time. Soon enough he’ll ask about how Mike’s life has been these past twenty-seven years. Right now his mouth feels gummy and disgusting, his thoughts fragmented with exhaustion and what may actually be a late-onset panic attack. He grips his knees tight and stares at the white bolts of his knuckles under his skin, trying to remember how to breathe.
“You okay?” Mike asks eventually, gently. Derry slides by outside the windows, sun-bleached and so bright that it feels like Eddie’s eyes are still adjusting from the caverns even though it’s been at least an hour since they surfaced.
“I’m fucking great,” Eddie says, and it comes out horrible: brittle and uneven and sharp enough to cut. “I am—great, Mike, thanks for asking.”
“Yeah,” Mike sighs. He reaches over to jostle Eddie’s shoulder lightly without looking away from the road. “Want me to pull over?”
“No.” Eddie closes his eyes, doesn’t think about the inhaler that’s just a scrap of melted slag under a pile of rubble. He doesn’t need it. He’s never needed it. He can breathe just fucking fine without it. He flexes his hands on his knees, then takes a slow breath to the count of four, holds it, and lets it out. He does that a couple more times, then opens his eyes to glance over at Mike’s profile, the poorly concealed worry on his face. “I’m okay. Sorry.”
Richie would give him a hard time about it. Bill or Ben would prod him gently to make sure he’s really okay. Mike just nods, flicking the turn signal on to pull down a side street. “All right.”
The walk-in is a newer building, blond wood and light gray faux-fieldstone that looks like it probably went up in the late 90’s and hasn’t been maintained since then: like all of Derry, it has a vague air of rot under the facade. Peeling varnish and insect damage around the door.
In the clinic, the receptionist does a visibly revolted double-take at his appearance but says nothing as she slides over a stack of paperwork to fill out. Mike steps out into the lobby to make a phone call, and he’s still out there when the nurse comes in to fetch Eddie. Eddie has a brief, insane impulse to call him back in, which he stomps down just in time. Derry might be bringing the worst parts of his childhood up to the surface, but he’s not actually a fucking child, and he’s certainly capable of sitting still through a handful of stitches in an antiseptic little room without Mike to hold his hand.
“We’ll give you a local,” the doctor who examines him says. She hasn’t said anything about his general condition, other than to have the nurses clean the area around the wound carefully. “It looks like it was pretty clean. Shouldn’t take more than...hmm, maybe eight stitches? We’ll have you right out of here, Mr. Kaspbrak.”
“Thanks,” Eddie says stiffly, and he sits still for the lidocaine shot and the sickening tugging sensation of the stitches. He vaguely takes in the aftercare instructions and the sheets of paper he’s handed, and escapes out into the lobby without even bothering to make a follow-up appointment. He’s more aware than ever of how fucking grimy he is, and he’s beginning to doubt his capacity to keep from having a screaming public breakdown if he spends any longer in here.
Mike is off the phone by the time he gets out to the lobby. He gives Eddie a long look, and Eddie tries to arrange his face into something that doesn’t look completely unhinged. He’s not sure he actually manages it, but Mike shuffles him back to the car without a single judgmental word.
At the Town House, he gathers up clean clothes and his toiletry bag and knocks on doors until Bill, who is the only one still awake, lets him in to use his shower. He’s heavy-eyed and untalkative and looks about as exhausted as Eddie feels, and the room is dark by the time Eddie gets out of the shower. Eddie murmurs his thanks and slips out of the room without waiting for an answer.
His own room poses something of a problem. Probably, he could go arrange to get another room at the front desk—the place seems completely deserted other than them—but the idea of going down the two flights of stairs and tracking down another human being who works here and then explaining the whole mess just suddenly seems like… entirely too much. He heads back to his room instead, ducks his head briefly into the bathroom, which is still demolished and covered in blood but doesn’t appear to have any serial killers in it.
Fucking good enough. He’ll freak about everything later, when he’s awake. He pulls the door shut and collapses onto the bed and is unconscious before he can even get the blankets over himself.
He doesn’t know if he dreams, but he wakes up bleary and out of sorts some time later. It’s still light out, and the quality of it is disorienting: a fading orange sunset glow that reminds him sharply and unpleasantly of the Deadlights. Richie floating like a broken doll, pale and lifeless with blood drifting up…
Eddie groans, levering himself up on the edge of the mattress. The anesthetic has worn off, and his injured cheek feels stiff and sore. He prods at it with his tongue without quite meaning to, winces, and scrubs his hands over his eyes, then strikes his temples lightly, like he’s made out of wet clay: like he can mash himself back into his proper shape with his bare hands.
He’s not even sure what his proper shape is. He feels alien to himself, somehow, sitting here in this chintzy hotel room with the hot sunset coming in through the flimsy blinds and lighting the room up orange. He licks his lips and tastes blood again, and this time he fucking knows it’s his imagination.
Richie had blood on his mouth. His nose had been gushing with it, and once he landed on the rocks it stopped floating. It coated his whole mouth and chin in gore, and it was the only thing Eddie could taste when he kissed him. The blood, and Richie’s cool, motionless lips under his. His blank, clouded eyes. Eddie has never kissed a man before, but he doesn’t think that’s what disturbs him about it. It didn’t feel like Richie he was kissing; it didn’t feel like a person. It was like kissing a statue. Or a corpse.
He swallows convulsively, then scrubs his hand over his mouth and goes to brush his teeth until even the memory of blood is drowned out in the sharp mint flavor of his toothpaste. His cheek aches furiously by the time he’s done.
The light has started to dim when he comes out of the bathroom, feeling slightly more anchored in reality. He flips the bedside lamp on and exchanges his pajama pants for a pair of jeans, moving stiffly. Between the panic and the stab wound, he hadn’t really noticed before, but he’s covered in bruises. It’s actually probably a wonder that nothing seems to be broken; that they aren’t all even more battered than they are.
That nobody actually ended up dead. He’s still not sure he believes that one. There’s a part of him that’s convinced this is all just another illusion and he’ll turn around at any moment to see his friends’ torn-open bodies and the leper advancing on him with silver eyes and sharp teeth sprouting out of its rotting jaw.
He shudders and pulls his shoes on hastily, suddenly desperate to get out of his empty room.
When he steps out into the hallway he can hear voices from downstairs: Bev and Ben, at least, and he’s pretty sure Stan’s down there, too. Richie’s door is still shut, no sound coming from beyond it, and Eddie pauses in front of it for a long moment before he forces himself to keep walking.
Bev and Ben are at the bar, Stan tucked into a corner of the room with his phone pressed to his ear. He glances up when Eddie comes in and gives a little wave, which Eddie returns before he goes to sit at the bar.
“Patty?” he asks, nodding toward Stan.
“No, he talked to her earlier. He’s ordering food, I think,” Bev says.
“As long as it’s not Chinese. I think I’m going to have a stress response to fortune cookies for a while now.”
“Yeah. Jesus.” Bev rubs her hands over her arms, and leans into Ben when he settles a hand on her shoulder. It’s just a moment, before she twitches away, and Ben lets her go. “I’m gonna—go have a cigarette.”
She slips out the door, digging through her purse, and Eddie watches her light up and exhale smoke out into the deepening gloom before he turns back to Ben. “Is she okay?”
“Are any of us?” Ben asks, which, fair point.
Eddie shudders again. He scrubbed his skin nearly raw in the shower earlier, but it still feels crawling and grimy. “Yeah. Yeah, fuck,” he mutters, and rests his elbows on the bartop, dropping his head into his hands.
“Drink?” Ben asks.
“Why the fuck not.”
A soft huff of laughter, and then there’s the sound of glass clinking, a bottle opening. A glass is pushed between his elbows a moment later, filling Eddie’s nose with the sharp piney scent of good gin. He takes a drink, then sets it back down. “Thanks.”
“Of course.”
“I don’t really drink, normally,” Eddie says, and picks up his glass again.
“I do,” Ben says. When Eddie glances over at him, he’s got an awkward little smile on his face. “Too much, probably. Half of it’s just so I can sit at the bar and have someone to talk to. Kind of sad, huh?”
“No,” Eddie says, although it is. It’s not like he’s got room to talk, though. He can’t remember the last non-work related conversation he voluntarily had with anyone. Unless he counts Myra, which he probably should, but the very idea of facing the pile of messages she’s left on his voicemail over the past twelve hours makes his whole body thrum with low-level panic, so he’s trying not to think about her at all.
He takes another drink and watches Ben out of the corner of his eye. “So,” he says finally. “You and Bev, huh?”
Ben shrugs a little, but he’s smiling. “Yeah.”
“Good for you,” Eddie says, and looks back down at his glass. He’s thinking of the cistern, a memory twenty-seven years old. Ben, soft-cheeked and young, clutching at Beverly’s lifeless floating body. Pressing a desperate kiss to her mouth and hauling her into a hug when she woke up gasping.
And then last night: Richie, lifeless and floating. His slack cold bloody lips and the way he didn’t gasp awake until after Eddie pulled back. Eddie spins the glass with shaking hands, then takes another drink. The liquor is starting to hit him with a soothing warmth blooming out from the pit of his stomach, but his hands still feel cold.
“Thanks,” Ben says, and Eddie has to actually cast his mind back to remember what they were talking about. He’s still exhausted, and the downside of his five-hour midday nap is that he’s probably not going to sleep much tonight. He doesn’t flinch when Ben touches his arm, but it’s a near thing. “How about you, how are you doing?”
“Great,” Eddie mumbles. “Everybody’s fine, everybody’s alive, I’m great.”
“Yeah,” Ben says, with a little huff of laughter. Eddie is saved from having to respond by footsteps on the stairs. He jerks his head up, anxiously certain that it's Richie, but it’s Bill, heavy-eyed and wild-haired, rubbing at the imprint of a pillow seam down the side of his cheek.
“Hey, guys,” he says, and collapses onto the bar stool next to Eddie. “Mike’s on his way over.”
“Food should be here in twenty minutes,” Stan adds, tucking his phone away as he approaches. “Pizza. I got some garlic knots and an antipasto too, should be enough for everybody. Has anybody seen Richie yet?”
“I think he’s still sleeping,” Bill yawns. “Didn’t hear him in there when I went by.”
“Yeah, me neither,” Eddie says. He rolls his shoulders and glances toward the stairs. He’s been sort of dreading talking to Richie again, but there’s suddenly another kind of dread bubbling up inside of him. What if there are some lingering effects from the Deadlights? What if Richie was hurt worse than he seemed to be? Eddie’s body feels like one big bruise right now, and he didn’t fall fifteen feet onto a pile of rocks after getting his mind torn into by an interdimensional monster. Richie could have any number of internal injuries that wouldn’t have been obvious right away—they should have made him go to the walk-in, forget about the two-inch hole in Eddie’s cheek. He could have had an aneurysm, he could have been bleeding out internally this whole time while Eddie napped and drank gin and dithered like an idiot—
Eddie pushes his seat back and stands up so abruptly that he goes lightheaded. “I’ll go make sure he’s, uh—I’ll get him.”
“Are you—” Ben starts to ask, but Eddie is already heading for the stairs.
The burst of panic already feels stupid by the time he gets to Richie’s room. He knows—he fucking knows that he’s probably just spiraling, that he’s hungry and tired and has just been through one of the most supremely fucked up events of his life. Richie is almost certainly fine, and Eddie should almost certainly just let him fucking sleep.
He knocks sharply on the door anyway. There’s no response, so he knocks again, louder. “Rich? You awake?”
Silence. Not so much as an irritated grumble; not so much as a snore. Fear coils a cold knot in the pit of Eddie’s stomach. He knocks again, knuckles falling on the wood hard enough to hurt. “Richie!”
The silence stretches out, and then there’s a groan, the sound of springs creaking, lumbering footsteps. Eddie sags slightly in relief, and barely manages to start feeling stupid again before the door swings open. Richie leans heavily on the doorframe in plaid boxers and a wrinkled t-shirt, hair all over the place. His eyes are bloodshot and puffy with sleep.
“Dude,” he says. “Is the fucking building on fire, or what?”
“I, uh,” Eddie says, and makes a face. “Sorry. Stan ordered food. I just came to see if you were awake.”
“Well, I sure fucking am now,” Richie grumbles, but he doesn’t sound all that put-out about it. He turns to head back into the darkened room without pulling the door shut behind him, so Eddie lingers there, watching as he scrubs a hand over his face, scratches his belly idly, then leans over to root through the duffel bag spilling unfolded laundry across the foot of the bed. His bare legs are long and pale under his boxer shorts, and there’s a mottled patch of dark bruising across the backs of both thighs that makes Eddie hiss involuntarily when he sees it.
“What?” Richie asks, glancing back at him, then down at himself. He makes an awkward face like it’s only just occurred to him that he’s in his underwear. “Jesus, I’m sorry, just let me—”
“No, just—does that hurt?”
“What?” Richie says, following Eddie’s gaze. His expression does something odd, and Eddie realizes that it does in fact sort of look like he’s staring at Richie’s ass, but before he can try to sputter some denial that’ll sound wildly suspicious, Richie laughs and says, “Oh. I mean, yeah, but I’ve definitely done worse to myself partying.”
“What the fuck kind of parties are you going to?”
“Not recently, I’m fucking respectable these days—”
“Your last special had a five-minute bit about taco shits.”
Richie cackles, pulling a pair of jeans out of his duffel and dragging them on over his boxers. He does wince at the movement, but he doesn’t otherwise seem all that discomfited. His strange mood from earlier seems to have faded; his face is tired but otherwise perfectly cheerful. “I still can’t believe you actually watched that shit.”
“You made that shit.”
“Yeah, but at least I got fuckin’ paid.” He leans to grab a pair of glasses off his nightstand, an exact duplicate of the pair he lost in the quarry. Off Eddie’s look, he shrugs. “I buy like five pairs at a time, I break them fucking constantly.”
“You haven’t changed at all, huh?”
“I mean, I’m a little taller,” Richie says, still smiling slightly, and Eddie realizes that he was braced for a dick joke. The lack of one leaves him oddly off-balance. Before he can even think about pointing it out, Richie jams his feet into a pair of shoes and adds, “Come on, let’s go eat Stan’s food and I’ll tell you all about the time I almost broke my neck falling off of a balcony at Liv Tyler’s Y2K party.”
“No way you got invited to Liv Tyler’s party, you fucking liar.”
“Well, okay, invited is a strong word,” Richie says, pulling the door shut behind him as he steps out into the hall, and Eddie finds himself leaning into his space, drawn into his orbit just like he always was as a kid. “I had this buddy who was working as a sound engineer with Universal, and we ended up crashing it, so…”
“Jesus Christ,” Eddie sighs, but he feels a smile pulling at his mouth as he follows Richie down the stairs. Richie was like that as a kid, too. He had a knack for finding the kind of trouble that made for good stories, the kind of reckless moxie that Eddie found equal parts magnetic and infuriating. It’s no surprise that Richie became a comedian; he’s always been a storyteller, and he’s always been funny. The only surprise is that he doesn’t write his own material, and Eddie says as much as they get to the lobby, his verbal filters strained to failing by exhaustion and everything else.
Richie pauses, glances back at him, and makes an odd face. “Yeah, well. Kinda hard when you’re missing the first eighteen years of your life, man.”
“So does that mean you’re going to start now?”
“Depends,” Richie says, and raises his voice slightly as they come into the lobby. Mike has come in while Eddie was upstairs, and he’s sharing the loveseat with Bill, talking quietly. “Mikey, what’s the verdict? Are we going to actually remember this time once we leave?”
Mike shrugs with one shoulder. “I don’t know why not. It’s dead. There shouldn’t be anything stopping us…”
“Yeah, fuckin’ better be,” Richie says, and flings himself onto a bar stool. Eddie doesn’t miss the wince that follows, but he covers it up pretty quickly. “Because I love you, man, but if you call me back here to fight a sewer clown again, I’m blocking your number.”
“Seconded,” Stan mutters. He rubs at his wrists briefly, and Eddie sees Bev watching him with the drawn and fragile look she’s been aiming at all of them sporadically since the other night.
None of us make it another twenty years. I’ve seen all of us die. All of us—
Patricia found me in time, was what Stan said, with a sharp, tense look that forbade any further questioning. Eddie’s not stupid, though.
Morbidly, he wonders what death she saw for him. He can guess Richie’s.
He rolls his shoulders with a sudden shudder. “Ben, is that my glass?”
“Yeah,” Ben says, and tips some more gin into it without asking before sliding it over. Eddie collapses into the seat next to Richie’s and takes it.
“Some fuckin’ party this is,” Richie mutters, leaning over the bar to come up with a bottle of whiskey. “Does anybody even work here? Are we gonna get the cops called on us for stealing booze? I’m in enough trouble with my publicist as it is.”
“I really, really do not give a fuck,” Eddie says, and swallows most of his drink in a single gulp, blinking away the tears that come to his eyes at the cold burn of it. “Four of you are millionaires. You can pick up the tab for this one.”
“I’ll get it,” Bill says. “It’s m-my fault we were ever there in the first place.”
“Oh, don’t start that martyr shit,” Richie grumbles. He tacks a smile onto the end of it, but it’s a sharp-edged and brittle one, and maybe Richie isn’t actually as okay as he seemed right after Eddie dragged him out of bed. He was always sweeter right after he woke up, and it’s a surprise that Eddie can remember that now, that his hazy memories of countless sleepovers from thirty years ago still hold true.
They're mercifully interrupted then by the arrival of the delivery guy bearing a thermal bag full of pizza. He barely gives the bizarre little gathering a second glance when Stan ushers him in, but Eddie guesses that most delivery people have seen weirder shit. Even in Derry, which is stiflingly normal over the underlying horror.
Richie and Bill have a brief but vicious argument about who’ll pay, which is interrupted when Ben calmly intercepts the delivery guy and hands him a platinum card. Eddie watches over his shoulder as he signs the screen and adds a tip that’s generous enough to get the guy out the door without any further questions.
“Thanks, Ben,” Mike says pointedly, and the other two drop the argument to grumble their thanks as well as they spread the bounty over all the rickety antique tables that are definitely not supposed to be exposed to pizza grease. Eddie thinks about pointing that out, then doesn’t. Instead, he loads his plate up with two pepperoni slices and a pile of garlic knots drowning in grease and goes back to the bar.
Eddie, what are you DOING, think of your CHOLESTEROL, he thinks, in the voice that always says that sort of thing to him: a sort of amalgamation of Myra and his mother. He doesn’t remember the last time he’s had pizza. He lives in fucking New York, and he doesn’t remember the last time he had pizza.
Shut up, Mommy, he thinks, and mercifully doesn’t say out loud. He tips some more gin into his glass and takes a huge bite of his pizza. It’s greasy and probably honestly not all that great, objectively, but it still tastes like the best thing he’s eaten in decades.
What a sad fucking life he’s lived. What a sad fucking end it would have been if he’d died down there.
“God, I don’t know the last time I’ve had pizza,” Bev says, with a groan that sounds borderline pornographic.
“Don’t you live in Chicago?” Richie asks. “What they have there isn’t pizza, Miss Martian, it’s a fucked-up casserole.”
“You live in California, I don’t want to hear it.”
“At least we have good sushi out there.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever had good sushi,” Mike says wistfully, from his seat on the couch.
“Add it to the bucket list. After Florida, and—I don’t know, skydiving, nipple piercings, maybe a threesome or two—”
“Beep beep, Trashmouth.”
“You’re so fucking gross,” Eddie adds.
“Hey, man, I’m just throwing some ideas out there.”
“Thanks a lot,” Mike says.
“Seriously, though. You’re not sticking around here, are you?”
Mike sets his plate down on the floor beside his foot. His fingers rattle on his knee. Finally, he says, “I don’t know. I don’t—I don’t think I ever let myself think that far ahead.”
A silence follows that, and then Richie says, “Jesus fucking Christ, that’s sad.”
“Richie,” Bill says reproachfully.
“No, you know what—it is! It’s sad! Okay? Mike, man, you’ve spent the past forty fuckin’ years stuck here, you can go fucking—live your life! Do shit you actually want to do! What do you want to do?”
“I…” Mike trails off, then shakes his head with a little laugh. “You know, I always thought about writing a book. Never got around to it, somehow. It always seemed like there were more important things to worry about.”
“Well, not anymore! There! Mike, write a book. I bet you can come up with a better ending than Bill, any day.”
“Hey,” Bill says, but it’s mild. Mike bumps his knee, laughing softly.
“It’d be nonfiction anyway. How about you?”
“I—ah. I need to call my wife, for one thing,” Bill says. He sets his plate down and rubs his knuckles between his eyebrows. “And my producer. And—y-you know, I might have already been fired, actually.”
“I’m sorry,” Mike says sincerely.
“N-no. It’s—it wasn’t your fault. I’m not worried about that. But I need to talk to Audra. I owe her more of an explanation than I gave her. About a lot of things, honestly.”
“Yeah,” Stan sighs. “Tell me about it.”
“Didn’t you already talk to Patty?” Eddie asks. He’s trying very hard not to think about the fifteen missed calls he had from Myra before he lost his phone in the sewers. If she hasn’t already tried to file a missing persons report on him, he’ll be very surprised. That’s something that he will absolutely have to deal with sometime in the near future. The very thought of it makes his stomach feel like it’s eating itself.
“I told her that I’m okay and that I miss her. I am not going to explain all this over the phone.”
Richie lets out a sharp burst of laughter from the bar. “Jesus, you’re planning on telling her? What, like—the truth?”
“I don’t lie to my wife,” Stan says primly.
Eddie drops his eyes, twisting his wedding ring around and around. It sits in the indent at the base of his finger, as much a part of his hand for the past ten years as his fingerprints and neatly trimmed nails. He doesn’t have much of a tan, but the white band of skin beneath it seems like a shocking contrast when he works it up over his knuckle. He hefts it in his palm for a moment; it’s not heavy, of course, but the small weight has a different quality like this.
When he glances up again, Richie is watching him, eyes unreadable behind his glasses. Eddie cringes, bracing for the joke, but it doesn’t come. Instead, Richie turns back toward Bev and starts heckling her choice of liquor, and Eddie clenches his fingers on the ring, then drops it into his pocket, a move that feels more momentous than it actually is.
He still needs to call Myra back. He still needs to go back to New York and deal with his life. Tempting as it is at the moment, he can’t spend the rest of his life hiding out in the Derry Town House getting drunk and eating pizza with these people he only remembered two days ago.
He can do it for tonight, though.
Bev’s delighted cackle breaks through his reverie. “Oh, oh definitely. Oh my god, that’s gonna be so fucking gross.”
“Hey, if you can’t handle it—”
“I’m not the one who pukes at the drop of a hat here.” She leans over the bar and comes back up with a bottle half-full of amber liquid with a bright yellow label. “To finish it off—”
“Gross,” Richie says appreciatively, and slides a pair of glasses already half-full of murky liquid toward her. “Top ‘em off.”
“Is that Fireball?” Ben asks, in a tone that straddles the line between fascinated and revolted. “What else—?”
“Jagermeister, vodka, and—what else is in there?”
“Spiced rum,” Richie says. He and Bev lift their glasses, clink them together, and then throw back the contents. Bev manages it with remarkable aplomb; Richie goes red and starts coughing, then scrubs a hand over his mouth. “Oh god. Oh Jesus Christ, that was a mistake.”
“Literally anyone could have told you that,” Eddie says, as Bev leans over to pat his shoulder, laughing. “You’re not going to throw up, are you?”
“Give me a second,” Richie gasps through his fingers, and Eddie surreptitiously starts peering around for a garbage can. A moment later, though, Richie drops his hand, takes a deep breath, and says, “Okay. Okay, I’m good. Molly Ringwald, you’re a machine. Hats off to you.”
Bev laughs, then gags theatrically. “Okay, I really need a glass of water, though.”
“Yeah, same,” Richie says, still ragged.
Ben slides out of his chair, laughing, to go get a pair of glasses. Eddie folds his paper plate neatly over the scraps of his dinner and drops it into the garbage can. He’s dropping back into his seat as Bev says, “So what about you, anyway, Trashmouth?”
“What about me?” Richie asks, accepting the glass of water Ben hands him. The flush has faded from his face, and he’s leaned against the bar in a lanky sprawl of limbs. Eddie watches his fingers rattle on the bartop before he sets the glass down and swipes absently at his mouth.
“How are you going to fix your life?”
“What?” Richie laughs. His shoulders hunch up briefly, then drop. “I get paid obscene amounts of money to get up on stage and tell jokes I didn’t even have to write. My life is fucking great.”
“Mike’s going to write a book. You could start writing your own material.”
“Yeah, I’m not really cut out for that confessional shit. Appealing to the lowest common denominator has been working out pretty well for me. You know.” His mouth pulls into a smile that seems less than amused. “The grand tradition of failing upward.”
“Must be nice,” Mike says dryly.
“Yeah, it’s fucking great.”
There’s a tension in the air now that unsettles Eddie. He watches as Stan straightens slightly in his chair, tucking his phone back into his pocket, expression going sharp.
“Okay, okay, shit,” Richie says, and scrubs both hands over his face. “Okay. Yeah. So it kind of fucking blows, what else is new. It was like that for all of us, right? Monkey’s paw bullshit.”
“You get everything you ever wanted and nothing you wanted at the same time,” Mike says. “If you leave, anyway. If you stay, well…”
He spreads his hands. He doesn’t really have to finish. If they stay, like Mike did, they get—Derry. That’s a monkey’s paw all its own.
“Yeah,” Richie mutters. For a second it seems like he might stop there, but then he heaves a breath and lets his hands drop, gripping the edge of the bar so hard that his knuckles go white. He’s not meeting any of their eyes. “Yeah, so. I guess if I wanted to fix all my shit I’d probably have to start with coming out. Um. Starting with you guys, I guess. So, yeah, I’m gay.”
“Oh,” Eddie says softly, without quite meaning to say it. He sees Richie’s eyes dart up toward him, then away. Tension knots his jaw. There’s a breath of silence, then two, then three, and then Ben leans over to clap him solemnly on the shoulder.
“Thank you for telling us,” he says, with the kind of sincerity that nobody but Ben could pull off. Thank god he said something before Eddie could blurt out whatever idiot thought bubbled up to his tongue first. “That was really brave of you.”
Richie sags briefly into the touch, then lets out a huff of laughter and twitches away.
“Yeah, I’m a regular fuckin’ hero. My manager’s gonna be thrilled. So that’s over with, thanks for your attention, can somebody please talk about literally anything else now?”
“I’m getting a divorce,” Bev offers. “I broke a picture frame over Tom’s face when he—” she breaks off, rubbing her bruised wrists. “Well. It was long overdue.”
“You know, if you want us to kill him for you, I’m already technically an axe-murderer.”
“Mike and I already hid one body,” Stan interjects, and Bill is nodding. Eddie is, too. It all has the flavor of a bitterly morbid joke, but he also knows he’d do it if she asked. They all would. He thinks that even Ben, sweet gentle Ben who used to carefully rescue spiders from the clubhouse before they could get smushed, would willingly bury an axe in Tom Rogan’s skull for what he did to Bev.
“Get in line,” Bev says. “I’m going to take the company, anyway. My friend Kay already hooked me up with a lawyer, and she said I have a case, so that’s what I’m doing. The designs are all mine anyway, and I want to watch him lose everything more than I want him dead. It’ll hurt a lot longer.”
“Vicious,” Richie says appreciatively. He holds out a hand to slap, and she does, smiling that brash, lovely smile that Eddie remembers from that first time she charged out in front of them and off the cliff at the quarry. Beverly Marsh, fearless and unstoppable.
She raps her knuckles on the bartop afterward. “Okay! Well, that was fun. Can we find something to drink that’s not disgusting now? My mouth still tastes like somebody set a licorice stick on fire in it—”
“And you want to make sure Haystack will still suck face with you again later,” Richie says, nodding seriously. “Reasonable.”
“Richie,” Ben says, blushing hotly, and Bev elbows him in the side before pulling away to grab more glasses from behind the bar.
“Suck face,” she says, “Jesus, are you twelve?”
“I’m a comedian, so like, yeah, basically.”
Bev elbows him again. It isn’t gentle, but there’s a fondness to it all the same. A kind of friendly, casual intimacy when Richie slings an arm over her shoulders and rests his chin on the top of her head.
Eddie scrubs his hands over his elbows, watching them with an indefinable ache. Other than the group hug they all crashed into outside of Neibolt, it’s been years since he’s intentionally touched anyone more than the duration of a brief handshake. The sum total of his recent experience of physical affection has been the dry, perfunctory kisses he and Myra exchange every morning before work.
He can’t bring himself to count their occasional fumbling efforts at sex, which have never really become comfortable over all the time they’ve been married. It’s like there’s something fundamentally broken in the part of Eddie that knows how to reach out to other human beings.
He thought that, anyway, until he came back home.
“Eds?” someone asks, and Eddie flinches and looks up to see Stan watching him carefully, in that calm observant way he always had. Eddie doesn’t know if it was a habit formed from birdwatching or just the reason he was so suited to it, but even when he was a kid he had the knack of looking at things and people in those quiet moments when no one else was paying attention, and seeing more than he was intended to.
“Yeah.” He coughs. Everybody else is already over by the bar, crowded close, shoulder to shoulder, touching like it’s easy. Richie glances over briefly, then away before Eddie can read his face. “Yeah, uh, just spaced out for a second there. Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Stan says gently, and reaches down to offer him a hand up.