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Richie was eight, maybe nine, when he was first introduced to the concept.
"What do you mean, roommate?" he asked his mother over his pancakes after she had informed him that his father's old college roommate Kevin would be joining them for dinner that night. "Like, Oi, mate! Put a shrimp on the barbie?"
Maggie snorted, easily not paying any mind to Richie's poor attempts at an Australian accent while slipping into the chair across from him and placing one, singular sad pancake onto her plate, one of the boring ones without the chocolate chips. "Someone you live with, sweetie, like sharing a room or an apartment," she explained. "And for heaven's sake, use a fork, you're getting syrup everywhere."
"So, like you and Dad?" Richie asked, ignoring her and raising an eyebrow as he bit into his pancake. Maggie scrunched up her nose.
"Kind of? But not quite the same. Your father and I are married, a roommate is more like a friend that you live with that you split bills with. Makes it cheaper. Your father and Kevin were roommates in college to save money."
Richie felt his eyes widen behind his glasses. "You can do that?" he gasped. "You can live with your friends? You don't have to grow up and live with a girl?"
Maggie rolled her eyes, cutting off a small piece of pancake and chewing it daintily. "Someday, Richard, you'll be over the moon about living with a girl," she told him knowingly, but Richie seriously doubted that.
He couldn't wait to get to school and tell the guys about his new discovery. He could just imagine what kind of shenanigans he, Bill, Stan, and Eddie could get up to without any parents or boring girls in the way.
And even though Bill had admitted that he kind of liked the idea of living with a girl someday, and Stan had informed that that there was no way in hell he would willingly share a living space with Richie, even under threat of torture and death, Eddie, bless his tiny heart, was one-hundred-percent on board, which was, somehow, even better.
"Holy shit, really?" he asked in surprise and relief when Richie had excitedly told him about the whole roommate thing at recess. "That sounds amazing. Can you imagine? We could stay up as late as we want, and eat pizza for dinner every night. We wouldn't even have to clean up after ourselves if we didn't want to!"
They spent countless recesses after that planning out the future, the parties they would throw every night, even on school nights, the junk food and sugary drinks that would fill up the fridge, all the R rated movies they would watch, just he and Eddie, no one to tell them what they could or couldn't do.
"Why aren't more people doing this?" Eddie asked, carefully adding a chocolate fountain into his blueprints of their future kitchen on a scrap piece of paper they'd nicked from their teacher's desk. "Why would anyone want to waste their time getting married when you could just live with your friends?"
Richie nodded in agreement and put the finishing touches on his bed-to-shower water slide idea; he didn't understand either.
"Hey Sasquatch, come grab me a bowl."
Richie slowly blinked his eyes away from his phone to meet Eddie's unimpressed glare through the living room and into the connected kitchen where he was frowning impressively. "Grab yourself a bowl, dipshit," he huffed, "you're the one in the kitchen."
Eddie's frown deepened even stronger. "I can't get myself a bowl, because it is up too high and I have a fucking hole in my shoulder, asshole," he hissed, attempting an annoyed little point at the offending bowl sitting innocently on the top shelf of the cabinet, and only making it about halfway due to the aforementioned shoulder hole. "I asked you last week to please move them to a lower shelf, and you still haven't, so get your lazy ass over here and grab me the goddamn bowl."
Richie's smile, unable to contain itself, finally broke through his put upon scowl much to Eddie's mounting vexation, but Richie, doing as he was told, made a big show about standing up, complete with groaning and stretching and the cracking of joints before finally dragging himself into the kitchen at a slow crawl and grabbing the stupid bowl.
"There, was that so hard?" Eddie asked sarcastically, grabbing for the bowl as soon as Richie got it down within reach. "Now, while you're here, move the others to the bottom shelf so we don't run into this problem again."
Richie rolled his eyes, but grabbed the bowls and slotted them into a tiny space Eddie had already made for them next to a stack of small, round salad plates. "You have two arms, you know," he quipped, closing the cabinet and grabbing the two boxes of cereal off the top of the fridge without even needing to be asked.
Eddie inwardly smirked at the action, and nodded to the box of Reese's Puffs. Richie handed him the box and put the Cheerios that Eddie absolutely had been the one to insist they buy but had never actually opened, away. "Have you gotten mail yet today?" he asked, aiming to change the subject. Richie shook his head.
"No, not yet. I can grab it when I get back from my meeting, though, if you want."
Eddie shoved a mouthful of cereal into his face and quickly shook his head. "No, I got it, I need an excuse to get some fucking fresh air. I can make it down the end of the driveway and back."
The doctor had been very insistent on Eddie needing to use this first month 'out on his own' to rest, sensing (correctly) that that was going to be a difficult task for wound up, hyperactive Eddie Kaspbrak to adhere to.
Thankfully, Richie usually had no problem keeping Eddie from tearing his stitches by doing something stupid with the added bonus of somehow never coming off overbearing, but coming up on three weeks on house arrest after months in the hospital and rehabilitation institute (god, Eddie was so fucking grateful he had good insurance), he was beginning to lose his mind and was looking for any reason to stretch his legs,
Richie, probably sensing Eddie's less than innocent ulterior motives for volunteering to get the mail, eyed him suspiciously. "Just to the mailbox and back?" he repeated, just a bit suspiciously. "'Cause we have a doorbell camera, dude. I'll be able to see if you wander off."
"I'm not gonna fucking wander off," Eddie grumbled. He had absolutely been planning on wandering off.
Richie hummed knowingly like an asshole and plodded off to go get ready for his meeting.
Eddie finished off his cereal, rinsing out his bowl and sticking it in the dishwasher. Dishes were technically one of Richie's chores, being so arm-heavy and all, but since he knew Richie wasn't going to get around to doing the dishes until that evening, and he didn't want to stare at it sitting in the sink all day (and what Richie didn't know wouldn't hurt him), he figured doing that much wouldn't kill him.
He felt immediately bad about it of course, because of course he did. Guilt, shame, and codependency were the base-level of Eddie's basic human existence, but he was working on that! And Richie was helping! Despite his pesky adherence to the doctor's orders to keep him from reopening his wounds.
Honestly, Richie had been wonderful, all things considering.
Sure, Eddie crashing in his surprisingly modest Beverly Hills bachelor pad guest room mid-divorce wasn't exactly the water slide and chocolate fountain paradise they had dreamed up together in third grade, but being roommates with Richie was actually pretty fucking great, boring adult mundaneness included.
Richie handled the bulk of physical household chores for the moment; an arrangement Eddie fully intended to redistribute the second the doctor gave him the go ahead, but in a move that was actually rather insightful of him, Richie allowed Eddie to take control of just about everything else he deemed relatively safe; handling the bills and figuring out what weekly groceries to put in to the grocery delivery website they definitely overpaid for, and keeping the little things tidy and organized and clean.
Eddie also helped keep Richie on top of his frankly absurdly hectic and wonky work schedule, making sure to add things to his calendar and leaving notes on the refrigerator about meetings or impromptu shows Steve had thrown together at the last minute. He was out of work to focus on his recovery, but at least he was able to keep busy in some possible way, if not physically, but hey, Eddie would take what he could get.
"I'll be back in a few hours," Richie called, slipping his wallet and phone into his pocket and grabbing his keys from the bowl on the table near the door. "Don't do anything fucking stupid while I'm gone."
Eddie rolled his eyes. "I'm not going to do anything stupid, you dick."
"That's what you said last time, and yet I came home to you going to fucking town on the showers with a toothbrush, so..." Richie said with a smirk. Eddie scoffed.
"If you don't scrub the grout, you can get mold," he huffed. "My torn stitch would be the least of your fucking worries if you end up with histoplasmosis, you gross fuck."
Richie laughed loudly, ruffled his hair, and slipped out the door with an exaggeratedly blown kiss. Eddie tried not to blush.
That, unfortunately, was the only downside to the whole roommate thing.
Eddie had been unmistakably developing a stupid, embarrassing, little crush on Richie since Derry.
The thing was, he had always been weirdly drawn to the guy. Even as kids, Eddie had always thought Richie was way cooler than hindsight allowed him to see he actually was. Little Eddie couldn't help but fight for his undivided attention, usually by being too loud or too annoying for him to ignore, always secretly hoping Richie would choose him over the others, to want to hang out with Eddie just as badly as Eddie wanted to hang out with him.
Now, at forty-one, Eddie could see his childhood obsession with Richie for the infatuation it was, made all the easier by the addition of now-adult-Richie's sharp jaw and broad shoulders on his tantalizing six-foot-two frame, but that didn't mean he was any closer in letting it be known to anyone but himself than he was when he was a snot-nosed little dweeb of a preteen.
After Richie's car was long-gone from the driveway, Eddie slipped on his robe (sure, it was a balmy sixty-fucking-four degrees outside, because Los Angels was a fucking hellscape, but it was still January) and slippers and hobbled out to the mailbox at a slow but steady pace.
As much as he and Richie joked about Eddie's injury being simply a small puncture wound in his shoulder ('Tis but a flesh wound! Richie's voice chirped merrily in his head at the thought), in reality, as much as they tried not to talk about it, it was pretty fucking gnarly.
The claw had nearly got him straight in the back, but thanks to a well timed yell from Stan, Richie was able to grab him and roll them out of the way quick enough to evade something worse. But even so, Eddie had lost a lot of blood; the claw had brutally ripped across the skin and muscle of his back and shoulder before finally sinking in and nearly taking off his arm.
He shivered at the memory, and rotated his shoulder a little where he had unconsciously tensed it, letting out a slow breath. The worst was over, he reminded himself, no more living in the past.
He was healing. In more ways than one.
The mail, at first glance, was the usual affair: bills, junk, more bills, credit card offers, a bank statement that was supposed to be paperless goddamnit, a postcard from the dentist reminding Richie his six month cleaning was soon, and at the bottom of the stack, a plain, deep red envelope.
He blinked down at the envelope for a moment, flipping it around and looking for any sign of who it might have been from, but save for a cheery little heart sticker sealing the flap, it was completely blank, no writing to be found.
A cold, spiky flash of jealousy washed over him as he hobbled back up the front steps and closed the door a bit roughly behind him, tossing the red envelope, the bills, and Richie's dental appointment card onto the growing pile of Richie's unchecked mail by the door, willing himself not to fucking pout.
Of course Riche was going to get anonymous fucking love notes dropped off for him at their house, that wasn't a fucking surprise. Eddie had a Twitter, he saw the kind of thirsty shit people tweeted about him on a daily basis. Richie was famous and funny and popular and fucking handsome as all hell. He was newly out and riding high from all the positive press of his most recent amazing set he'd been performing locally. It was almost February, and Eddie shouldn't have been fucking surprised that Richie would be fucking courted.
No, Eddie wasn't surprised.
But, he thought, glaring at the envelope out of the corner of his eye, he wasn't exactly thrilled about it either.
O
Richie got home a few hours later, looking just a bit more dead inside than when he left, a common occurrence when a meeting with Steve was involved, unfortunately, but seemed otherwise content as he slipped off his shoes and shoved them sloppily onto the shoe rack.
"Oh hey, Eds, did you get the mail?" he asked suddenly, clearly going too casual and missing by a few solid feet.
Eddie raised an eyebrow, looking up from his laptop. "Yeah? What, you didn't watch me on the Ring to make sure I didn't collapse or burst into flames, or whatever it is you think is going to happen to me if I walk too fast for five seconds?"
Richie snorted. "Sadly no. Steve had my fucking balls in a vice grip all fucking day, I barely had time to piss." He pushed his glasses up his nose awkwardly and cleared his throat. "Anything good? Like, in the mail?"
"Maybe?" he shrugged, returning his attention back to scrolling mindlessly through Twitter without actually reading anything. "I put your stuff on the table."
Richie blinked down at his pile of mail and frowned. "Oh," he mused, and because the universe hated him, immediately reached for the stupid red envelope and held it up. "What's this?" he asked, all wide eyed an innocent like he didn't know exactly what it was. "Are you sure this is for me?"
Eddie tried not to scowl, reminding himself sternly that he had no right to be jealous, Richie wasn't fucking his. "Well it's sure as hell not for me," he snapped, probably a little too harshly, slamming his laptop closed and stomping off to his room.
The last thing he wanted was to see Richie open some romantic, sappy letter from some potential new boyfriend.
No fucking thank you.
O
Unfortunately, the envelopes kept coming.
Twice, sometimes three times a week, Eddie pulled the same deep red envelopes out of the mailbox before gagging and shuffling them to the back of the pile and out of his sight before the jealousy could overwhelm him to actual, physical sickness.
Richie, for his part, never talked about what was inside the envelopes after he took them back to his room, and Eddie wasn't sure if it helped, or if the not-knowing made the painful pit in his stomach at the mere thought of them even worse.
He didn't notice any sort of changes or additions added to Richie's personal calendars, so at least he could tell himself this fucking mystery suitor wasn't making an effort to meet up with Richie or go on dates or anything else heart-shattering like that, and Eddie wasn't about to ask and ruin the beautiful illusion.
As long as they could keep ignoring the envelopes' existences, things would be fine.
"Did you get the mail yet?" Richie asked gruffly one afternoon a few weeks after the letters had started.
Eddie blinked once in surprise at the tone, but shook his head. "No, not yet."
"Good," he snapped, reaching into the inside pocket of his jacket...
And pulled out a bright red envelope.
Eddie frowned. "If you already got the mail, why the fuck did you ask me if I did?"
"Are you fucking—? Eds," Richie moaned, running his fingers through his already mussed up hair and screwing up his eyes as if actually pained. "C'mon dude. You can't be serious right now."
Eddie scoffed, crossing his arms across his chest. "What the fuck are you talking about, Richie?" he seethed. "What? You just want to brag now, or something? Rub it in my face that you got yet another fucking love letter? I'm well fucking aware, you asshole."
"Eddie!" Richie cried, his eyes wide and wild behind his glasses. "The letter is for you, you absolute maniac! Jesus Christ."
"What?" Eddie asked quietly after a long, tense beat.
"Yeah, you fucking idiot, god," Richie groaned miserably. "Did you even look at the envelope after the first time? Your name is all fucking over it." He held up the envelope, and sure enough, 'Eddie', written in messy, chicken scratch scrawl, graced the front of the envelope in large, blocky letters.
Eddie blushed. "Oh."
"Yeah, fucking oh," Richie sighed, sobering suddenly with a flush of his own across his cheeks. "I've been trying to give you this fucking thing for a month, man. It's been the same goddamn envelope every fucking time."
"You were?" he asked, standing up and walking over to him cautiously. "Rich, why didn't you just tell me that?"
"Kinda defeats the purpose of writing a letter, dude," he chuckled sadly.
Eddie rolled his eyes, opening his mouth to remind Richie that a letter didn't do any good when it didn't reach it's fucking recipient, but cut himself off. "What's it say?" he asked carefully.
Richie sighed and all but shoved the envelope into Eddie's chest. "Read it yourself," he told him, immediately turning on his heal and stalking out of the room
"Wait—Rich!" he called after him, making to follow him before Richie winced and froze just at the lip of the hallway.
"Nope. No way am I sticking around while you read that." He laughed hollowly. "I'll be in my room if you want to talk about it after." He disappeared down into the hallway, his door clicking shut a few moments later.
Eddie frowned down at the envelope in his hand, the same envelope that had been driving him crazy for the last few weeks, and fuck, it had been for him all along.
With one last forlorn look back down the hallway at Richie's closed door, Eddie padded back over to the couch, sat down, and opened the letter.
'Dear Eds
I know it's a few weeks early, but happy Valentine's Day.'
Eddie paused and quickly checked his calendar. Valentine's Day was the next day.
He'd really been trying to give him this thing forever. Fuck.
He gulped and kept reading.
'This is not the ideal way of doing this, but I honestly think that if we left it up to me and my dumb, fucking mouth to actually say all of this out loud, it would never happen, so here we are. Time for some goddamn transparency.
Eddie Kaspbrak, I am in love with you.
I was in love with you when we were seven and you yelled at me for eight straight minutes after my milk carton exploded and got chocolate milk all over you. I was in love with you when we were thirteen and I watched you kick an interdimensional sewer clown in the face. I was in love with you when we were sixteen and I had to watch you get smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror when my family left and you were stuck behind in Derry. I was in love with you for twenty-seven years, even though I couldn't remember you.
I'm in love with you now.
I am in love with the way you look in the morning before you've had your coffee. I'm in love with the way that you never turn any lights off when you leave a room. I'm in love with the fact that you always leave drawers, like, two fucking inches open when you go to close them, so I'm constantly hitting my hip on them in the kitchen. I love that you are absolutely terrible at listening to doctor's orders, despite insisting you follow them to a T.
When we were kids, goofing off and making imaginary plans to live together in our giant penthouse mansion with our nightly pizza parties and swimming pool full of chocolate pudding, this wasn't what I imagined. And yet somehow this, this boring, mundane, unremarkable reality where we eat sensible, fiber-rich meals, watch Forensic Files, and go to bed at a reasonable hour is better than any dream I could have imagined. But it isn't fair that you don't have the full story.
God, FUCK this is so sappy.
So here's the deal, Eds. When you get done reading this, you have a few options:
- We ignore this ever happened. We go back to being friends and roommates and never speak of this letter again. (preferred)
- We talk about it like real life adults. You decide you are okay living with someone who is in love with you. (unlikely, but also preferred)
- We talk about it like real life adults. You move out because it's weird to be living with someone who is in love with you. (understandable)
-
We ignore this ever happened. You move out because it's weird to be living with someone who is in love with you. (also understandable)
I'm following your lead here, bro. Whatever you decide, I will respect you 100%. Ball's in your court.
Love always,
Richie'
Eddie gripped the letter tightly in his hand, popped up, and immediately power-walked down the hall to Richie's room, hitting the wood rapidly in quick succession until it finally cracked open just enough for one glass-framed blue eyeball to peek out.
"So, we're doing this, huh?" Richie's voice asked dryly. "We're talking about it?"
"Of course we're talking about it," Eddie huffed. "You think I would just ignore this?"
Richie shrugged and stepped aside so Eddie could join him in his room. "I mean, I'd fucking hoped." He sighed, gesturing to Eddie to take a seat on the edge of the bed while he pulled up his desk chair and sat down stiffly across from him so they were both facing each other.
Eddie bit his lip. "So," he began, wincing, "you're in love with me?"
Richie blinked once, long and slow behind his glasses, opened his mouth, took a deep breath, and immediately shook his head. "Nope. I can't fucking do this," he said, standing up and walking back over to the door.
"Rich!" Eddie gasped, standing up to go after him. "Dude, what the fuck?!"
"Dude, I did all this through a fucking letter on purpose, alright?" he snapped back, gesturing to Eddie kind of wildly. "I can't, fucking, look at you and say this shit."
Eddie frowned, crossing his arms across his chest. "Seriously, Richie? Seriously?"
"Yeah Eds, seriously," Richie practically growled. "Like it's so fucking easy. I'd like to see you try this confession shit."
Eddie's eyes narrowed, his nostrils flared, and he caught himself nearly biting a new hole in his cheek to match the other side as he glared at the now smug looking Richie across the room.
So, maybe it wasn't exactly a character trait he was at all proud of, but if there was one thing about Eddie that hadn't changed even after all these years, this was it.
He could never back down from a challenge.
Especially a challenge made by Richie.
"Oh yeah, asshole?" Eddie seethed. "I'll show you a fucking confession."
The smug expression dropped off Richie's face, his eyes widening. "Uh..." he mumbled, confused.
"Yeah, that's right, dickwad, so listen up." He stepped a little closer to Richie, making damn sure to speak loudly and annunciate as clearly human possible as he bit out, deadly serious, "I'm in fucking love with you."
"Uh..?" Richie repeated, a little higher pitched and manic.
"You heard me, Trashmouth, I'm in love with you! I've been obsessed with you since I was a little fucking kid! You are my favorite fucking person, and these last few weeks living with you have been a literal dream come fucking true! You are never getting rid of me, so deal with it!"
"Why are you fucking yelling at me?!"
"Because you're an idiot, and you make me fucking crazy!"
They both seemed to run out of steam at the same time, glaring into each other's eyes; Richie, looking vaguely terrified but hopeful, and Eddie's breathing slightly elevated. Finally, Richie audibly gulped, licking his lips and smiling, strained but kind.
"My written confession was way more romantic than that, man," he joked, weakly.
Eddie rolled his eyes, biting back a grin. "'Following your lead here bro'?" he quoted in a horrible, nasally imitation of Richie's voice, raising an eyebrow and taking a cautious step closer.
Richie chuckled, adjusting his glasses and letting Eddie maneuver himself so they were almost chest to chest. "Fuck you, I said a lot of romantic shit before that."
"Wrote a lot of romantic shit before that, you mean," he corrected, wrapping his arms around Richie's waist and inwardly cursing, for the millionth time, his inability to lift his arms high enough to wrap around Richie's, frankly, tantalizing neck. "I haven't heard jack yet."
Finally, Richie's face broke out into a blinding, loving grin. "I love you."
Eddie chuckled, beaming right back. "Yeah?"
"Absolutely," Richie answered, bluntly. "I'd love you even more if you let me turn the office into an arcade like we planned in third grade, though."
"Not on your life."
"I bet I still have the notebook with all of our blueprints somewhere!" he laughed, holding Eddie closer, even as he tried to halfheartedly wiggle indignantly out of his grasp. "Ben would do it, we'd just have to ask. He'd probably even give us a discount."
"We are not getting a fucking arcade," Eddie scoffed, though he knew he was still grinning like an idiot. "If anything is getting renovated in this place, it's a hot tub."
A delightful blush bloomed across Richie's cheeks. "Hot tub, huh?" he asked, obviously, endearingly giddy. "The hot fudge hot tub?"
"Not if you ever want me in it with you, no," he snorted. "Those things are gross enough as-is. No, a regular hot tub. No hot fudge or nacho cheese, and definitely no Jell-o. Properly treated water only."
"Lame. Where's the fun in that?"
Eddie smirked, stretching up on his toes so their noses brushed. "Give me ten minutes and an extra strength Ibuprofen for my arm, and I think we can figure something out."
Richie, eyelids lowered dreamily, grinned, leaning down to finally close in the gap between their lips.
"Best. Roommate. Ever."