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Eddie’s quiet.
He’s warm under Steve’s hands, all blood and bone. His shoulders are broad, skin soft and sweeping. Spine relaxed. Hair shorn down to the scalp so now he can’t really hide his eyes behind the thick frizzy curtain of it. He’s all laid bare, out in the open, exposed in every way.
And he’s quiet.
He’d been so loud before.
“Talk,” Steve asks, and he feels bad about it for a second, like he’s commanding a dog to speak. Heel. Roll over.
Eddie’s not a pet. Not something to be had by anyone other than himself and Steve knows that.
He just can’t form any other words. He tries but it comes out a sticky mess of syllables, a stuttering jumble of, “I mean, can you—I just—I—”
“Steve,” Eddie murmurs, clear and bracing. It’s one word.
It's a start.
“Yes,” Steve breathes, and he shifts a bit and they both gasp at the movement and the fire it sparks, simmering low and steady in both of their bellies. Kindled and kept alight by this moment.
“Steve.”
“Eddie,” he says. Looks down into Eddie’s eyes and his breath catches again for a completely different reason.
Eddie’s staring up at him with round eyes half-lidded with lust, and his irises are so dark they blend seamlessly into the pupil. His cheeks are flushed, blotchy, and his lips are parted and slick and swollen. Red like cherries. Red like blood.
Steve thinks that he’s probably memorized the shape of them now through touch alone, never mind through each and every stolen glance he’s taken since the start.
He still ducks back down to kiss him again. Just to check. Just to make sure.
It beats the alternative of meeting that gaze and confronting what it might mean.
He didn’t used to feel so uncomfortable with showing his love. He wasn’t always this awkward about receiving it. But a lot has happened over these past few years and if there’s anything he’s learned, it’s that love is a finite resource. It can run out or be taken away or broken into a million sharp little pieces; he’s learned the hard lesson of how necessary it is to be a little stingier with it, a little more reserved. He’d been way too generous before and wound up having to sweep up the pulpy mess of his battered heart from a tiled bathroom floor.
He’ll give it to a few select people unquestionably. Robin always and everywhere, no matter what. The kids whenever they’d like, too. Nancy, even after everything, and even though it’s different than it was before. And he thought that this was it, that this would be it for the rest of his life.
But here Eddie is, a pillar in his life, and he’s cemented so solidly that Steve wonders how he’d ever functioned without him in the first place.
Here he is and he’s holding Steve’s heart in his hands, cradling it protectively within the crooked plane of his palms like he won’t let anyone else get to it. Like he won’t let it snuff out.
Maybe it was stupid to let him in, to give into the possibility of this love so easily. Steve doesn’t think so, though. Not after everything.
Eddie has been forcefully subjected to this world, to this horror-tinged life, and he’d faded into it so easily and with minimal complaint, all things considered. He takes up an empty spot at Steve’s side and tells him things that nobody’s told him before. He’d told Steve that he was brave. Kind. Good. And he’d looked just like this while he’d done it: brown eyes all probing, curious and gentle, and yet somehow also knowing. The glint to them and the tilt to his mouth—they both mean something that Steve hasn’t quite been able to decode yet.
Steve thinks that he’s the best in all of the ways that matter. He’s kind and loud and good with the kids. He protects them. The kind of person to hammer up a shield when everyone else is making weapons.
And he’s still so warm all the time, all over the place. Not just beneath the skin. But in his face, too, and his words, and his love: open, inviting, trusting.
“You’re so warm,” Eddie tells him, dragging him right back. The words are moaned right into his mouth, so low and deep that Steve can feel the vibrations of them. “Steve, you feel so good. You’re so good for me.”
“Yeah?” Steve asks.
He’s not shy. Not like this, never like this, but he’s on the precipice of something else, and it’s bigger, sensitive and open like a fresh wound, and it’s selfish, too. It wants. He wants. It’s enough to make him go quiet and sincere and starry-eyed.
“I—I wanna be good for you.”
He’d meant to sound cool about it, meant for it to come out low and dirty, to spark something new.
Instead it comes out breathlessly needy.
To distract from the raw vulnerability he’d just displayed he rocks a little bit, lifts up and down. Tests the waters. Watches for the tightening of Eddie’s muscles, presses his palm to his chest to feel the way his breath stumbles and rises again. Picks up just to fall. He sinks. The backs of his thighs rest against the tops of Eddie’s.
Eddie groans. His head lolls back a little. He’s still talking just like Steve had asked. “God, you’re perfect. Baby, baby. You’re so perfect. So good for me.”
Steve’s middle goes tight, pulled taut like a bowstring just waiting for the release of pressure. He’s so turned on. He feels so good.
He didn’t know it could feel like this.
He’d thought, back in sophomore year—his first time with a girl, rushed and sloppy and drunk, locked inside a bedroom at a random jock’s house party—that it was meant to feel fragmented, individual iridescent shades through a kaleidoscope. A mosaic of colors that never quite met or matched up.
He thought that it was meant to feel incomplete afterward. That he was meant to feel incomplete, like he was still waiting for something big to happen even after all was said and done, the orgasms wrung out, condoms trashed, breath sucked out of his lungs through messy kisses.
He’d thought so every time since then. Even with Nancy, and the profound love he’d felt for her—he’d always been looking for something that wasn’t there for him to find. Not just the kaleidoscope, the little fragments. He wanted the bliss of the whole picture. Completion.
The vulnerability is still there, and the fear, too. But Steve also feels full for the first time maybe ever.
He’s full. Not just because he’s fully seated in Eddie’s lap, thighs squeezing around the width of him and hips working up and down the length of his cock; but also because he feels so right. It’s the best he’s ever felt. Like this is how it should’ve been all this time and he just hadn’t known any better.
He wants this to last forever. All night long. Into the early dregs of the morning, too, before they have to separate.
The apocalypse is happening. The end of all things. Hawkins still blames Eddie for the events of the spring. He’s wanted by the law. Hunted by the fucking cult of the basketball team. And the world is on the verge of splitting open.
These things won’t just fix themselves. There’s a looming danger, an impending sense of doom, a deep-set need to do everything right just for one night while they still can. Get it all off of the chest before everything goes to shit tomorrow.
He can’t think about that right now.
“Keep talking,” Steve begs. He picks up the pace a little. Rides Eddie deep and hard and right. Even then, it’s slow, unhurried, like they have all of the time in the world even when they don’t.
Eddie might die again. Steve might die. They might both die, and Steve can picture that future so suddenly and vividly that it makes his chest tight: the both of them splayed bloody on the ground, reaching out for one another, hoping to touch before they lose their grip and fall into death like children falling into sleep.
Not quite managing it. Reaching anyway.
He can’t think about it.
He won’t, because there’s here and there’s now and the glowing tangibility of it. There’s this: Eddie, impossibly alive, buried deep inside of him, holding him with his wide hands and callused fingertips, breath quick and eyes blown and cheeks ruddy with a pleasure that Steve brought him.
He’s all scarred up, pink webbing of rough skin reaching from his hips up to his cheek. His hair is gone. He’s got tattoos that Steve’s never seen before, rough and sketchy. One on his chest, another on his forearm. The thick rings on his fingers are cool where they press into Steve’s skin. He looks up at Steve and doesn’t blink, just stares, eyes flitting all over like he’s taking in all of Steve’s features, memorizing them.
Moonlight filters in through the window of Steve’s childhood bedroom, painting him in swathes of silver.
Steve grew up here. Him and Eddie are in the bed that he’s slept in for almost his whole life. The same sheets and blankets, worn thin and clean. Plaid wallpaper. Trophies, polaroids. A heavy-duty bag by the door packed with flashlights, batteries, water bottles, a swiss army knife. His baseball bat lying prone on the floor just beside it, flaked with demogorgon blood.
He never used to like his room. Good things just didn’t happen here. He was here every night that his parents were gone, and he was here with Nancy the night Barb died. He didn’t choose this room or the awful decor, the wallpaper and posters and sparse furniture. It was never really his. He never really made it his own.
He thinks he might like it now.
Eddie’s hand presses to his cheek, pulls Steve back in, away from his thoughts, towing gently.
“Steve,” he says. “Come back.”
Steve nods. “I’m here. I’m here.”
Eddie blinks a little, dazed. Nods. “You’re here.”
“Yeah,” Steve says. He goes stiff when Eddie pushes back up, deep inside, so deep. Can’t help but throw his head back, gasp for air that escaped without his permission, clutch at anything in reach. Eddie, mostly. Eddie’s shoulders and chest and the sensitive nape of his neck.
He goes mindless. He forgets where he is, what he’s doing. Just knows the presence of his pleasure and Eddie giving it to him. Eddie just below him, driving in rhythmically with his own hips, searching for that one spot that makes Steve’s toes curl, his fingernails dig into flesh. Eddie staring at him like he’s the best thing he’s ever seen.
“You’re so beautiful,” he whispers.
It’s unlike his words from before, the ones that had been so threaded through with his arousal that they were patchy. This is real, the feeling that the words drag with them. It’s heavy, hard-hitting, and it gives Steve pause.
He stalls. They both do. He meets Eddie’s eyes again, and Eddie’s just looking up at him, gazing, and it feels so much like love that Steve goes breathless with the weight and shape of it, suddenly lodged heavily into his throat.
“What?” he stutters.
“You’re so beautiful like this,” Eddie tells him. He’s vulnerable in his honesty, too. “I wish… I wish I could keep you forever. Just like this. I wish that this would never end. I want you all the time. I want to stay like this forever.”
Steve bites his lip so that it doesn’t betray him by wobbling. “You don’t mean that.”
“I do,” Eddie says. He leans forward a bit, the tip of his nose nudging against Steve’s. “I mean it.”
“You don’t—”
“I do.”
“It’s not—we can’t—”
“We can,” Eddie insists. His face is now pressing to the side of Steve’s, his lips trailing across his cheek to his ear. “We are.”
His hands ghost over Steve’s hips, up his waist and around to the small of his back. A little lower still, fingers delving to the place where their bodies meet, where Steve is stretched around him, so wet and wide and accommodating. The place where Eddie thrusts up and up so suddenly and so deeply that Steve thinks he might never recover from it; his body will always know this shape after tonight. He’ll ache for it afterward and feel glaringly empty for the rest of his life.
Steve gasps a little and moans again. Eddie does too.
“Fuck me,” Steve begs. “God, fuck—fuck, Eddie. Fuck me. Love me.”
Eddie looks at him, nods, and buries his face into Steve’s neck, and gives into himself, into Steve, chases his moans and gasps again and again until they both crease and quiver and fall together into euphoria, and then again into sweet oblivion.
Time moves differently after, slowed down, inching like sand being fed through an hourglass.
Eddie’s breaths are slow and even as the sweat cools on his skin. Steve traces over the large stretch of scarring on his chest with his fingers. It covers most of his left pectoral and stutters out into little dots and dashes on his shoulder, patches of Morse without any meaning.
“Do they hurt?” he asks quietly.
Eddie hums. “Not so much anymore.”
Steve nods a little. “Good.”
“Do yours?”
“Mine?” Steve asks dumbly.
“You have a little ring around your neck,” Eddie says, and he reaches up, circles over the barbed width of it, across Steve’s Adam's apple, his touch so delicate it lifts goosebumps to Steve’s skin. “Halo in the wrong place.”
“I don’t really notice it,” he confesses. “Unless I’m looking in a mirror.”
“So you notice it all of the time, then?” Eddie asks, then waits a moment to crack a smile.
Steve whacks him in the arm. “Asshole.”
He giggles. “Sorry, sorry. Couldn’t help it. It looks cool, you know. Metal as hell.”
“So do yours."
Eddie’s eyes go all soft again. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
All of the quiet moments—the pauses and breaths and in-betweens—all of it feels so natural that Steve almost doesn’t realize they’d stopped talking in the first place. But they had, and some time passes before Eddie opens his mouth again.
“You know, that was kind of my first time.” It’s somehow both abrupt and casual, and it takes a second to sink in before it rocks Steve to his core, the casual confession of it.
“Really?”
“Yeah,” Eddie says. He leans in, his lips hovering over Steve’s shoulder, breath warm and damp. “Look, I’ve been blown before. Got a handjob or two from people who wanted discounts on weed. But I guess I never really cared much about the whole song and dance of going all the way. Not until now. With you.” He pauses, then shrugs like he’s throwing caution to the wind. “It’s different with you, Steve. You know? All of it. I don’t know how else to say it. It’s just different.”
He doesn’t elaborate but somehow Steve feels like he understands. It was different. It is.
“It is?” he asks anyway.
“Yeah. Course it is.”
Steve is quiet. He reaches up to run a hand over Eddie’s head, the soft fuzzy hairs. “It was kind of my first time, too. Like this.”
Eddie hums.
“And I,” Steve pauses, tries to swallow past the accumulated emotion: the love and the fear and the greed, the self-doubt and the adoration, too. “I’ve never felt like this before. Not with anyone else. I thought I did, I thought I knew, but—it wasn’t the same, you know? It’s all so much more intense now. It’s… It’s real.”
“This is real,” Eddie echoes.
He edges back down, leans in really close, until he’s pierced the bubble of Steve’s space and it’s second nature for Steve to reach out to him, to pull him close, to breathe in the scent of him, the Eddie smell, tobacco and leather and sweat and fear and a little bit of weed, breathe it in deep until he can’t smell anything else. Until all he can feel or see or think about is Eddie. Eddie Eddie Eddie.
Eddie in front of him, pulling him in, reeling him until they crash together, bodies like magnets, not willing to separate.
Eddie holds him close, looks into his face, sees the emotion there and the way it jumbles together, at war, and he leans in to blow a sweet little raspberry into Steve’s cheek just to dispel any last remnants of doubt.
Utterly stricken, Steve might love him for it.
“I want you,” he confesses.
“You just had me, Steve.”
“I mean—I mean I want you after this. I want you in the future. I want you in my life. I don’t care how, or if you don’t want me in the same way. That’s fine. It’s just that when I picture my life after this, if we both survive, well—I picture you there, Eddie. I picture you with me.”
A moment frozen in time. He sees Eddie a lot of different ways, though. In the kitchen of a double-wide, smoking a cigarette and drinking black coffee from a mug taken down from a peg on the wall. Sitting on the back patio of Steve’s house, feet dipped into the crystal clear pool, his hair grown out again and drawn up and away from his neck in the throes of a humid summer day. In Hawkins everywhere as a free man, the Big Buy and the high school parking lot and the pretentious Loch Nora cul-de-sacs and all up and down Main Street.
But also maybe outside of Hawkins, too. For starters, in front of an old dinged-up RV, surrounded by children, all of whom share one or more of his qualities: his warm eyes and crooked smiles and big curly hair.
Eddie’s face cracks right down the middle and all of a sudden there’s so much feeling welling up in his eyes, in the lines of his mouth and chin, in the furrow between his eyebrows. “You do?”
“Yeah. I do.”
He laughs, then. “This is crazy,” he says.
“It is,” Steve confirms.
“Who would’ve thought, you know? Who would’ve thought that we’d wind up like this? I know I didn’t. Thought I’d never get to have you in the way I wanted. Settled for just staring at you in the hallways. It worked for a bit. Then you just had to go and graduate.”
“I stayed, though,” Steve argues. “Stayed here. Didn’t really have much of a choice, but, well. I stayed.”
Eddie nods. “You did.”
“We’re both here, and we both—we’re—you know.”
“I know,” Eddie says. His face kind of goes cold again, although it’s not directed towards Steve. “Yeah.”
“It’s gonna be okay,” Steve tells him. It’s a half-truth. “We’re gonna make it out.”
Eddie nods. “We will.”
“And then we can have each other.”
“We can,” Eddie repeats. It’s gentle, just like everything else about him.
Steve nods. Breathes in Eddie’s smell again. It’s the best.
“We will.”
Eddie’s thumb sweeps a careful arc over the swell of Steve’s cheek. It lands at the corner of his mouth and then migrates over his lips, soft and warm.
“We do,” Eddie says.
Outside, the sun begins to rise.