Chapter Text
The first and only thing that Eddie can think when he gets the invitation in the mail is the audacity.
Not only is the guy who cheated on him marrying the guy he cheated with, now he’s inviting Eddie to the wedding. Eddie guesses this is what he gets for having an ex who’s an influencer. Everything’s about the fucking publicity.
This is honestly probably worse than when their engagement was announced last year. At least then his stans were shitting on the guy on Twitter. Eddie is the first to admit that Corroded Coffin’s fanbase can get pretty rabid, but he kind of loves them for it. Even if he doesn’t officially, publicly condone it. They did their best to cancel Eddie’s ex, but this is the internet—nobody gives a shit after 48 hours and it’s not like there was a ton of overlap between Eddie’s fans and the audience of a mid-size lifestyle vlogger in the first place.
The engagement is old news at this point and nobody online is going to care again until the wedding is happening—on April 25th apparently, what a pretentious fucking date for a wedding—so Eddie’s gonna have to deal with this on his own.
Or not on his own.
Right away, he’s pulling out his phone and calling Nancy. Her journalistic interests lie decidedly outside the world of entertainment but she runs in enough of the same circles that she usually knows what’s going on in the industry before even Eddie does.
As soon as she picks up, Eddie says, “Hey, guess who just invited me to their fucking wedding.”
“He didn’t,” Nancy says. No need to actually explain who. Of course she knows.
“He did,” Eddie says, “Just got the invitation in the mail.”
“God, a mailed invitation? Somehow that’s worse than if he had just texted you.”
“Well, aside from the fact that he can’t text me because his number is blocked, yeah. Kind of would have preferred that.”
“That really is some audacity.”
“That’s what I said!” Eddie loves that Nancy can be just as bitchy as him sometimes. This is why she’s always his first call when something annoying happens. “When are you back in LA?”
“My flight gets in Tuesday morning,” Nancy says, “I want to get there before Robin and Steve.”
“Are they staying with you?”
“No, with Max and Lucas.”
Steve and Robin fly into town every once in a while to catch one of Lucas’ basketball games, or one of Eddie’s shows, or one of Jonathan’s exhibits, or whatever else any of the number of them who are in the area have going on. Since so many of them are here already, Eddie sort of half thinks that the rest of the group should move here and half thinks that he would never wish LA on his worst enemy, let alone his friends.
So it works for them to just fly in when they can. Steve and Robin are able to the most often, whenever they’re in between failed business ventures that they cooked up with their shared brain cell and a dream. Eddie thinks the last one had something to do with gourmet lemonade? He’s stopped keeping track at this point. They always joke that they’re just biding their time until they can fulfill their real dream of becoming sugar babies for some rich bisexual. Then Eddie always calls their bluff by reminding them that he could definitely find them a rich bisexual who would be down.
“I’m having them over for dinner on Wednesday, you want to come?” Nancy asks.
“Yeah, I’m down,” Eddie says, “Think they’ll let me complain more about the wedding thing to them?”
“I would count on it,” Nancy says, and he can hear her smiling through the phone.
“Then I’ll see you Wednesday.”
As promised, Steve and Robin are appropriately horrified and offended on Eddie’s behalf that his ex—who Robin nicknamed Dickbag shortly after the breakup—would dare invite him to the wedding.
“There’s no way you’re going, right?” Steve asks, twirling fettuccine alfredo around on his fork.
“Hell no,” Eddie says, shoveling pasta into his mouth. “Even if I wanted to see that piece of shit again, it’s a two-day thing in goddamn Coachella.”
“That’s tacky,” Nancy says.
“Right?” Eddie says, “And if you go you have to stay the night because they rented out this big ass house on this huge property but the only place they’ll let you park is at the edge of it like five miles away from the house so they’ll have a shuttle running but only at a certain time on day one and then again after the reception on day two.”
“Sounds like you really looked into it,” Robin says, eyebrows raised over her glass of wine.
Eddie shrugs. “There was a QR code on the invitation,” he says, “I wanted to know why.”
“One,” Steve stays, gesturing with his fork. “Who puts a QR code on an invitation? And two, that’s the most convoluted system I’ve ever heard.”
“It’s like they’re saying, ‘You’re going to celebrate us for two days and we’re going to make sure it happens by not letting you leave,’” Nancy says.
“Exactly,” Eddie says.
Robin sets down her wineglass and leans across the table towards Eddie. “Aren’t you kind of curious, though?”
“Curious about what?” Eddie asks.
“Everything,” she says, gesturing vaguely. “What it will be like, who’s going to be there, whether anyone’s going to make a horrible, embarrassing fool of themselves?”
“Well, it’s an influencer wedding,” Eddie says, rolling his eyes. “So that’s sort of a given.”
“What is this?” Steve asks, elbowing Robin. “Are you trying to tell him he should go?”
Robin shrugs. “I would.”
“You would?” Nancy asks her, eyebrows raised.
“Why not?” Robin says. “I’d roll in there like, ‘What’s up, motherfuckers, look how totally hot and better and more successful than all of you I am.’”
“I do like being hot and better and more successful than everyone,” Eddie muses, nodding.
“You do realize that would be a terrible idea,” Nancy says, looking between the two of them. “You absolutely should not go to your cheating ex’s wedding.”
Eddie drags a piece of hair over his face, considering. “It’s like you two are my shoulder angel and shoulder devil right now,” he says, grinning. He looks at Steve. “Stevie, what do you think?”
“Uhh, do you get free food?” he asks.
“Presumably.”
“And do you get a plus one?”
“Yeah, that was definitely on the invitation.”
“Then I think go with Rob’s revenge angle,” Steve says, “Do the whole hot and better than you thing plus you can be like, ‘Look at my sexy new boyfriend.’”
“Uh, well, I think the obvious snare in that plan is that I don’t have a sexy new boyfriend,” Eddie says, “Or any boyfriend, for that matter.”
“So?” Steve asks, “Pretty sure you could find some guy to go with you in like two seconds. I mean, you’re Eddie fucking Munson.”
“There’s a fairly significant difference between some guy he can find and a boyfriend,” Nancy says, giving Steve a scathing look. “I don’t think ‘some guy’ would have the desired effect.”
“When’s the wedding?” Robin asks Eddie.
“April 25th.”
“You can find a boyfriend between now and then,” Robin says, “Easy.”
Eddie pokes at his fettuccine alfredo. “Maybe not so easy,” he mutters, “Considering I haven’t at any point in the last year.”
“Well, have you been trying?” Steve asks, sounding exactly like Eddie’s teachers in school whenever his grades were low.
“Goddamn, Harrington, didn’t think I was gonna get attacked tonight.”
Robin kicks him under the table. “Why did you think tonight would be any different?”
“You don’t need to find a boyfriend, Eddie,” Nancy says, putting a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “You don’t need a plus one. In fact, you don’t need to go to the wedding at all.”
Robin is nodding along, but by her expression it looks like she’s following an entirely different train of thought than Nancy. “Yeah, maybe you don’t need to find a boyfriend,” she says, “Maybe you just need someone who knows you well enough to act like your boyfriend.”
She throws a significant look at Steve, who is nodding with the definite look of someone who has no idea what she’s getting at.
“That’s a terrible idea,” Nancy says flatly.
“No, actually, it might not be,” Eddie says, “My ex hates Steve.”
Steve’s brow furrows. “Wait, what do I have to do with it?”
Robin pokes him in the side. “I’m saying you should go as Eddie’s boyfriend, dingus.”
Steve’s face clears. “Oh!” he says, “Yeah, I’m down.”
“You are?” Eddie asks, eyebrows lifting.
Steve shrugs. “Yeah, why not? Free food, free vacation.” He frowns at Eddie. “Why does your ex hate me, though? I only met him, like, once.”
“He never got over the Chicago Incident,” Eddie explains.
The Chicago Incident was something that happened while he and his ex were still dating. Eddie was on tour at the time, and their bus broke down in Chicago. Due to some sort of double-booking issue, the hotel that everyone else on the tour was staying at was filled up without a reservation available for Eddie. It was easier for him to just stay with Steve and Robin than to try to figure out another hotel. And since their couch sucks, he slept in Steve’s bed. It was not even remotely a thing, but his ex had kind of lost his mind over it. Now, Eddie realizes that the dude was definitely just projecting.
“He never believed me that you and I didn’t have history,” Eddie adds to Steve.
Steve nods. “Oh, I got it,” he says, “Then yeah, that’s definitely perfect. You can be like, “Hey, look at my super hot, super great boyfriend who just so happens to be the guy I told you not to worry about it.”
“Are you calling yourself super hot, Harrington?” Eddie asks.
“What, are you gonna tell me I’m wrong?”
Eddie grins. “Not in a million years, big boy.”
“For the record, this is a terrible idea,” Nancy says, her voice clearly resigned to the fact that no one is going to listen to her on this.
Robin reaches diagonally across the table to put her hand over Nancy’s. “It’ll be fine,” she says, “They know each other well enough to pull it off.”
“Okay, if we’re gonna do this, we gotta lay the groundwork now,” Eddie says, pulling out his phone. “Rob, switch places with Steve.”
“Why?” she asks.
Eddie opens Instagram. “I’m gonna do that whole soft launch the boyfriend on the story thing,” he says, “‘Cause I can’t just show up in April with a boyfriend no one’s ever heard me mention before or it’s gonna look fake.”
Steve nudges Robin to her feet and then slides into her chair across from Eddie. Robin claims Steve’s seat and scoots it over until she’s out of frame. Eddie lines up the shot so Steve’s head is cut off and tells him to hold the fork so it looks candid.
“Switch the wine glasses,” Nancy says, pointing. “That one has Robin’s lipstick on it.”
“Good catch,” Robin says, making the switch.
With that sorted, Eddie snaps the picture. Then he leans closer to Nancy. “Help me caption it,” he says.
“I’m guessing you don’t want to reveal who he is just yet?” she asks, mirroring his pose.
“Yeah, I think we give it a few weeks,” Eddie says. He grins at Steve. “See if people guess on their own.”
“In that case, something simple,” Nancy says, “And something that implies he’s coming from out of town, so the clues are there.”
“What about, like, ‘missed you’ with a heart?” Eddie asks.
Nancy nods her approval. “Perfect.”
Eddie types the caption and adds it to his story. “There,” he says, “Let them lose their minds over that for a bit.”
Sure enough, when Eddie gets home from Nancy’s place a few hours later and checks Twitter, his fanbase is in an uproar over the picture. There’s nothing when he’s signed in to his main account but when he switches over to his alt where he interacts with his fans more, both his name and #WHOISHE show as trending.
He scrolls through threads of people trying to figure out who the guy in the picture is. No one has mentioned Steve, but Eddie wasn’t really expecting that since his fans don’t really know who Steve is. He’s not one of the people that gets commonly associated with Eddie.
Typically, his friend who gets linked to him the most is Nancy. She’s made a name for herself in her own right as an investigative journalist, plus there have been plenty of times when she’s been out somewhere with Eddie when he’s gotten papped. If not quite as close, his most recognizable friend is definitely Lucas. He’s not sure what people find more surprising—that Eddie is good friends with an NBA player or that said NBA player regularly plays in the same D&D group as him.
Max also gets associated with Eddie fairly frequently, since she’s also relatively in the public eye because of her Youtube channel. She does urban exploring and, on occasion, paranormal investigation. Her channel is still fairly small, but there’s definitely a decent amount of overlap between her audience and Eddie’s.
Eddie’s fans would also recognize Jonathan, even if they don’t necessarily follow his work. Jonathan’s photography gets displayed in small galleries, and he likes to keep it that way. He enjoys his simple life with Argyle and their son James Jr in Lenora, though he is close enough to come hang out with Eddie on occasion, and he’s done tour photography for Corroded Coffin a handful of times, so their fans know who he is.
Jonathan does in fact get suggested a couple of times as an option for who the mystery guy could be. An account called @queeen_ofhell posts a screenshot of Eddie’s story next to a blurry photo of Eddie and Jonathan smoking on the beach from some time last fall and says, “bringing back my eddithan agenda from october when you all said i was crazy.” Another account called @sluts4jeff has replied to that with a screenshot of an Instagram post from Argyle that was posted in September for his and Jonathan’s two-year anniversary (and Eddie finds it genuinely impressive that they even found Argyle, since Jonathan’s personal Instagram is private and he doesn’t think Argyle shows up anywhere on his public photography account). In their reply, @sluts4jeff says, “remember how jonathan literally has a husband AND a child.”
Eddie does also see a fair amount of discourse over whether the guy in the story is even meant to be a romantic interest at all. So he goes back to his mentions to find a tweet to like that will confirm it. He picks one from an account called @fuckhiggins that posted the screenshot of the story along with the caption “he thinks he’s so slick” and likes it. Within minutes, that has Twitter in pandemonium again as they post screenshots of the tweet in his likes. It also means that he’s flooded with mentions both related to the story and not, since people know he’s active now.
He might be having a little too much fun with this. What’s the harm in egging them on a little more? He gives it ten minutes and then he opens Spotify and turns on his horniest playlist. Back on Twitter, he finds the account that’s dedicated to posting updates of whatever he’s listening to on Spotify. The first couple of songs go unnoticed, but then they start picking up on the trend. An account called @garethsleftpinkie replies to the update of the current song playing with screenshots of the last few songs and the caption “lmao hes getting RAILED boys,” to which someone else has replied with that gif of Lucille Bluth saying “Good for her.”
Maybe fucking with his audience shouldn’t bring Eddie so much joy. But goddamn it if he isn’t having the time of his life.
Eddie waits a few weeks before he RSVPs to the wedding. The day after he does, he gets a text from Chrissy that says heard you’ll be at the wedding! i’m excited to see you but im sorry it’s not under better circumstances <3
Potentially the worst part of Eddie’s breakup was losing Chrissy in the divorce. Chrissy is a beauty influencer and publicly very close friends with Eddie’s ex. Though she sided with Eddie in private, she stayed friends with his ex. He doesn’t blame her for it; his impression of the beauty/lifestyle influencers is that they’re always about two misplaced remarks away from their entire community completely imploding. So he doesn’t have any hesitation before he texts her back.
Wednesday 3:18 PM
excited to see you too!
im bringing my bf you’ll be able to meet him :)
Wednesday 3:23 PM
omg yes!!! i saw your story he seems cute from the neck down haha
Wednesday 3:24 PM
ill send you a real picture of him one sec
okay kind of a shitty picture but thats steve <3
Wednesday 3:31 PM
aw he’s such a cutie!!!!!! excited to see you BOTH!!!!!
Maybe the wedding won’t be terrible. Having Steve with him and being able to hang out with Chrissy might actually make it pretty bearable.
It’s a week later when Steve texts him saying, They’re onto me with a screenshot of his DMs flooded with people asking him if he’s dating Eddie. For a second, Eddie wonders if Chrissy leaked it somehow, but when he opens Twitter, he sees that it’s actually because of Max. A couple days ago she posted a series of photos captioned january photodump on Instagram. Eddie didn’t think much of it at the time, but now the third picture in the carousel—a photo of Max with Steve and Robin outside Lucas’ game they came into town for—is circulating. Apparently, someone put together that the timeframe of the game they saw lined up with Eddie’s story, so now people are theorizing that Steve is The Guy.
Eddie sees plenty of tweets with Max’s picture posted side by side with the screenshot from his story. An old photo of him and Steve (with Robin cropped out) from a couple years ago at El’s birthday that someone definitely had to scroll far on Eddie’s Instagram to find is also going around, along with another slightly more recent one from Steve’s Instagram of the two of them at Erica’s high school graduation last year. There’s still a healthy amount of skepticism that Steve is The Guy, since the timing could easily be a coincidence, but then someone finds a picture posted by Dustin a couple months ago in Steve’s tagged photos where he’s wearing the same shirt as in Eddie’s story, which as good as confirms it for most people.
An account called @garethkitten tweets i wonder if eddie is watching this and if he’s impressed by our detective skills or if he thinks we’re all unhinged. Eddie likes it on his alt.
Then he calls Steve.
“So the cat’s out of the bag now, huh?” Steve asks as soon as he picks up.
“Yeah, more or less,” Eddie says, “My fans on Twitter have put it together, but I don’t know how many people know outside of that.”
“So you want to publicly confirm it?”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m calling about. Are you going to Jonathan’s opening?”
“At that gallery? I don’t know, Rob and I haven’t talked about it.”
“You should come,” Eddie says, “We can be photographed together and we can also post something together to confirm the relationship. I mean, we really need a newer picture together. People have just been using the picture from Erica’s graduation or El’s birthday two years ago.”
“Oh God, that one?” Steve asks, “I look terrible in all those pictures from that birthday.”
“What? No, you look cute.”
“You’re such a liar, but thank you,” Steve says. Eddie can hear his smile through the phone. “I think I’m probably in for Jonathan’s thing, though. I gotta talk to Robin and see what she thinks, ‘cause all our time and money is currently going into Soup Soup.”
“What the actual fuck is Soup Soup?”
“It’s soup!”
“Stevie, that’s meaningless to me,” Eddie says.
“It’s what Robin and I are working on. We’re really good at making soup so we’re thinking we can perfect a few recipes and market it. We wanna be Campbell’s for the new age.”
“That’s, uh, great,” Eddie says. He gives this particular venture maybe two months before they abandon it. “But listen, as far as time and money go, you can stay with me and use my kitchen for whatever soup needs you have, and I’ll buy your plane tickets.”
“Okay,” Steve says. He’s finally stopped fighting Eddie whenever he offers to pay for things. It took a few years, but Eddie has managed to convince him that he has way more money than he’ll ever know what to do with and that being able to pay for things for his friends makes him feel less guilty about having it. Eddie also tells Steve that he’s just paying him back for all the times before Corroded Coffin took off when Eddie was dead broke and Steve would buy him food and spot him for gas.
“Plan on me being there for the opening,” Steve says, “And I’ll find out if Robin wants to come too.”
“Cool, just let me know,” Eddie says, “And I’ll see you in a couple weeks.”
“Yeah, I’ll see you then!” Steve says, “Goodbye, angel, love of my love.”
Eddie laughs. “Goodbye, babydoll.”