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Steve’s sitting on the edge of the pool with his feet in the water when Eddie sits next to him. The night air is cold in a suffocating sort of way, yet suffocating in a way that feels right. The night air fills the emptiness of his lungs like puzzle pieces snapping into place. It’s cold out, and the water is colder, and Steve feels alive.
“It’s late as hell,” says Eddie, voice soft and low like it used to be.
It’s a little painful to hear him like this again, after so long. It feels voyeuristic. Eddie shouldn’t be talking to him so softly, so sweetly. Eddie shouldn’t be talking to him at all. Eddie shouldn’t be here at all, shouldn’t be breathing the same air as Steve, not after everything. But Steve doesn’t feel like yelling at him, so he stays quiet.
Eddie just offers him a cigarette.
Their hands brush as Steve takes it.
Eddie hands him the lighter, too. It’s strange. Eddie used to light Steve’s cigarettes for him, back in high school. He’d lean in real close with the lighter and look up at Steve through his eyelashes and Steve would find it hard to breathe. And then Eddie would take the cigarette and take a drag and blow the smoke into Steve’s face, and then he’d rest it between Steve’s lips. And he wouldn’t look away. Not once.
Now, Eddie hardly looks at him.
“How’s your uncle?” asks Steve, studying Eddie’s face. The moonlight makes him look all the more angular.
Eddie looks a little surprised, but he answers all the same. “Wayne’s alright. It’s been tough lately, with the hospital and the court and everything, but he’s holding up pretty okay.”
“Yeah?” Steve has an ache in him that he can’t quite place the source of. “He still work at the plant?”
Eddie looks surprised again, like he didn’t think that Steve would remember.
Steve tries not to take offense.
“Yeah, he does.”
Steve takes a deep breath and fills his lungs with smoke. He's smoked since high school, sure, but it's different with Eddie here. The smoke sits in his chest like guilt pools into his gut. He can't help but think about how Eddie shouldn't have sat next to him. How, in these last few weeks, Eddie shouldn't even have let Steve talk to him. And yet, selfishly, Steve is glad that he's there.
It's easier to smoke when Eddie is next to him.
He looks around at the trees. He feels Eddie’s eyes on him the minute he turns away.
“We should probably talk about it,” Eddie whispers.
“About what?” Steve asks.
They both know he knows.
Steve swallows hard. “I didn’t cheat on you, you know,” says Steve, and Eddie’s eyes dash from the bob of Steve’s throat to his eyes. It’s the first time they’ve looked each other in the eyes since Steve told Eddie to make Vecna pay.
“That girl, at the party,” Steve continues, “kept flirting with me. And I didn’t know how to tell her I was taken, because nobody knew, and I wasn’t ready to come out yet, and she kept dancing on me. I told her she was too drunk, and that she needed to have some water, so I took her to the kitchen and I left her there. And when I came back, you were gone. Then I was looking for you everywhere and when I found you all you did was yell at me before you left, for good.”
For the first time in probably his entire life, Eddie doesn’t know what to say.
“You were my ride home, you asshole,” says Steve, and he should be angry, but it’s been three years, and Steve finds that he doesn’t care quite as much as he used to. “I walked home in the rain.”
Steve wouldn’t remember whose party it was even if the Russians tortured him again, and he couldn’t tell you who the girl was or whose house they were at, but the look on Eddie’s face was something engraved into the inside of his eyelids.
He saw it, a lot, before he drifted off to sleep.
“You’re an asshole, Harrington, you know that?”
After that, Eddie stormed out. It had taken Steve a little longer than a minute to piece together what had caused it, but that had been a minute too long.
This Eddie, the one sitting next to Steve at the edge of the pool and not next to him in class, looking at him curiously instead of sending glares that made it hard to focus on his biology homework, sighed. “I think I have this problem,” he begins.
“You think?” Steve laughs, not meanly. “And just one?”
Eddie chuckles softly. It isn’t like the big laugh he had when the kids did something stupid or when the Corroded Coffin boys made some nerdy reference.
Although Steve feels a little selfish thinking it, this laugh feels just for him.
“I think I’m scared of seeing the good in people,” Eddie confesses. His breath condensates. “You know, I know you didn’t cheat on me.” And this time, it’s Steve’s turn to look a little surprised. “I got home and I thought about it and I knew it wasn’t you. But by the time I got to school in the morning and I kept seeing you around, I forced myself into believing that you’d done it.”
“You’re an asshole, Eddie, you know that?”
They both laugh.
“I know. And that’s my problem. We were just hooking up, at first, and then it became more than that, and even when you said you loved me, or you bought me flowers, I guess I couldn’t help but keep thinking that I was just a hookup to you. When I saw you with that girl, my mind just ran with it, and I guess I used it as ‘evidence’ that I was right. That I had been all along.”
Steve considers this for a moment before turning back to Eddie. “You know, you were never a hookup to me. I liked you for months before we hooked up the first time; I just asked because I finally stopped feeling guilty about it.”
“Christ, Steve,” says Eddie, because he doesn’t know what else to say.
Steve screws up his face and looks Eddie in the eyes. “You were everything to me, Eddie. I loved you so much.”
And Steve doesn’t say it, but both of them hear the You still are. I still do.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” Eddie asks, hushed.
Steve blinks at him. “Would you have listened?”
They sit there in silence for what feels like hours. It’s more likely just a few minutes. An owl hoots not too far away. The grass rustles in a gentle breeze.
“I loved you, too, Steve.” I love you, too.
“Yeah. I know.”
“Steve.” The name rolls off Eddie’s tongue like morning dew off of a leaf. “We should probably talk more, later.”
“Not right now,” Steve responds, hardly audible.
Eddie studies the planes of Steve’s face. “Not right now,” he agrees with a nod. “But what do we do, now?”
They breathe in tandem as they finish their cigarettes. The moon is a little higher in the sky than it was when they first began talking. Eddie’s pinky rests dangerously close to Steve’s. They interlock. Steve doesn’t know how Eddie feels, but it feels like the universe has stopped, just for them.
“Eddie?” His name fits comfortably on Steve’s tongue. Like it belongs there.
“Yes, Steve?”
Steve grins wildly, like a little kid. “I’m going to push you into the pool, now.”
Eddie snorts, then gives Steve his signature crooked smile. Steve hasn’t seen it in a while. “Please, don’t.”
He doesn’t get much of a heads up before he’s plunged underwater, long hair trailing behind him. He gasps for air and grabs onto the edge of the pool, about to get out before he reconsiders. Instead, he grabs both of Steve’s legs, yanking him in the water. Steve screeches, equal parts boy and pterodactyl.
It’s much past midnight by the time they stop pushing each other around in the pool.
And as they walk back into Steve’s house, hand in hand, sopping wet and fully clothed, Steve feels the most hopeful he’s felt since 1983.