4. Chapter 4

Steve wakes with a sick jolt, like he’s fallen from a great height. Bleak grey light is streaming in through the gap in the curtains, where he was too drunk to close them the night before, and there’s a cold, hollow feeling in his chest and a slow thumping headache making itself known in his skull. He finished the night with whiskey, he remembers, which is why he feels so rough.

He drags himself out of bed and brushes his teeth. The mint toothpaste tastes foul in his mouth. Looking at his reflection, he finds deep dark circles under his eyes. He thinks idly he’s glad he didn’t bring a girl home, and then freezes at the thought. Right.

Helen. Nancy. Eddie and Danny, Eddie pushed up against the van, Eddie with all the haziness of making out just rolling off him as he came to say goodbye, Eddie who’s gay, Eddie for whom Steve threw a punch–

That Eddie.

The thought of breakfast makes his stomach turn, so he settles for coffee and a nice half hour lying on the cool hardwood floor as he waits for the phone to ring. Which it has to at some point, right? Unless Eddie–

Steve feels another rise of nausea. Danny– I mean, things make sense about Danny now, the pierced ear and all the stuff about the liberation in San Fran. But he was so different in high school. Willing to laugh along with all the rest when guys like Eddie were tormented in the hallways. Steve finds it somehow difficult to believe — in a pretty self-deprecating, uncomfortable way, actually — that he can have changed so much. Steve might have, but Steve’s nearly died a hundred times. And Steve’s still straight.

So he waits for Eddie to call.

And waits. And waits.

By ten, his feelings have deepened from sick, hungover anxiety to fear. What if it was all some plot, some horrible prank to humiliate Eddie, to hurt him, conveniently getting Steve out of the way so–

When his racing, spinning thoughts reach that point, he doesn’t hesitate any longer. He throws on some clothes and hurls himself into the car, flooring it to the trailer park. His heart is pounding in his chest when he gets out, like he’s going to find Eddie in the same way Eddie found Chrissy, like Eddie’s been strung up or Vecna’d or worse, somehow, could it get worse than that?

He takes out his bat.

The morning is dull, grey, and foreboding. He crosses the path in two strides and raps on the trailer’s door. There’s no answer but silence. He knocks again: “Eddie? You there?”

Still no reply. He peers through the broken window, half-shuttered blinds obscuring his view, and spots no movement. He knocks once more and then the fear twisting in his gut becomes too much to ignore, so he tries the handle. It’s unlocked.

The trailer is dim and smells strongly of cigarettes. In the kitchen there’s a coffeepot, but it’s stone cold, as are the butts in the various ashtrays scattered over pretty much every surface. Steve shifts the bat in his hand and moves further in, towards Eddie’s bedroom. “Eddie?” he tries, uselessly, because the trailer has that sense of emptiness to it, so he knows he’s alone.

There’s a dull, rhythmic crackle drifting through the air, the steady click of a record that’s finished and hasn’t stopped spinning. He finds the record player in the corner of Eddie’s chaotically decorated room, side A of Led Zeppelin III spinning away helplessly on it. He turns it off and the room decays into silence. The bed is rumpled, but not slept in. Eddie isn’t here.

Steve tightens his grip on his bat. “Eddie?” he tries again, and wonders what the fuck he’s going to do. Call Dustin, probably, and isn’t that a little bad, that his first port of call in emergencies like this is a child?

He goes outside again. Eddie’s van is here, and as a last ditch effort he knocks on it, and then tries the door, which slides open. The strip of light widens, falling across scattered blankets and clothes, crumpled bits of trash buried among records and books and just a load of junk, really, and nestled among that junk is a person, curled up with his face buried in his hair and one ringed, tattooed hand visible above the blankets. Eddie.

Steve feels a flood of relief so hot it makes his knees tremble. Then there’s a following rush of anger, because he was worried. He knocks on the side of the van with the butt of his bat, sending a thundering echo around the space, and Eddie jolts up, hair flying everywhere as he scrambles back with wide, shell-shocked eyes, and maybe Steve feels a little bad.

At least, he feels bad until Eddie tilts his chin up and reveals the dark, florid stain of a hickey on the side of his neck. Then everything inside Steve seems to shrivel up and curdle like old milk.

“You were gonna call,” he says. It comes out accusing and pissed-off, which, he supposes, is better than desperately sad.

Eddie blinks at him owlishly. “I– was I? I was, was I?”

Steve looks closer. In the stream of light, Eddie’s eyes are like molten bronze, which makes it easy to see how dilated his pupils are. “Jesus, and you’re high.”

“Coming down,” Eddie mutters, moving to scramble past Steve outside. Steve doesn’t move far enough away, so Eddie brushes against him as he goes. He smells earthy, sweat and weed and — Steve flinches — sex. Then he stands blinking in the morning light, stretching his arms above his head. His t-shirt, the same Iron Maiden one from last night, rides up and exposes a strip of pale skin, the V of his hips above low-slung sweatpants, and Steve stubbornly keeps his eyes on Eddie’s face.

“You know, I thought you’d been murdered or something, which wouldn’t exactly be, like, outside the realm of possibility, would it, and I just asked you to call so I thought–”

“I’m sorry, okay? Jesus. I had a rough night.” He rubs his eyes and goes inside, twitchily reaching for a cigarette. Steve follows him.

“Yeah, I’m sure you did.”

Eddie looks at him sharply. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

Steve throws his hands up in the air. “It means I spent all of last night trying to, uh, stop you from being murdered and then I ask you to call to make sure I haven’t, like, completely failed at my job and you don’t call, you just take a bunch of your own stash instead and I really spent this whole time thinking you’d been murdered by the guy you went home with–”

Eddie freezes.

So does Steve. He hadn’t meant it to slip out quite like that, that he knows, and now he’s made it sound like–

“I don’t know what you mean,” Eddie says through his teeth, and his voice is both desperate and resigned at once, like he’s clawing for the last shreds of something already out of his reach.

“C’mon, man, you don’t need to do that. I saw you with Danny last night, before you left. And that hickey is huge.”

Eddie’s hand leaps to his neck and he winces, like he’s only now realising it hurts. He keeps his hand there by his adam’s apple, which jumps as he swallows nervously, his thumb pressing into his skin. “I’m sorry I didn’t call,” he says quietly, eyes on the floor.

Steve doesn’t know what to say. He’s annoyed, still, at the drowsy disorientation in Eddie’s blown pupils, at the ruddy hickey blooming on his throat, at the way all of this is setting something antsy in Steve’s chest and he doesn’t know what to do with it, any of it. He manages to huff a sigh, looking away, bringing his own hand to his forehead: “It’s not– it’s not about that, man.”

It’s the wrong thing to say. Eddie’s face twists, the anxious shyness falling away into a steep, mocking smile — “What is it about, then? Pray tell. I think we’d all like to know.” He doesn’t give Steve a chance to answer. “No? Okay, fine, I’m sure I can deduce the answer for myself.” He throws his arms up in the air, flouncing across the room like he’s on stage. “Hmm, let’s spin the wheel! I’ll have an ‘H’, please, Pat — oh, look at that, the word begins with ‘H’, maybe I’ll win the grand prize, I think I can already guess what it–”

Steve cuts him off. He refuses to let him finish that sentence. “It’s not, Jesus, it’s not a problem, I just– you, like, complaining about your night and then–”

“Yeah, well, King Steve, you don’t know shit about my night. Like I said, it was, uh, pretty fucking terrible, actually, if you’re that desperate for all the gory details–” he leans forward, leering, a manic desperation in his eyes, and Steve jolts back “–like, uh, how I couldn’t get it up because being here makes me want to crawl out my goddamn skin? And how– how I couldn’t even suck his cock–” Steve reels at that, at the casual, defiant emphasis with which Eddie spits it out “–because I already couldn’t breathe, and you wanna know what I’m coming down from? It’s Special K, okay, which I did a load of after Danny fucked off because my mind wouldn’t stop fucking going and otherwise I was gonna spend the whole night having, um, panic attacks, so I needed to get out of my own head for a while and it was the only way I could fall asleep, which I eventually did at, uh, seven a.m., maybe? Which was three goddamn hours ago, so you’ll excuse me if I’m really fucking tired and would rather just go back to sleep than deal with whatever judgy, preachy bullshit you’re about to land on me, so.”

They stare at each other for a long moment. Eddie slumps back against the wall, like he’s used up all the energy he had left. Steve’s first thought is that he wishes he’d been there for him last night, because it does indeed sound like a terrible night, and Steve’s had a lot of those. His second is about how stupidly fucking obscene the word cock sounds in Eddie’s mouth.

“So there you have it, Harrington.” Eddie tilts his head back against the wall, a slow, bitter smile on his face. “What, cat got your tongue? You not gonna hold my hand again, now you know I’m a fag?”

“Eddie–”

The smile drops. The veneers, the melodrama, the bitterness and the sarcasm and the mania, they fall. All that remains is a small, agonised fear, the fear of a feral animal in a corner. “Just get out. Just get the fuck out.”

Steve takes a step towards him. Eddie flinches. It’s not a real flinch, it’s not like he thinks Steve will hurt him, necessarily, but it’s a wince and a pulling back and actually maybe he thinks Steve will. Which feels like crushing defeat in Steve’s chest, absolutely crushing, so he takes a step back. “I’m not– I’m serious, I don’t– I don’t have a problem with it. I really don’t.”

“God, I knew letting you in was a bad fucking idea,” Eddie mumbles, and Steve doesn’t know what he means, whether he means into the trailer or more generally, and if he means more generally then it brings him right back to the start and what is Steve going to do with that– with Eddie ignoring him again, cold and lonely and hating him again– “Get out. Please.”

“Eddie–” he tries again, but Eddie looks like he’s about five seconds away from throwing something at him and the nearest thing is an ashtray and Steve would really rather not stick around for that, so he moves away to the door.

“Just get out,” Eddie says again, quieter now, hands clenched together in front of his mouth in fists so tight his knuckles are white, like a violent sort of prayer.

Steve gets out.

He grabs his bat from where he dropped it by the van in a sort of haze, going through the motions of stowing it in the trunk and getting in the car and turning over the engine without thinking about any of it. He’s thinking instead about Eddie’s face as he called himself a fag, that self-loathing married with an open, defiant pride, like he was allowed to hate himself but no one else was, the way he owned it and turned it around on Steve like it was Steve who was being insulted, like it was Steve who should be ashamed.

Which, he guesses, he should be, since Eddie is now convinced he’s homophobic.

“Fuck!” he yells, slamming his hands against the steering wheel, and then shouts it again for good measure. A horrible hopeless dread is creeping through him, worse than the dread he felt when he saw Eddie and Danny kissing last night, and it’s a dread that’s beginning to work its way into his head and put all sorts of strange thoughts there, like that thought of I wish I’d been there for him last night only in a context that doesn’t make any sense at all, a context where it wasn’t Danny there last night, it wasn’t Danny by the van, it was–

He doesn’t let himself finish that thought. He drives to Robin instead.

Family Video is closed on Sundays, thank god, because he’d rather die than work there hungover. So he finds her at home. She opens the door in her pyjamas and takes one look at him and calls over her shoulder, “Mom, I’m going out!”, following him out to his car in her socks.

“You don’t wanna get dressed?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t wanna spend another minute in that house with her.” Then she looks at him frankly. “Also, you don’t seem like you can wait.” It’s when they’re driving away — he doesn’t even know where he wants to go — that she asks the inevitable question. “What happened, Steve? Talk to me.”

He flexes his hand on the wheel. The dread rises up again, too choking to breathe, and it takes a second before he can get words out. “Eddie–”

He doesn’t know where to go from there. But something changes in Robin’s face, like she gets it suddenly, and she sits back. “Let’s go somewhere quiet, okay, and then you tell me.”

The Pet Shop Boys are playing in the background, and absently he turns them way down. Then he nods without speaking. He doesn’t trust his voice.

He drives them to a spot by Lake Jordan, an unspoken agreement between them to go nowhere near Lovers’ Lake. Then they get out and sit on the hood together a little way from the shoreline, the heavy grey curtain of cloud above them beginning to lift a little. Robin sits cross-legged, while Steve lets his legs hang down, his hands clasped together between his knees, heart still pounding like it was when he thought Eddie had been fucking murdered.

Robin waits. Which is the right thing to do, because eventually the words just come out. “So, Eddie’s gay. Which you totally knew, I know that, and I should have known too, surely, I mean, like, there were plenty of hints, and because I’m so fucking oblivious–”

He stops. She lays her hand on his arm. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” she says. “But, like–”

“I know you couldn’t. It’s okay. It’s really okay. That’s not–” He looks down. “That’s not what’s got me so–”

“So what has, Steve? What happened?”

It comes spilling out, all of it. The party and the plan, the beers and the dealing and the staring at each other in the dark with their knees touching, Nancy’s upset and the punch Steve threw and the crux of it all, Danny and Eddie kissing and then Eddie leaving and not calling and Steve not saying a single goddamn word to defend himself this morning– Eddie spending the whole night suffering and now thinking the worst of Steve as well–

“I don’t know what to fucking do, Robin, I can’t– I can’t go back to him hating me, it was awful when he hated me, but now I can’t even fucking blame him because I couldn’t even act like a normal person when I found out he was gay–”

Robin is looking at him carefully. Very carefully. “Steve. I’m gonna– I’m gonna ask you a really personal question, the answer to which I was one hundred percent sure I knew until recently which means I never actually asked it, though I probably– definitely– should have done, and, like, you don’t have to tell me the answer, it’s more a question for you on the inside, if that makes sense? Is that okay?”

The dread swirls around inside him. “Okay.”

“How straight are you?”

He stares at her. And stares at her some more. “I’m– what do you mean? I’m just straight. I like girls, you know that–”

She rolls her eyes. “Yeah, duh, I fucking know that. I’m just– why don’t you think about it, for a second, okay? You can like girls and not be straight, you know.”

He doesn’t know. She says it so matter-of-factly, but he doesn’t know that, and it feels weird even to hear her say it. But he is straight, isn’t he? Isn’t he?

He thinks about the V of Eddie’s hips on show as his t-shirt rode up. About his long ringed fingers, his crooked, sardonic grin, the fearless ease with which he is himself, his defiance about that, his defiance about everything. Steve feels the dread rise up — and the way the hickey pulled at his chest, the way Danny pulled at his chest, and he knows what that feeling means, that pull, though he’s been trying so fucking hard to ignore it. The same pull he got when he’d see Nancy with Jonathan, in the beginning, a nasty, sick little jealous pull under his ribs, the pull that says That should be me, I wish that was me, but this isn’t Nancy. This isn’t a girl at all.

But Steve isn’t like that. Steve is King Steve, Steve ‘The Hair’ Harrington, Steve who takes home a different girl every weekend but is looking for the right one to settle down with, really, he’s unlucky in love but isn’t everyone? And he’s unlucky in love but not cursed. Not that he thinks it’s a curse but–

Robin, in the car that day, I ask out the wrong girl, and bam, I’m a town pariah. The guy at the party, All the fags are carrying something. Eddie’s own words this morning, You not gonna hold my hand again, now you know I’m a fag? The way it’s always been so easy for Steve, so easy, and this would be nothing if not difficult.

He’s the normal one. He’s not a priss like Nancy, a loner like Jonathan, a weirdo like Robin, a freak like Eddie. He’s the one who doesn’t have anything wrong with him, and the very thought feels horrible, something he’d have said three years ago when he was a worse person and the very idea that he’d be having this conversation at all would have made him curl up his lip in disgust — but he is, he’s the normal one.

And how is that going for you? says a voice in his head, a voice that sounds suspiciously like Robin. Shitty love life, doesn’t know what he wants, happier crossing an alternate dimension with Eddie ‘The Freak’ Munson than going to the movies with a girl — how normal is he really? Really?

Don’t you ever think we should just– I don’t know. Do the thing no one expects us to?

Robin is still looking at him, uncharacteristically silent and patient. The sun has broken through the grey above them, casting rippling shadows through the canopy of budding spring leaves. He knots his fingers together and sucks in a long breath of cool lake air.

“Steve?” she asks at last, voice soft. “You OD over there?”

He smiles faintly. “No.”

She nudges her shoulder against his. “It’s okay, you know. If you’re– not straight. It isn’t all that bad.”

“Huh, glowing assessment right there,” he snarks, but his tone is low and quiet.

“You just– you know what I mean. I mean– it’s scary, at first– it’s scary all the time, actually, but mostly at first– but then, I don’t know. There’s something– liberating about it. Eddie would be able to explain it better. But it’s like– having a part of yourself that’s yours, only yours, and it’s uniquely yours, like no two people are gay in the same way and yet when you meet another gay person it’s like– I don’t know, it’s like the sun comes out.”

He looks at her. “That why you and Eddie get along so well, then?”

“I mean, not only, but–” She smiles a shy-looking smile. “He’s the first other gay person I’ve met, like, knowingly. I can’t tell you how fucking nice that is, Steve.” Then she considers him. “Or maybe I can.”

He looks down at his hands again. Don’t you ever think we should just do the thing no one expects us to? “I don’t know,” he says finally. His voice is barely a whisper. Saying it makes it real, is the problem. Just like he knew Eddie might be gay until he saw him kissing Danny, at which point he was gay, and there was no taking it back, and now that Steve knows Eddie is gay there’s no taking back what Steve might be either.

“That’s okay. You don’t have to know. Even not knowing is a step forward, right? In the right direction?”

He pulls his legs up and puts his head between his knees, lacing his hands together in his hair. “Holy fuck,” he says, voice muffled. Four apocalypses later and this is somehow the craziest moment of his life.

“Holy fuck,” Robin agrees amiably.

“How the hell do I tell Eddie I wasn’t acting weird because he’s gay and that’s, like, a problem but because I might be–” His voice dries up in his throat.

Her hand lands on his shoulder, and he looks up. “Yeah, I mean, that is potentially an issue we should probably resolve at some point but– not right now. Right now — and I’m speaking from experience here, you should never have your sexuality crisis in the presence of the person whose fault it is, even if he is gay and maybe possibly a tiny bit or a lot into you too —” Steve freezes, but she doesn’t give him a chance to interrupt “— you’re going home to think about this. Or wherever you wanna go. Sort your head out before you screw it all up again seeing him again.”

He nods slowly. He can do that.

“I knew you were obsessed with him.”

He lets out a low groan at that. “But what if I’m just– imagining things. What if I’m just– what if I’m just jealous he– I dunno, he got some last night, jealous that he’s friends with you, jealous he’s friends with Dustin–”

“Maybe you are,” she says, though by her tone she doesn’t believe that for a second, “and maybe you’re not. And either way, you’re still gonna be my stupid ass best friend and you’re still gonna be the best damn babysitter Henderson’s ever had, so cut that shit–”

She breaks off with an oof as Steve pulls her into a hug. A hug he quickly regrets, because he knows sometimes she doesn’t like touch and he should have asked, shouldn’t he, but she just smiles at him, as he pulls back, and shoves playfully at his shoulder.

“Going soft on me, Harrington?” she says, and his eyes are stinging, so he just swats at her and smiles through it. Then she looks at him speculatively. “You know, maybe it’s finally time you watched Rocky Horror.”