Chapter Text
“Mind if I sleep here tonight?” Steve asks.
He pats the carpet beside his head as he speaks, elbows bent upward, and his hands feel slow and clunky. Beneath them, the carpet is — kind of scratchy, actually. Not soft. But he can’t imagine getting up any time soon, even as the alarm clock on Eddie’s nightstand marches toward three in the morning; he could very well cry out at the notion of abandoning this odd relief he’s found, the way his muscles have unwound from each other.
“Like, right here?” he adds. “On the floor.”
Eddie breaks out in a wild laugh, bright and spontaneous — tearing out of him as if by accident. The sound catches Steve off guard. Makes his heart jump. He quirks an eyebrow at the sound with a grin and a lazy roll of his head, his vision drifting curiously across the profile of Eddie’s splayed-out body. It’s hard to see much, at a horizontal, the both of them laying on the ground at opposite angles a few feet apart; but he catches Eddie’s chin jutting upward from the column of his throat, his chest heaving under his cutoff tank top as he cackles. For a moment. Then it’s over as soon as it started, only echoing in Steve’s skull.
“Sure,” Eddie answers, a leftover smile in his voice. “It’s a nice floor.” He spreads his arms out against it, brushing an invisible snow angel into the carpet, slow-motion. Measuring the soft scratch of the fibers against his bare arms.
Steve cringes, imagining the ragged texture against anything other than his palms, and is grateful for the loose sweatshirt he’d tossed on before driving over. But other than that — yeah. It’s a nice floor. He finds himself sinking into it, into the entire room.
They’d barely even smoked anything. Hand to God, he imagines telling Robin — a habit he returns to when navigating situations like this one, these casually agonizing one-on-ones he keeps finding himself a part of. Nights spent toying with the deceptive comfort of Eddie’s presence, where eventually the silence might stretch and Steve might start feeling rough and apprehensive. Like if he so much as breathes the wrong way he’ll get caught with all the darker thoughts in his head. The Robin that lives in his head is a lifeline, an ear for all his distressed and melodramatic longing; as is the real one he’ll inevitably end up spilling his guts to, a couple days from now.
We barely fucking smoked anything, he’ll tell her, exaggerating a little or maybe a lot, and then we had to lie down, like, right away. No, he didn’t “lace it with something,” Rob, you sound like a moron.
They’re just kind of tired, is the thing. Well — Steve is, at least, but he can assume the same of Eddie, who’d spent a clumsy few seconds clearing the floor of half its typical chaos before flopping over with a huff. Steve had ended up in much the same position a little later in the evening, sliding down from his seat against the side of Eddie’s bed, down like a sinking ship.
Those days where everything seems to catch up to him, mentally or emotionally or, tonight, physically — he’s discovered over the years that they tend to be a shared occasion. If he calls around he’ll find somebody else is off-kilter, tossing around in that uncomfortable blend of restless and weary. So he goes for a drive with Robin or nods his way through one of Dustin’s elaborate rants over the walkie-talkie, going mhm and totally and no way.
Or — more and more often — he ends up here, in the Munsons’ new trailer, or wherever else he and Eddie might have landed after a long day. Bone-dead and heavy. Dizzy on one thing or another.
Whatever smoke that’d drifted between their lungs and into the air is long gone, having slipped out the cracked window; and whatever meager high they’d wrung out of it is probably on its way out, too. But everything’s still kind of shifting in place, calm — drowsy and weightless at the same time. Everything is soft and warm from inside Steve’s sweatshirt. And the floor is, indeed, nice.
“Mhm,” he finally agrees, almost absently. He’d turned back towards the ceiling sometime in the last thirty seconds, now finds himself studying the empty space. The only uncomplicated surface in Eddie’s new room, free from posters or clutter or anything scrawled in Sharpie. “S’nice.”
“Yup,” Eddie says. A moment passes, then the next, pleasantly quiet. The hum of the AC and the cicadas buzzing outside the cracked window harmonize in the meantime.
Eddie clicks his tongue before he speaks again, musing — “I think if I tried to move my spine would snap in half.”
Steve barks out a laugh, hears Eddie mirror it with a chuckle. “What the fuck? What happened?” he asks, voice twisting between amusement and concern, and he cranes his neck to look at him again. More effectively this time, at least, propping himself up on an elbow and tilting his head.
“Slept on it funny, I guess. Fucking—” Eddie curses, trying to stretch his arms where they’re still spread, before cutting himself off with an exaggerated shout. At least Steve hopes it’s exaggerated. “AGH! Shit!”
“Maybe you shouldn’t be lying on the floor,” Steve says, as Eddie knocks his head back against the carpet in annoyance, grumbling.
“Fuck you. We just established how nice the floor is,” he bites, but he’s getting up anyway, pushing himself off the carpet with a hushed sound of discomfort — high-pitched, but deep in his throat, a two-note thing that ends on a question. Steve would hesitate to call it a whimper, from the disturbed look Robin would give him, but that’s kind of what it is. (And who is he kidding — he’d say it three times over just to rile her up.)
Something in the pit of his stomach snags on the sound, replays it in his head as if to make sure he’d really heard it right, and then the derangement slips away again. As it does.
But he’s kind of staring, he realizes, at the back of Eddie’s tank top, the speckled impressions of the carpet etched into his lean arms. Staring, still, as Eddie lifts them over his head and stretches with a deep, creaky breath in, his cutoff tank riding up enough to expose the small of his back. A few notches of claw marks curl around his right side, shiny pink against pale skin. And, peeking over the edge of his jeans, his boxers are red today.
Steve breathes very carefully over the course of the next fifteen seconds, just shy of actually counting out every inhale and exhale. Eddie busies himself making that weird, long sound people make when they’re practically about to pull a muscle, then twists his back left, and right, his face scrunched up whenever Steve catches a glimpse.
“No, it’s fucked,” Eddie determines, ceasing his movements and slumping forward a bit, cross-legged. He sweeps a few frizzy curls over his shoulder with the side of his hand, patting haphazardly at the errant strands. There’s a lamp in the corner casting a dim, yellowish light over the slow-motion of everything. It kind of grates on Steve when he’s in a worse mood — he doesn’t like feeling like he can’t see very well, like the shadows might start moving or the world might start spinning — but it always looks nice on Eddie’s hair. Brings out the warmer tones.
“I used to give Nancy massages,” Steve says.
It’s out before he even knows where it came from. Really it’s like somebody else said it, commandeering his voice — the thought process didn’t happen, or if it did, it happened without Steve’s supervision. Maybe something to do with brown waves of hair, dimmed lights. He’s too busy balking at his words to retroactively connect any dots, at the moment, so he can’t be too sure.
Eddie’s just as confused, it seems, because he goes completely still. The silence hangs heavy, for the three or four seconds it’s there, and Steve wishes he could see Eddie’s face. Finds himself incapable of guessing at the expression he might be wearing, right now. He just has to stare at the back of his head, the tensed line of his shoulders, until Eddie finally says, “Oh, yeah?”
He sounds softer than Steve expected, under that layer of derision. And he turns his head, too, as he says it — not enough to face Steve, but enough to betray some level of curiosity. Like he wants to listen a little more closely.
“Uh,” Steve says, glancing away once he catches the edge of Eddie’s cheekbone, electing to study the carpet instead. Picks at it idly, feels guilty when a fiber comes loose. “Yeah. When we were together. Her backpack always weighed like, twenty pounds.” He laughs a little, smiling as he tries to twist the thread back into the floor. It’s not the kind of smile he really feels deep down; all he feels, kind of indifferently, is the memory losing warmth — a couple years old and split off towards Emerson. “Probably still does.”
Eddie glances further over his shoulder to look at him; Steve catches the movement in his peripheral vision, something subtle. It grabs right back at him, though, forces his attention like someone slinking into class ten minutes after the bell. Like some of the few times they’d ever caught eyes before their shared apocalypse, actually — lifetimes ago in Eddie’s second senior year. Steve had thought he was kind of interesting, then, but mostly weird. His eyes were always really wide or really narrowed, and either way always searching. Judging. There was a weight behind the way he looked at things.
And there it is again, that weight. They’re staring at each other for an entire two seconds, wherein Steve isn’t sure anymore who got caught looking at who, before Eddie blinks away. “Yeah…” he sighs through a faint laugh, belated. Steve misses his face the second he can’t see it anymore.
He feels like he’s supposed to keep talking. He’s supposed to keep talking, right? He was telling a story; Eddie’s waiting for the ending. He has the urge to pull at the collar of his sweater, all nervous, like he’s sweating behind a podium in some big crowded room.
“Anyway,” he gets out, awkward, because he doesn’t know what ending Eddie’s looking for but he figures he has to get there somehow. “I guess it kind of helped. I mean, she said it was, y’know— Nice.”
“Mhm,” Eddie says, nodding almost imperceptibly. Then his voice dips down, mocking, and he’s probably smirking too; “Oh, I’m sure it was.”
“Ugh, that’s not what I meant,” Steve rolls his eyes, thudding back against the carpet. But he’s not sure what he expected, bringing up Nancy in his presence — Eddie’s still weird about the two of them, even when he tries to hide it. And Steve notices, sometimes, when he tries to hide it.
This time, Eddie just giggles, like a toddler or a cartoon villain or some other kind of menace, and clambers up off the floor. And he has a funny way of moving, even when he’s not whatever they both are now — he’s always swaying and stumbling in wide arcs, like his center of gravity is somewhere outside of himself and his body’s left trailing behind. Steve tracks him with a quizzical sort of smirk, jerks away a little when Eddie dives headfirst into bed just a foot or two from Steve’s spot on the floor.
After a moment of shifting and creaking and Eddie going ow — sounding more offended than actually injured — as he resituates himself, his head pops into view from over the edge of the bed. Right above Steve, staring down at him with those wide, impish eyes.
“‘Sup,” he says, folding his hands on the edge of the bed where he rests his chin. “Are you tired?”
“Not really,” Steve says, because he isn’t anymore. He thinks if he lifts his head up, up a few inches, Eddie’s hair would probably brush his cheek. It’s hanging in a soft curtain above him, framing Eddie’s face, and he wants to run his hand through the waves. He wants to curl his fingers and pull.
Instead he stacks his hands against his lower chest, like a body laid to rest. Here lies Steve Harrington. And isn’t that the last thing Eddie needs — another corpse in his house.
“You?” he returns, after a beat.
“Dying,” Eddie says, inexplicably. Eyes wide, tone grave, lips just barely turned up in a smile. There’s a scar etched by the corner of his mouth that might remind Steve how, less than a year ago, the joke would have been less funny; but the thought passes by without settling anywhere.
“Oh,” he laughs. “So do you want one?”
Eddie scowls at him, dipping his head. “Want what?”
“A massage.”
Steve doesn’t have a name for the face Eddie makes at that — it’s subtle, eyebrows raising just barely, the depth of his gaze flickering with something he can’t read. Too complicated. Or maybe Steve’s just completely out of the loop, again and seemingly always.
“I don’t know. Might help,” he continues, fighting through the dead air, wondering a little how his own expression might read at the moment. Casual? Sincere? Fucking desperate? “Since you’re dying and all,” he adds with air quotes.
“Funny,” Eddie says, that heavy look slipping from his face when he rolls his eyes, unimpressed. He sounds almost insulted, which sounds like fire alarms going off in Steve’s head. “Very funny.”
“I’m not joking,” Steve insists, then blinks hard enough to reset himself. “I mean— the dying thing was a joke.”
“It was my joke.”
“I know,” Steve rolls his eyes. Although I’m not sure I really get it. “I’m genuinely asking, though. Do you want one?”
They frown at each other for a moment, Steve breathing in and forgetting to breathe out, before Eddie breaks. “What— Seriously?” he says, huffing out a sharp laugh and shaking his head dismissively, “You don’t have to.”
“I know,” Steve says. “I’m just asking.”
Just asking, he repeats in his own head, sounding both defensive and unconvinced. In the voice of the former, he tacks on: Not a big deal. And he wouldn’t lie to Robin — at least, not like that, not with any hope she’d actually believe him — so he must be talking to himself, now.
Eddie goes unreadable again. Chews his lip for a moment, and Steve feels jealous of both parties.
“Okay, sure,” Eddie finally sighs, wagging his head with the words, voice drawn-out and crossed between condescension and resignation. He leans back and away from Steve’s vision, muttering, “You better have, like, magic hands or something.”
Well, shit. Steve’s hands — somehow they feel even more anxious than the rest of him, kind of pins-and-needles all the sudden. He makes fists around the childish tingling in his palms, as if he could strangle his own nerves. He wanted to do this. He wants to do this. It doesn’t have to be weird.
Standing up, he finds Eddie sitting cross-legged in the center of the bed, rubbing idly at his shoulder and watching Steve from the corner of his eye. Steve pulls at the edge of the blanket, straightening out the fabric that’d crumpled up beside Eddie — he can’t stand that lumpy sort of texture underneath him, but then again, who can?
Then he’s walking on his knees across the bed before he can think too much about anything like is this a bad idea and yeah this is probably a bad idea. He kind of stumbles a bit on his way over. The high’s not gone, then; or maybe something else is making him unsteady.
“You said you slept on it funny?” he asks as he settles behind Eddie.
“Yeah,” Eddie says, glancing back at Steve before facing forward again. He slips his hand away from under his tank to frisk through his hair, shaking it all out, then yanks a hair tie off his wrist to loop it around the mass of curls in a high ponytail. It’s a swift, practiced movement, just as perfectly disheveled as the rest of him. A couple strands fall to rest against the edge of his cheekbones.
Steve clears his throat. “Where, exactly?”
“Uh, fuckin’ everywhere, I guess,” Eddie shrugs. “Not sure how I managed that.”
Steve snickers, almost teases him — seriously? Because Steve has a pretty good idea how Eddie might have managed that. They’ve had dozens of impromptu little sleepovers and slumber parties, or whatever the grown-up terms for those events might be; they’ve even shared a bed exactly six times, probably seven when he sticks around tonight. It’s an elaborate dance of nerves, desire, and self-restraint every time, made all the more difficult by Eddie’s continuous frenzy of sudden movements. He twists and kicks and rolls around in his sleep, alternates between taking up the entire bed and folding into himself — even since before the nightmares, he told Steve one morning, sometimes I wake up all twisted like a pretzel.
“Yeah, I’m not surprised,” Steve says, instead. He shuffles forward a bit, sits back on his heels. “So, I’ll just start with the shoulders…?”
“Okay,” Eddie says.
Steve nods, as if Eddie can see it, pushing the sleeves of his sweater halfway up his forearms. Flexes his hands once, twice, before reaching for Eddie’s crooked shoulders. Eddie jumps a little as soon as — oh man — Steve’s touching him.
“Relax,” Steve tells him, and also himself, pressing lightly against Eddie’s shoulders. They’re warm through the beaten fabric of his tank top; solid. “But also if I fuck something up then tell me.”
“Uh-oh,” Eddie drawls, “you mean to tell me you’re not a professional masseuse? An expert in the field?” He cranes his neck to frown up at Steve through his eyelashes, all melodrama. Grimacing as he does it, almost imperceptibly, but Steve is always catching the little things. “Am I in danger here, Steve?”
“Yeah, if you keep twisting around like that! Come on, turn around,” he scolds, lifting a hand to gesture at him, making a spinning motion that Eddie tsks at before obeying. “And, like—” Steve continues, hands returning to Eddie’s coiled shoulders, “Just loosen up a bit.”
“Mhm,” Eddie hums. “And how exactly shall I go about all that?”
Steve scoffs an exasperated laugh, trying to focus on the points above Eddie’s shoulder blades, lightly pressing his thumbs into them. “Just take deep breaths or something,” he says. “I don’t know.”
“Or something,” Eddie repeats in a put-upon mutter. “Great bedside manners on you, dude, stellar.”
Steve digs the heel of his hands into Eddie’s shoulders, shakes him a little. Which is fine, because they shake each other around all the time, they fucking tackle each other, kick shins and bump shoulders. Guy stuff. This— this is, arguably, guy stuff.
“Dude, we don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” Steve’s reminding him, though, because Eddie’s been all flighty about it, and a little rude—
“No, sorry, wait,” Eddie says hastily, straightening up and squaring his shoulders. “I’ll shut up now.”
Steve pauses, frowning at the back of Eddie’s head for a good second or two, then tries to resume where he left off. Which — well, he hadn’t made it very far. And God, wouldn’t it be embarrassing if he were suddenly horrible at this? He tries to shove the thought out of his mind before it eats him, tries to focus on the last few times he did this, instead; calling on muscle memory as he rolls his palms against Eddie’s shoulders, the fabric of Eddie’s shirt.
There was a girl named Katherine he’d gone out with for a little while, months ago; he’d been annoyed that it clearly wasn’t going anywhere, but terrified, somehow, that it would. Robin had called that fascinating. Anyway, it’d been their… fourth date or something. They had dinner somewhere unremarkable, skipped a movie because her parents were out of town. And Steve remembers her room had been spacious and messy and mostly shades of green, and her bed had been soft. Remembers curling over her back as she laughed, helping her take off her bra, dragging his hands across her back.
It hadn’t been guy stuff then — whatever. Something can be multiple things. And he’s not concerned about any of that right now, as he makes circles with his thumbs up into Eddie’s neck. He’s concerned about— actually, wait— he’s concerned about Eddie’s neck.
“Dude,” he says, rubbing his thumb back down the stubborn muscle, into his upper back. Even through the shirt, he can feel the knots under Eddie’s skin. “How’d you fuck it up this bad?”
“What’d I do?” Eddie says in a blur of syllables, sounding a little out of it; he tries to turn around again, like he wants to see for himself.
Steve counters the movement just as instinctively, palming the back of Eddie’s neck with his left hand. “Don’t—” he starts, and Eddie’s already gone still. Steve’s ring finger just grazes the rough edge of his jawline. That’s nice. Kind of terrifying.
“Uh— your neck, right here,” he explains, tapping just above the angle meeting Eddie’s neck and his left shoulder, “And all the way through here.” He lowers his hand, then, to stretch at the hem of Eddie’s shirt — Eddie flinches, makes a small sound — and then he’s gently pulling down the fabric, skating his finger down Eddie’s incrementally exposed back. The kind of thing you do without thinking, except it’s the only thing, suddenly, that’s ever existed worth thinking about. He can’t tell whose skin is burning. The entire room is on fire.
“It’s all stiff,” he finishes, heart pumping. “Like, cramped.” He finds a spot to the upper left of Eddie’s spine, presses his thumb into the stubborn muscle. The shirt hooks around his knuckle. “Do you feel that?” What does it feel like? Good?
“I don’t know,” Eddie says.
“Gimme your hand,” Steve says, holding his free hand out by Eddie’s head. Somehow he can feel Eddie scowl at it, a disturbance in The Force type shit, but he reaches back; Steve grabs his hand to direct it down towards the trigger point. It’s high up enough that Eddie can reach it easily — could probably find it without Steve yanking his hand around, but neither of them seem quick to point that out. He smooths his fingers against the muscle, hand working under Steve’s palm.
“Uh-huh.” His voice is quiet, at least by Eddie standards; kind of distant. “Weird.”
“Yeah, it’s all stiff, like I said. That can happen if you overuse a muscle, or...” Steve finds another knot by his shoulder, rubs at it with his thumb idly; his other hand still held against Eddie’s, affixed, seared into place. “Maybe— Oh, shit,” Steve remembers, “Probably from the garage? ‘Cause you’re hunched over the cars all day. Or like, underneath them.”
Eddie nods. Takes another few seconds to respond out loud. “Yeah, maybe.”
Steve frowns, again, at the back of Eddie’s head. This is weird. It’s been weird from the start — from the moment they first spoke to each other, really, bodies pressed together and jagged glass at Steve’s throat — but this is a different weird. Eddie’s not usually so quiet, not this shaky, slow-motion kind of quiet, unless he’s brooding. Feeling guilty over something.
“You okay?” he asks, softly pulling his hand from Eddie’s, the other from the fabric of his shirt. Parks them gently on the edges of his shoulders. Somehow the careful brush of his fingertips, there, feels just as criminal.
“What— yes,” Eddie says immediately, like it should have been obvious, glancing back at Steve and snapping away again in the span of a half-second. He pulls his own hand away, tightens his ponytail and clears his throat. “Uh, magic hands. Back to it.”
Steve huffs a laugh. Kind of wants to be a dick about it, what’s the magic word or something, but he holds off.
“Aye-aye,” he says instead, waves a vague little salute that Eddie can’t see anyway, and skates his hands back down Eddie’s spine. Probably too quick to be anything soothing, but he’s digging right under the neckline of Eddie’s shirt instead of pulling the fabric away, this time, and he’s trying not to dwell on the fact that — that’s a little insane, he thinks. He might as well be shoving a hand down his pants.
He hears Eddie suck in a silent breath, feels his back straighten under the pads of his fingers, startled. Searching for another trigger point, he tries to let himself breathe, wants Eddie to do the same. His skin is blazing under Steve’s fingers, painfully smooth over the ridges of his spine, the planes of his shoulder blades. He rubs his thumbs in circles, down, across. Slow and insistent, his heart freezing at the now-and-then shudder of Eddie’s breathing. And then there’s another spot — a stubborn twist of muscle halfway down the right side of his back — and Eddie makes a sound when Steve digs into it, like ah-h, quiet but it rings in Steve’s skull. And it means nothing, necessarily. Except that Steve is doing a good job. Which is good.
He’s really stretching out Eddie’s tank like this, though. “Could we take off your shirt?” he asks. “I’m fucking up your shirt.”
Eddie makes a breathy sound that was maybe supposed to be a laugh, or that maybe he’s hoping sounded like one. In a similar, disbelieving sort of wheeze, he says, “I guess,” and reaches back to grab at the neck of his tank. Steve helps him peel off the shirt, pulling it up from his sides and over his head. Tucks a lock of hair back over his ear. He knows he’s being indulgent, now — but this entire ordeal has been acutely indulgent. Something can be multiple things, or whatever.
Eddie tosses the shirt somewhere unimportant. He could be chucking it at an open window or towards an open flame, he could be launching hand grenades, somehow, and it would still be unimportant. His back is on full display in the dull light, lithe and pale, and Steve is allowed to touch him in about a third of the way he wants to. And he wants. He’s sick with how much he wants, the kind of sick that shows up in your dreams like an omen. Wakes you up with a warning, some kind of imperative — call a doctor. Check the lock. Jack off about your friend, quick, before you can feel too guilty.
Steve ignores the hot twist in his gut — or tries to, very gallantly and with zero success — as he works his hands across the exposed skin. Gently rocking into him with the touch and pretending it doesn’t feel the way it feels. Hah. Okay.
“I could show you some stretches, sometime,” he offers. “If this kinda thing happens a lot.”
“I’d probably just fuck it up worse,” Eddie chuckles.
“No,” Steve says. “Not with me, I’m a good teacher.”
He doesn’t really have any evidence to support that claim, not off the top of his head, but Eddie doesn’t ask for any. Or if he does, Steve doesn’t hear him. His eyes are caught on a small tattoo a few inches above Eddie’s waistband. A scratchy, beetle-looking thing near his left hip; Steve must have missed it earlier, when the tank top had ridden up.
It feels illicit for some reason, that location. Feels entirely sinful when he touches it — presses his index to the center of the beetle, all impulse. He almost jerks his hand away immediately, startled at himself and at Eddie’s responding shiver.
“When did you get this?” he says, praying his voice doesn’t sound as rough as it feels to use it. “The buggy thing.”
“Scarab,” Eddie corrects, and the word sounds familiar but if there’s a dot Steve’s meant to be connecting, it eludes him. “Uh, maybe a month or two back? Thought I showed you already.” He twists around, peeking over his shoulder and lifting his arm out of the way. “How’s it looking?”
“No, I’ve never seen it. It looks good,” Steve says, tracing a finger along the wingspan as he studies the drawing. “I mean, I don’t know what a scarab is, but the lines are pretty clean.”
“It’s — a kind of beetle. From Ancient Egypt and stuff, y’know?”
Steve nods, paying attention but also kind of thinking about pressing a little harder into the softer flesh there by Eddie’s hip. Mostly thinking — don’t do that. But he does it.
Eddie stutters. “Uh, yeah. So it’s— supposed to be symbolic, or whatever,” he continues, sounding almost frantic to play it cool. Steve hums, dragging his finger like he wants to feel the ridges of the tattoo itself, delicate lines across warm skin. Eddie must have actually gotten it somewhere decent, paid good money. And here’s Steve, probably fucking it up somehow.
Except Eddie would be hollering at him if that were the case, but he's just sort of watching Steve prod at him. And Steve could almost laugh — they’re both totally out of it, aren’t they? He has no idea how much time has passed in the last ten minutes.
“Death and resurrection, and all that,” Eddie adds after a moment. It clicks into Steve’s head, raw.
He glances up at Eddie’s face, eyes catching on the scars across his torso and chest, the notch by his mouth. Eddie meets his eyes with a wide stare, full lips parted, and Steve still doesn’t know how to respond. Just stares with creased brows, caught somewhere between Eddie’s eyes and his open mouth. It would be so easy, just to lean down—
Eddie twists away, laughing soft and a little hysterical sounding. “Don’t know why I got it there,” he rambles. “Nobody’ll ever see it. I can barely see it.”
I’ve seen it now, Steve thinks. He’ll probably see it forever.
“I like it,” he says instead, resuming the massage, and he’s not sure what else to say so he doesn’t say anything.
It’s easier, with the tank top out of the way, except it’s also a lot more difficult — every time he makes new contact, the room feels feverish, blinding. He avoids the few places where Eddie’s scars curve around into his back, not wanting to hurt or discomfort him. If they’re anything like the jagged etches on Steve’s sides and shoulder blades, they don’t really hurt anymore when touched, but they don’t feel nice either. Kind of tight and numb, every time he nudges one by accident in the shower or at the pool.
And there’s the emotional aspect, too; the sinking in your ribs about it, the half-formed flashback. The weird looks from anyone who happens to catch them — at the gym, in the bedroom. The fucking grocery store when he has to reach for something on a high shelf.
He doesn’t take his shirt off with girls anymore, if he can help it, which is probably part of why he and Katherine were never headed anywhere. Like, symbolically.
So he tries to be careful where he touches and digs at. More careful than careful — fucking vigilant. But it’s getting harder to focus, to keep his thoughts from churning around in vulgar directions and his face from heating up as it happens anyway. Eddie’s making those little sounds again, hums and sighs of relief that Steve suspects he’s trying to stifle. And he understands, obviously, why he might be trying to keep quiet. There’s a layer of embarrassment in… pretty much everything, Steve has learned, but especially in something like intimacy — the kind of embarrassment even Eddie can’t bite through with a wicked grin.
But also it’s kind of unfair, right, because Steve’s trying to help him out here. So it would be totally fine if Eddie would just — loosen up. Exaggerate it, even, like he does everything else, and Steve is thinking on a downward spiral here, digging his palm into a twinge in Eddie’s lower back; make that sound you made earlier, he pleads, that half-whine, let Steve be the reason he made it, let Steve be the reason he couldn’t hold it back, please.
Eddie’s breath hitches, and for a terrifying nanosecond Steve fears he’d said it all out loud, which would be some sort of tragic irony. But then Eddie tilts his head back a fraction and chuckles in kind of a sad way, saying, “Oh man, I think I might be a masochist.”
Steve enters a different kind of terrified, ripping his hands away, all but shrieking — “Am I hurting you?!”
“No! What? Shit,” Eddie rushes, a garbled staccato that’d make Steve snort in any other circumstance. “I didn’t mean to—”
He cuts himself off as he looks back at Steve, for a moment, and his face is red, about as red as Steve feels. Then he’s staring resolutely downward, and Steve can see him clenching a fist in the blanket beneath them. “No, it’s nice, you can keep, uh, going.”
“What are you talking about?” Steve bursts out, hands still tensed up by his own chest, blood cooling anxiously as the apprehension sets in. “What are you talking about.”
“Nothing,” Eddie says, stubbornly. He shakes his head, dislodging another few curls from his ponytail. “It was— nothing. I was just being weird, in my head.” He seems to will himself into looking back at Steve for all but a second, tapping at his head as if to demonstrate — then scrunches his face together and turns away again. “Doesn’t matter. Sorry.”
Steve watches uselessly as Eddie curls into himself, falling sideways into the bed with a huff. His legs are still half-crossed, body bent at an odd angle; it’s an awkward shape, and Steve marvels for a moment at Eddie’s strange physicality. But the detail slips away, and worry fills back in. Not for the first time in his life, he feels like he has no idea what’s going on; and, not for the first time, he’s afraid whatever’s happening is his fault.
“Uhh,” he says slowly, tilting his head and leaning slightly over, trying to peer at Eddie’s face. “What do you mean, you were being weird in your head?”
“I just— I made it weird, okay, like with everything,” Eddie fusses.
“Okay,” Steve says. He doesn’t want to freak him out, prod at him or anything, but he’s being so cagey and erratic that it’s hard not to. “...What do you mean?” he repeats.
Eddie makes a strangled, irritable sound that almost makes Steve jerk backwards, sends his eyebrows flying upward. “Ohhh man,” he complains, and flops over to lay on his back, muttering under his breath something okay fine and whatever before frowning up at Steve. His voice — when he finally talks at a volume Steve can somewhat comprehend — is pitchy, a little choked.
“I have… feelings. About you.”
Well.
It’s certainly a confession, in the sense that Eddie says it like he’s admitting to some kind of crime, his face still scrunched up and voice dragging out of him. And it’s vague, dreadfully fucking vague but words like feelings are involved, so. Steve feels himself go completely still, stomach sucking in like he’s bracing for impact — everything freezing to a halt except the nervous heartbeat racking his chest.
Eddie keeps going, the words seeming to spill out of him now, clumsy and imprecise. “And you— you’re, y’know, got your hands all over me, and you were talking about Nancy, right, like,” he takes a breath, just half a second, “You said you used to do this to— for her, right? So I guess a part of me was just—”
And he bites his lip around whatever word’s supposed to come next, eyes squeezing shut like he’s trying not to scream or lash out or cry or God knows what. Steve should probably be a little more tactful, then, but he’s losing his mind and his heart is in his throat, so he just gets out a rough, “Just what?”
Another one of those exasperated sounds, and then Eddie says, at the highest possible pitch, “Pretending?” He says it like a question, and then rushes to answer it, clawing his hands across his blushing face — “To be her, I guess? Or someone, in general, that you— That you…”
An awful little grief washes over Steve as Eddie trails off, the words that might come next too daunting for the latter to say out loud. Someone that you like. Someone that you want. Someone that you’d fall in love with, maybe. Everything Eddie is, to Steve, that he thinks he isn’t.
He peeks at Steve through his fingers, eyes deeper and more frenzied than ever. Steve’s stomach is tying itself into knots, guilty and confused and — somewhere deeper, toying with all the secrets Eddie’s admitted to — a little thrilled. “Eddie,” he says, aching.
“M’sorry,” Eddie grits out, voice still all reedy, and he thumps his head against the bed a few times, digs the heels of his hands into his eyes. Most of his hair has escaped the ponytail, by now, fanned out messily underneath him and across his face. Steve wants to brush it away, to fix whatever’s storming around in Eddie’s head; he wants to apologize. But he’s frozen in place, watching Eddie tear himself up. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. I was being weird, I told you.”
“Eddie—”
“And— also, it kind of hurts, right? Like, it doesn’t feel good, in the actual, uh… emotions of it all.” All the tension leaves him, then, at least physically — sliding off his frame as his arms fall to his sides, shoulders slumped backward and eyes closed. He draws out the words in that particular self-deprecating lilt of his. “But I keep doing it anyway.”
He waves at himself, hands brandished in a half-hearted ta-da! as he laughs darkly. “Masochist.”
Whatever it was that held Steve so firmly in place throughout Eddie’s torn-up little monologue must be what propels him forward, then, finally, but kind of inexplicably — he grabs Eddie’s raised arm in a sudden rush, simply tightens his fingers around Eddie’s wrist and jostles him a bit. Eddie snaps his eyes open, gawking at him.
“Eddie,” Steve repeats, forceful and almost harsh. Third time must be the charm, because Eddie for once doesn’t find something more to interrupt him with, just stares up at Steve with huge eyes and minutely lifts his chin in some possibly-subconscious kind of a nod. Again, a little thrill rings in Steve’s chest, but right now he just needs Eddie to stop torturing himself. Very suddenly, and without much grace, he needs him to know what he’d been dying to keep a secret less than an hour ago.
“You don’t have to do all that, okay?” he begins.
“Okay,” Eddie says tentatively, an echo of Steve’s own confusion from only minutes ago. “All what?”
“All of that. Beating yourself up, man, first of all — I keep on telling you not to be so fucking hard on yourself all the time,” Steve explains, then pauses to try and veer himself back on track. “But also— the pretending thing.”
“The…?”
“The pretending thing. You were just saying.” God, this would be difficult enough without Eddie randomly acting like his mind’s been wiped. Steve squeezes his wrist a little, but, watching Eddie’s gaze flick between his hand and back to Steve’s face, he’s not sure if it jogs Eddie’s memory or just disrupts it further.
“You don’t have to pretend to be Nancy or anybody else, that’s just— you don’t have to do that, okay?” he explains. “And I’m sorry I brought her up, if it was… confusing. I don’t know why I did that. I didn’t even mean to.”
He breaks eye contact, like he’s trying to catch his breath; sometimes when he’s looking at Eddie’s face he forgets to blink. Glancing downward, his eyes land at the curve of Eddie’s collarbone, then the weird zombie-looking face tattooed on his chest, the shiny scar torn through it.
He smiles softly, shrugging. “I just wanted to touch you.”
Eddie’s eyebrows jump, just minutely, except it’s terribly easy to catch when Steve is leaning over a little ways above him. Eyes trained on his face, again, at the new flush of color happening there. “You—” Eddie says, then breaks off in a nervous laugh, a stuttered breath more than anything. “What?”
“I wanted to touch you,” Steve repeats, grinning — trying to hold back a laugh, because the last thing Eddie needs is another mixed signal, a detail he’ll wrangle into a reason to doubt himself. Things are still kind of precarious, Steve knows it. But saying the truth out loud feels electric, like the rigid weight he’d wrapped around his every thought has been extinguished, exploded into raw energy. He rubs his thumb against Eddie’s wrist, shifting his grip to trace up the side of his hand and down again. “Since, like, forever. ‘Cause of feelings. I thought I was kind of obvious.”
“Well you kinda were ,” Eddie practically yelps, and Steve can’t reign in a shocked laugh as Eddie struggles returning to a normal volume. “But there’s always that little voice, y’know, that’s like — chill out, man, he doesn’t actually wanna fuck you.”
Steve raises his eyebrows, smiling just a little smugly but mostly in genuine surprise, and Eddie looks for a moment like his mouth had just gone off ahead of him again. But then he narrows his eyes and seems to double down, raising his own brows right back at Steve and lifting his chin like a dare. Letting the words hang in the small box of empty space between them.
Steve does the same, not that he really means to. He just strokes the side of Eddie’s hand again, and reaches out with his left to trace a thumb down his cheek, skin hot to the touch. Gently, he takes Eddie’s chin in his hand. Holds him there lightly by his thumb and index finger. Eddie chews on his lip and juts his chin upward again, still in Steve’s grasp — in defiance or surrender, Steve doesn’t know, but his heartbeat sinks into some liquid kind of heat either way. He wants to pry his mouth open with his fingers. He wants to kiss him on the cheek. Sweetheart.
More than anything — he wants to hear those sounds again. To crawl over and pull them out of him, louder, gasping. He feels his face heating up again and his heart thudding in his skull and wonders if Eddie can hear it, or is he too busy gnawing through the meat of his bottom lip, waiting and waiting for Steve to say something?
“Eddie,” is all he can think of. It’s not even a breathy, infatuated thing; just soft and a little chiding. He shifts his hand to ghost a thumb over Eddie’s lips as he says his name, lightly traces the wet spot where Eddie’s immediately stopped biting — his mouth parting at the contact like Steve had pressed a button. He holds the touch there, marveling, and holds Eddie’s wrist in what might be a vice grip, and holds his gaze like he can’t stand to lose it. Dark eyes, flickering.
And then — finally — he’s closing the gap. Shifting his touch back to Eddie’s jaw, pressing his wrist against the mattress because he’d fall over without a way to keep his balance, leaning all the way in like this, with the world still all heavy and slow. Eddie gasps a little as he moves in, makes a small sound like oh! , and when their lips meet Steve feels him choke around a sob.
It’s a chaste thing, all things considered, though the sound Eddie makes underneath him could just as quickly drive Steve’s tongue down his throat; there’s a warm press of their lips together, a breath shared between them as their heads tilt, before Steve pulls away enough to check that Eddie’s alright.
And, well. He’s as beet-red as he’s ever been, chewing his lip again and scrunching his nose, jaw working like every piece of him is trying to hold something back. His mouth is wet. His eyes are wet. Oh, fuck, is he actually—
“I’m not crying,” Eddie snaps, voice indignant and wavering. “I’m not gonna cry.”
Now Steve’s gonna fucking cry. Or come. Not actually, but — Jesus. Eddie’s done some terrible thing to him that makes his head, heart, and dick jump at the same details. “What’s going on?” he asks with another gentle laugh, brushing a few strands of hair from Eddie’s cheek with the same patient tenderness. But his hand shakes as he does it. God, he wants this.
“I just can’t believe this is happening,” Eddie says. A tear slips down across his cheek; he swipes at it roughly with his free hand, the one not pressed into the sheets. “Fuck, can you just kiss me again? I’m not gonna cry.”
“It’s okay if you do,” Steve assures him, leaning in to kiss softly at his cheek. “I might cry.”
“Yeah, right,” Eddie laughs. Puts on a voice that comes out crackly and unpolished. “Whatever for?”
Steve rolls his eyes, grinning. “‘Cause I’m kind of in love with you,” he says, discovering it for the first or the thousandth time, practically giggling, and Eddie moans something oh my God -like as Steve finally meets his lips again.