6. Chapter 6

So Steve kisses him, and kissing him is like nothing else in the world.

Eddie lets out a surprised sound against his lips. Steve thinks about pulling back for a moment but then Eddie’s melting into him, hands twisting out of his grasp to clutch at Steve’s face and Steve’s own hands tangle in his hair, ridiculously soft, he now learns, as Eddie’s lips part and he deepens the kiss hungrily and it’s a messy kiss, the way the first kiss with someone usually is, teeth knocking together and noses bumping and neither of them really knowing what to do with their hands and also it’s different kissing a guy, it’s sharper angles and the faint scratch of stubble and a gravelly lowness to the gasp Eddie lets out when Steve bites down on his lip, and it’s messy and it’s perfect and it’s fucking insane in a really, really good way and Steve can’t quite believe it’s taken him this long to do this already.

“Only took you sixty years,” Eddie breathes, when they separate for air.

“Shut up,” Steve says, and then kisses him again to make him shut up, because he can do that now.

His kisses a trail downwards, down the sharp line of Eddie’s jaw, down his throat, and Eddie’s head tips back even as he gasps out, “If you’re planning on– fucking me in the woods, then by all means, continue– doing that but if not then you should probably– stop–”

For a moment, Steve’s tempted. Like, sorely tempted. But it is the woods and they’re alone but anyone could walk past, really, and not only that but the feeling of dread hasn’t completely gone away just yet and he’s not sure he’s ready to dive into it quite that deep, not right now. So, reluctantly, he stops.

Eddie looks at him through half-lidded eyes, a hazy smirk forming on his kiss-swollen lips — Steve’s fault now, and the thought is weird and wonderful in equal measure — and says, “No wonder the girls like you so much.”

Steve can feel himself blushing. Holy shit. “Shut up,” is all he manages again, and the smirk widens.

“Who knew that I, Eddie ‘The Freak’ Munson, lowest of the low at Hawkins High, would one day render King Steve speechless, not by the power of any wizardry or devilry but by the power of this irresistible mouth of mine–”

Steve shoves at his shoulder. Eddie rolls backwards and grabs Steve as he does, pulling him down onto the ground on top of him so they’re nose to nose in the dirt and the leaves and the light in Eddie’s eyes is the happiest he’s ever seen him, and it’s more than enough to push Steve’s lingering doubts far, far down. They grin at each other.

When they’ve sat up again, sitting side by side with their knees touching as the sky gradually deepens into a rose-colored dusk, Eddie speaks again in a softer, serious tone. “It’s bisexual, by the way. The word it sounds like you’re looking for. For liking both.”

Bisexual. Steve tries it out in his head, and finds it seems to fit. I’m bisexual. He imagines saying it to his mom and feels something inside himself shrivel up. But then he imagines saying it to Robin, and the thought isn’t nearly so bad. “Bisexual.” He nods slowly. “Okay. Cool.”

Eddie laughs suddenly, looking like the sound was startled out of him. “Yeah. Cool.” Then his eyebrows crease together and he looks closer at Steve, smile dimming. “Is it– is it really? You’re not gonna, like, go all gay panic on me or something, right?” His tone is forcibly light.

Steve drops his hands to the grass and pulls at it, eyes on the distance. There’s still something swirling in his gut, something a little panicky, maybe, but he’s not going to make that Eddie’s problem. “No.” He sighs. “It’s just been an… interesting day.”

“You can say that again.”

He smiles stupidly. “It’s been an interesting day.”

“Ha, ha, very funny.” Eddie says dryly. His fingers are twitching again; Steve wonders if he ever sits still. “Who knew you had such comedic chops — you’re wasted on the video store–”

“Finally, someone’s seeing my potential.” A moment, then he lets the smile fade: “I’m, like– to be totally real with you, I’m very confused right now. Like, my whole idea of myself is– yeah. And I don’t know what to– I just know that it, like, really fucking sucked when you were avoiding me and I really don’t want you to do that again and, like, really the opposite of you avoiding me is what I want but I don’t want to fuck this up and–”

“I’m not gonna avoid you again,” Eddie says softly. “I shouldn’t have– yeah, I shouldn’t have done that.”

Steve wants to say it again. But what if I fuck this up. Eddie is so– tender, is the thing. Beyond the denim and the leather and the hair and the music and the antics that have everyone recoiling — he’s tender. A barely-healed wound. And Steve knows the feeling, knows being bruised and battered and feeling like a wonky Christmas light will shatter him completely. And beyond that, Eddie is different. Realer, and truer, and softer because of it. Mean and soft at once. Steve tries to be a nice guy but he’s a nice normal guy, and normal guys aren’t that soft, they’re just guys who get awkward when things get too emotional and Eddie isn’t like that. Really. Eddie deserves to be understood.

But he doesn’t say any of this. He just looks at Eddie, at his full kissable lips, at his long pretty hair and his long pretty eyelashes, and he wants. He wants. And even thinking that in words in his head is freeing, somehow, and makes his stomach swoop and his heart pound and everything feel right and scary at once.

Eddie scores his nails across his palm and keeps his eyes on his hands instead of Steve as he speaks again. “I don’t want to– like, I don’t know. I don’t want to be your experiment, Steve Harrington.”

“Experiment? I don’t–”

Eddie’s eyes move to him, and cling to him steadily. “You have a sexuality crisis and kiss the local fag all in one day, that day being the very first one after you learn said fag is gay in the first place — forgive a man for having his suspicions, right?” And the joking tone is back but only just, and there’s a horrible fear underneath it.

“You’re not an experiment.” Steve feels a little sick, actually, at the wording. “You’re– you’re you. You couldn’t ever be–”

“Wouldn’t be the first time.” Eddie smiles sardonically, but there’s a great sadness behind it, a sadness that makes Steve angry, actually, that someone might have treated him that way. “It’s okay. Par for the course, really. But–” And he looks away again. “Can’t do that with you. Really, I– really, I can’t. Got enough shit going on in my fucked-up little head, y’know? King Steve might do me in.”

“I wish you’d stop calling me that,” Steve says quietly, scuffing his sneakers in the grass.

He feels Eddie look at him sharply, out of the corner of his eye. There’s no response for a second, and then, “Sorry. Habit.”

“I’m not– that, anymore. And I know you know that but I want you to know that, like– I was pretty awful. And I spend a lot of time now, uh, trying not to be awful. And I don’t want to be awful to you.”

“That would be preferable, yeah,” he says softly. “Not that– yeah. I’m sorry I kind of– assumed the worst of you. I tend to do that, these days, y’know? It’s a self-preservation thing.”

Steve can’t blame him for that. Suddenly he’s reminded of Jonathan, for some reason, cloaking himself in his own hostility and hiding away from the world, the opposite to Eddie’s sardonic shamelessness but made of the same material, like two sides of one coin. How seeing Jonathan in the hallways in 1983 made him prickle with discomfort under the collar, a weird feeling that he couldn’t name and now, actually, maybe he can, because he finally has a word for it.

For some other reason that makes him think of Danny. Of the purple blossom of the hickey on Eddie’s throat, of the way less than twenty-four hours ago he was kissing someone else, someone who isn’t Steve. “What about Danny?” Steve says, quiet.

Eddie looks at him. “Well, my answer to that depends on what you’re asking. He was, um, just a hook-up, if that’s your question, and not a very successful one to boot. I didn’t really, like, know him in high school but what I did know suggested to me he wasn’t as straight as he said he was, which became pretty clear at the party when he was making bedroom eyes at me across a room full of people. So, uh, he was there, and I– uh, I couldn’t have the person I really wanted, so–”

“You do that a lot? Like, hook up with people?”

Eddie raises an eyebrow. “Is that judgement I hear in your voice, Steve Harrington, metaphorical killer of ladies and all-round seductive bad boy–”

“No,” Steve says stubbornly, rubbing the back of his neck. More like surprise — which is itself probably a bit offensive. To tell the truth, until the revelations of the party he’d assumed Eddie was a virgin. All the D&D stuff, the weirdness, notable enough as a freak that it would have been widely known if he’d been sleeping around. Or not, because turns out he has a damn good reason to keep that under wraps.

Eddie seems to take pity on him. “There’s not a lot of people to hook up with in this town. So every so often I, y’know, get out of this shitty place and try to pretend it doesn’t exist for a night or two. There are a couple good gay bars in Indianapolis.”

The idea doesn’t really compute in Steve’s brain. A place, a real place, where everyone is just themselves with no need to lie about it, unabashed, unashamed, just like Eddie, and it sounds terrifying and exciting all at once. “So, uh, that’s where you go? When you’re out of town?” Eddie nods. “And the menthol cigs your friend left in your jacket — he wasn’t just your friend?”

Another eyebrow raise. “I suppose I should be flattered you remembered that.” Eddie looks at the dirt, fingers endlessly toying with his rings. “I do it less, now, though. It’s getting– dangerous, out there, for people like me.”

Steve doesn’t need to ask what he means. He remembers the guy at the party, All the fags are carrying something, and feels a low swoop in his stomach, like vertigo. People like us, he considers saying, and can’t quite get the words past his lips. His heart is pounding and he becomes aware that his hands have a weird tremble in them, the tremble they get when he wakes from nightmares about blue light and monsters with faces that open like flowers, only the Upside Down’s got nothing to do with this, this is all him. Him, and it’s terrifying.

Then there’s a hand on his arm. Eddie’s touch is steady and steadying, his other hand coming up to cup Steve’s jaw, forcing their eyes to connect — “No gay panic, remember?”

“Isn’t that, like, a murder defense?” Steve jokes weakly. “I’m not gonna murder you.”

“Well, that’s always nice to hear.” Eddie smirks, but his eyes are serious. “I mean it, Steve, stop torturing yourself. There are plenty of people out there who are more than capable of doing it for you, and the whole what can they say to hurt me that I haven’t already said about myself sounds cute but really sucks in practice, actually. Trust me.”

“I do,” Steve says, in a daze. He wasn’t really intending to say it out loud. Eddie stares at him, those rich dark eyes widening. Steve thinks fuck it and decides to double down. “I trust you, like, a lot, actually, I don’t know– something to do with all the shit that happened, probably. And– other reasons.”

“Oh.” Eddie exhales, a shaky breath that ghosts over Steve’s cheek. They’re only inches away from each other. “I mean, there’s something so cliché about trust issues, right, like where’s the originality in that, but–” He stops. Looks down, and then looks up again, a new resolve in his eyes. “I’m working on it. On trusting you too.”

Steve can’t do anything but kiss him.

It’s a soft kiss, almost chaste, and this time it’s Eddie who’s blushing as they pull apart. Or maybe it’s just the richness of dusk casting its red glow over them, the water in the quarry glittering with the last embers of sunlight. Hawkins is suddenly beautiful to Steve, in a way it’s never really been beautiful before.

And so is Eddie, and Steve thinks it again: what if I fuck this up. Because he’s a little bit cursed, isn’t he. But so is Eddie, and so is this town, and if the fourth apocalypse isn’t the time to throw caution to the wind then when is? Don’t you ever think we should just do the thing no one expects us to?

When the sun has dipped below the horizon, Eddie gets to his feet. “I should, um, get home. My uncle– he worries–”

“Yeah, I know. He threatened me with a switchblade.”

Eddie, to his credit, looks horrified at that, eyes wide in the gloom. “Shit, I’m sorry. We’ve just had a lot of– and, yeah, you do kinda look like the type.”

Steve makes an indignant sound. “He said I had a ‘decent look about me’, actually.”

“He said that? Aw, shucks, you got the Wayne Munson stamp of approval, I can’t possibly get rid of you now.”

They smile at each other. But Eddie is twitching, still, winding a hand through a curly strand of hair and pulling it in front of his face, nervous.

“This isn’t– tell me I’m not gonna go home and never hear from you again. Or that I’m gonna wake up tomorrow — if I even fall asleep, let’s be real here — and just, like, have dreamt this whole thing. Tell me this isn’t–” He takes an audibly deep breath. “Tell me this is real.”

Here’s the thing: Steve is scared. Steve is fucking terrified. His whole problem has been not knowing what he wants and now he does know, he does know what he wants but what he wants isn’t what’s right, at least in the world’s eyes, it’s so far from normal and he feels like he’s in freefall. But so is Eddie. That much is clear. And if they’re both falling they may as well do it together, right? So he says, “What are you doing tomorrow night?”

Eddie looks startled. “Uh– there’s the first D&D of term after school, until probably eight? But– nothing, after that.”

“Eight it is then. I’ll pick you up.”

“How am I gonna get to school in the morning, then, if you’re gonna chauffeur me away into the night, being the chivalrous gentleman you are–”

“I’ll drive you. I drive Robin too, I’m basically going that way anyway.”

Eddie looks at him in the dark. “We’re really–” He breathes out and laces his hands together behind his head. “We’re really fucking doing this, are we? I’m really– Jesus, I’m really going on a date with Steve Harrington. Maybe I really have lost my mind.”

“No more than I have.”

Eddie exhales through his teeth. Then he smiles a little in the gloom, and leans over to kiss Steve again, lightly, pulling away before Steve can deepen it and draw him in.

“Okay, then. We’re doing this.” He turns to go, then looks over his shoulder. “Fair warning, Stevie — if you break my heart, my uncle’s very handy with that switchblade.”

The idea is less frightening than almost fond.

Steve thinks about it that night, as he’s checking the voicemail and finding no calls at all, no word from his parents, not that he’s surprised. They’re still in Miami, last he heard, and he’s happy for them to stay there at this point. But he thinks about Wayne wielding that switchblade in defence of his nephew — not even his son — and feels a sting of something cold in his chest. Which he decides pretty firmly to ignore.

Rocky Horror is still in the VCR, he realises. He thinks about sitting down to finish it but he’s tired, and overwhelmed, and the elation of what it means to be a little bit gay is marrying pretty uncomfortably with the panic of it. So he turns out the lights (not all of them; he hasn’t been able to sleep without the hall light since 1983) and tosses and turns all night.

Wakes up with the realisation he’s got a date with Eddie Munson at the forefront of his brain, a phrase on repeat as he brushes his teeth and pours Frosted Wheats into a bowl and eats them standing up, watching mist creep over the pool. Today. He’s going on a date with Eddie Munson. Eddie the Freak. Eddie the pretty guy with the long hair and large eyes and softness about him that no-one else sees — that Eddie.

What does he wear? Where do they go? If this was a girl he’d just take her to the movies, or the diner, or else just skip straight to the good bit and head to Skull Rock for a bit of handsy making out but they’ve done that already, the making out in the woods, even if it wasn’t that handsy, and Eddie isn’t a girl. And suddenly Steve’s feeling like he’s never once done this in his life before.

“What’s got your knickers in a twist?” Robin says, in a cringingly bad English accent as she swings into the passenger seat. “Oh, wait, stupid question. I take it Rocky Horror was a success, then?”

He looks at her with wide eyes. Then he looks at the road, then he looks at her. He can’t quite bring himself to drive on just yet, so they’re just sitting stationary outside her house. “Robin,” he says. He opens his mouth but nothing more comes out.

“That bad, huh? You must really be in the thick of the identity crisis, oh my god, okay, talk me through it, I want to hear all your thoughts on–”

“I’m going on a date with Eddie. And– I told him. And I kissed him. And I’m going on a– oh my fucking god, Robin. Oh my god.”

She stares at him. And stares at him some more. The silence stretches so long between them it feels like the span of his last frayed nerve, which is mightily close to snapping.

“Where do I even take him?”

Robin explodes.

“What the actual fuck, Steve, you couldn’t– you called me because you were scared of Rocky Horror and then I hang up and in the space of a mere–” she checks her watch “–seventeen hours you’ve somehow done and dusted the gay crisis and zoomed straight over to your crush and kissed him and holy fucking shit Steve Harrington you kissed a guy before I kissed a girl I could murder you right now!”

“But where do I take him?” Steve says again, miserably.

She sighs. “Just– drive, okay, and tell me everything.”

“But there’s no time. We’re picking him up too.”

She stares at him again. “Oh my god. Oh my god, this is what you’re like when you have a crush. You’re hopeless. I thought I’d seen it all from you, Steve Harrington, yet you continue to surprise me each and every day.”

He leans his arms on the steering wheel and drops his head between them, letting out a low groan. “What if I fuck this up, Robin, I can’t fuck this up, he’s so–”

“You might fuck this up,” she says, and he whips around to glare at her. “But so might he. So might a million other outside factors, Steve, you know you can’t think like that and you never had this problem with Brenda or Linda or Heidi or any other of the million women you’ve dated in the last six months–”

“But that’s exactly it,” he says, voice small. “They’re women. And Eddie’s– Eddie. And I–” He swallows, throat suddenly dry. He doesn’t know when he came to this realisation — somewhere between Robin’s grave questioning and Eddie’s hot, perfect kisses — but it’s there, sitting immovably on his chest. “I really fucking like him.”

Her face softens. He can’t really bear to look. “You know what to do, Steve. You’re — as much as it pains me to admit it — good at this. And he likes you already. He likes you so much, it’s honestly been kind of annoying to endure both of you pining so fucking loudly–”

“I didn’t even know I liked him until yesterday!”

“Well, neither did I, admittedly, but retroactively it made all the pieces fit together, so. And Nance could tell something was up at the party, too, so really you owe us all compensation for–”

“Wait, Nance? When did you see her?”

Robin flushes. “Family dinner dragged, so I managed to escape at, like, eight but then you weren’t picking up the phone and I wasn’t gonna sit around in my room with my Nana downstairs so I– yeah. Called Nance. We hung out.”

“...Okay,” Steve says. It sounds weird, for no real reason — why shouldn’t they hang out? — but right now he has bigger fish to fry. “I swear I’ll never ask you for another thing in my life if you tell me where I’m taking Eddie tonight after D&D.”

“We both know that’s a lie, but I’m feeling generous. A regular gay mother hen. So– I mean, seriously, Steve? You are supposedly the expert– but here. There’s a rerun of The Evil Dead on at the drive-in a couple towns over all this week, Eddie and I were gonna go but clearly you need this more than I do. He loves that movie. I’m sure you can work out the rest.”

“Buckley, I love you.”

She smirks. “You owe me. Which debt I’m claiming as an explanation the absolute first second I get a single chance, so prepare yourself for that, my friend, I want all the details.” Then she stops. Her voice gets quieter, some of the glee going out of it. “I just don’t– I can’t believe you, dude. How can you just– do that? Know what you feel and then just act on it, like that?” She snaps her fingers. “It takes me years of desperate pining and suffering in hopeless silence to even look at someone I like, and here you are, so stupidly fucking confident with it all–”

“Maybe I am just an idiot,” he allows. “But like– I don’t know. I’ve never held back from going after, like, what I want — I’ve never had to, and it just didn’t even occur to me to start doing that now. Like– yeah. Maybe it was stupid.”

“It’s not,” she says suddenly, sharply. “Just because– yeah, just because the rest of us have learnt to be afraid doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do, to be afraid. Like, maybe if I had a bit of the patent Steve Harrington brand of foolhardiness maybe I’d actually be in with a chance of–”

She closes her mouth, like she’s about to spill some secret she doesn’t want to share, and he frowns at her, because he thought they had no more secrets left.

She just shakes her head, like she’s jolting herself out of some daze, and says, “Well, drive, then, don’t want to be late to pick up the man of your dreams–”

“Oh, you are going to be so annoying about this, aren’t you,” he groans, as he puts the car in gear.

She smiles. “Yep,” she says, popping the ‘p’. He drives off, already a little late, he realises, because he didn’t factor in explaining the resolution of the gay crisis to Robin to the schedule. Robin fiddles with the radio, though he’s told her many a time that it’s my car, my music, as he’s told everyone, though very few of them listen. She and Dustin both have a shared interest in DEVO, which is exhausting.

But what she settles on is pretty decent, actually, magnetic synth beats and a voice with a ridiculous range that sounds only vaguely familiar until Eddie slides into the backseat in that stupid Hellfire t-shirt and those unfairly snug ripped jeans and says, “The Bronski Beat is Robin’s good influence, I presume?”

“Of course,” she says, as Steve splutters, “Hey, I like this! And why do you like this? This is, like, the furthest thing from all your metal stuff I’ve possibly ever heard–”

“Oh, so he’s admitting he’s heard it now? That’s a step.” Eddie, when Steve looks at him in the rearview mirror, is smirking. The eyeliner is back, fuck, and it makes his eyes look somehow bigger than normal, darker and richer and full of promise.

Robin snaps her fingers in front of his face. “Eyes on the road, Steve, Jesus, if I die because of your bisexuality–”

Eddie falls to laughing in the backseat as Steve blushes horribly, like really truly awfully, and puts his eyes back on the road. “This is Smalltown Boy, Steve,” Eddie says, a laugh still in his voice, and it’s pretty, that laugh, that voice. “I’m a gay guy in a small town who ran away from home — it’s practically required listening, metal or no.”

Ran away from home. Steve didn’t know that, and a sideways glance at Robin tells him she didn’t know that either. But there has to be a reason, he guesses, that Eddie lives with his uncle, not his parents — it only makes sense. “Truer words never spoken,” Robin says. “Your gay education starts here, Steve Harrington.”

“Hey, I already watched half of Rocky Horror–”

“Only half?” she cries, throwing her hands up in the air. “You couldn’t even finish it before you–”

“In my defense, the little shits interrupted me. And then–” he looks at Eddie again “–okay, yeah, I was a little busy.”

“Did you at least get to Touch-a-Touch-a-Touch-a-Touch Me?” Eddie says, leaning forward with his hand on the back of Steve’s seat, fingers brushing his shoulder. There’s a sudden waft of– cologne? Eddie’s wearing cologne.

Steve feels his cheeks color again. Why oh why does that keep happening to him? “Yeah,” he manages. Eddie leans back as if satisfied, and that was definitely deliberate, wasn’t it. Jesus H. Christ. Munson is going to kill him.

When they arrive at the high school, Robin skips out clumsily, saying over her shoulder (thankfully in an undertone), “Later, lovebirds!”

Eddie leans between the seats again before he gets out, face inches from Steve’s. “Later, lovebird,” he repeats softly, in a tone that pretty much has Steve’s heart in a puddle. “See you at eight.”

“See you at eight.” Eddie saunters off among the crowd of gathering students, Steve unable to tear his eyes away until he’s long disappeared into the building. Fuck, he thinks. Eight o’clock it is.