#Uncle Fritz | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

luveline · 10 months

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𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐠𝐡𝐨𝐬𝐭 | 𝐞𝐝𝐝𝐢𝐞 𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐬𝐨𝐧

Best friends since middle school, you tell Eddie everything, which is why he's so surprised to find out you've been keeping a secret —you’re hearing a voice whenever you're home alone. He’s always had a thing for the fantastical but he can't believe in ghosts, and the longer you insist on it, the more worried he becomes. This would be bad enough if Eddie didn’t have a secret too, and it threatens to change everything between you. [22k]

fem!reader, best friends to lovers slow-burn, mutual pining, eddie is infatuated with you, idiots in love, paranormal activity/au, heavy hurt/comfort, angst, fluff and affection, wayne is uncle of the year every year, ghost-hunting

cw assumed auditory hallucinations, talk of mental health, surrounding worry and circumstances, mentioned mental illness stigma, recreational drug use mention, prescription drugs, grief

my endless gratitude and thank yous to @h-ness1944 and @mrcylvsu for their sensitivity beta reads and for answering my questions so many moons ago, I'm very, very thankful for all that hard work, and all the time and energy you both spent!

˚ʚ♡ɞ˚

Eddie's desk fan is on the fritz. It twists back and forth with a weak metallic clicking sound that promises eventual electrocution but for now provides momentary relief. Even the nights have been hell lately. No matter how many windows he and Wayne open, the air at home stays thick with humidity.

Sweat shines on his brow and collar. He refuses to tie his hair back, and each hour it grows more and more uncomfortable.

"Are you sure you don't wanna come and lie up here?" he asks, shifting reluctantly to peer over the side of the bed.

You're laying on the floor of his room, just as sweaty but half as unhappy. You've abandoned a book to your left, having declared the weather too much to concentrate through.

"Our body heat will mingle."

"The fan is really helping," he argues lightly. "If you die on my floor Wayne won't ever let it go. Just come up here."

You mumble something he doesn't hear and pull your shirt from your chest. You attempt to fan yourself with the thin, clinging fabric. It doesn't work, but it does expose the soft hill of your abdomen to his guilty eyes. His mouth dries up.

"It's getting late," he says. He's not trying to get rid of you, promise, but now he's thinking about your body heat mingling and why it wouldn't be such a bad thing, and he doesn't want to. "I'll drive you home, yeah?"

"In a minute," you agree, looking as if you have no intention of moving.

You turn your face to the side, eyes closed, lashes skimming the delicate skin of your under eye. Eddie sits up and rakes his greasy hair away from his face. He'll drop you home, take a cold shower for purely heat related reasons, and hopefully sleep through the night. It's a very unlikely outcome, but a man can dream.

"Come on. We'll roll the windows down and go really fast."

"Eddie," you chastise.

"Moderately fast."

His sleeveless tank top gets caught as he leans down to try and flick you. Eddie can only ever forgive his fourteen year old self for maiming perfectly good vintage in times like these. A completely unnecessary culling of an entire wardrobe's worth of sleeves, but when the weather gets bad for a few heady weeks every summer, he remembers the reasoning behind it.

He's stripped of all his clunky jewellery for now, adorned only in the dark ink of his multiplying tattoos. His most recent addition is an artist's rendition of the Eye of Sauron, blinking up at him from beneath his volley of bats. Still sick, he thinks to himself smugly.

You've pulled yourself into a sitting position with your arms crossed over the bed, your hand stretched out to touch his plaid pyjama bottoms. You're in a nearly matching pair; when Eddie called you to hang out earlier you'd turned him down, citing a reluctance to change. He'd promised to pick you up in his own pyjamas, and you've been lying on his floor since then.

You're the laziest kids this side of the Wabash river, Wayne'd said, looking over your limp bodies with a smile.

The other side, too, Eddie popped back. Will you put those chicken wings in the oven for us, please?

Eddie's not a monster, the wings were pre-prepared. Any other day he'd correct his uncle, say, hey, we haven't been kids for years, but the heat makes him feel gross and sometimes you just want your dad to make you dinner. (Sometimes Eddie's just lazy, also.)

"Eds?" you murmur.

He lets his hands fall away from his hair where he'd been scratching mindlessly and turns to you. He's lethargic, feels like he's turning his head through molasses. "What, sweetheart?"

Years of being friends lends an easy affection. His pet names are purely platonic. Or they used to be. Either way, you aren't perturbed.

"Can I sleep over?"

He usually says yes to that question immediately. But again, the thought of your sweaty body curled into his with your hands breaching a friendly gap to curl over his waist like they tend to do fills his stomach with dread.

His little crush is making him a bad friend, he decides. He will always, first and foremost, be your friend.

"Of course you can." He rubs his mouth. Feigning casualness. "How come?"

You peel out of your fatigue and get on your knees. The extra height is all you need to finally grab his legs, smiling sheepishly. Eddie won't judge you for almost anything and you know that, so it's gotta be outlandish.

"I think…" You tap his kneecap. "Okay, laugh at me if you need to, but I'm pretty sure my house is haunted."

"Like, by a ghost?"

"What else?" you ask, laughing good-naturedly.

"Why do you think it's haunted, superstar?"

You drop your face onto his thigh, giving him a disjointed hug. He hugs you back for as long as the heat will allow it, a handful of stolen seconds with his hand over your back.

"I swear, sometimes, I can hear someone talking."

That's… scarier than he imagined. "Shit, I thought you were gonna say a coat fell off the hanger, or the light in your bathroom started flickering again."

"It has," you admit, your mouth pressed to his thigh. "But it's just the bulb."

He pushes you off of him, your voice sending vibrations through places he'd prefer it didn't, and you fall back with a half-hearted stab at melodrama.

"Oof," you say, straight-faced.

"You really think it's a ghost?" he asks.

"No. I don't know. I won't believe in ghosts until I see one, and I haven't seen one, but if it were a ghost, this is the type of behaviour I'd expect from it. So I guess I do. Does that make sense?"

"Sure." He doesn't know. "What does it say?"

"Here's the bit where you won't believe me."

You smile at him from your spot on the floor. Your hand curls out, like a tight budded flower coming to bloom.

"She asks about you," you say quietly. "It's pretty much all she says."

"Who?"

"The ghost."

"She's a she?"

"Sounds kind of like one."

"Come sit up here with me."

Eddie knows his voice has gone hard and weird, but he can't help it. He understands that he doesn't understand anything, that the world is large and works in mysterious ways, but he wouldn't forgive himself if he took this lightly. You sound so convinced — it makes him feel ill.

Because Eddie doesn't believe in ghosts.

You climb up onto the bed in front of him and he doesn't take your hand. He should. You won’t meet his eyes, a sign that you're slightly embarrassed. It's not what he meant to do.

"What does she say?” he probes.

You go teasing and shiny, a glimmer in your eye. "I know you don't believe me, Eddie."

"Who says I don't believe you? I just need you to explain."

"She says…" You laugh. "Okay, she says stuff like, 'Eddie is okay?'"

Eddie stares at you.

"I was going to tell you–"

"When?" he demands.

"I'm telling you right now!"

"How long have you been hearing voices?"

You climb up on knees to wrap your arms around his head. "You think I'm delusional," you say, a loving murmur in his ear.

He grabs your waist. Unsurprisingly, hugging you doesn't make him nearly as electric as he'd worried. It feels the same as it always has, like hugging his best friend. Loving the smell of your hair is new, but everything else stays the same.

"I don't think you’re delusional, I don't, I just– if I told you the same thing."

You pull away, and his hand comes to rest atop the curve of your hip. "I'd believe you," you say.

"I believe that you believe there's someone talking to you about me. Uh… if it is a ghost haunting your house, why's she talking about me?"

You take his hands off of your waist, squeezing his fingers together in your palms. "Don't know. I tried asking but she never answers, and last night…"

Eddie stands up.

"Where are you going?"

"We gotta let Wayne know you're staying and he's about to fall asleep, and I want a cigarette, and you need something to drink."

"I don't want a beer."

"No," he says. When he says to drink, he really means something cold to sip on. He's hoping to grab you back from… whatever it is you're going. "Soda, apple juice, drink what you want."

He fiddles with the drawstrings on his pants, waiting for you to join him at the doorway. You stay sitting on his bed. He doesn't know what your face means.

"Hey, you still have to tell me about it. I want to know, swear to god. We have all night." He holds out his hand. Wiggles his fingers at you. "I'll let you paint my nails again too, like a real girls night."

That grabs your attention. You slide off of the bed and take his hand, shrieking as he yanks you ten miles an hour down the skinny hallway and into the living room. Wayne's got the sofa bed out already, his padded roll-up mattress laid out over the springs and a sheet stretched corner to corner.

"Hey, kids," he says, fluffing one of his pillows. He chucks it at the top of the mattress. "Home time?"

"Can I stay over, Mr. Munson?" you ask.

Wayne rolls his eyes. You once spent eight days here with no breaks sometime in the summer of 1987 and he hadn't batted an eye. Eddie made sure it was truly alright with Wayne, of course, and you'd done your share of housework. Point is, both Munson's find your asking to stay unnecessary.

"I'll make pancakes in the morning," you add.

"Oh, in that case." Wayne throws his blanket out over the bed and sits on top of it. "By all means, kid, stay over. Tell your guardian."

"Can't. In Santa Barbara."

"Ah, then I have to insist you stay," he says, laying down with a huff.

Eddie passes him the TV remote. "She's a big girl, Wayne." You're well past the age of parental supervision.

Wayne answers with a grumbling sound that means, hey, you can keep talking to me but there's no guarantee I'll answer.

"I won't be annoying, promise," you say.

Wayne grunts again.

"That's old man talk for I know you won't," Eddie translates.

You nod, glad to have permission, and meander into the kitchen. "Can I–"

"Yes!" Eddie and Wayne call simultaneously.

Wayne laughs to himself in that pleased gruff way he's good at and tucks his arms behind his head. He's wearing one of Eddie's t-shirts. They've been the same size since Eddie was seventeen, something both Munson's utilise when laundry day is approaching but not quite upon them.

"Lighter?"

Wayne scrunches his eyes in displeasure. "By the sink."

"Thanks." For some reason, Eddie doesn't leave. He stays standing by the TV, listening to the voice of a late-night talk show chuckle through a joke about some scandal.

When Eddie was younger, he'd get into bed beside Wayne and watch TV until his eyes hurt. Too young to have stopped needing comfort and too old to know how to ask for it, he'd drift down the snug hallway into the living room and Wayne would usually be asleep or almost there. Eddie would stand by the TV hesitantly, and if he was sleeping Wayne must've been able to feel it, a new parents instinct or something, because he'd soon wake, and if he wasn't he'd look at Eddie like he'd been waiting for him. Like Eddie was running late.

His teenage years were almost solely defined by bad dreams and TV with Wayne. On the good nights, Eddie would go back to bed. On the bad nights, heartache would swallow him whole. Well, almost whole. His cheek would rest on Wayne's shoulder as the night went on. Miraculous and ordinary at once. That's the only bit of him that didn't hurt.

Pain emaciates the good from his memory, but it can't erase the comfort of watching TV with someone who loved him when they didn't have to.

Wayne pretends to chop Eddie in the stomach. Eddie laughs and dodges out of his path.

"Gotta be faster than that," Eddie taunts.

"Don't chain smoke," Wayne says.

"We won't be up long." Eddie's lying. He can't imagine that either of you will be getting an early night tonight considering the nature of your confession. What he means is, you won't be keeping Wayne up, and Eddie won't smoke more than what's wise.

Wayne hums.

You're in the kitchen screwing the lid back on a gallon of apple juice, your cup a quarter filled. You're like that. Won't ever take more than you need.

"One for me?" he asks.

"I figured now all your taste buds are dead, you wouldn't want any."

"Ha-ha," he says. The kitchen is unusually clean. "Shit, stop cleaning my house. Good god."

You pull one of his jackets off of the seat of one of the kitchen table's chairs and shake it out. "So I can sleep here, eat here, but cleaning is where you draw the line. I like it."

Eddie grabs the lighter from beside the sink in one hand and your wrist in the other, pulling you away from the table before you can start organising their mail and through the back door.

It's still sticky-hot out and the steps are warm to the touch as the two of you sit down hip to hip. He pulls the stiff pack of cigarettes from his pants pocket and hands them to you. Your hand is already waiting. You peel off the plastic and tap the pack against your chest. You like doing it, arguing that it makes you feel like you're Chelsea Marino in Glory Days, all dark smiles and indulgent self-loathing.

You open the pack, tug out a lone cigarette, and pass it to him.

"You're like a pez dispenser," Eddie says, putting the butt of the cigarette between his lips.

"You little freak."

He laughs and almost drops his cig. Wayne's heavy zippo struggles to light, low on gas.

"Loser can't even light a cigarette."

"Who put two dimes in you?" he asks, thrilled by your negging.

He takes a sharp inhale as the end of the cigarette finally lights, the heat tickling his throat until it burns the way he needs it to.

"Somebody must've," you say.

"Reckon we can tip you upside down and get something to eat?" he asks through an exhale of smoke, tapping ash into the small egg cup to his left that's been serving as an ashtray for as long as he's been smoking. It used to be yellow. Every now and again he washes it and sees the old chicken paint underneath. "Too late for cooking."

"Are you hungry?" you ask genuinely. "I told you we should've had more than just wings."

"It was too hot to eat hot stuff. It's still too hot. Tomorrow, we should go to Bradley's and get stuff for sandwiches."

Eddie waits for your answer. "I'm sick of PB and J, Eds," or "Yes! And a pitcher for sweet tea, my captain." You don't say anything, your face turned up to the sky and your eyes closed, soaking in the heat.

He has half a mind to go get a spray bottle and douse you before you collapse.

"What's going on with you?" he asks.

"I'm just thinking."

"Think out loud. Don't be fucking selfish."

"I'm not sure you wanna hear it."

He puts his cigarette in the eggcup ashtray half-smoked, ribbons of white curling up into the shimmering summer heat. Any other time he'd lounge back and let the nicotine course through his system, a momentary relief against the winding tightness that comes with being so hot, and so worried about you.

"If I ask you how you've been feeling lately, could you answer me?" he asks. "Without assuming I don't believe you. Don't get mad, just tell me."

You drop your shoulder against his. "I feel fine, I think. You know me, I– I worry too much, and work is overwhelming. If you took me to a doctor, he'd probably prescribe me ambien and a week in a dark room, but. I really don't think I'm making this up."

"I don't think you'd know," he says. Isn't that the deal? If you're having a hallucination of some kind, it would likely sound and feel real enough to trick you in some capacity.

"Trust me," you say. Your hair brushes against the top of his damp arm. He can't smell good, but you don't say a thing about it.

"I do." Eddie turns his head to take another drag. He blows the smoke as far from you as he can manage. "Tell me about last night," he says, eyes on the weather worn plating of the trailer. "What happened?"

If you're not messing with him, your ghost has been talking to you for a while now. Something happened last night to scare you in a way you hadn't been before.

He fights his rising nausea with a final drag on his cigarette. You stop leaning on him, hands back in your lap as you tell the story.

"I was listening to the stereo real loud while I did laundry. I don't know if I was trying to, you know, block it out if she started talking, I'm not stupid, I– I know it could be all in my head. I don't think it is, but I'm not stupid. I went down to the basement to swap the load out in the dryer, and while I was down there…"

You look like you don't know how to explain it. Eddie bites his cheek.

"She wrote me something," you say finally. "In my notebook, the one you got me for Christmas. She said hello."

"I could've written it," he says. "I don't remember, maybe I left you a message in it knowing you'd find it."

"Did you come in and take it off the shelf, too?" you ask gently. "Eddie, I know your handwriting. I'm not making this up."

He sighs, rubs his face with both hands, the smell of smoke and salt ingrained in the lines of his palms. He gives himself a long five seconds scrubbing at his stubbly jaw and wishing it was colder, then he shoots up onto his feet and pulls open the door.

"Early night," he says decisively. "If you're still sure there's a ghost in the morning, I'll come over. See if she'll talk to me too. How does that sound?"

You hold your hand out. Eddie takes it, hoisting you up.

"It sounds like you need a better strategy for getting girls to go to bed with you."

"It's working, isn't it?"

"Loser."

—

You wake up to Eddie tapping your shoulder.

"Come on, sweetheart," he says quietly, his voice rough as hewn stone. "I made you pancakes."

It's as if you're submerged at the bottom of a shallow pool. Sound and heat and sunlight reach you, but it's dull. It takes you a second to understand what Eddie's saying, and why his thumb is rubbing into your shoulder.

"Come on," he says again, "'fore they get cold."

You blink. Blink blink blink. Your throat hurts and you have a bad taste in your mouth. Your eyes feel like somebody flicked sand at you while you slept, gritty and dry. You kick the thin blanket away from you, a long day of writhing in the heat yesterday having turned you to sludge, your limbs limp and uncooperative.

Eddie's frowning at you when you look up.

"Want me to get you a rag?" he asks.

"No, I'll wash my face." Your words string together like toffee melted between them and hardened again while you weren't looking. "Oh," you murmur, wincing as you set your feet on the ground. "My back really hurts. Did you push me out of bed last night?"

"You slept like a log. Same position all night." He reaches for you, but his hand wavers. He must change his mind.

Eddie leaves the door wide open as he leaves. The radio is on, and a song he secretly loves but won't admit to wars with the sound of sizzling oil. If you strain, you can hear him humming. You get closer and dip into the bathroom, the door open so you can listen to Eddie sing the chorus.

Dance with me, I want to be your partner, can't you see? The music is just starting.

He doesn't sing well, really. It's a light, high-pitched rendition. He isn't trying. He feels comfortable enough around you to be unapologetically mediocre, and it's somehow sweeter than if he had a voice like Larry Hoppen.

You wash your face with handfuls of cold water, your lips tasting of salt as it drips down your nose to your neck, rogue rivulets of run-off seeping into your rolled sleeves.

The heat broke overnight. A light rain patters soundlessly against the windows, and the back door has been propped open in the kitchen to let in the smell of fresh churned earth. Petrichor.

You pat your tacky face dry. Eddie turns to the sound, and you nod at Wayne's empty seat.

"Where's your uncle?" you ask.

"He wanted to get epoxy and a fresh roll of duct tape in case we spring another leak. The rain was pretty bad last night, I think he's worried it'll rot the ceiling. I don't know. Don't worry, I made him something first."

You sit down and let Eddie serve you a stack of pancakes. The ones on the very top are piping hot. You slather them in butter and maple syrup as he sits down next to you, a plate of his own in hand.

"How's your back?" he asks. He's being too soft with you.

"I saw a ghost, Eds, I'm not dying." You slice down the pancakes with the side of your fork, attempting to act unbothered. "Worst case scenario, I'm schizophrenic."

Eddie sits down in the chair next to yours. It's a small table but there's ample room. His proximity is a choice. "Worst case scenario, you're being targeted by an evil demon, but schizophrenia could also be really bad," he says. "S'why I'm worried."

"Eddie." You put down your fork, swallowing a half-chewed mouthful roughly. "Hey. If it's my head, I'll go to the doctor and I'll let them take care of it and everything will be fine." You have no way of knowing if what you're saying is true. Mental illness isn't easy. You're just saying what you think he needs to hear without outright lying. "I'll take the meds and you'll be there for me. But I'm fine. And you're being weird."

"You're trying to piss me off."

A little. Pissed is better than anxious. You'd rather give him something to glare at than a reason to twist himself into knots. "You're easily riled," you jest.

His eyebrows rise. He eats his pancakes and you your own, the wrinkled knees of your pyjamas rubbing against one another as he jigs his leg along to the song on the radio. The rain starts to worsen, fat droplets slapping the screen door like the thwack of a bullet. From your seat, you can see the sky dark with grey clouds, the sun a long forgotten foe. The humidity has been cut in half, which is to say bad but not unbearable. Last night, if you'd been awake to feel it, the rain would've been warm in your palm. Getting up to close the door now, you nudge the ajar screen wide with your foot, letting some of the rain lash your arms and face.

You sigh at the chilly coldness of each blessed drop.

"Heatwave from hell is finally over."

"Thank fuck for that. Let's hope it's miserably cold for weeks," Eddie says.

It's mid September —summer has said goodbye with one last fierce kiss. By October, you'll be wrapping yourselves up in throw blankets on the couch on the porch, or hiding inside with Wayne's special pasta (buttered noodles and green pesto for the 'brave') watching slashers on Eddie's blurry TV. The humidity will be nothing but a gross memory.

You wash your plates and Eddie lets you shower first. You have your own shampoo in the corner, and a rose scented body wash Eddie buys but doesn't use (but it isn't for you, idiot, why would he buy you something so expensive? He got it by mistake). You could draw the cracks in their shower tiles with your eyes closed, and the condensation that clings to the cold water pipe, that's how many times you've been in here. You finish quickly, dry quicker, and pull fresh clothes over your still-clammy skin.

You tap Eddie in. He's somehow even faster than you were, and you swap places in his room. While he's changing, you dry the bathroom walls with a towel as soon as he's out, knowing the small room has a propensity for dampness.

"Stop cleaning my fucking house," he says when you traipse back into his room, his head hanging upside down as he towel dries his curls.

You forgo your usual explanations and tell the truth. "I know you're perfectly capable. I like helping, that's all."

"I know. Ugh, you suck. Do you have any deodorant?"

You grin and pull your deodorant out of your bag, a new-ish stick of Teen Spirit. Eddie sees it and sighs, obviously unprepared to smell like Pink Crush for the rest of the day. "I have like, half an inch left of Caribbean Cool. Coconut?" you offer.

He goes with the coconut scent. The wall of privacy between you has eroded to a scrap of paper after so long living in each other's laps, but you feel guilty for looking at him, the shifting muscle beneath the skin of his arms and chest stealing your focus. If Eddie were to see you without your shirt, you doubt he'd find himself anywhere near as distracted. He'd look if you let him because that's the way he is, unaffected by simple intimacies, but when you tell him to face the door it doesn’t aggrieve him. Most of the time he’s already averted his eyes.

"Gotta add that to the list of shit we need. Have you seen my shoes?"

"Your white sneakers are in the hallway. One of your converse is under the bed, but it's hard to say about the other." You swallow a sudden lump. "Are we going shirtless?"

Eddie does not go shirtless. He pulls a shirt on that thankfully has sleeves, and then a zip up hoodie under his leather jacket. You didn't think to bring a coat yourself due to the extreme baking temperature of the day before. You're lucky you had clean clothes here, considering you hadn't intended to spend the night. Or, not lucky, loved. One of the Munson’s has washed what you’ve left behind.

You have a momentary lapse as Eddie puts his shoes on, trekking into the bathroom to look in the mirror. It's no secret that you aren't pretty. You can make a good effort, and you keep it classy, stay clean, but you aren't pretty, not by your own opinion.

Eddie knows everything about you (nearly). He knows you don't think much of yourself. And a younger version of him had comforted you as earnestly as an awkward teenage boy could manage, but these days he goes for the root of the problem. He still tells you that you're pretty occasionally, or rather, "Looking good, babe," but not today.

"Hey." Eddie looks you up and down. "What's wrong?"

"I look stupid." You glance at your legs. Why does everything look so weird on you?

He hooks his arm through yours and starts to drag you down the hallway to the front door, sideways like two crabs. "No."

"Yeah, I do, and people are gonna think I do, too."

"Who cares what other people think?" And there's grown-up Eddie's rhetoric, Who gives a fuck what other people think?

"Me," you say.

You understand exactly what it is he's trying to do: free you from the anxiety of overthinking. It doesn't work as often as you wish it would, but he gives it a good go.

"No, you don't. We don't care what other people think because it doesn't affect us." He doesn't make light, exactly, but his eyes are bright and his smile is sweet as he opens the front door and gestures for you to go down first. Rain and wind are quick to kiss at your naked arms.

"What if they all think I'm some sort of slob?"

"Then they'd be wrong. It's okay for people to be wrong about us. That's their problem." More familiar argument. It actually does make you feel better, despite hearing it a hundred times before. "People are wrong all the time."

Eddie follows you down the first step and turns away to lock the door.

"Like you and my ghost," you say, trying to steer the conversation from your moment of weakness and into happy territory again. "You don't think she's real."

"Baby, I'd love it if you proved me wrong with that one." He jogs down the rest of the steps, knowing it’ll give you a conniption, the wet metal a death trap waiting to happen. “Go! Get in the van!”

You scramble across the grass and the curved pathway to the drive where the van is parked and yank open the passenger door with all your strength. The handle is notorious for sticking shut. When nothing happens, Eddie curses up a storm as he clambers into the driver's seat and over the console to force it open, giving it a good old-fashioned kick from the inside. It flies into your waiting hands and you rush up the step into the front of the van away from the rain that’s growing heavier and heavier by the hour.

“Well, glad I didn’t waste time letting it dry,” Eddie says, wringing his hair out over his lap. It only drips two or three drops, but it’s funny all the same. The top of his head shines like a dark halo. “About the ghost. Do you really believe in them?”

“You asked me last night–”

“I know, but last night you said you wouldn’t believe in one unless you saw it, and then proceeded to talk about it like it was real.”

“I’m agnostic about ghosts.”

“Oh, yeah?” he asks. He sticks the key in the ignition and turns it until the engine groans to life. The van was old when he got it. Now it’s super old.

“No. What’s agnostic mean?” you ask.

“We’ll buy a dictionary.”

“I kind of believe in ghosts. I believe in my ghost. If I ever see one, I’ll believe in all the ghosts. Shit, I sound stupid.”

“No, you don’t– you don’t! It’s okay to not know, I wasn’t trying to interrogate you about your personal beliefs.” He is a very responsible driver these days. He keeps his eyes on the road. His hand, however, strays to your arm. “You’re not stupid, superstar.”

“Don’t,” you plead. Superstar is a nickname that stuck despite your vehement disagreement with its origin and further usage. “It makes you sound like an old dad and I’m the son who just got benched at little league. Again.”

You stand as much as your seatbelt will allow and dig out the purse from the butt pocket of your jeans. “I’ll get gas.”

“Way too personal for our relationship.”

Bad, overused joke.

Eddie doesn’t want you to pay for gas, the same way he doesn’t want you paying for takeout or birthday presents. He hates ‘handouts’ —it took you a while to convince him that gas money isn’t a handout, it’s you trying to keep things fair. You know how it feels to need the money and not want to ask for it, so you put him in a position where he never has to ask.

Things are easier now. You’re not in high school anymore. Work doesn’t pay as well as you want it to, but it’s enough to get by, especially while you’re living in your childhood home with only partial bills to pay. Eddie isn’t hurting for money either. That’s something to be grateful for.

Eddie pulls into the gas station. He won’t let you pump while the wind is whipping, but you sprint into the gas station and trawl the fridge for the biggest drinks, sticking two cans of iced tea under your arm. The cold immediately eats into your naked skin. You jog to the counter to pay.

“Pump two, please,” you say, putting your cans down.

“Twelve dollars.”

You frown. Eddie only put ten dollars on the pump. Well, deducting your two cans of iced tea at 99 cents each, ten dollars and two cents. What an asshole.

You hold out a twenty dollar bill with a smile, and look out the window as you wait for your change. The rain is too heavy to see him, but you imagine Eddie drumming the wheel of the van with both hands. You shiver out a thanks as your change hits your palm, dropping it into your purse with your best receipts. There’s one for bowling (a triple defeat, Eddie a secret master), one for two whole frozen cheesecakes you’d eaten in bed a month ago with double-sized dessert spoons, a couple for Hawk theatre; Back to the Future II, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Ghostbusters II (‘89 was a great year for sequels). All your best memories printed on thermal paper.

“Holy shit I’m so cold,” you squeak, prying open the door without the aid of Eddie’s kick.

“You’re soaked, you fool. You want to go home first for a sweater?”

You close the door behind you and drop the iced tea into the console, grimacing at the great clang they make. Your seatbelt snaps into place around your soft middle, and without ceremony you’re back on the road for your original mission.

“No sweaters, Bradley’s. Stupid to double back.” You look at him from the corner of your eye. “I think we should get frozen pizza and extra toppings to put on them. And fries, obviously, and dessert.” The ghost won’t care. Probably.

“You forgot the side salad.”

“Forgot,” you say, laughing. “Why yes I did.”

“Dessert,” Eddie says, his turn now to make some decisions. “I want a slurpee real bad right now, so I’m thinking we buy a bag of ice for your food processor and get some syrup.”

“We could go get slurpees,” you say encouragingly. If that’s what he wants, why not?

“We have shit to do,” he says, smiling so much his dimples peek out. “Ghosts to convene with, notebooks to analyse. Feasts to prepare.” He looks deeply speculative. You assume he’s thinking about the maybe-ghost, but he says, “Why are we getting frozen pizza? They have those pre-packaged ones now that are basically fresh.”

“They taste the same.”

“Liar, the bottom of the frozen ones go soggy and the cheese burns on the crust. You know that I’m right, don’t give me dish.”

“Aren’t you always?”

Eddie has a horrible tendency to be right about things. Maybe that's why you hadn't told him about the ghost for so long, because you'd wanted to handle it yourself without his explanatory assurances. You’re the worrier and he’s the one who always sets it straight.

What if I make a fool of myself? you've asked him once.

I’ll make one of myself, too.

What if they fire me?

We’ll get you a new job with me cleaning up after idiots.

What if it never goes away?

It will.

What if body snatchers get us while we’re sleeping?

That one made him smile. The fondest upturn of a pretty mouth, not an expression you often see. Then they get us, he’d said, whispering across the pillows, face only partially visible in the struggling light of the TV. It’ll be awesome. Me and you. No brains, no worries. Just lettuce heads forever.

You watch him beating along to a song you aren’t privy to against the wheel. He hadn’t seemed to mind the idea of losing his mind with you back then. He doesn’t believe you now, but that’s because he hasn’t heard her voice. The whistling wind warping itself into coherent syllables. Reaching for you, a dark slice of sound.

Eddie… has… a secret…

You look at your lap, tamping down a shudder at the sensation of ice riding your spine.

Don’t we all?

—

Eddie feels you’ve been overly relaxed about the situation at hand. He doesn’t want to back you into a box and declare a health crisis, but he’s been thinking up possible illnesses while you weigh the pros and cons of pizza toppings in case he has to take you to see someone. He’s not sure how gas lines work but he’s sure a quick phone call to the Munson landline could clear it up for him. Perhaps the most effective test of all for carbon monoxide poisoning would be to subject himself to the same circumstances. He’ll spend a few days at home with you and see how he feels afterward. If push comes to shove he’ll light a match and see what catches.

On the inside, Eddie’s panicking about your mental health and, admittedly, the slim reality of a supernatural presence. On the outside, he’s playing along with your unconcerned dinner plans and aimless chatter. If you want to pretend that today is the same as any other day, he's prepared to let you. He won’t do the same, but he won’t discourage you, either.

You cut through one of the home aisles toward the front of the store with a heavy basket on your elbow, Eddie hot on your heels. He grabs a pocket dictionary from the display to his left and hurries to keep up with you.

You’re shivering. “I really didn’t think it would rain,” you say.

Eddie looks past the registers to the glass doors at the front of the store where rain pelts with a force bordering on stormy weather. If it gets much worse than this, he'll insist you both go back to Munson headquarters and hunker up to wait it out.

“The weather,” Eddie mumbles, unlike himself. “Are we expecting a storm? Maybe we should grab a cart and get some basics. Crate of water.”

“Okay, we can do that. Are you worried?”

“Kind of.”

He meets your eyes. He loves your eyes. He knows you don’t. You're not insecure in a way he feels he can fix —if he can fix any of it. It’s like you dissociate, for lack of a better word, from the things you can’t love. You don’t look in the mirror, won’t let him take photographs of you. You don’t say it. You call yourself stupid, weird, silly. Never ugly.

But he knows.

And now this whole ghost business. Eddie needs to think of something he can say to you that will inspire a better level of honesty going forward.

“How long have you been speaking to the ghost?” he asks.

You grin at a conveniently abandoned shopping cart at the end of the aisle and slide toward it on squealing shoes. You look around broadly for an owner, and when they don’t appear you place your basket in the stomach of it. The only thing remaining from whoever used it beforehand is a small tray of four cupcakes.

“Four. One for you, three for me,” you say, ignoring his question with a smug giggle.

Eddie loves you in a way not many people can love someone else, the kind of love that takes years of patience and acceptance and sweetness to take root, kind of love you only feel after seeing someone at their best, worst, and weirdest — memories come thick and fast whenever he thinks about the sheer years you’ve spent together, seeds of affection long germinated and rearing to grow. You, throwing up behind a Denny’s with sick in your hair, crying so hard you couldn’t catch your breath, and when you could, asking him if he wouldn’t mind buying you a new t-shirt to wear in the car as though you were some dastardly imposition, and not his sick best friend. You, on top of the world, surrounded by people who loved you with a birthday cake in front of you, eyes brighter than the blinking flames of each dripping candle. You, in pyjamas too tight, too loose, old or brand new with your hair up, down, washed, and greasy, your lips chapped, bruised then healed, parted against one of his pillows as you slept, as you yawned, as you laughed, talked. No matter what you’re wearing, saying or doing, you, in his bed, completely at home.

Eddie has a thousand images of you in his head and they all fight to play again, like a VHS on constant rewind, or a movie with duplicated film, double, triple exposed. Before even an inkling of a crush had ever come around, he loved you. That's why it doesn’t really matter that he can’t kiss you. He can’t imagine loving you more than this.

Sometimes, sometimes… you put your leg over his and your thigh spreads out across the top of his, and he has to beg himself not to want to touch you. He wonders if you’d mind. Eddie thinks about asking so often it turns into its own fantasy. He knows what cadence his voice would take, the exact grit and warmth, his hand waiting on your knee and aching to inch downward.

You pull him from his sickly introspection with a poke. Your fingernail dents his shirt precisely atop a small beauty mark. He doesn’t know if you know what you’re doing, if you’ve seen his naked chest enough times to realise that there’s a mole right there an inch shy of his belly button, if you’d ever looked at him in so much detail.

“Transmission incoming,” you say, your fingers flattening over his abdomen, your palm hovering apart. Like the pole of an opposite magnet, it refuses to connect. “Chirp. Houston, we’ve been attempting to connect with Astronaut Munson. He is unresponsive. Let us know when you make contact again.” You smile at him ruefully. “Damn moon keeps dropping signal.”

“Sorry… Astronaut Munson? Do they call astronauts astronauts? I thought it was commander.”

“I don’t know, Eddie, I haven’t brushed up on NASA related job titles lately.” Your deadpan wanes, replaced with a genuine concern. “Are you okay? You really did get lost.”

“I’m just thinking about, you know– Your ghost,” he lies. The ghost should be his highest concern, and for the most part it is, but he’d let his attention get pulled along by other things.

That’s the thing about love. It feels much more important in the moment than anything else, even when it shouldn’t.

“You’re super worried about the ghost.”

“It is an uber worrying ghost.”

“‘Cause she talks?” you ask.

“Well, yeah. Most of the time you just get, like, blurs on night vision cameras or the general malignant presence of the thing. Not words.” Not questions concerning your best friend.

“Casper talks and he’s gorgeous,” you say. “A true sweetheart.”

“Doesn’t Casper have to protect Lucy from his evil ghost uncles?”

“Who the fuck is Lucy?”

“The girl. Lucy and Johnny.”

“Bonnie?”

“Oh. That sounds right. But her name doesn’t matter,” Eddie insists. “My point was that the bad ghosts outweigh the good three to one. That’s more than half, you realise.”

“His name is Casper the Friendly Ghost,” you say, shrugging. Eddie hopes you know where it is in the store you’re going to. He hasn’t looked away from your face for the last twenty minutes. “It’s in the name.”

“But your ghost isn’t Casper,” Eddie says.

“No. My ghost isn’t Casper, but she hasn’t tried to kill me. She would have written something threatening in my notebook or knocked all the books off of my shelf if she were evil.”

Eddie frowns. You’ve steered him around the store like you’ve never been here before, changing your mind after turns to go down the opposite aisle, murmuring about bottled water. He reaches for your hand on the shopping cart rail and can’t resist squeezing it as he pulls it away.

“I got it,” he says.

He swears that your expression flickers. Worry breaking through the closed shutters of your blasé.

You’re not so chatty as you follow him toward the back of Bradley’s where they keep the big jugs of water. He grabs one, thinks back to the bad weather and grabs another. It’s unlikely that you’ll need them, but Eddie would rather be safe than sorry. “Do you have a lamp?” he asks. “An oil lamp? Or a flashlight?”

“I have a flashlight,” you confirm. “Is it really so bad? Uh, I don’t wanna ask again, but I– maybe I could–”

Eddie wants to pull your face into his chest. He thinks about it. Would he have hugged you like that a year ago, before the butterflies and the late nights daring to think of the dough of your thighs or the column of your throat when you tip your head back? He might’ve. It would mean something different, but he might’ve.

He throws an arm around your shoulder and gives you a good shake. “What is wrong with you? If it gets any worse, you’re staying with me. I’m only asking about a flashlight in case we have one of those worst case scenarios and get stuck in your haunted house. I refuse to die like the jocks in a b-rated horror.”

“The jocks or the whore? Isn’t it the girl who sleeps around that gets murdered in the dark?” you ask.

“Super unfair. I sleep around, do I deserve to die?” he asks, dropping his arm.

You mime stabbing him in the gut. Everyone's so violent.

Eddie is amazingly unharmed as he gets you to the register. You try to fight him on who’s paying, but you’re an idiot who insisted on getting gas. It’s the leverage he needs to win. Out of Bradley’s and back into the rain with grocery bags double bagged, you run for the van and thrust the spoils of your shopping trip in the passenger seat footwell. Eddie opens the side door to lug the water jugs inside and you take the cart back to the front of the store against his wishes.

He waits for you to be in arms reach and gets back in the van. You’re soaked to the bone. He’s cold in three layers, so you must be freezing. He shrugs off his sopping wet leather jacket and then the zip hoodie underneath, draping the zip hoodie over your lap and chest and then rushing to put his leather jacket on again.

“Thank you, good sir,” you laugh.

He’s already fiddling with the air conditioning. Heat bursts from the left vent but not the right, leaving you in a cold bubble. “Shit, I’m sorry, the right vent’s still busted. Ol’ Beauville keeps letting us down.”

“Don’t hate on the Beauville!” you scold through chattering teeth.

“You're dying,” he says. “Hold on, I’m gonna do ninety.”

“Do not speed!”

You get to the road outside of your place without any hydroplaning. You live on a regular American street in a two-story semi-detached house not too far from Hawkins High school with your guardian, who isn’t home very often. It has three bedrooms, one bathroom, and a lot of white walls. You often lament that the house doesn’t really feel like your own, and punctuate with a giddy laugh he doesn’t understand but adores nonetheless.

Eddie parks his van on the long gravel driveway as close to the house as he can get it and ushers you inside with your keys. You’re cold enough to listen without complaint.

He puts the groceries in the kitchen on the countertops and kicks off his shoes, intending on putting them away when he’s sure you aren’t in any danger of hypothermia. He kicks off his shoes by the door, locks it tight, and starts up the carpeted stairs to your room.

He’s not surprised to find you half-naked, but overfamiliar, affectionate friendship doesn’t necessarily mean you like being seen. He averts his gaze from your naked legs and tries desperately to think about anything but underwear. The more he tries not to think about them, the worse it gets.

“Hey,” he says, covering his eyes so you know he isn’t perving, “our horror flick just got dirty.”

“Yikes,” you say. “Don’t look.”

“I’m not, I’m not. You could’ve closed the door. You know, spare me a guilty conscience.” Then, because he just can’t help himself, “When did you start wearing fancy panties?”

“Fuck off, Eddie,” you laugh.

“Do I have to make the switch to tighty whities?”

“Our underwear choices do not concern one another.” You trek toward him. He peeks through two spread fingers and finds you thankfully reclothed in dry sweatpants and a sweater soft with age. “I thought tighty whities hurt your–” You raise your eyebrows.

He regrets being honest with you when you were teenagers. A little secrecy might help repaint him in your mind as less of a huge loser. You could possibly find him attractive if you weren't privy to the numerous embarrassments that make up his life, he thinks.

He chokes on his own tongue and dies right there in your bedroom. “Why do you remember shit like that?”

“Same reason you keep a heat pack in your room in case I get all crampy,” you say.

You give him one of your sick smiles —you have to know what you’re doing, you have to— and drape your arms over his shoulders, nearly knocking him down with the sudden addition of your weight. He, stunned, plants a foot behind himself so you don’t both trip and fall on your asses.

The plane of your back beckons beneath your sweater. What he’d give to slip a hand under the hem to explore the ridge of your shoulder blade with his fingertips.

A quiet ensues. Your hug turns from a joking attempt to push him around a bit to a real one. He steel-arms your waist, tightening them around you three times in quick succession, nose buried in your hair to steal a deep breath.

“This where the ghost talks to you?” he asks, looking over your head into the chaos of your room. It’s not dirty, but it isn’t tidy, either.

You sigh too much like a moan for his sanity and stand up tall, your hands trailing down his chest unthinkingly as you follow his gaze. “Yeah. I don’t know if we’ll hear her over the rain. It has to be really quiet.”

“What are you doing? Experiments?” he asks. He sounds as distracted by it all as he feels.

“No. Something I noticed, is all.”

“I don’t get why you didn’t tell me the first time it happened,” he confesses, voice dropping to a murmur.

“Um… remember senior year, you kept missing class because you had all those doctors appointments?” You smile sheepishly. “‘N’ you didn’t tell me about it until after you knew you were okay?”

During his first senior year, Eddie found a small cyst in his arm. Small compared to other cysts, large in his arm. He worried it was malicious, or rather Wayne worried and Eddie didn’t know what he thought about it until after they’d cut it out. It had been a thankfully speedy affair in a doctors office they couldn’t afford. Eddie didn’t tell you about it until he’d been all stitched up and tested — he tried, but then he would imagine the look on your face when he did, and it made him feel like his intestines had learned to jump rope.

He still remembers when he finally told you, the split second between, “a tumour,” and “but it’s not cancer.” The relief on your face. The shock of upset tears it caused.

“I guess I was trying to be good to you,” you say, shrugging and starting down the stairs.

Eddie follows. “If something like that happened again to me, god forbid,” —he dips into a melodramatic voice, scared of the sombre mood that’s descended— “I wouldn’t keep it to myself. I’d make it your problem instantly.”

Every now and then, Wayne will lean over the back of Eddie’s chair at the breakfast table and grab an arm, feeling for a tiny bump that hasn’t come back. You’d done the same in your own way: you wrote ‘check for lesions :D’ on a piece of paper and taped it to his bedroom doorway. It fell off ages ago, but he occasionally gets déjà vu as he leaves the room. And as he walks down the hallway, he’ll roll up his sleeve and check that there's nothing there.

Eddie didn’t tell you senior year. A lingering abandonment issue, maybe, ‘cause Dad didn’t stay when things got hard, who cares? He doesn’t think about that shit anymore. Figures the mark it left was enough. But these days, he’d tell you if he found a lump in his arm, or a ghost in his room. Your scribbled note made sure of that.

"Are you listening to me?" he asks.

"You'd make it my problem," you provide. "Tell me something I don't know."

He grabs you by the shoulders at the bottom of the stairs and blows into your ear.

With the lights on and the radio at a low volume, the rain outside doesn't seem nearly as imposing. The kitchen is small with a long strip light above that gives the room a near clinical white cast, the countertops shining clean, not a plate in the sink. It's evident how much time you don't spend here. No photos on the fridge, no salt or pepper shakers on the table. Where Eddie and Wayne have their insane mug collection made up of states and hours and way too much money in some cases, you have four black coffee mugs in a tower stack by the seldom used machine. Where they have a corkboard of photographs, Polaroids and printouts from Walmart off of rinky-dink digital cameras, you have one photo on the wall, a professionally done portrait of you from the day you graduated and Eddie, unfortunately, did not.

Eddie's grad pictures are much less robotic. Too much eyeliner but just enough you, he has his arm thrown over your shoulders in the back of a grungy restaurant, his smile blisteringly bright. He might as well have written 'Thank Fuck' across his forehead. There's another one of him and Hellfire Club at the time, blurry with the flash making him pale as snow. You and Wayne had been trying to make the camera focus, twin scowls on your faces. Eddie's expression was one of pure joy.

He tried to make up for your shitty grad pics by celebrating your first job with a pack of Polaroids. You'd looked adorably strange in the uniform, so young but so done with his shit, eighteen and exhausted. He keeps one in his room in the bottom of the box with all his rings and chains. If you ever found it, he'd think about drowning himself.

Your appointment with a ghost waits until after dinner. You pull your frozen pizzas out of their boxes and put them in the oven (you don't preheat, which Eddie thinks is a questionable choice, but he'd help you get away with murder). While they defrost and start to cook, you slice and dice your extra toppings on the wooden chopping board beside the stovetop. He stands there with his hands washed and nothing to do. Just watches you cut up jalapeños for him and thinks about how he's going to take care of you if the ghost doesn't speak up. Does he tell your guardian? You're an adult. All your healthcare would be private and confidential. Could he tell Wayne? Would that be a betrayal?

"Check the pizzas?" You scrape the seeds out of a jalapeño, eyes pinched in concentration.

Eddie doesn't know if he can eat. You aren't as out of it as you were at the store, but you aren't fully present. A song you love plays on the radio and it's like you don't hear it.

He pulls the pizzas from the oven. He makes a smiley face out of pepperoni and jalapeños, earning half as big a smile as he thought he would from you in response.

Together, you clean the small mess you made. The pizzas brown. When they're done you take them out, cut them up, plate them, and carry them up to your room on a tray with a two litre bottle of sprite and two plastic cups. Eddie changes into a pair of his pyjama pants that you keep at the bottom of your dresser before he sits on your bed, wide-eyed when he sees how many slices you've managed in his absence.

"Nobody's gonna take it away from you," he teases lightly.

"Can't be too careful 'round you," you say, dropping a crust onto his plate. It's his favourite part.

"Thought you wanted fries?"

"And I thought you wanted a side salad."

"I wanted snow cone syrup," he says, shrugging.

He considers offering to go make you some fries anyway, but he takes a big bite of pizza and it tastes so good he forgets about it. Eddie doesn't know nothing about nothing, but if he had a say, he'd make it so that he and you could spend the rest of your lives doing this, meaningless jabbering over greasy food. It's not a good idea —you need vegetables that aren't on pizza, and fresh grains, and who knows what else to stay healthy— but Eddie's never claimed he had them. He wants this.

He gets it most of the time, but he's selfish. He wants it every night. He loves Wayne but he wants to come home to you, or to have you come home to him, in a space that you decorated, a life that you made. He wants a dog and a pet fish and, in five years or ten or never, a baby if it's what you want too. A front door lined with three pairs of shoes.

He also wants a limousine that takes him from place to place and a room full of thousand dollar guitars. A man can dream.

The first port of call for any dream is making sure you're okay. Let the ghostly stakeout begin.

Sated and sick at once, Eddie puts your empty tray on the dresser and goes to turn on the TV. "She won't talk if the TV's on," you interrupt.

"Ugh. Any chance she likes the stereo?"

You slouch down where you'd been sitting and shake your head. Your jaw goes soft, eyes softer when you smile. "It's not all bad. She doesn't care how loud you turn a page."

Eddie can't be with you every second of the day, the same way you can't be with him. There are shifts to take, shifts to cover, dungeons to pilfer and dragons to slay. You have your job, your other friends (none as handsome as he is), your hobbies. How often are you home alone, talking to ghosts?

He stands by your bookshelf, eyes skipping over the titles in slight disinterest.

"Hey," he asks, "where's your notebook? I wanna see her handwriting."

"I left it on the top shelf."

Eddie stares. There are a few other notebooks and sketchbooks aligned here, but not the one you'd described.

"You sure?" he asks.

"I left it right there,” you say with a yawn.

Eddie looks at you from over his shoulder. You’re tired. He figures he can see the notebook later, and offer you some remedial comfort now. Anything to wipe the frown off of your face.

He grabs a book off of your shelf at random and cracks it open. You love being read to. You'd beg and beg him growing up, and he'd almost always oblige.

"Can I read aloud, or does she hate that too?" he asks, turning away from your shelf.

"I've never tried it."

"I'll do it quietly?"

"Sure," you say, a tired but pleased smile on your lips. "I've read that one before."

"Should I get a different one?"

"No, it's good. It's the one I told you about with the demons who eat stars."

"The dirty one?" he asks, dropping like a stone near the top of your bed, the blankets under his hip warm from the residual heat of the pizza plates.

"It's not dirty. There's one scene toward the end where they get handsy, no graphic detail."

"And by no graphic detail, you mean…"

"No graphic detail," you repeat. It's awful how funny you find each other.

"Not even, like… hand stuff?"

"Do you want there to be hand stuff?"

"With the demons?"

You devolve into giggles, the kind that start slow and thicken into a giddy sort of breathlessness, your head supported by the headboard. Eddie looks up at you in awe.

"I could be into that," Eddie furthers, stretching your laughter as long as it will go. "Are they the kind that look like people but with extra arms or wings or something?"

"You'd like that, huh? Extra arms?"

"I wouldn't be opposed to extra arms."

"Gross," you cheer through another wave of laughter. "I don't wanna think about it."

Eddie looks to the book's first page and tamps down a grimace. You don't wanna think about him in that sort of position.

Eddie, excluding any extra appendages, thinks of you like that more than he should. Never when you're near, not if he can help it, but at night when the hot shower water beating down against his back can be shaped into the vague sensation of a body behind him, he thinks of your chest. Your hands. Or in the early mornings, when he's writhed into a contortionist’s ball and the streaking sunlight through the curtains is kissing his abdomen, he imagines it's your leg thrown across his hip, with your face turned into his chest.

Fuck, it kills him, because he knows what the real thing feels like. He's had you clinging to his waist on colder nights, and he's been under your hands. Tipsy, free with your touches, he's felt the breadth of your palms cupping his cheeks.

You're pretty, you'd told him, as you love to tell him when you've been drinking, but you need a haircut.

He never would've let you kiss him in that state, but he kids himself into thinking you wanted to. It was only booze doing what booze does.

"Read to me, serf," you demand.

Eddie clears his throat.

"The enemy is close," Eddie reads, "and the lane is overrun. Sympathy for the second kind had felt natural to Mellissa once, but now that she sees the sharp angling of their shoulders in the dawn light, she aches with hatred…"

The novel isn't bad. It isn't Eddie's favourite; the tone falls flat, and the main character's actions aren't fed by any particular emotion. Its first arc is formulaic, and soon the hero's forced to answer the call. You evidently find his rehashing tedious, as your head tips toward his head, and you wriggle your way down to his shoulder amicably.

"Don't fall asleep," he says.

"It's your whispering."

"I don't want to disturb the ghost."

"Okay." You start to pick at your nails, little scratches against the cuticle. "I won't fall asleep."

—

Your snores aren't gentle. You're a human being and Eddie doesn't expect you to breathe like a princess, but the wheeze is concerning.

He waits for you to settle down, easing your head onto the pillow. Your airway clears, and your snoring quietens to the same ambient level as the rain hitting the window outside. He feels your head for a temperature carefully. Back of his hand, fingers curled in so his ring can't startle you, he tries to gauge if you're running a fever.

It isn't normal for you to cat nap in the middle of the day, but the sun is occluded by dark clouds and the rain blots out what's left, leaving the bedroom in darkness, and you'd been warm and fed and Eddie had been doing something monotonous. It makes sense that you'd drifted off. Eddie wishes he felt tired too, so he could slide down under the sheets with you and curl a hand around your wrist.

He lies on his back, arms crossed over his chest, straining his ears for the sound of a voice.

I swear, sometimes, I can hear someone talking.

You have a vent in your room, and perhaps a couple of late nights after your shifts had you mistaking a groaning foundation or the wind for a whisper. That's a thing, right? People hear something in the wind. Fatigue has your mind playing tricks on you. Eddie should go to the library and see if they have anything to do with sleep deprivation.

It's no fun listening for ghosts. Eddie's shoulders and upper back begin to feel tense. The feeling travels lower, a snaking ache that wraps around each vertebrae. Even his tailbone hurts.

He shifts onto his side and stares at your closed eyes. He blows a breath at you to watch your lashes flutter like tufts of grass in the breeze.

Your breaths are like a metronome. He syncs his to yours for kicks, just listening. When you're both asleep, does your breath sync on its own? How do your bodies react to each other? Eddie has woken up to your arms around him or your body halfway across the bed, leg falling out from under the covers. You're irregular, where he has a tendency to grab at you while he's knocked out. He doesn't wrap his arms around you so much as hold you in his hands. His fingers curl in the hem of your t-shirts or bracelet your bicep. If he falls asleep with an arm above your head, he'll occasionally wake to find his hand at the top of it, your hair mussed.

He must be stroking it in his sleep.

Or maybe you're frizzy.

No shame in frizziness. Eddie's frizzy more often than not. Curly hair is hard to take care of and he has a lot of it. God knows it was worse before he started seeing that hairdresser in the city who makes magic happen with her thinning shears.

Your lips part.

Thunder cracks outside.

Eddie lifts his head to look out of the window in surprise. Summer days have come to pass and sunset comes earlier in the day, fractals of light bouncing between the violent rain. In an hour or two, it will be pitch black outside.

He should call Wayne and see what's happening. How he is, and if he thinks Eddie should come home and bring you, too.

Eddie clambers off of the bed, careful not to wake you. He slides across your hardwood floor and takes the empty dinner tray with him down the spongy carpeting of your stairs, back to hardwood in the hallway, and finally onto the freezing cold linoleum of your kitchen.

He locates the source of chill quickly. The window in front of the sink has unlatched. It's the thing you call him over for most; when you want to hang out you go to Eddie's, when the window won't close Eddie comes here.

His shirt hikes as he leans against the sink, his abdomen pressed to the cold countertop as he yanks the window and twists the handle the wrong way, goosebumps climbing his arms. It groans in resistance, but Eddie knows from experience that it’ll stay closed for a while.

He takes the liberty of turning your thermostat up as he waits for Wayne to answer the phone, coiled cord pulled taut.

Wayne isn't too bothered by the weather, "It's not a hurricane. A storm, sure– you'll be fine. But by all means, come home if you're scared."

"I'm not scared, jerk, I'm concerned."

He winds the cord around his arm, leaning in when Wayne's voice is hard to hear like it'll make a difference.

"...might go out," Wayne's saying, "call me, or call around Roger's… get back to… warm."

"Where the fuck are you? I can't hear a thing you're saying."

"Don't cuss at me. I'm with Roger, that's why I said to call Roger if I don't answer, he has that new pool table…" Anything Wayne says after that is garbled, like he has a hand pressed over his mouth.

“I thought Roger had a broken leg?” Eddie says. “How’s he getting around?”

“He hops. I left money in the bread bin for you, did you see it?”

“No, I didn’t see it. Wayne, we’ve talked about this before, I’m working. I appreciate it, I do, but I don’t need you giving me money.”

Whatever Wayne says at first gets eaten by static. Eddie doesn’t know if it’s your phone or the Munson’s. He doesn’t need to hear what Wayne’s saying to get the general gist of it. “…water bill..”

This again? Eddie paid the water bill. He thought he’d be allowed to do that, considering he uses the majority of the water, but it’s been a great point of contention between them.

“I’m sorry!” he says. “If I knew it would bother you so bad I wouldn’t have done it. But I don’t want it back, I’m not a kid anymore, half the time you don’t let me pay for groceries–”

“This might shock you, son, but I’ve been paying for you to eat for a decade. I ever complained? No, ‘cause it’s my job, and I don’t want you thinking any…” the words scratch out. Eddie guesses what he’s saying.

The broken phone is starting to irritate him.

He holds in his argument. Call it respect, love, whatever you want. “I’m not saying that! Listen,” —Eddie laughs to himself, words wrought with it like bubbles— “you’re senile.”

“You weasel–” The phone gives up. Whooshing air is all Eddie hears.

"I can't deal with this. I love you, I'll see you tomorrow, okay?" Eddie asks, rubbing the space between his eyebrows.

"Yeah, love you too, kid. Eddie–"

He doesn't catch the end of Wayne's sentence. The line goes dead. He pulls the shiny receiver from his ear and frowns at it.

Wayne was probably just telling Roger and the guys what Eddie was up to. Or what he thinks Eddie's up to, at least. Eddie told him via note that you wanted help rearranging your bedroom furniture. A small lie, but he didn't want to expose you to any outward judgement until he's sure himself what's going on.

Eddie hangs the phone on the hook. He grabs your plates, throwing the meagre leftovers in the trash and dumping the plates in the sink. He turns on the hot faucet and grabs a sponge and the dish soap and gets to work cleaning. It takes him all of five minutes, and he's oh so smug about being a decent person that he doesn't notice the chill.

He dries the plates and puts them in the cabinet across the room with his back to the sink. The dishes clatter together loudly, like a gunshot in the silence. He winces internally and tries to be gentler closing the cabinet door.

The hum of the kitchen light catches his attention. He looks up, unsurprised to find a bug crawling inside of the plastic covering that shields the long bulb. A moth, Eddie thinks, it's fuzz silhouetted in shadow. He doesn't really like moths, but he also doesn't wanna watch one die.

The rain seems worse when he turns off the light. Your kitchen faces out into the backyard, and through the night Eddie can see the house that's behind yours with its porch lights on. It turns the rain to quicksilver, and provides just enough illumination for Eddie to look up at the kitchen light and know what he's doing.

He drags a chair to the middle of the room and steps onto it. It's disturbingly slippery. Thankfully, Eddie doesn't plan on doing any acrobatics. He reaches up to the warm plastic light covering and feels along for the ridges to pry it off. One ridge clicks off, and another. He leans precariously toward the other side and feels for the third and forth ridge when thunder rumbles outside, and somewhere in the distance lightning flashes.

Eddie flinches but doesn't fall. "Fuck," he mumbles. Pussy.

The plastic falls into his hands and Eddie climbs off of the chair as quickly as he can. It's too hot to handle, banging against the kitchen table as he chucks it down. He'd turned off the light thinking the plastic would cool down fast, and he’d been proven very wrong.

"Shit," he mumbles some more. Your neighbour's porch light turns off, leaving him in total darkness.

Eddie’s hand aches from his mild burn. It's like whenever he has to wash the frying pan at home, he forgets that while cold water might cool the pan itself, the slim piece of metal that connects the dish to the handle stays hot. He's burned himself so many times on that fucker–

Lightning flashes again.

There's someone standing in your yard.

The second he notices the figure, it lunges left.

Eddie stands frozen on the spot, unsure if he should approach the window to get a better look, or if he should move backward and away from the potential harm.

He takes a step forward. Mind in a numb state of thoughtlessness, he walks to your sink and stands there silently, looking into the grass and trees for any hint of irregular movement.

Tree branches rail in the wind and rain. Eddie leans further forward.

A third flash of lighting comes, and it must have struck close by, as the light it gives off is long and bright. He gets a clear look at the yard and the image of his own reflection in the glass. No dark figure in the tall grass toward the fence, no heinous murderer trying the back door.

It’s dark again. Eddie puts a hand over the racing pulse of his heart. Fuck, he thinks. I’m seeing things. He’s on edge ‘cause of your fucking ghost, and it’s not your fault but he wonders if maybe loving you is making him tired. He regrets it as soon as he thinks it, what does that even mean? He’s loved you for years. It has never felt like a chore. But… tired. He’s tired. Pining for someone you already have, just not in the way that you want, is exhausting. It’s not your fault and it doesn’t change the fact that he’s exhausted. Today has been a long day.

He scrubs his eyes with his palms until they burn and lifts his head.

There’s a girl on the other side of the glass.

Eddie startles, startles again when he realises she’s not on the other side at all, she’s behind him, outfitted in white like an apparition, like an angel. She’s inside the house, ten feet away in the doorway.

His neck cracks with the force of his turn.

“Sorry,” you say, taking a step back into the hall. “I thought you heard me.”

“Oh, shit.”

You’ve turned the light on in the hall. Eddie turns back to the window and sees your reflection again, no angels and no apparitions. You’re just a girl.

He half turns and gets stuck like that, hand braced against his eyes, torso pitching forward. “Shit,” he mutters.

“Are you okay?”

Eddie laughs. “You surprised me. I’m fine,” he assures you, though he takes his time standing at full height. How can such a small scare feel like a marathon? “Creep, who fucking does that?”

“You were totally spaced, dude, don’t blame me,” you say, holding your hands up in mock surrender.

“I do blame you. I hope you feel blamed. Fucking fuck, that got me.”

“I wasn’t being quiet. I yelled. You didn’t hear me?”

He can’t stop the dubiety that warps his face. “No? What’s your definition of yelling? ‘Eddie?’” he imitates you, tossing his own name into the dark kitchen. “Unbelievable.”

“What were you looking at?” you ask, nodding at the window.

“Lightning.”

“That why you’re in the dark? Or have I interrupted something?”

“‘M moonlighting as a serial killer.” He grins at you. “Got me.”

You lean against the wall next to the light switch and turn it on, exposing the chair shy of his leg and the plastic cover from your light on the table.

“What the–”

“I’m doing a good deed. Or, I was. There was a moth at one point."

You help Eddie clip the light back into place. He climbs back on the chair and you hug his legs to make sure he doesn’t fall either way, arms encircling his thighs and your face pressed comfortably to his stomach. Your cheek flush with the naked stretch of his stomach, his shirt hiked up as he struggles to finish what he started, he explains the moth, who, for lack of an escape, has probably found a home in your curtains or your coat rack. You laugh at his softness.

Back upstairs, you won’t let him read to you again, and the ghost monitoring continues on. Eventually, you both get bored and turn on the TV. Eddie forgets his fright, you forget your haunted house, and the night ends. You fall asleep against his shoulder, drool leaking from the corner of your mouth. He pushes you gently down into your pillow, and goes to brush his teeth with a snort.

Eddie wakes in the morning with a crick in his neck. He feels better, having slept. All his monstrous yearning has fizzled out overnight, and he’s glad to find that the damp circle of dribble under your cheek isn’t cute, it’s gross. (Okay, it’s a little cute. He’s only human.)

The window brags an end to the extreme weather. Rain nor shine reaches through your drapes; the morning looks mundane. He kicks your shin ‘by accident’ and waits for you to rouse, keeping a safe distance. He doesn’t wanna get his morning breath all over you. That would be inhumane.

“Ouch,” you croak.

“It wasn’t that hard.” His voice is as rough as yours.

“Not your kick,” you moan. “My throat.”

“You’ve been drooling again.”

You cover your face sluggishly and your pinky must feel the wet spot staining your pillow.

“It’s embarrassing.” You dig your heels in at the bottom of the bed and pull your head off of the pillow so you can grab it and throw it out of view. Once it’s bashed against your mirror with a concerning glass sound, you pull the blankets over your face and sigh. “I’ll be here forever, if you need me.”

“Could be worse,” he says lightly. “Imagine waking up with a stiffy.”

“Did you–?” you ask, like you’re terrified to know but couldn’t not inquire.

“No, but I have. You know I have.”

“True. That is… unfortunately awkward.”

“‘Xactly. Don’t feel weird about your spit.”

You don’t feel as bad as you pretend. Sure, it’s embarrassing. So is puking in your lap at the movies, or ripping your pants climbing over the fence into the woods by Forest Hills, or getting fired after two weeks from the Palace Arcade because the manager didn’t like your ‘general demeanour and/or presence’, all of which he’s done and you’ve been a witness to. He thinks you might be impervious to humiliation as long as you’re together.

Eddie pulls the blankets over his head, pleased that the morning light reaches you even here. You’re curled on your side underneath them, bleary eyes meeting his from across the small stretch of mattress. You hadn’t touched him once while you slept.

“I don’t remember falling asleep,” you say quietly.

“We watched Poltergeist. You fell asleep with twenty minutes left.”

“Can you blame me? Snore.”

“You wanted to watch it.”

“It’s the only movie I own that has a ghost.”

You share a silent look. Eddie tries to keep a straight face and ultimately fails, his laugh roaring. You join in, half reluctant and half delirious in your fatigue. Your sleep-swollen eyes close like you can’t keep them open anymore.

He stays under the sheets stealing looks at you for as long as he can, despite the building, smothering warmth. The day passes with much of the same.

—

When you first started working at Leaven, Eddie called you a traitor. He said you’d made it impossible for him to show his face in Bradley’s. He’d been joking — the prices at Leaven are ridiculous, and completely out of the average joe’s budget. Bradley’s remains your go to for everything. He’s come around these days — he likes the fancy soups and admits Leaven’s has the best fresh fruit.

Despite the rich old women who frequent and make your workdays… less than ideal, you like working at Leaven. Your days consist almost exclusively of stacking shelves, but occasionally they chuck you on checkout and you get to sit in a padded chair for ten hours. You’re basically living the American dream.

Working here has introduced a special brand of monotony to your life. It’s very, very quiet, and that’s how you like it. But there’s something to be said for noise, for Eddie and Wayne’s noise specifically. You like going there after work to shock your body back into the real world. Here’s sound. Here’s life. Here’s love.

You’re scanning a bag of ‘holistic’ lemons when you notice Eddie lingering toward the front of the store a mere twenty feet away. You don’t wave at him, lest your customer think they aren’t the sparkling apple of your eye and report you to the manager, but you nod jerkily, hoping he takes it for ‘I see you’. He smiles and points his thumb toward the store’s cafe.

When your arms are numb from another twenty minutes of scanning and typing in coupon codes for people who don’t need coupons, you shut down your register and lock it all tight. You take your lunch break early, and thankfully there’s nobody in the cafe to yell at you for being unprofessional.

You waltz over to Eddie sitting at the back next to the huge glass windows and prop your lunch bag against the coke bottle he’s opened. “Hello, handsome,” you say.

“Hey, beautiful.”

“You want half of a turkey sandwich?”

He beams at you, kicking your chair out so you can sit. “Nooo, I brought you a hot dog.”

“Oh, gross. Give it to me right now.”

You know he made it at home before he’s even pulled the foil wrapped package from his bag. Eddie makes the best hot dogs ever. Fancy brioche buns, caramelised onions and a mixture of sauces on the world's worst meat. They make you queasy and they might be one of your favourite foods. You open it, delighting in its retained heat.

His wrist is shiny. You put your hotdog down to grab his arm and bring it closer to your face. He’s wearing a simple tennis chain with black gems like a rich girl. “What is this?” you murmur, pleased to see him wearing something nice.

“You like that? It was thirty four dollars from a magazine.”

“I love it. What’s the occasion?”

“My mom’s birthday.” He fishes his own hotdog from his bag and slaps it down in front of yours. You take a huge bite, and can’t answer him when he asks, “Is that really weird, buying myself something when it’s a day about her?”

You steal a swig of his coke and wince the entire time. “Sorry.” You cough. “No, that’s not weird, Eddie. Wanting to buy yourself something nice is a good way of dealing with a shitty day. A day that makes you feel shitty,” you amend.

“Maybe I should’ve got her a big bouquet of flowers or something.”

“You can still get her flowers.”

“Yeah.”

You take another bite of your hot dog and slip away to get a bottle of water from the cafe. You feel like an asshole for not hugging him. When you return Eddie’s already polished off his hot dog, and has moved onto one half of your turkey sandwich.

“Are you gonna be weird about it if I hug you?” you ask him genuinely.

“No.” He puts down the sandwich. “I don’t know. Maybe. I want one, though.”

You wipe your hands in a napkin showfully before approaching his chair. You slide a knee next to his thigh and wrap your arms around his head, a hand between his shoulder blades and the other pulling his face to your chest. You have to slouch. It's not entirely comfortable but it doesn't feel awkward, so you take the win.

"I'm sorry, Eddie," you say quietly. You think about kissing his head.

"Me too."

There's a moment in there where you feel a nasty emotion brewing, sadness and much worse. You know that the gutted pain aching through you right now is nothing compared to what Eddie feels. That loss.

It must feel so, so heavy.

You pet his neck affectionately. Your nose dips into his hair, the tip touching his scalp. Your hands come up, like trying to hold water as it trickles between your fingers, Eddie's slipping. You grapple to keep him with you.

"I love you," you say honestly. He's your best friend.

Eddie pats your back. "I love you too, loser."

"You're my best friend."

I would fucking think so, he'd say.

"You're mine," he says.

You smile and give him a good squeeze. When you pull away he doesn't look as odd as he had, relaxing against the hard-backed wood of the cafe chair as he tucks his hair behind his ear. He holds your gaze without any weight to it. You sit in your own uncomfortable chair and lean forward to compensate for the space between you, like two slanting trees in the wind, parallel but untouching.

"It's a really nice bracelet," you say.

"She'd like it, I think."

You don't know anything about Eddie's mom. She isn't someone he's ever been able to talk about with you. You can't remember the photographs you'd seen once upon a time, but you remember having the distinct thought that Eddie looked more like her than his dad or his uncle Wayne. She'd been beautiful, and her life couldn't be more starkly mourned.

"I'm sure she would. It's pretty."

His mouth wobbles. You're horrified for a moment, thinking he might burst into tears, but it's laughter he's chasing, and his little giggle is like a beam of sunlight. "Sorry," he says. Laughter doesn't seem like a good enough word to describe the sounds he's making, such understated, small curls of sound. Fleeting, golden. "She would've liked you, too. She would've loved you."

"That's a good thing?" you check, cautious that he might be on the precipice of a nervous breakdown.

"Yeah, that's a good thing. Is it ever bad? To be loved?" he asks.

He's teasing, but it feels like he's asking you something else.

"You could be a stalker, with that logic."

And there you go, ruining a moment with a shitty joke because you're too much of a coward to ask questions when you don't know the answer.

Eddie grabs his coke, tipping his head back as he says, "Who says I'm not a stalker already?"

Funny how the subtext of a conversation can contain magnitudes for one party and not the other. You worry you're in love with your best friend. He sips at coke and threatens perversion.

"You're definitely a stalker. You couldn't wait a couple hours to see me tonight?"

"I didn't realise I would be seeing you tonight," Eddie says, lifting his brows.

"Oh. I asked, didn't I?"

Eddie shakes his head. "Are you sure? I don't remember you asking, babe, I'm supposed to go play at Gareth's."

Babe is his funniest pet name, in your opinion. It doesn't suit you, or him, but it feels good anyhow. Like you're a babe, supermodel pretty for TV or magazine spreads, long legs and not a single wrinkle that isn't marring the paper itself.

"Bummer for me," you say lightly. "What are you doing, Dio tributes again?"

"Don't say tributes like that, like we're out sacrificing goats in studded jackets."

"That's a good image." You laugh. "That's funny."

"I don't know. He wanted to try something he wrote. Invited Jeff and Jamison. Band's back together."

"I'll get out my t-shirts."

You have all the corny classics; I'm with the band; I'm with the guitarist; a Corroded Coffin faux tour shirt, different Hawkins locations written in typeset sharpie on the back. When you made it, Eddie had been wearing the t-shirt and the ink leaked through. He had 'Lover's Lake, Nov 18' between his shoulder blades and 'The Hideout, May 22' over his tailbone for a week. By day three the words had become illegible but you'd known them anyway, in the same way you knew the dots between the letters H and I were freckles rather than ink spots. You've always looked at him more than you should.

"I could cancel."

You and Eddie experience the natural ups and downs of friendship, or rather the ebb and flow. You know you come back together eventually if you get too far apart, and there hasn't been a time since you met him where you were worried about the permanence of your relationship. You're human, and you get insecure about it anyway, but then he says stuff like that and you're confronted with how close you are. He puts you first. He has other friends, other healthy friendships and a life outside of you, but you still get to be a huge and important part of the majority, and that is more than enough. (It should be more than enough. Some days it is.)

"Now why would you do a thing like that?" you ask, sarcastic but soft. "You know they sound shit without you."

"I don't like knowing you're alone."

"I'm not lonely," you say. Truth or lie.

"That's not what I said." Eddie's eyes narrow.

"It's stupid to worry about me, I always lock the doors. I lock the windows, even the ones upstairs. I don't think I'm gonna fall victim to a home invasion anytime soon."

"I don't think many people think they're gonna be in home invasions until their homes actually get invaded. And it's not really what I'm worried about."

"Do you ever think that we worry too much?"

"Yes. We worry constantly. It's, like, our parasitic relationship with each other."

"Like a tapeworm," you agree solemnly.

"Exactly. I'm your tapeworm. And I'm worried about you."

"Can tapeworms worry?" you ask.

Eddie kicks you mildly. "I don't know? I don't think tapeworms have a level of consciousness beyond what's needed for them to survive. They probably think about eating and parasitizing and that's it. Don't make me ask, please."

You take a pull of your drink to prolong the inevitable. "Ask about what?"

"Your ghost."

"Ah."

Eddie waits.

You sigh again. "Look, I don't even know if she is a ghost, I probably just imagined it."

He pulls himself forward and there's the weight you'd be waiting for, sternness marked into his face one feature at a time. "Liar."

"What?"

"You're lying. You don't think you imagined it." He looks you up and down. “You think I don't know when you're lying?"

"I'm not lying," you lie.

"You are. I know you are," he says, smiling despite the point he's making. "I know what you look like when you do."

"What do I look like?"

"I can't tell you, you might change it, and then I won't know when I'm supposed to look out for you 'cause you never tell me anything."

"I don't want to talk about the ghost."

"Why not?"

"Because you don't believe me," you say too loudly.

Eddie reaches across the table but doesn't touch your hand. He puts his palm down and leans ever forward, says, "Hey, I do."

"No, you don't, you think there's something happening to me."

"What would you think, if it were me?" he asks, frustration seeping in. "Try and see it from how I'm seeing it."

"If it were you'd I'd believe you because you needed me to."

You cringe at yourself and veer back into your chair, shoving your hands between your thighs and clamping your legs closed. Your fingers turn numb.

Eddie doesn't look shocked, exactly. Surprised that you're talking to him unkindly, sure, and concerned.

This whole situation is ill-fated, you know that. What good can come of a ghost? Hooks from the past. "I never should have told you," you say quietly.

"Did you tell me?" Eddie asks, speaking with an anger that forms each word like a cut, clean and hurting. "You won't tell me anything. You tell me she talks to you, that she asks you about me. But you won't say what she says, exactly, and you have nothing to show for it. Your notebook conveniently disappeared. I can’t hear her."

He thinks you're making it up.

Fuck. He thinks you're making it up. Eddie thinks you're lying to him, and while it hurts like a sharp kick to the solar plexus, a flooring, winding pain, it's the embarrassment that has tears glowing along your last line. If he really believes you'd make something up like this for attention, what does he think of you? That you're some silly leech clinging to him through bad lies? That you're bored? That this is a game you're playing with him?

Your heart beats hard enough that you can feel it in your chest. Your hands shake with anger and hurt at once, your leg bouncing under the table in an attempt to keep the rush of it at bay. You look at Eddie with your lips parted, trying to say what you mean and not what you feel. You want to say something scathing, and you don't want to be cruel, and these are two facts existing at the same time.

Eddie has other ideas. He sees your eyes turn glassy, he must, because his anger drains and he turns sorry and soft. It reminds you of a different moment like a film cell played overtop, of a younger, remorseful him. The expression he makes when he's just popped you in the mouth wrestling, or burned behind your ear with the hair iron. An accident.

"I'm sorry," he says. Sheepish, gentle, sincere, embarrassed, too many threads of emotion to summarise with one word. "Sweetheart, I'm sorry. Don't cry."

"Fuck off," you mumble, looking down at your bouncing leg. You push your hand against it, forcing it to lay still.

"I didn't mean it."

"Stop, Eddie."

"I'm just hurt you're not telling me everything and I'm acting like an asshole 'cause I'm a big baby," he says, two shades from frantic.

A tear rolls down your cheek. You thought for sure you'd escaped them, but it had already welled, and with nowhere to go it races down your cheek. You paw at it and hope he won't see it.

He does.

Eddie's chair screeches across the floor as he stands up. You know he'll hug you before he's touched you. Same way you know he's freaking out on the inside, allergic to girl tears.

His hands take to your shoulders, hesitating there, and one slides behind your neck so his forearm presses against both shoulder blades. His lips ghost warmly over your forehead as he leans in. His other hand meanders, braceleting the top of your arm and running downward before swiftly changing paths to flatten out against the small of your back.

"I'm sorry," he mumbles, rubbing your back.

His tender hug exacerbates the hurt, like an exsanguination. You cry as quietly as you can manage and Eddie feels it under his hands, the two of you condensed at the back of an empty room. You forget where you are, what you're wearing, what you've been fighting about. What he said. You realise how badly you'd needed him to comfort you lately, and hate yourself for giving in.

He shushes you so quietly you think you might have imagined it.

Or maybe it was your ghost.

"I'm sorry," he says, his breath kissing your scalp. "I'm a dick."

"It's fine," you say. You despise yourself for how weak you sound.

"It's not fine."

"I wanted to stay because it's getting worse," you tell him. You don't mean to.

"Okay. Okay. Then you'll stay. It's no biggie."

"It's worse," you say, turning your face into his chest.

You're shaking hard. Eddie can't make it stop no matter how tightly he holds you.

"I'm sorry," he says again.

He doesn't have to be. If he was acting out, fine. If he does or doesn't believe you, fine. You don't need him to see ghosts, or apologise that he can't.

"I just didn't want to do it by myself," you confess, at the very pit of pathetic. You hope he won't hear. Your growing panic about the ghost is a secret you hadn’t meant to tell.

Eddie pulls away. He looks down at you, and if he wanted to he could kiss you, his lips are that close, but he widens the distance. He takes your face into his hands, calluses rough against your tacky cheeks.

"You think I'm gonna let you? I know I'm fucking it up royally right now, I know I'm an asshole, but I'm not fucking going anywhere, okay? Don't worry. Don't worry about it." He drops his hands to your shoulders. "I'm your parasite, right? Do you know how hard it is to get rid of a parasite? Sometimes they have to pull them out, and they're excruciatingly long, it's a process you don't wanna go through–"

You laugh wetly. Eddie promptly stops talking about parasites.

"Forgive me?" he asks.

You nod on automatic. Of course you do.

"I swear she's real," you say, rubbing your forehead with the meat of your thumb. You think she’s real, but the truth is that you just don’t know. You amend quickly, "I swear I'm not lying. I am hearing someone… even if she's not real."

Eddie frowns. "I know. I believe you."

That's when the real trouble begins.

—

Eddie wants to hold your hand desperately. You're wearing your nicest dress, split hem sewn with infinite care, and your dress shoes with the tiny heels. He doesn't get to see you like this very often, and he wishes it were a better occasion.

You've had your hair down at the hair stylists in the city, you're wearing concealer. You've done everything you can to look presentable. You look beautiful. He hopes you know that, at least.

You heave a sigh. You're as anxious as Eddie is to get this over with.

“You remember Hawk?” he asks you.

“Jack 'Hawk'?” you ask.

“Yeah, Hawk.”

“He’d come around for green?” you ask.

“Yeah, that’s the one. Alright. So, when you were on vacation last summer, Hawk knocked on the door, I answered. I’m straight, right? Haven’t sold anything in years, no plans on selling again. But Jack barrels up the steps and starts going on like I promised him something. I said, dude, I don't deal anymore, and could you possibly shut the fuck up? Wayne’s inside making milkshakes. Blender on, couldn’t hear us but I’m sweating bullets.

“Jack, fucker, starts begging.” Eddie leans into your shoulder, hushed. “He’s saying c’mon Munson, I know you got some, don’t you have a personal stash? I’m desperate.” He picks a piece of hair off of your sleeve. “I didn’t, obviously, and I told him that but he’s not listening to me, he’s getting all wild-eyed and fucking wound like he needs the hard shit. I’m just trying to get rid of him at that point, I don’t know if he was tweaking but he looked like he was going to hit me and I wasn’t interested in fighting.” He laughs, encouraging a smile from you. “Wayne’s inside making milkshakes. Full fat with vanilla extract– I’m not about to take a trip to Hawkins General.”

“What did you do?” you ask.

“I said to him, even if I did you wouldn’t be getting anything, asshole, and pushed him toward the steps, you know? It felt good, standing up for myself.”

“And he left?”

“No, he fucking hit me straight in the dick. Can you imagine that? Junk shot on my own front door.”

You gasp with giggly indignation, hanging on his every word now. Eddie knows he’s taken you out of your head, even if it’s temporary.

“He hit you in the dick,” —you whisper ‘dick’ like it’s insidious within these four walls— “‘cause he wanted pot? You should’ve pushed him off of the porch.”

“I would’ve but he fucking winded me.” He starts laughing again, your giggles contagious though you try to smother them with your hand. “It’s funny now, but it wasn’t funny at the time.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“He was five foot one. I’ve never felt that humble in my life, I told Wayne I was coming down with something and had the worst afternoon nap ever. Didn’t even get my milkshake.”

“No,” you mumble sympathetically. Your eyes widen. “Eds, I’m sorry, that’s not funny. He assaulted you–”

Eddie waves his hand at you. “He got in a cheap shot. I was fine. I’ll still have kids.”

You snort, “Thanks for the information.”

“I got him back for it, anyway.”

He pretends like that’s the end of that, like the story doesn’t go on and he has nothing to tell you. You wait raptly for him to explain but he gloats, knowing you're hooked.

You elbow him.

“What?” he asks. “Oh, you wanna know how I got revenge? You’re evil.”

“Less shame and more story,” you say.

“Alright. Are you ready? Here’s where it gets complicated.

“I’m at The Hideout listening to that new band that blazed through here a couple of months ago, Board Growth, or something? They’re incredible, the booze is cold, I’m tipsy and Gareth owes me anyway, I’m putting it all on his tab and he, seemingly, isn’t noticing. It’s great. Better if you hadn’t been on vacation again, what the fuck, but it’s good.

“And there he is. It’s the fucking Hawk. He’s looking down his nose at these young girls smooth-talking them. Or, he’s trying to smooth talk them, but it’s like watching a worm flirt with a praying mantis, okay, we all know who’s gonna lose.” Eddie’s knee rests against yours, your hand is on his thigh, he’s losing the thread of his story fast under the smell of your perfume and hair oil. “I knock back the rest of my drink, slick my hair like I’m James Dean and, in all my drunken intelligence, decide that this is the perfect moment for me to get him back.”

“I wasn’t on vacation.”

“What?”

“I only went once.” You’d gone for two days with some old friends. He remembers now, and rushes to fix the story.

“Why didn’t you come, then?” he asks, flipping the script. “You’re such a flake.”

“I don’t know, I don’t know when this was.”

“Stop bailing on me and ruining my stories,” he says, teasing.

“Okay, you’re hopped up on liquid courage and about to hit Jack in the dick,” you prompt.

“Right! I stroll up to Hawk and he’s instantly wriggly like the worm of a guy he is, and I say, hey Hawk, how’s it hanging?

“Maybe he’s just that stupid or maybe he thinks I’m putting out the olive branch but he actually starts telling me how he’s doing, and I’m looking at these girls as if to say, can you believe this guy? I cut him off, and I’m a loser, I’m not half as cool as I think I am but again I’m slightly incredibly inebriated. I’m making bad decisions.”

“Where’s your cafeteria bravado?” you ask.

“It’s worse than that. Imagine me at my most insufferable. I smile at the girls and I lean into Jack’s space, I’m laughing, I feel bad about what I’m gonna say before I’ve said it but I say it anyways. I lean right into his ear and tell him at full volume how sorry I was to hear about his recent bout of syphilis. I’m just so glad they caught it in time, man,” he says, imitating a past self.

You open your mouth. “And,’ Eddie says, jumping to finish, “so happy you could keep most of it, buddy.”

“Eddie…”

“I’m a bad person.”

“No,” you mumble, hiding your smile on his shoulder, your forehead a hair’s width from his chin. You’d laugh a storm any other day to make him feel good, whether you think he’s funny or not, but today all you can manage is a hand on his leg. “You’re not a bad person, he deserved it… fucking hit you…”

The story isn’t true.

He made it up. Right here right now. He just spent five good minutes of your lives spinning an outrageously awful story with poor jokes and one glaring plot hole, for what?

This is hard. Making you cry, begging you to see what a doctor has to say, playing grown up in a grown ups body. Eddie thought you’d get to be kids forever. He never imagined what would come after school, and then suddenly it is after, and everything’s an ugly boring mess except for you (and Wayne, god bless), and now you’re sick. The waiting room you’re in, the road here, the look on your face when he told you what he wanted from you. It’s all… heartbreakingly monotonous.

One doctor's appointment, he whispered across pillows. Late and neither of you asleep. The sound of cicadas outside and Wayne’s deep snore a room away.

You nodded and closed your eyes, and you didn’t say another word all night.

What’s the worth in a made up story? What good will it do? You have to see the doctor eventually. Distraction, Eddie thinks pleadingly. Relief. He just wants to give you as much relief as he can from what’s happening with the only thing he feels he has —his quick mouth.

He stares at your hand on his thigh. He wills himself to raise his own and put it on top of yours. He channels his thoughts, like this is telekinesis and not his own body, move. Move your hand, he says to himself.

It's a millimetre out of his pocket when they call your name.

You shoot up like a stalk and smile at the nurse who's come to collect you. You don't look jittery anymore, but there's a distinct doe in the headlights look about you as Eddie watches you trail down the hallway into the doctor's office. You look back at him three times, and each time is a whip.

As soon as the door closes, he bends forward in his chair and heaves a sickly sigh. His nausea has him coughing into his hand and praying he doesn't throw up here. If they want you to go somewhere today, like a pharmacy for temporary medication, or the emergency room for a CAT scan, he can't be covered in his own vomit.

A child babbles across the room. Eddie peeks at her through his fingers. She's pale with dark hair, much like Eddie himself, and her mom is the same. The kid's mom doesn't look like Eddie's mom besides that, but seeing her here in a hospital makes it impossible not to think of her. She's been on his mind so much lately. Her birthday is at the end of the month, and it isn't the same —she'd been in hospital for three brutally short days— but you're being here is like peeling the scab off of a wound he thought healed years ago.

Mom was everything. She was willowy and beautiful and tough as a board. She was smart, she knew everything; how to make microwave pizza taste gourmet, how to make whistles out of blades of grass, how to make a bad day feel brand new.

He wished he could say that he has her every detail committed. The cruellest, most terrifying thing about the people we love is that they aren't permanent, not their life and not what they leave behind. Over time, his mom has turned from an aching spear of love to a dappling of sunlight through the branches of an old tree — scattered. Beautiful and impossible and a thousand pieces in his memory, slowly fading over time.

There'll come a day where Eddie can't remember her. He knows that. He knows his frame of reference for who she was will reduce down to her photographs, and the nearly empty bottle of her perfume under his bed.

Eddie is haunted by her absence everyday.

There is no corporeal apparition of her at his shoulder, no cool chill running down his spine, but he's haunted all the same. It's why he won't accept your ghost. It's why he can't. He knows what it feels like to have someone with him who isn't really here, and he won't let you suffer through the same thing. He'll protect you from this, from her.

Even if it means he has to take you to doctors offices an hour out of town. If he has to bargain for it, and make you cry at work, and– and fucking drive this wedge between you, he'll do it.

He needs you to be okay.

He can't think about his mom anymore. He loves her, he misses her, but if he thinks about her too much he won't be able to stand up.

Eddie sits up, takes a lungful of air in, and waits. He senses you as you come back down the hall, grateful for your dry cheeks, and your small, small smile. Tiny but irrefutably there.

He stands up and holds out his hand. You don't take it, but you walk into his side so your hips are pressed together and he falls into step with you.

"So…" he says.

"She asked if I was getting enough sleep," you say, "and I told her I was. I explained everything to her like I promised I would, even– even… I told her everything. And um, she seemed very open."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, she– OK." You frown.

"Listen, you don't have to tell me if you don't want to. I know I practically forced you to come, but it's still your life, and you can have privacy from me–"

"It's not that. I just don't want to cry in here."

He puts his hand on your shoulder, his arm folded against your shoulder. You don't speak until you're out of the doctor's office and weaving through people as you walk toward the parking lot.

"She thinks I'm having auditory hallucinations. And that it could be an initial symptom of schizophrenia, or something else. She said it usually starts around my age, and–"

"Hey, it's okay," he says, though internally he feels as distressed as you're beginning to look, horrified by your crumpling chin and wringing hands. "It's okay. You don't have to say it if it's going to upset you."

"It might not be anything," you say, shaking your head. "She said the human brain is complicated, and sometimes stuff like this just happens. She wants to, uh," —your voice twists up very high— "see me again after I've had some sleep to see if it's persisting."

Eddie nods. He's fucking glad that the doctor took you seriously, grateful for her advice and her reluctance to misdiagnose you with something. It's not as though Eddie wants you to be experiencing hallucinations. But he thinks you are, and he needs help looking after you if that’s the case.

"Did she prescribe anything?" he asks.

"A week's worth of ambien. She didn't really want to, but I told her about, you know, you coming over to make sure I'm okay, and I know that was because of the gh–" You bite your lip. You're shaking like a leaf. "Well, she thought it was you making sure I'm not an insomniac. Which I'm not."

"I'm really proud of you," he says quietly. "I know you don't want this to be happening. I get it, I promise. I don't want it either, but this is a good thing."

He can see you regaining some composure. You smile a little, and you offer him your prescription paper. "You know it only costs seven dollars for seven ambien?"

"I could get you some for free."

Your laugh startles him. "No, I don't think so."

"I'm not offering. Just saying. I know a guy."

"No, you knew a guy who knows a guy who could get me something ridiculous, like a percocet."

"I'd never give you anything like that."

"I know." You come to a halt. The cloudy weather paints you in shadow. "I'm sorry this is happening."

"You're what?" He doesn't let you answer moving to stand in front of you. "Why would you apologise for this?"

"Because it's my head," you say stiffly.

"You didn't want this to happen. And– and it might not be happening at all. You'll try the ambien, and you'll take care of yourself, and we'll go from there. I wasn't trying to scare you… I wish I could brush it off, you know? I wish I could believe that you…" He takes you in. Your skirt and jacket are swaying in the cold wind. You look one sharp shove from falling over. "I get that it isn't like me, to not believe in the fantasy–"

You save him from his miserable attempt at placating you.

"I know."

He licks his lips.

"I love you," Eddie says as he starts toward the van again. "Let's go fill your prescription, and then I'll get you whatever you want to eat."

"Boys are so weird about I love you," you say, following. The light behind your eyes makes your teasing worth it. "You say it like you chewed on it first. Struggled to get that one out, did you?"

It's not your best insult. Neither of you are exactly on form.

"Just so hard to say it to you."

You take what you perceive to be an insult on the chin. Only Eddie knows there's a sliver of truth in what he's said.

You generously let him help you into the passenger seat. He's hopeful that your mood's improved until that wretched frown worms its way across your pretty mouth once again. You wait for him to round the hood and start the van before you explain yourself.

"There's a support group. For anybody who's, um, hearing voices. Schizophrenics, manic depressives…"

"Is that something you want to go to?"

"I don't know. Can I be honest with you?"

"Yeah. Absolutely."

"I don't know if I believe that it isn't real. I know that's the point. The definition of hallucination is, uh… an experience involving the apparent perception of something not present, and so… it makes sense. My ghost isn't there, even if I think she is, so I must be hallucinating, but Eddie," —you shrink in on yourself— "I have this feeling that won't go away."

He loves you. You're terrified.

He's already guessed what you're going to ask for.

"Can we try again? Please? I'll take the meds and I'll go to the support group, but in the meantime, could you please come back and just– just listen. Maybe it takes a while for her to talk to someone else." You scrub your face. "Fuck. I sound fucking crazy."

Eddie squeezes the wheel. "Don't say that. Don't say it like you've done something wrong. You didn't do anything wrong."

People say crazy but they mean sick. They ridicule what they can't understand.

He doesn't understand, but he wants to. He says, "If you want me to, we'll try again. I'll come over."

You look up from your palms. He notices almost habitually that they're smaller than his. When you were young teenagers there'd been a short period of time where you'd been the taller one, with bigger hands and a bigger smile. Lately, you've seemed small.

"Really?" you ask hopefully.

"You came here 'cause I asked you to. It was hard for you." He turns his eyes to the road and turns the key until the Beauville's engine is thrumming with life. "I'd do a lot of shit for you, superstar. Like, anything. If you need me to keep trying then I will. And you'll–"

"I'll keep trying too," you promise.

It's all he can ask for.

—

The sky is all kinds of grey. It stretches like a sheet from one corner of your eye to the other, darker toward each limit of your vision, a gradual decay into colourlessness toward the very top where the sun fights hardest to burst through an impossible expanse of clouds. They seem thick as marshmallo, but where they begin is hard to decipher.

Your eyes feel sore. You imagine a hand reaching for you, hitting you, pressing its cold knuckles to each bruised eye socket to calm the raging ache behind them. You hadn't expected to feel this way. It isn't the first time you have, but to feel so intensely unreal while there's someone still with you is new. You lean your weight against the sill and let your arms swing from the open window ledge, knuckles scraping the scratchy brick of the house's exterior walls, instantly chilled by the weather.

A black band of birds burst across the sky somewhere leftwards. The pitch and tumble with no discernible formation. They're too far to hear. You imagine the flap of wings, their buoyed cawing, screeching to one another as they swim between pylon cables and their brothers spread wings.

"What kind of birds do you think they are?" Eddie asks.

You feel his weight settle into the ottoman beside you. You'd dragged it to the window with tired arms. You haven't felt up to anything since you got home, though Eddie's promise should've restored a little hope. He's going to keep trying to meet your ghost. You'll have to hope you don't get worse before that.

You know, starkly, that you aren't having auditory hallucinations. You know, starkly, that your ghost had written to you in your missing notebook.

But maybe that's the nature of your hallucination. A night bent over the pocket dictionary had ended as this one begins, with the crushing realisation that you cannot trust what you know. To put it plainly, you're afraid that you're mentally unwell. Terrified of how it’s going to change your life, the people in it.

Eddie's afraid too.

Your orange bottle of pills glares like a flame to your right where it stands waiting for you on the nightstand. Eddie's made up your bed for the two of you. He could sleep in the guest room, and he never has.

"I don't know," you say hoarsely. Your voice sounds as you feel, like something has its hooks in you, and it's dragging you down, down…

"They're too big to be pigeons."

"They're too dark. They're crows," you guess, tracing an outlier as he skirts the crowd of his family and spirals up into the air.

Like a party trick, you expect him to disappear, or explode, or rocket up into the cotton clouds and out of view. He slows as he falls, and then he dives back toward the main swarm of birds as they migrate toward the horizon.

There's a feeling brewing in you that you don't like.

If you can't trust your own perception. If real isn't real. If you need someone to sit beside you and distinguish real from fake, if… if you're sick.

If you're sick, what does that mean?

You search for something in the air to hold onto.

Eddie hums softly, his hand pushing out into the static as he points toward the glowing clouds. "Sun's going down slow."

You raise your hand and wrap it around his. It isn't enough. You force your fingers between the gaps of his, just a little longer, thicker, solid, and lock him in. He feels real. That's the key. As far as you know, hallucinations don't carry that far. Bugs crawling over your skin and through the strands of your hair, an itch you can't scratch, a drop of rain from a concrete ceiling, the brain can recreate these things. But the exact width of Eddie's palm or the feeling of his calluses against your loveline, your lifeline, and the heartbeat that bumps against the meat of your thumb when you focus, that's impossible. That's a level of precision the human brain can't find.

Right?

Eddie curls his thumb around yours. You can feel his gaze on your cheek like a breath blown between parted lips. You turn toward him, and you catalogue every little mar or mark, every fine hair. His wrinkles, his textured jaw. The strands of a fallen curl come apart near his eye, grown out bangs kissing the highest point of his cheek.

You're panicking. There's a thumping behind your eyes.

"I don't know if you look right," you say.

"I look very right. I'm extremely handsome," he says.

You hold his hand out of the window, worried you'll drop it, and it'll fall.

If Eddie were at home tucked into his double bed a mile away, she would've talked to you by now. Your breath shortens as the meaning behind that thought solidifies.

She only comes when you're alone. Why do you think that is?

She's not real.

Is that how it works? Can hallucinations, auditory, visual, or otherwise, take place in the company of others? You know next to nothing. Maybe they aren’t so common with loved ones standing guard.

You push your head out of the window again and look down at the flat, dying grass in the backyard, a yellowing carpet of bluegrass. Bluegrass is prominent because it can grow anywhere, like mould. With all the rain these past few days, the grass should've livened into a plush and solid green, like the lawns in the southern side of Hawkins where the rich people lavish in sprinklers and gardeners alike. It remains rumpled.

Eddie rubs the back of your hand. It's far from the closest you've ever been. There have been nights you spent unawares in his arms, waking with your face tucked into his neck, so embarrassed you couldn't look at him afterward. But it's the most intimate touch you've ever endured. The whorls of his fingerprint embossing itself into your hand, a quarter circle that doesn't cease. Time feels brief and unsteady.

Eddie must realise you're having a bad moment. He shuffles closer to you, your arms twined, his hair tickling your shoulders. It snaps you back, in a way, with its softness.

"Let's go to bed," he says when the sky's more charcoal than light.

You're cold. You follow. You latch your hand in his and he doesn't say a word, closing and locking your window with one hand, pulling the sheets of your bed back deftly for you to climb in. You slide across to the outermost side and he follows, leaning over you to pull the sheets to your chin.

He stays hovering there.

He holds very still.

"Everything's going to be okay," he whispers.

"What if it isn't?"

"It will be, you…" he trails off. He keeps your hand in his, but he plants his elbow on the other side of you, like a lover about to share sweet nothings, his face so, so close. "You'll be okay, no matter what happens."

"I wish she'd told me more," you say.

"The doctor?" He draws a small, careful line across your cheek with his index finger. "Sweetheart, we'll find out everything there is to find."

"I want to know how scared I should be. Because this feels like torture."

"You don't have to be scared." Eddie smiles, and as far as you can tell, though you're having trouble trusting yourself, it's one of his genuine smiles. "Why do you think I'm here, huh? It's not to watch as something bad happens."

You lift your chin. He's too close to look at both eyes at once: you have to choose, and you can't. Your irises dance back and forth between them, shuddering in indecision.

"You'll look after me," you say, not a question.

He turns his hand, stroking down the length of your cheek with the backs of his fingers. They feel much softer than the undersides, the flat of his nails like silk. Your eyes burn as you free your hand from his, hoping he'll be kind with that one, too.

"I'll look after you."

You tuck your hands behind the trim of his waist and, knowing you shouldn't, let them feed into his shirt. You draw a shaking line through the downy soft blanketing the small of his back until your finger is skipping up the jutting bumps of his spine. It's like climbing a staircase by touch alone. You wonder if anyone else had ever done this to him, if they ever wanted to, and if he'd let them.

Eddie releases a breath. Warmth feathers along your skin.

His hand strokes down to your neck, resting at your collar. Half a second and his petting returns, the side of his thumb brushing your soft jawline tenderly.

He must feel you swallow. His pupils travel down the whites of his eyes like the steady descent of the setting sun.

"I can't," he says softly.

Can't what? you want to ask. You don't know if you should. You know the answer, but does he?

"You're not all here," he says, hand paused. He cups your cheek, holds you in place. You hadn't been moving. "But when you are, I could. I could."

"I don't know if I…" you drift off. How can you explain it to him? I don't know if I'll feel better any time soon.

His eyes move sideways, as if the instruction for your reassurance lay somewhere in the apple of your cheek.

You don't want him to kiss you if it's a fixative meant to soothe your rampant nerves. You want him to kiss you for a hundred reasons, but that's not one of them. You're not sure he wants to kiss you beyond that.

He would, you realise. Kiss you, if he thought you wanted it badly enough. That's a lot of power to have over someone, more than you want over him, and you can't ask him to. You look away from his eyes and search upward, trembling hands and the starts of your forearms pressed to his back, hiking his shirt up one inch at a time.

He sits up agonisingly slowly, in the same way the sky has fallen from light to dusk; inchingly, so as to escape notice, until suddenly you can't feel the emanating heat of his chest against yours anymore, and the only light inside of your room is a yellow band sliced by the ajar door.

Your hands fall back. One under the sheets, one over. Eddie sits where you lay, his hands at the crook of your elbows. He gives symmetrical, superficial massages to each.

The life has been sapped from you, as if it were tied to the sun sunk beyond the horizon. A brutal fatigue sets in.

"You should take your ambien," he murmurs.

"Okay."

The eye tattooed on his arm seems to follow you as he reaches for your seven dollar bottle. He twists off the cap and shakes a single pill out for you, and you watch as the lines of his arms start to blur.

You take your pill, lying firmly in the middle of your pillow, and wonder if now would be an appropriate time to burst into panicked tears.

"I'll look after you," Eddie repeats after a while. Or maybe he doesn't. The weight of the day and the helping kick of your medication pulls you under. He lays down next to you carefully, his hand searching under the covers for yours.

And there, standing in the corner of the room, is your ghost. Real. Stunningly, terrifyingly real.

You can’t open your mouth wide enough to warn him.

˚ʚ♡ɞ˚

end of part one! thank you so much for reading, I really hope that you enjoyed! this was my baby and such a labour of love in April and I’m so happy now to share it :D if you have the time, please consider reblogging, it means so much to me and I’d love to know your thoughts on the story so far <3<3

#eddie munson #eddie munson x reader #eddie munson x you #eddie munson x y/n #eddie munson x fem!reader #eddie munson imagine #eddie munson fluff #eddie munson fanfic #eddie munson oneshot #eddie munson scenario #eddie munson drabble #eddie munson fic #eddie munson fanfiction #stranger things fanfiction #stranger things #stranger things fic #stranger things x reader

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