If there’s any place a joke couldn’t grow, it’s here, on Eddie’s hotel bed, Eddie’s words slipping through silk sheets, warm with alcohol—once, I’ve kissed a man once—Richie’s mouth unable to find a punchline. It’s late, and his own room is two floors above, but he can’t seem to move away from here.
“You can tell me,” he says instead, voice soft.
Eddie turns to look at him, half his face pressed into the cushion of his pillow. They’ve been laying like this for two hours now, since they came up from dinner, bodies almost fitting into each other, but never touching—a crown shyness.
“It was on a business trip,” Eddie says slowly. “Ten years ago. We were passing through Nebraska...went out for drinks before checking into a hotel, and there was a man sitting by the bar. Young. My age, maybe.”
He’s quiet, then, for a stretch of time—mouth pursed at the ceiling like he’s trying to get something out. He covers his face in both of his hands as though to filter the shame in his voice, but it bleeds through.
“I was married.” It sounds like a wail, the way it’s ripped from Eddie’s chest, but when he pulls his hands away, his face is collected and dry. Richie feels an electric shock through his body, but keeps still. Memories of his own experiences, experiences with men in bars, creep in. “Men...they always say ‘oh, I was drunk’, ‘oh I wasn’t thinking.’ But. I knew what I was doing.” He sniffs. “When I offered to go up and order our drinks. When I told everyone I’d meet them back at the hotel. I knew exactly what I was doing.”
There is a sorry there, underlining the shame in his voice, but Richie isn’t sure if it’s a sorry—period or a sorry for not being sorry at all.
“Eddie,” he tries, a sense of impending doom seeping through his chest. Eddie closes his eyes.
“I kissed him on the sidewalk outside that bar and he slipped me the name of his motel and I...Richie I wanted to go. I wanted to go so badly. But it felt like... I was just on the edge of something. Just on the edge. And that if I did, the earth might open up and swallow me whole. And I wouldn’t come back.”
His eyes stay closed, and Richie wonders if he’s imagining it. The kiss. The kiss outside of some hole-in-the-wall bar in Lexington.
In his hands, Richie can feel it. The fold of a man’s dress shirt where it had been tucked into his slacks. The way his back curved into the press of his fingertips when he’d leant into him; soft, then hard, then relentless. He was twenty-five, looks no less strange than they’d always been, but at a peak where they could, at an angle, be mistaken for handsome. He’d just finished a gig earlier that evening; one on a list of self-booked tour dates that would send him from one side of the country to the other, alone in his mom’s beat up, old van, but not before being halted abruptly right here, in Lexington, Nebraska, by a man in a bar. Would catch sight of those freckles and spend the rest of the night making one drink last two hours, ridiculously hoping that when the rest of his friends left, he would hang behind. Must have hoped well enough, too, because he had.
Eddie lets out a huff of air. “You know I forgot his name by the time I was in the cab, but can still remember the room number? Like...like part of me is still hoping to go. Still trying to.”
Richie swallows. “208,” he said.
Eddie whips his head back to Richie. “What?”
“208,” Richie repeats. “208, it was room 208 and I stayed...an extra day I stayed before hitting the road in case...just. In case.”
His heart hammers humiliated in his chest as he watches Eddie’s mouth turn down, his eyes widen.
“Richie?” he says softly, name wavering on a lilt.
Richie just shakes his head, uncomprehending, and looks up at the ceiling. After a moment he feels Eddie’s hand on his shoulder, moving down to his chest, over his heart. It’s shaking, and Richie holds it in his own to steady them both.
They wait for the horror to pass to see what it leaves them with.
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