The first time she said it, he thought maybe it was just a slip of the tongue or something.
"You're so pretty, Eddie."
They were sitting together at the picnic table, textbooks and homework spread out in front of them that Chrissy was diligently doing and Eddie was diligently ignoring in favor of making notes for his next Hellfire campaign. They'd been unlikely friends for a few weeks, Chrissy having come to him in search of drugs and instead found a tentative kinship with a fellow freak in the woods.
He looked up at her, feeling how rounded with surprise his own eyeballs were as he let out a guffaw of disbelief.
"I think that's my line, Chrissy. But a lowly jester sitting at the queen's court, I am meant to compliment your beauty that rivals the very essence of springtime. Not, uh, the other way around."
She giggled a little, but her eyes were still roving over his face. Searching for something, though Eddie had no fucking idea what.
After a minute, she shrugged, returning to her history essay.
Eddie just kinda figured that was that.
"Gosh, you're pretty," she said again a few weeks later.
He was riding the high of playing for her – finally, Jesus Christ – and laughed loudly enough for the entirety of the Hideout to hear. Still incredibly sweaty, he'd just jumped off the stage to come greet her immediately after their set finished.
Those were the first words that fell past the lips he'd spent more time than he cared to admit dreaming about.
"Damn, not even, 'Wow, Eddie, you're so good at guitar' or anything?" he jested, trying to shrug off her compliment with a joke. She beamed at him, giggling when he pitched his voice to try and match her dainty way of speaking. "You wound me, Cunningham! Am I not rockstar material?"
"All rockstars are good at guitar!" she cried in defiance. "But not all of them are pretty!"
"Not all rockstars are good at guitar! What about the bassists and the drummers and the singers?"
"That's not the point," she huffed before giving him that star shine grin that wrapped his heart in a fist and choked it until it was beating with the same resonance as her name. "But, um, you do play guitar really well, too."
That, he kinda figured, despite counting up all her little accidental compliments like rosebuds trying valiantly to bloom, should've been that.
"Eddie," she sighed, leaning heavily against his shoulder as they watched some stupid made-for-TV movie through the haze of their shared high. "Do you know how pretty you are?"
They were sprawled across the dingy couch in his trailer, snacking on popcorn – Eddie munching on, like, fifteen kernels to Chrissy's every one. He hadn't even realized she was looking at him.
Jesus. She was so close. So beautiful. Her pointy little chin pressed against his shoulder, staring up at him like he was a sunrise and she'd never before seen daytime.
"Me?" he scoffed, trying valiantly to buck the urge to kiss her. Fuck if he didn't want to, though. But that was, like, some law of the goddamn universe or something. Earth's magnetism sustained the gravity that kept everything from floating into space, matter cannot be created or destroyed, and Eddie Munson desperately wanted to kiss Chrissy Cunningham.
"Sweetness, have you looked in a mirror?" he asked, trying not to dwell too long on the verbal vomit that was this sudden introduction of a pet name. "You're a fucking knock out. Starlight in human form. Comparatively, I'm basically a gelatinous cube."
Though the D&D reference was lost on her, it did nothing to deter the sudden spark of fire behind her reddened eyes. In a move that stole the actual breath from his fucking lungs (since she already had the heart from his chest), Chrissy was swinging her leg over his and pulling herself into his lap.
Repeat for emphasis: into his fucking lap.
Both of her perfect, tiny little hands came up, gently cupping his jaw as she stared him dead in the eyes. Storm clouds meeting forested brown across burning coals.
"I may be starlight or springtime or whatever else you want to call me," she said, her voice taking on a severity he'd rarely heard from her. Not since she told Jason and his goons to leave the Hellfire kids alone a couple weeks ago, just before miraculously ending their monarchic relationship in front of the entire school. "But that doesn't negate the fact that you are also pretty."
"Uhh." She was way too fucking close for him to think clearly.
"Just accept the compliment, please."
He'd swallowed his tongue or something. Responding to her simply wasn't possible. He no longer had a voice box; it was lost in the ether of his weed-addled body. He just stared wide-eyed at the woman of his dreams who was currently straddling his lap and holding his face and opening up a variety of daydreams he'd had about this exact scenario, though not anywhere near under these circumstances.
A knock at the door broke them apart, someone calling through the door about pizza delivery, and Chrissy begrudgingly climbed off of Eddie to let him pay for their dinner.
He couldn't really let himself hope that she hadn't wanted to move.
They were lying together in his bed, sweat still cooling on their spent bodies. Each of them turned onto their sides, eyes absorbing one another's nakedness as though still uncomprehending of how they'd made it to this moment.
It was two-thirty in the morning when a frantic knocking had awoken him from a decently peaceful sleep. He'd stumbled out of his bedroom, expecting to find... well, he didn't even know. Something that most certainly was not Chrissy Cunningham, standing in her pajamas and tennis shoes, clutching the stuffed cat-bug-thing he'd won her at the Fourth of July fair two weeks ago with tears in her eyes and a determination set in the rigid line of her jaw.
(The plush was, admittedly, almost a little creepy, but also extremely cute, and it was the only thing Chrissy had gushed about for a full week, so.)
She'd barreled past him into the living room, bouncing on her toes and teeming with anxious energy that made his throat close and his eyes prick with tears unrelated to his interrupted sleep. It felt like she was here to slice his heart in two or something. It took true, actual willpower to shut the door and give her his attention.
"Uh, hey, Chrissy, what––"
"I love you," she blurted out, blinking like she hadn't expected those words to come out of her own mouth. Lips twisting, she pushed on, refusing to allow her admission to hang between them for even a second. "I'm, like, completely in love with you, Eddie. And–– And I've waited for you to notice, but you haven't, and at first I thought maybe you didn't like me back, and that was okay! Or, it–– it had to be okay, right? Because I valued our friendship so much. But then, at the fair, we were talking, and you mentioned that you liked someone, but you didn't say who, and I was so heartbroken that I cried for, like, three days, and then Nancy told me that I was being so dense, because of course you liked me, but how could that be, because you never said anything! And I thought I'd just come here and tell you because I can't keep it in anymore, Eddie, I can't––"
Her rambling had only cut off when Eddie finally found the strength to fucking move. He crossed the scant distance between them, cupping her jaw in his hands and pressing his lips to hers in a messy, imperfectly perfect kiss that tasted like pretty springtime starlight.
"Of course it's you, Cunningham," he'd rasped when they finally pulled apart. "It's been you my entire goddamn life."
They crashed into his bedroom after that, cat-bug-thing and tennis shoes and pajamas discarded in favor of skin and lips and hair and whispered promises caressing fevered flesh.
And now, she was gently caressing the line of his jaw, the curve of his cheek, the shell of his ear, and whispering, "So pretty," into the few inches of mattress between them like it was a brand she could sear into his very soul.
His first instinct was to shy away, to deny, to turn the compliment back on her and remind her that she was, in fact, the absolute definition of beauty in this world and every other galaxy. To tell her that sunlight fell from her hair and oceans crashed inside her eyes and every freckle dotting her skin was like a fresh raindrop on dewy summer grass.
Instead, he caught her hand in his, pressing a soft kiss to her palm, her thumb, each of her fingers, and whispered,
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
areudirty
germansingergirl
gummygunk
vaporwave
stormborns
origamiaround
