#itav

“We should find the time to get the gang back together.” Richie Tozier said, barely looking up from the tea party he was currently hosting with Sam. Her black curls that revivaled her fathers were ducked under a backwards neon yellow baseball cap that in no way matched her strawberry print sundress. “A good old Losers reunion.”

“You don’t need to plan some elaborate reunion as an excuse to see Eddie, you know?” Stan Uris said dryly from behind the puzzle he was putting together on their living room table. “He lives in the city, you have his number. Just ask him to get coffee.”

Richie scoffed and shot Stan a dirty look. “I said Losers Reunion, not Richie and Eddie reunion. It has nothing to do with seeing Eddie, I don’t even know who that is.” 

Patty snickered from where she was curled up with a book on the loveseat, and Sam mimicked the sound. Richie couldn’t help but smile, it wasn’t very often that they were all home. Patty worked at River East Elementary School teaching kindergarten, and was therefore gone all week and home only on weekends. Stan had similar hours at the bank, but Richie’s schedule was all over the place and completely unpredictable. This was the first weekend he’d had off since he’d started at DreamWorks TV nearly a year earlier. He was hoping that he’d start getting more weekends off- he worried he was missing out on too much of Sam’s life. 

Samantha Tozier had never been part of the plan, but Richie wouldn’t trade her for anything. Richie and her mother, Sandy Gill, had only been seeing each other casually when she’d found out she was pregnant. They’d tried throughout the pregnancy to make it work, but they couldn’t pretend to be in love with each other. They barely knew each other, really, and only a couple of months after Sam had been born, Sandy had tearfully told Richie that this wasn’t the life she wanted. She wanted to travel and be free, she didn’t want to be a mom and that she was sorry. Richie had understood- it wasn’t the life he’d expected either, but he adapted to it quickly and loved it more than he’d thought he would. Last he’d heard from Sandy had been 8 months earlier, and she was living somewhere in South Africa. He sometimes worried about what Sam was missing out on with her mother gone, but he felt it was the better option than having Sandy resent being forced to stay around. Plus, she had Stan and Patty in her life, which was better than any parents. Richie knew that for a fact. 

Stan and Patty were trying to get pregnant, Patty had told him a couple weeks earlier. They were having problems, but Richie and Stan hadn’t talked about it. Richie thought that maybe he was embarrassed. Two of his closest friends had found themselves with surprise children out of the blue, and he couldn’t get his own wife with child after months of trying. It was nothing to be ashamed of, Richie knew, but he also knew that Stan likely wouldn’t see it that way.  

“Besides, Eddie has a boyfriend.” Richie said with a long sigh. “Haven’t you heard? They’re the It couple of the business world these days.”

Eddie Kaspbrak was the one who got away. Throughout puberty, Richie had been absolutely in love with him. He’d been the awakening to Richie’s deeply, deeply repressed homosexual feelings. Eddie had made the summer before high school a hell of emotion overload, and it hadn’t really gotten any better in years. The five months they’d been together in Richie’s junior year had been one of the happiest times of Richie’s life. But Richie’s junior year had been Eddie’s senior year, and Richie knew that their relationship was going to hold Eddie back from getting out of Derry (and away from his crazy ass insane mother) and Richie couldn’t let that happen. He wasn’t proud of everything he did as their relationship fell apart, and he didn’t blame Eddie for not keeping in touch after he left. He’d been friendly enough at Stan’s wedding, but they weren’t exactly texting buddies even now. Though Richie couldn’t deny that some lingering feelings had made themselves apparent after seeing Eddie at the wedding.