#rhs

“Roads are quiet. It’s, like, midnight,” Eddie answers. Frank isn’t wearing his open-toed platform heels, which have been abandoned over by Eddie’s bike. His feet are covered only by fishnets. He likes the feeling of the sand beneath them, but he’s so much shorter without the shoes. “I’ll be fine.”

“You’ll kill us both, Eddie,” Frank snaps. “This argument would be resolved if you were to promise me to stop flirting with random girls.”

“You fucking flirt with everybody so that seems hyp- hypa- fuck, I’ve forgotten the word,” Eddie says. He never showed up to school and English wasn’t his strong point as it was. Frank tuts and rolls his eyes, so Eddie finishes with, “it feels unfair.”

“Hypocritical,” Frank says, his voice flat. There it is again, his condescending tone, thinks he’s smarter than Eddie, better than Eddie. He’s always trying to hint that Eddie might be stupid, trying to convince him that Frank’s way is always the correct way, because Frank is smart. And Frank is smart, but he’s also a bitch.

“Your whore mother fucked a thesaurus and you were the result,” Eddie answers. Their fights can be quite vicious but Frank isn’t protective of his mother. He hates her. And he doesn’t know who his dad is (hence his mother being a whore), so who knows, maybe it was a thesaurus.

Frank laughs humourlessly. God, he has a sexy laugh. It’s unfair that he should still be so sexy while they’re arguing.

“That’s rather a good one for you, my darling,” Frank says. He drinks more of the vodka, such a long sip that Eddie starts feeling badly done to ‘cause it’s meant to be for them both. “We aren’t leaving this beach. We are having a night at the beach and there’s nothing you can do about it. Smoke some marijuana and calm down.”

“Does that mean you’re done having a go at me?” Eddie asks, even though he knows the intelligent thing to do there would be to have changed the subject and hope Frank forgets about it.

“No. It means that you aren’t getting out of here without fucking me so accept your fate. I’m not leaving this beach unfucked,” Frank says. Eddie considers his options. There are worse fates. He sits down on the grass, facing the ocean, wearing his sunglasses despite the time of day. Frank arrives in his vision a second later and gets down, straddling Eddie’s lap and reaching into the pockets of his leather jacket to retrieve his cigarette and lighter. “Eddie.”

He props a cigarette in Eddie’s lips and lights it for him, almost dotingly, and then does the same thing for himself. Frank is always playing on Eddie’s ego, stroking it, making him feel talented and cool, and then turning around and calling him an idiot, confusing Eddie and making him unsure how to feel, unsure whether Frank really adores him or not.

“Yeah, baby,” Eddie murmurs in acknowledgement, pulling the cigarette out of his mouth and exhaling smoke.

“You do care about me,” Frank says. His voice has taken that quality, that pleading, sweet little tone. Like he’s some poor, injured creature. Eddie’s been on this rodeo with him before, week in, week out. He watches Frank bat his ridiculously long lashes, pout his blood red lips. “You don’t want to hurt me, do you?”

“’Course not,” Eddie says. He would never set out to hurt Frank. He does care about him, despite the way they behave towards each other sometimes. He wouldn’t have stuck this relationship out this long if he didn’t care.

“Of course not. You’re sweet,” Frank says. He has changed tactics. His lips then start to press kisses to Eddie’s face, to his jaw and his nose and his head. Eddie closes his eyes, letting Frank kiss the lids and then his lips, which Eddie returns after a second, the two of them giving each other brief, sweet kisses over and over until Frank starts to speak again, trailing kisses towards Eddie’s ear, down his neck, as he talks. “It hurts me when you flirt with girls, Eddie. Or boys. Or anybody. It makes me feel disposable.”

Eddie has to laugh. Frank’s kohl-rimmed eyes look up at him in genuine shock at the audacity, so Eddie explains himself.

“You really think I could fucking dispose of you and replace you with some random person? You’re not exactly an easy act to follow,” Eddie says. For a second, Frank’s expression doesn’t change, and then he glances down. The self-consciousness is genuine. Eddie has seen it be genuine often enough to know when to recognise a performance and when to recognise the real thing.

“You could fall in love with anybody at any time. Humans… their emotions are unpredictable, Eddie. Say what you like to flatter me, but your heart can always turn away from me,” Frank says. “And I can do this to pull you back in, intrigue you again.” He starts to kiss Eddie’s throat, sucking and licking and biting, his voice now slightly muffled. “But I still might have been replaced in every way that matters. And I’ll be nothing more but an interesting story to tell your fake friends one day to prove to them how wild you were once.”

Eddie sighs softly, partly feeling bad for Frank and partly in pleasure. He loves it when Frank gives him hickeys like this. Frank seems, sometimes, to be a wild animal, something inhuman. Eddie can’t place exactly what makes him feel that way. Frank is insatiable and can’t be tied down. He has sharp teeth. But his body is warm when you hold him.

“Why do you hate my friends so much?” Eddie murmurs, deciding not to immediately address everything Frank just said. He finds that it’s better to prove to Frank that he’s more than just a fuck by talking to him rather than just blindly insisting over and over that it’s true.

“They’re posers,” Frank answers. He’s only met Eddie’s friends a couple times at parties and they did, admittedly, all treat Frank as though he was an exhibition at the party rather than a person who was also attending it. Being an exhibition, Frank has told Eddie, is only fun for an hour or two before it becomes tiresome. Frank bites into Eddie’s shoulder suddenly, a genuine bite, drawing blood. It isn’t the first time he’s done this. Eddie never stops him. He can understand why it’s erotic and moans softly.

“Fuck,” he murmurs. Frank licks up the blood, laughing softly. He’s so hardcore, Eddie thinks. That’s why he was initially attracted to Frank, before he started seeing a real person with real feelings beneath it all. Frank is intense and down for anything, he never says no. Eddie likes having somebody around who’s as crazy as he is.

“You’ll stay at the beach with me, won’t you?” Frank asks. He lifts his head, pressing his forehead to Eddie’s. There’s a drop of blood on his bottom lip. “I’m no longer <em>annoying</em> you?”

Eddie smirks in amusement and scoffs. “I can handle it.”

“Can you?” Frank asks. He kisses Eddie a few times again, soft and lingering. Sometimes, Eddie thinks, you’re with somebody and you just know you’ve found your person, and he feels that way with Frank. He knows that no matter what, Frank would never just leave him, never break up with him. A small part of Eddie thinks that Frank would sooner kill him than leave him.

“I didn’t bring lube, you know,” Eddie says. Or condoms, but Frank has never given a shit about condoms before and is unlikely to start now.

“You can use spit, it doesn’t matter,” Frank murmurs. His hands are touching Eddie’s face rather than his body, along his cheek and jawline. “I want you inside me, Eddie. I don’t want you to go near anybody else again.”

Eddie can’t promise that. Frank would never promise <em>him</em> that. So, rather than responding, he kisses Frank deeply and pushes him over, onto his back on the sand. The tide is coming in, threatening to wet the ends of Frank’s flayed curls.

“I’m gonna rock your world, baby,” Eddie whispers, his hand finding his belt and his zipper. Frank inhales sharply, glancing down to watch. His excitement is clear and it makes Eddie excited. There’s no argument that the two of them can’t get through.

-

Frank is just about the loudest person to have sex with ever, which is why Eddie was glad that the beach was completely empty other than them. Eddie doesn’t dislike the loudness. He’s not the quietest either, but Eddie tends to yell a lot of expletives whereas Frank just moans like an animal, the sounds filthy. By the time they’re done they’re both covered with sand, which pisses Eddie off quickly, but Frank doesn’t care.

“Can you get medical issues from having sand in your cock? Sand cock?” Eddie asks Frank, trying to clean himself off a bit with the water from the sea, albeit not very successfully because the coldness of the water keeps making him chicken out. Frank is lying on the sand with his fishnets, gloves and pearl necklace still on, smoking a weed cigarette. He’s watching Eddie, amusement glimmering in his eyes.

“You’ll survive. You’ll have soft skin,” Frank says, his voice fading into an erotic purr at the end of his sentence. He’s so fucking performative. Eddie turns to glare at him. Frank’s hair is a little wet but not too bad, the curls not entirely flattened. They look as though they’re likely to tangle terribly.

“You’re taking the piss, aren’t you?” Eddie asks, walking away from the water to find his underwear and jeans and everything that he just carelessly discarded. “That’s not really a thing?”

Frank laughs, turning his cheek to press again the sand. “Don’t worry yourself.”

Being covered in sand is uncomfortable but if Eddie tells Frank that, then Frank will say some bullshit about how it’s all about your mindset and Eddie is a negative person or something like that.

“You wanna get on the bike and head back to the castle, baby?” Eddie asks. He thinks Riff and Magenta are going to be pissed at them for staying out this long, even though they don’t have any right to tell Frank off. Eddie knows them both well enough to know that they don’t like it when Frank leaves the castle for hours on end, but Eddie doesn’t know why. He’s heard stuff in passing about how they have some kind of work to do and Riff and Magenta want to get it over with, but Frank’s too busy having a good time.

Eddie has seen Magenta tell Frank off before, though. Just once, early in Eddie’s relationship with Frank. She was punished and she hasn’t done it since. Eddie doesn’t like to think back on it, to be honest, but he figures that the way that Frank treats his servants is none of Eddie’s business.

“Why would I want to do that? Come and lie with me,” Frank says. Eddie pulls his underwear on so he feels a bit less exposed and then goes to lie beside Frank, who tosses the end of his cigarette into the sea. Frank shifts so he’s half on top of Eddie and looks down at him, tilting his head. His head is dripping slightly onto Eddie’s shoulder. “I don’t want to go back there yet, Eddie. Why do you?”

“I dunno. I like the castle,” Eddie answers, shrugging. Frank spends most of his time there but seems to feel sort of claustrophobic in there sometimes. It can be difficult for him going into town, ‘cause with the way he dresses he sometimes gets into trouble. Eddie has got into bar fights defending Frank before. Got arrested one time and the next day Magenta had to come and bail him out. She seemed pissed, but Frank thought that it was “very dashing”. Frank is, obviously, pretty capable of defending himself, but he likes just sitting there and watching Eddie fight. It’s all fun and games until Eddie gets out his switchblade knife and then everybody acts like he’s an axe murderer.

“Sometimes I just want to run away,” Frank admits, tracing his finger over Eddie’s chest. “Riff and Magenta would never let me. Right now I seem to have them convinced they’re under my power but at any point they could remember the truth.”

Frank seems thoughtful and far away. High. He seems to have forgotten that Eddie’s there and Eddie doesn’t think he’s supposed to be hearing all of this. Eddie isn’t a deep thinker. A smarter man than him might be concerned about what work Frank is actually doing locked up in his lab all day.

“They’re not that bad, man,” Eddie says, referring to Riff and Magenta. Frank doesn’t answer, gazing at nothing. Eddie is rubbing his waist absently, where his hand is resting. “So where is home to you, if it’s not the castle?”

“I’ve never had a home I don’t want to run from, Eddie,” Frank admits. “But if I can stay in control of the place, it’s a little better.”

<em>He’s such a control freak,</em> Eddie thinks, almost fondly. He’s not the kind of guy to make some sentimental effort to build a home for his boyfriend, no matter how much he thinks Frank deserves one. He just hands him another cigarette quietly and holds him a bit tighter.

“Wherever you run to, baby, I’ll always go with you,” Eddie says, after a minute or so of silence. Frank smiles, turns to kiss Eddie’s neck, three silent words hanging between them that neither of them will ever say. They don’t need to.

-

Eddie and Frank get back to the castle an hour later after Frank got over his melancholy, and Eddie parks his bike, hangs up his helmet and follows Frank in. Frank never wears a helmet, although Eddie offers. Frank claims “not to need it” and says it’ll mess up his hair. On his head, be it.

“Guess who’s home!” Frank calls to the castle. It’s about 5am in the morning now and Frank is probably going to have one of his cat naps. Eddie will join him, go into a whole night’s sleep and not wake up again until past midday. Frank will say <em>I don’t understand how you can sleep so long.</em> Eddie will say it’s weird how Frank only sleeps for an hour or two at a time.

There’s something so off about him. Probably all the heroin use.

“We’re so pleased to see you, master,” Riff Raff says, somewhat passive-aggressively, with a sarcastic smile, appearing out of nowhere with Magenta beside him.

“Yeah, whoopety-fuck,” Eddie says sarcastically, walking over to the stairs. “I need to go to bed. You coming, Frankie?”

“Of course,” Frank answers. He smiles wickedly at his two servants and says, “I’ll be an hour or two and then I’ll be free for you to worship me. I can see you’re desperate for my company.”

“Yes, we’ll die if we go without you for a moment longer, master,” Magenta says, her voice laced with actual sarcasm. Frank growls at her and snaps his teeth in warning, like an angry dog, an eccentricity he has sometimes when he’s irritated. “I am going to go and see to the chickens.”

“Nice one,” Eddie says. He doesn’t care and heads up the stairs towards the master bedroom where Frank stays. Eddie always sleeps here when he’s over, unless he happens to pass out somewhere else. He once passed out in the lab watched Frank do these crazy equations and when he woke up he was lying on a stretcher and Frank started injecting him with drugs, like some crazy doctor/patient roleplay. Eddie was into it. It had drugs, it had bondage, it had Frank. It had everything, really.

Frank’s room is filled with strange objects, like a jar of teeth, that Eddie used to be fascinated by but is now totally over. He also has Steve Reeve films on VHS, some horror movies that Eddie prefers, a bunch of vinyls, some of which Eddie bought him as gift (like Elvis, for example – no record collection is complete without Elvis). Frank’s favourite is Ziggy Stardust. He plays it over and over, not caring when Eddie is a bit of a snob about it. Eddie loves Bowie, really, and he introduced Frank to him in the first place. He introduced Frank to a lot of shit. Frank always told Eddie he grew up in some posh home in England (which you could guess by his accent), and that he felt suffocated there and left as soon as he could. God knows at what point he woke up and decided to wear lingerie. Frank really has a mind of his own.

“Mmm, I’m ready for a nap,” Frank says, his voice breathy as if the concept of a nap gets him off. Everything gets him off, though. Eddie turns to watch him stretching before he dramatically throws himself on the bed while Eddie is removing his boots and most of his clothes.

“Want me to take those shoes off for you, sweets?” Eddie asks, going to do so without being asked, unbuckling them at the ankle and tossing them carelessly on the floor before climbing on the bed with Frank. Eddie has a few clothes lying around somewhere for tomorrow. He thinks Magenta washed them. Right now he and Frank smell like they fell into an ashtray and fucked in it.

“You’re good to me,” Frank murmurs, reaching to rub Eddie’s bicep gently. Eddie is in just a t-shirt and underwear now. Frank is still wearing what he wore to the beach and seems to have no inclination to take it off. He shifts closer and starts kissing Eddie’s shoulder.

“Come on, you’re too much, baby,” Eddie says, laughing softly. He’s exhausted but Frank never stops, running his hand under Eddie’s shirt, over his stomach and his chest. He kisses the side of Eddie’s face a few times.

“I know,” Frank says, his voice a little muffled against Eddie’s skin. “It’s nice to touch right before sleeping. Makes me feel more comfortable.”

Eddie pulls Frank close, smirking in amusement at Frank’s antics, feeling his arse. Frank hums softly with pleasure.

“You’re like a cat that needs to be stroked as it drifts off to sleep,” Eddie says. Frank laughs. His laugh is so familiar, almost booming sometimes, loud and unapologetic and unmistakeably his. “I’m tired, OK? I got you, but I’m going to sleep. Settle down. Have your fucking nap. Riff and Magenta are chomping at the bit for you to get it over with to go and deal with whatever the fuck it is they want you to deal with.”

“I don’t want to do that, I want to stay here with you,” Frank answers, huffing slightly, shifting down so he can rest his head on Eddie’s shoulder and cuddle closer to him, entangling their legs. “Maybe I’ll try and sleep longer. Stay with you.”

“Yeah, well, don’t hurt yourself. God forbid you sleep a normal eight hours. You’ll wake up disorientated.” Eddie is mostly teasing. He does wonder if maybe Frank would be calmer as a person if he slept longer, but Riff and Magenta barely sleep either. Like why were they awake at 5am? Frank wasn’t even home.

“Disorientated, hungover. The both of us.”

“It’d be nice to wake up to you still there next to me for once.”

Eddie doesn’t intend for it to come off the way it does. Downright romantic. They both go quiet, neither of them wishing to acknowledge it. Eddie can be softer than he seems, deep down. And Frank is definitely more of a romantic than he lets on. Eddie’s always been able to tell by some of his music, some of his films. Eddie doesn’t know how he could ever satisfy him, though. He doesn’t think he’s capable. He’s no Hercules.

The two of them go to sleep with no more being said. Sunlight will soon start streaming through Frank’s sheer, useless curtains. The curtains that hang around this four-poster bed aren’t any thicker. They’ll sleep through the sunlight – or at least, Eddie will, because he’s exhausted – and wake up late enough that they’ll stay awake through the night again. They won’t leave each other. They rarely do, other than when Frank is busy working with Riff in the lab.