#thefutureisbright

And so, now they’d finished high school, emerged not quite boys but still not men, Richie was still waiting. He spent the summer waiting for Eddie to finish his summer homework so they could go and watch the kingfishers dancing in the reeds at the barrens. He waited for Eddie to finish work at the library, standing in the parking lot, the August air wrapping itself around him, tickling his sunburnt skin. He waited for Eddie to open his window, witching-hour late, so he could clamber through and wrap himself around Eddie, terrified Tetris-pieces clutching at each other after nightmares, hoping that they were each braver than each other.

It's been nearly two hours since Eddie got out of church. The image of Eddie, knelt on the floor of St Benedict’s, hands clasped tight, so tight, eyes screwed shut, set Richie’s stomach alight, a forest-fire, destructive, lethal. The image floated in Richie’s brain for a while, Eddie knelt on the cold, stone floor of the church, Eddie knelt in the shower, rivers of water flowing across the parched plain of his back, Eddie knelt on Richie’s grimy carpet. So fucking dirty.

Richie grabbed his half-interested dick, squeezing it just so, just enough, a whisper of friction. Half-interest turned sailed straight to undevoted attention, and Richie sighed. The air was too hot, stifling, judgemental, and his hands were already damp with sweat. Sliding off the bed with a grunt, Richie slunk into the bathroom, locking the door behind him.

 *

 Another hour passed, and Richie was still waiting. The worst of the heat had gone, had sunk into the scorched grass, and the sounds of midsummer started floating back through Richie’s open window as people emerged from their houses. Children, screaming in delight, having wriggled free from the desperate clutches of their parents who stood, sunblock in hand, defeated. He’d run the water in the shower as cold as it would go, but it hadn’t been of much use. He’d come, gasping, face red with embarrassment and the release of a tension that had sat coiled in his abdomen for what felt like forever.

They’d spoken about it once.

They’d been at the library, Richie browsing the fiction shelves blindly, fingers skating over the spines of books he never had any intention of reading. They’d walked home together, an unspoken arrangement, and Eddie followed Richie up past the old well house on Neibolt street, and didn’t turn down the dusty track. They barely spoke as they walked, and Eddie kicked an old glass beer bottle all the way to Richie’s street, before sending it skittering into the undergrowth.

“Have you ever –”

The question died in Richie’s mouth before he’d realised he’d been half way to asking it. Eddie looked up from where he was lying.

“Huh?”

“Aw,” Richie started, throwing the elastic band ball he’d been working on at the wall, “never mind, Eddie Spaghetti.”

“No, come on, you can’t do that. Have I ever what?”

“It really doesn’t matter, Eds.”

thunk, thunk, thunk went the ball against the wall, a rhythmic heartbeat.

“I’ll fucking garotte you, Richie. Have I ever what?”

thunk

“Are you going to let this go?”

thunk 

“We both know the answer to that question.”

thunk, thunk –

“Have you ever wondered what it’s like …”

Eddie stared at him, slack-jawed, almost bored.

“What it’s like to what?! Stop being so cryptic, you’re not smart enough to pull it off.”

“What it’s like to suck someone off, like … a dude?”

Richie expected Eddie to react in one of three ways. One, to punch Richie on the nose and flee from the Tozier house never to return again. Two, to admit that yes, he had wondered what it’s like to suck someone off, why, isn’t Richie very perceptive for asking such a question. Three, to shrug his shoulders, all ‘nope, never have, never will, now stop fucking pining after me’.

Instead, Eddie just blinked.

“You’re killing me here, Eds. Are you gonna say something?”

“I’m thinking.”

“What is there to think about?” Richie babbled, motormouth running at full speed, max-fucking-horsepower, “it was a dumb question, just a joke. A classic Richie jest, heh. Don’t sweat your pretty little head about it any longer –”

“I’ve thought about it.”

Blink.

“Do you want to go and see whether Bev’s finished her shift? I fancy getting out of here, s’too fucking cold in your house,” Eddie yawned, standing up and stretching his arms above his head.

And that was that.

After that day, they never sat down and had a conversation about why they look at each other for slightly too long, eyes meeting over shitty diner coffee at two in the morning after an evening of tomfoolery in Mike’s barn. They never acknowledged that, when they walk home together after leaving the diner, six dollars left in a neat pile on the edge of the table, Richie would grab Eddie’s hand, and hold on tight, fingernails digging in, just scarcely, just enough. If Eddie thought it was weird, thought that Richie had a screw-loose and needed tightening, he didn’t mention it, he just rested his hand in Richie’s vice grip, barely holding on himself, but he didn’t need to. Richie had him.

They never acknowledged that when they said goodbye, Richie would duck down, face hovering next to Eddie’s, and he’d kiss the soft spot behind Eddie’s ear, a secret pressed into Eddie’s skin.

 *

 Eddie showed up close to midnight, when the sun had been chased across the sky by the moon which shone brilliantly in the sky.

 [Eds: 23:42: are you gonna let me in?]

[Eds: 23:42: i brought you something]

[Eds: 23:43: seriously trashmouth this branch doesn’t feel like it’ll hold forever]

[Eds: 23:44: OPEN YOUR FUCKING WINDOW]

 The window was barely half open when Eddie tumbled through it, limbs knocking together awkwardly. He’d had a growth spurt last year, shot up several inches in one summer, and Richie often found himself staring at the criss-cross silver slithers across his back when they went swimming at the quarry. Eddie hated them and had spent ages on the internet looking up remedies for stretchmarks, had even gone to the doctor, convinced that he’d need a skin graft, but Richie loved them, wanted to trace them with his tongue.

“I wish you’d let me use your door like a normal fucking person, asshole,” Eddie groaned, rubbing his elbow where it had fought with the sharp edge of Richie’s desk and lost.

“You really think Went would let that slide? Anyway, you’re a fucking liar if you don’t find this way more romantic.”

“Romantic?”

“Yup, romantic.”

“You’re a fucking idiot.”

Eddie was right, of course. Richie was a fucking idiot, with his heart glued messily to his sleeve.

“Here,” Eddie says, thrusting a small, wrapped package at Richie’s chest. His face has gone an odd colour, almost the colour of the marshmallows Richie’s mother decorated her apology hot chocolates with. “Just, don’t say anything until you’ve opened it, okay?”

The package was wrapped in newspaper,

‘the senator staunchly denies the accusations of …’

‘the next few days will be mostly dry, with the occasional …’

‘Mick Jagger, 77, has been caught with …’

“Stop reading the fucking wrapping paper, Jesus Richie,” Eddie snaps, and Richie looks up.

Eddie’s standing in the middle of Richie’s room, and he looks … panicked. Not the sort of panic that Richie is so used to seeing painted on Eddie’s face, panic that his mother will find out he’s snuck out of the house, panic he’s flunked a test, panic he’ll be late for his shift, panic he got some of Richie’s spit on his face when they’ve laughed with heads bowed close together. This panic, this is different.

“Eddie…” Richie warns, voice low, gravelly. “What is it?”

“Just … open it,” Eddie says, and there’s no bite, no sarcastic-witty-‘shut-the-fuck-up-Richie’-Eddieness. Richie doesn’t recognise the look on his face, can’t match it to the bank of Eddie expressions he keeps in his mind.

The paper comes away easily, and Richie’s left clutching a blank CD in a clear case.

“A CD?”

Eddie rubs the back of his neck with his hand, still not looking at Richie straight.

“Yeah, it’s … I thought about just sending you a link to a Spotify playlist but this … it felt more real.”

“Real? Eddie …”

Eddie shakes his head. “Shut up, okay. Just … listen to it. When I’ve gone, listen to it.”

The room feels smaller. The memories of them sitting here, playing video games on Richie’s dads old gamecube when they were seven, of watching horror movies about killer clowns and monstrous body snatchers when they were thirteen and Eddie would shriek loudly into Richie’s shoulder before punching him, of sitting and staring at the walls, a joint balanced precariously between Richie’s lips, Eddie bobbing his head along to Chris Cornell’s voice seeping out of Richie’s shitty speakers, the memories pushed at Richie’s arms, at his legs, squashing him. The room felt smaller, and Eddie, standing there, with his ridiculous determined expression and a set jaw, felt huge.

“Uh..,” Richie stammered, dumbly, staring at the CD in his hands.

“I’m gonna go now, okay? I think … I think it’s best if I go now. Text me, when you’ve listened to it. Text me and … yeah. Listen to it when I’ve gone?”

Before Richie could answer, before he could look at Eddie in the face, the room was empty.

Richie threw the CD on his bed, staring at it as if it might grow legs, arms, a mouth – as if it might speak to him, “this is what you think it is! It can’t be anything but this! Listen to me and find out! It’s what you always wanted!”

Richie stared at it. The insignificant chunk of plastic lying on his bed innocently, provocatively, as if it didn’t contain the secrets of the universe, as if it didn’t have the capacity to change Richie’s life in several short yet monumentally significant minutes. He’s almost sure he won’t’ listen to it. He grabs at it gingerly, holding it between his thumb and forefinger as if it’ll burn him, as if it’s something disgusting. He drops it in his overflowing waste bin, before marching out of the room, and down the stairs. The house is silent, and Richie stands in the sitting room, unsure what to do now.

Half of him wants to throw open the front door, and hot foot it to Eddie’s house, clamber in through the downstairs bathroom window that never shuts properly, tiptoe past Sonia passed out on her La-Z-Boy, pin Eddie against the wall of his immaculate bedroom, and demand that Eddie take it back. He wants to thrust the CD at Eddie, wrapped in the stupid newspaper, and leave. Pretend it never happened. It would be easier this way, nothing would have to change. They could go back to stolen glances across the room, clasped hands on intoxicated walks, dry presses of mouths to secret spots that no one else knew about. Easier.

The other half of him screams at him, begs him, to dig the CD out of the bin, to scrape the pencil shavings and the toenails off of it, and to put it in his Walkman, and to listen to what Eddie had to say. Hell, it might not even be what Richie thinks (hopes, dreams, dreads) it might be, it might be something mundane, a new album Eddie has found online, a new artist he thinks Richie will like, a recording of his new, perhaps ill-advised, stand-up comedy routine, and …

Not an expression of undying love, a token of affection, a symbol of everything Richie means to Eddie …

Wrapped up in a neat little plastic bomb that threatens to detonate and lodge shrapnel in Richie’s, till now, carefully-guarded heart.

Shit.

 *

 Most of Richie’s life had passed him by as he waited for Eddie. Only now, on this sweat-sticky summer night, Eddie waits for Richie. Impatiently.

 [Eds: 01:54: have you listened to it?]

[Eds: 02:13: this isn’t fucking funny]

[Eds: 02:43: Rich?]

[Eds: 04:20: im sorry]

 The sun filters in through the living room window, reborn. Richie’s still sitting on the sofa, head in his hands.

 [Eds: 05:12: Richie seriously]

[Eds: 05:45: listen to track 3 again]

 Track 3. Richie hasn’t listened to track 1, the CD is still lying in the waste bin, rejected, a grenade with the pin still intact, but waiting, ready, willing. It feels inevitable, really. Richie knows that, eventually, whether today, tomorrow, next year, thirty years from now, he’ll listen to that CD and he’ll run to Eddie. He’ll run, and it’ll all be different, the kind of different that sends electric-shock excitement shooting down Richie’s spine, and anticipation collects in his pores, seeping, oozing, unstoppable. It’ll be different. Richie needs, craves, different.

But, and it’s a huge, omnipresent but, they can’t go back from different. They can’t decide that actually, things were better the way they were, let’s stop being different and go back to what came before. Different is permanent, a deep gash that scars but doesn’t disappear, a tectonic shift, Atlas shifting his grip on the world, never again to place his hands exactly where they were before.

Whether it’s worth it, to take a punt on different, to screw his eyes closed and hope for the best, to jump into the void and hope it catches him with velvet-plush arms, Richie doesn’t know.

His phone buzzes, a long, prolonged clattering against the wooden coffee table.

[incoming call from: Eds]

Richie ignores the phone.

He sleeps the day away, a sleep that doesn’t quench his thirst for oblivion as he dreams vividly, dreams of difference and soft hands and eyes that roll and squint and of premature laughter lines etched on soft, youthful skin.

 *

 When Richie wakes up, it’s dark. He has 17 missed calls, and two texts.

[Eds: 14:52: don’t freak out, okay. I made that tape because I can’t bear the thought of you going off to college and of being such a fucking coward that I’d let you go without telling you. I’m sorry if it’s all weird now, but at least I’ve been honest with you. If you don’t feel the same, it’s fine, honestly. It’ll stop being weird eventually.]

[Eds: 17:19: I’m still coming to wave you off tomorrow, just FYI]

Ah. Tomorrow. The day Richie bundles himself into his father’s Subaru and leaves Maine for Chicago, the Windy City, the city that never sleeps, the city that Eddie won’t be in. Ay, there’s the rub.

Leaving Eddie behind as they are now, friends, best friends, best friends who look at each other for too long and hold hands in the dark, feels like a sucker punch that Richie can never recover from. Leaving Eddie behind as something different …

It’s half past eight and the CD is still in the bin, but now, Richie is in his bedroom, staring at it, daring it,

Make it different.

 *

 It takes him two hours to pluck up the courage to dig the CD out of the bin and put it in his Walkman. Another thirty to press play. He skips straight to track 3, fingers shaking.

 You have always been my safe home I walk, I run, I burn out into you You have always been my safe home My whole world has moved on

 Fuck.

Immediately, different settles over Richie like a thick smog. As soon as the song stops, before he’s even spoken to Eddie, it’s different. He can feel it, taste it, touch it in the air. And, as if he knows, as if he’s watching Richie at that very moment, Eddie texts.