It's Always Halloween on my Heart

You step aside, opening a narrow gap in the hallway. He ducks his head slightly, a private smile pulling at the corner of his mouth, and steps through.

The smell of him fills the trailer instantly: leather, dry grass, gasoline and tobacco. "Bedroom's in the back," you say, to your own hand, mostly.

"I figured," he calls back, already moving through your space like he belongs to it. When you round the corner, he's standing in the middle of the room with his toolbox at his feet, looking at the shelf above your desk with the same attention he'd given your collarbone thirty seconds ago.

"The Demonology of Medieval Europe," he reads, then lets out a short breath through his nose. He turns to look at you over his shoulder, one eyebrow up like the corner of his mouth. "You know, this town already tried to run me out for a RPG game." A beat. "If anyone sees me walking out of here with that under my arm, I'm a dead man. We'd both get burned at the same stake."

"I've heard worse eulogies." You nod at the window. "Over there."

"I see the window." He doesn't move toward it. "You read all of these?"

"Most of them."

"For fun?"

"For work."

He turns to look at you fully now, both eyebrows up, reassessing. There is something in the way he does it that makes it feel like being placed into a different category. A more interesting one. "What kind of work?" he asks.

"The kind that makes people ask questions at parties."

He grins at that, quick and crooked, a little surprised by it, and finally turns toward the window. He crouches down in front of it, sets the toolbox open on the floor, and you get the full view of the back of his neck, the knobs of his spine where his t-shirt hangs loose, the tattoo that starts somewhere under his collar and disappears.

"It's the casing," he says, more to himself than to you. "Warped from the heat. Happens to these old trailers." He pries at it with a flathead, jaw working once, and the latch gives with a pop that's louder than expected. He catches the frame before it rattles. "There." He tests it twice, sliding the lock open and shut. "You can actually protect yourself now."

"I feel so safe now."

He looks at you over his shoulder again, and there it is, that almost smirk that's been sitting there since the porch.

"You should, princess," he says, very simply. He packs the toolbox without rushing, while you lean in the doorframe to watch him do it because you can't think of a single reason not to. He stands, brushes his palms on the thighs of his jeans, and turns to finally face you. "I'm Eddie," he says, like this is new information, like you haven't already filed it away somewhere you'll need later.

"I know," you say.

"Uncle Wayne talks about me?"

"Hawkins is small."

"Good things, I hope."

You reach past him to push the window open an inch, testing it.

"Good enough," you say.

He stands in your hallway for another beat, toolbox in hand, like he's forgotten what the exit is for. The porch light buzzes faintly through the screen.

"Well," he says, finally. "You know where to find me if anything else needs fixing."

He says it like “fixing it” covers a very large territory.

~~

The silence of the trailer park is loud in the way only small places at night can be: crickets in overlapping frequencies, the distant television two trailers over, the soft percussion of moths battering themselves against the yellow bulb above your head. You stand on the top step of the porch with a cigarette caught between your fingers and your elbow on the railing, watching them do it. The moths, you mean, their absolute commitment to something that will not end well for them.

A match scrapes in the dark below and then Eddie steps out from the shadow between the trailers. His boots crunch on the gravel, and he stops at the bottom step, looking up at you. He nods at your hand before saying

"Those things'll kill you, you know?" 

You take a long drag first, then exhale slowly. "I hope so."

There is a pause in which he appears to consider this information seriously. He reaches into his jacket pocket, pulls out a crumpled red pack of Marlboros, the soft pack, already half-dead, and slides a cigarette between his lips with the easy fluency of long habit.

His thumb catches the wheel of his lighter on the first try. The blue flame jumps up and for one second illuminates the sharp line of his jaw, the way his eyes stay on your mouth while he lights up.

He takes a long drag, blowing the smoke sideways, slow, deliberate, his lips still slightly parted.

"You were saying?" you say.

"I was saying those things'll kill you." He holds the cigarette loosely between two fingers, gesturing vaguely with it. "Statistically."

"Statistically, really?" you snort.

"It's a health concern." He takes another drag. "I worry."

"You're smoking right now, Eddie."

"I'm aware of that, sweetheart." He exhales through his nose, unbothered, a faint smile tucking itself into the corner of his mouth. "Look, what I do is my business. What you do," he gestures again with the cigarette, "is a tragedy."

You laugh before you can stop it, a small sound that escapes between your teeth.

"You always come out here at odd times of the night?" he asks.

"When I can't sleep, yes."

"What keeps you up?"

You look at him. The moths keep doing their thing above your head. "Restlessness," you say, and it's true enough.

He nods slowly, like this is an answer he understands in his body. He shifts his weight, rests his forearm on the railing beside yours, close enough that you can feel the warmth radiating off him.

He brings the cigarette to his lips and for a moment you watch his profile, the way he tips his head back slightly when he exhales, the long line of his throat.

"Me too," he says to the dark. You smoke in parallel for a while. He finishes his cigarette. You finish yours. Neither of you moves to go inside.

"You know what I think?" he says eventually.

"I don't."

"I think the restlessness is the point." He drops the butt, grinds it under his boot, and when he straightens he's a step closer than he was before. The top of his head is nearly level with yours from where you stand above him. Close enough that you'd only have to lean forward slightly. 

"I think people who can't sleep are just paying attention." His eyes move over your face, slow and unashamed. "More than they want to admit."

"...the fat joint is making a compelling case for itself."

He takes one more step up, your bodies now separated by exactly the thickness of the railing, and his hand lands beside yours on the worn wood, his little finger a breath from yours.

He's looking at you the way he looked at your bookshelf, the way he looks at things he wants to understand by going closer.

"Goodnight,sweetheart" he says, and means not yet.

"Goodnight," you say back, and mean the same.

He goes down the steps, unhurried, and you watch him disappear between the trailers. The dark swallows him whole and then it's just you and the moths and the yellow light and your own hand on the railing, your little finger still warm from almost being touched.

~~ 

The storm arrives in the wednesday afternoon without any warning worth trusting, just a greenish quality to the light. The air going suddenly still and electric, and then the sky opens. Dirt paths turn into brown rivers in minutes. You watch it happen through the small window above the kitchen sink before grabbing the laundry basket from the floor, because the alternative is re-washing everything and you are not doing that, at all.

The laundry shed is barely a shed. It is a converted storage unit at the end of the second row of trailers: corrugated metal walls that drum in the rain, a single bare bulb, two washers that work and one that doesn't, three dryers that spin on their own schedule, and it smells in there.

The dryer that has your sheets in it has decided, in the spirit of the afternoon, to stop spinning. The sheets are wound into a single heavy, damp rope around themselves. You reach in and pull, and the whole mass resists you with the passive aggression of wet laundry everywhere. You are still fighting it, one knee braced against the machine, when the shed door rattles open.

Eddie ducks inside in a rush of rain and cold air, and the door slams behind him against the wind. He's soaked through, his leather jacket dark at the shoulders, heavy with rain, his hair plastered in pieces against his forehead and neck, water running down the sides of his jaw. He shakes himself once like a dog, ineffectively.

He looks at you.

He looks at the wet sheet coiled around your arms like a defeated boa constrictor.

"Rough day?" he says.

"This shit won't come out."

"Sheets?"

"Jammed."

He looks at the space between you and the back wall. He looks at the dryer. He does a quick calculation that you can see him doing, and then he takes a step forward, because he is Eddie Munson and apparently this is just what he does: he steps into spaces.

His chest is at your back, your shoulders inside the bracket of his arms, his hands coming over yours on the wet canvas.

The rain on his jacket is cold against your arm. His skin underneath is warm; you can feel it through the damp fabric, that specific heat that has no right being as present as it is. These two things happen at once and you feel both of them with equal clarity, and you do not move.

"You have to push the latch from underneath," he says, low and close. Not a whisper exactly, just what his voice does when there isn't room for it to go anywhere else. "This one sticks. Wayne's been meaning to fix it."

"Wayne's been meaning to fix a lot of things."

"He's a busy man." His fingers press over yours, guiding them to the right angle against the mechanism. His hands are large, the rings gone, and his palms are calloused in specific places, guitar-player places. You feel every point of contact. You are being very quiet about it. "Right there. Now push up."

You push up, the latch yields with a clunk, and the drum releases its grip on the sheet. The wet mass loosens in your hands.

He does not move away.

His arms stay bracketed around yours, his chest stays against your shoulder blades, and you can feel, through the damp jacket, through the thin material of your shirt, he's breathing slower now than it should be, deeper, the way someone breathes when they're trying to focus on something they're not looking at directly.

"Got it?" he says.

"Yeah," you say, "got it."

The dryer ticks. The single bulb swings slightly in the draft from a gap in the corrugated wall, making the shadows shift all the time.

"You're dripping on my laundry," you say.

"Little bit, yeah." His voice is still close. You can feel it more than hear it through the drum of the rain.

"You're going to make me redo the whole load."

"That would be a shame." A pause. "I'd feel terrible."

"You don't sound terrible."

"I'm hiding it." Another pause, and in it the specific quality of someone choosing their next words. "I'm very good at hiding things."

You turn your head slightly, not enough to face him, just enough that you're no longer fully facing away, that the line of your jaw is visible to him if he's looking. Which he is.

"Are you?" you say.

"Mostly," he says. Then, quietly, with something honest in it that he hasn't quite covered over: "Not always."

"I should probably," you start.

"Probably," he agrees, and he doesn't move for another full second, a second that you will find yourself thinking about later, at inconvenient moments.

Then he steps back. The cold air rushes into the space where he was and it's a physical thing, an absence you can map to your spine. He leans against the opposite wall, all of eighteen inches away, which is as much distance as the shed allows, and runs one hand through his wet hair, pushing it back from his face.

He looks at you as the bulb swings. He has a small cut above his left eyebrow, old and faded, that you haven't noticed before.

"You want help with the sheets?" he asks.

"I had it."

"You had it for twenty minutes before I got here and the machine disagreed."

"I was making progress."

"You were losing a fight to a dryer, c’mon sweetheart."

You pull the sheet out properly now, bundling it against your chest, and look at him over the top of it. He's almost smiling. His jacket is still dripping onto the cement floor, a slow, steady sound under the rain.

"You can stay until the storm passes," you say, which is not an answer to what he said.

He understands it as one anyway.

He slides down the wall until he's sitting on the floor, back against the corrugated metal, long legs stretched in front of him. "So," he says, studying the ceiling. "Demonology."

You start folding the sheet, badly, in the way sheets always get folded in small spaces. "What about it."

"Is it a hobby or a calling?"

"Does it have to be one of those?"

He looks at you from the floor, from under his damp hair, and grins: slow and warm and a little dangerous, the way certain things you should be careful around are sometimes the most beautiful things in the room.

"No," he says. "I guess it doesn't."

The rain keeps coming. You sit on top of the middle dryer, the one that works, and let the hum of it warm you through, and you talk; not about anything that matters yet, not about anything that costs you. 

Somewhere between the third question and the seventh you stop being careful about what you say. Not enough to notice, just enough that he does.

"You're easier to talk to than you look," he says at some point.

"What do I look like?"

He considers this with more seriousness than it deserves.

"Like someone who could wreck my life," he says, casual, like he's noting the weather.

When the rain stops, neither of you notices right away.

~~

The Hideout is the kind of place you don't end up in on purpose.

You ended up in it on purpose only in the sense that the rain was impossible and the door was the closest one. Now you've been here for forty minutes with a drink that's been empty for twenty, watching the condensation run down the side of the glass in slow, uneven tracks.

The lighting is low enough to forgive a lot of things, smells like cigarettes and old leather and beer that belongs to a previous decade. Someone on the small stage is doing something to a guitar riff that it didn't deserve, and three stools to your left someone is talking loud enough for two conversations, and you haven't heard a word of any of it,anyway.

You're watching the second drop reach the bottom of the glass when the stool beside you scrapes back. Then he says your name like he's setting something down carefully. You look up.

Eddie is standing with one hand on the back of the stool, still in his jacket, rain-damp at the shoulders as always. His eyes move over the empty glass, then back to you.

"Didn't take you for a Hideout girl," he says.

"I'm not. It was raining, that’s all"

"Sure." He says it like he doesn't entirely believe you and finds that interesting, he sits, signaling the bartender with the ease of someone who has never once worried about whether a room would receive him. The bartender nods immediately, you file this away without meaning to.

"They're bad," you say, nodding at the stage.

"Tragically." He doesn't look away from the band. "The bassist has potential. The rest of them are crying for help."

"Harsh."

"Accurate."

"You play, right?" you say. You already know. He probably knows you know.

"Little bit," he says, and the way he says it, low and with that half smile already happening, makes it clear it is not a little bit at all.

You let yourself look at him, just for a second more, actually look at him, the way you've been carefully not doing since day one, and the problem, the real problem, is that it doesn't help.

"Right," you say, and look back at your drink.

"You want another?" he asks.

"I shouldn't."

"That's not what I asked."

You push the glass forward.

The band finishes their set to applause that is generous considering, and in the small shuffle of the stage reset someone leans down from the monitors and says something to Eddie. 

"You know them?" you ask.

"Thursdays are mine," he says, and his face does something that is not quite modesty and not quite arrogance but lives comfortably in the neighborhood of both.

"Is that so?"

"Eight months running." He finishes his drink, sets the glass down with a small, definitive sound. "I've become something of an institution."

"This place smells like an institution."

He points at you, completely serious. "Atmosphere. I created that."

He stands, shrugs the jacket off in a single movement and drapes it over the back of the stool. Underneath, just the black t-shirt, the denim vest, the patches catching the low light.

"You're going up there?" you say. It comes out less like a question than you intended.

He looks at you over his shoulder, and there it is, that specific version of his smile, the one that knows exactly what it's doing.

"Don't go anywhere!" he says.

You watch him take the three steps up to the stage. Pick up the guitar with the ease of something he stopped thinking about years ago. Watch the room shift in a way you didn't notice it could shift, a current changing direction.

You pull his jacket off the back of the stool and set it on your lap without thinking about it.

The room shifts before he plays a single note. It's a small thing, the way people reorient without deciding to, drinks paused halfway to mouths, conversations losing a thread. He adjusts the strap, says something into the mic that makes the front of the room laugh, and you didn't catch it but you see the effect of it, the way the space loosens around him.

Then he plays.

You've heard people play guitar. You grew up with a radio and a television and enough county fairs to know what competent sounds like. This is not that. This is something that starts in his hands and moves through the instrument like it was waiting there and he's just the one who knew where to find it.

You pick up your drink. You put it down without drinking.

He moves differently up there. Not performed differently, just differently, like the stage is the place where the rest of him has room to exist. His head drops slightly when he hits something he likes. His eyes close for a bar and then open, find the middle distance, find the back wall. Find you, once, just for a second, before moving on like it was nothing.

You look down at the jacket in your lap: the patches, the worn collar, the smell of it, rain and something underneath that has no business being as present as it is.

You look back up and you realize, sitting there, that you've been collecting versions of his face without meaning to.

He plays three songs. You know this because you count them. The last one ends on a held note that he lets die slowly, deliberately, like he's deciding when to let go. 

The room comes back to itself. The applause is different from what the previous band got: warmer, more specific, the kind that knows what it's responding to.

He says something into the mic again, easy and unhurried, thanks the bar by name like it's an old argument he's fond of. Then he hands the guitar off and steps down from the stage, and you have approximately four seconds to decide what to do with your face before he's crossing the room toward you.

He drops back onto the stool. His cheeks are slightly flushed, his hair worse than before, and he reaches for his drink before remembering it's empty. He signals the bartender, then turns to look at you.

He looks at the jacket in your lap. "So," he says.

"So," you say.

"Verdict."

You take a second and he lets you take it, leaning one elbow on the bar, watching you with the patience of someone who already knows the answer and is enjoying the wait.

"You're good," you say, because there's no version of honesty that gets you out of this one.

"I know." No hesitation. But the way he's looking at you when he says it takes the arrogance out of it somehow, replaces it with something more direct. "I wanted you to know too."

The bar fills the silence around that. Someone laughs too loud near the door, the bartender sets two fresh drinks down and disappears.

"The jacket," he says eventually, nodding at your lap.

"You left it."

"I did, saving my place for after the show."

"I was holding it," you say, "so it wouldn't fall."

"Right." The corner of his mouth moves. "Considerate of you."

"I am a considerate person."

He looks at you for a moment in that way he has, the one that makes you feel like you've been read without giving permission.

"Yeah," he says quietly, "I'm starting to think there's a lot of things about you."

You don't answer that but you don't give the jacket back either.

~~

It's Friday, which means nothing except that the week has finally stopped moving and left you somewhere quiet with a cigarette and your feet on the railing.

You hear his door before you see him: the specific sound of it, the particular weight of his step on the gravel. He's got his keys in his hand, jacket on, heading for the van.

He sees you and automatically slows.

"Going to the store," he says, by way of hello.

"Okay."

He turns back with the expression of someone who already knows what they're about to do.

"You want anything?"

You look at your cigarette, at him. You think about the Friday night stretched out in front of you: the trailer, the couch, the film you've been meaning to watch.

"Popcorn," you say. "The microwave kind, oh! And Coke. And something with chocolate."

He stares at you for a moment.

"That's a lot of wants for someone sitting alone on a Friday."

"Are you going or not?"

"I'm going." He's already turning toward the van. "I'm just saying. You could've led with the movie."

You watch him go as you finish the cigarette.

"It's Nightmare on Elm Street," you call after him.

He raises one hand without turning around. Acknowledgment, or something close to it.

He comes back twenty minutes later with a paper bag and lets himself be let in, and the next part happens the way things happen when no one is officially deciding anything, he ends up on the floor with his back against the couch, you're sitting criss-cross above him, the lamp doing the bare minimum, the Coke sweating onto the coffee table, and Freddy Krueger doing his thing on the screen.

The popcorn sits between you, the joint appears at some point, the way it does.

"She knows she's in the dream," he says, after a while. "And she's still going toward him."

"Eddie..."

"I just think it's worth discussing."

"Watch the movie."

He watches the movie, mostly. 

The room gets warmer and quieter and the sounds from outside arrive slightly later than they should, and the conversation moves the way conversations move when no one is steering. From the film to nothing in particular to something that starts to matter without announcing itself.

"Can I ask you something?" he says to the TV.

"You're going to anyway."

"Why Indiana?"

You look at the screen. "Cheap. Quiet. Wayne had the trailer."

"That's the practical answer."

You glance down at him, he's still looking at the TV, his chin tipped up slightly, his profile caught in the blue light.

"I got divorced," you say simply, because it's late and the weed has done what weed does,"Eight months ago."

"It wasn't loud," you say. "No one screamed. It was very quiet, actually." You pull the sleeve of your shirt over your hand. "He had this way of explaining my feelings back to me. Why were too much. Why my reactions were disproportionate." A pause. "He did it long enough that I kinda started to agree with him, you know?"

The movie fills the silence. Someone runs down a hallway.

"Sorry," you say, and mean it. "That was..." You reach for something and land on the wrong thing entirely. "Freddy Krueger is a better conversationalist."

It lands badly, no timing at all, you know it lands badly. But he laughs anyway, a real one, and there it is: the slight fold at the corner of his eye, the crease in his left cheek, the specific unguarded quality of a face mid-laugh.

You look away first.

"He did a number on you," Eddie says, quieter now, the laugh still warm in his voice.

"He was very thorough."

"Yeah." He turns the chocolate wrapper over in his hands. "I've met guys like that. They make you think the problem is the size of you." He pauses, not quite getting the next part right, trying again. "You're not small. You've just been in a small place."

"You don't know that," you say.

"I've been paying attention all week," he says simply, like it's not an admission. "and I know you’re bigger than this, than him."

On screen someone screams. He shifts, turning to face you properly, his arm coming up to rest on the couch cushion beside your knee. The performance is gone, his voice dropping into the register it finds in small spaces.

"Look," he says. "I know you're older and you've got your whole," he gestures vaguely at you, at the blazer on the chair, at the stacked books, at the general fact of you, "thing going on. And I know I'm," another gesture at himself, less certain, "what I am." His jaw tightens slightly. "But I've been thinking about you since Monday, and I'm pretty bad at pretending I'm not."

You open your mouth but what comes out is a cough. Not a small one. A full, graceless, weed-in-the-wrong-place cough that bends you forward and will not stop, your eyes watering, one hand braced on the cushion.

"Are you?" he starts, between his own laughter.

You hold up one finger. The cough continues.

He gets up, goes to the kitchen, comes back with a glass of water and crouches in front of you, his mouth pressed shut in the specific way of someone fighting very hard not to laugh at you.

You take the water and drink. The coughing subsides.

"Okay," you say, hoarse.

"Okay," he says, and he's smiling, the real one, and he's close, and you're still catching your breath, and the TV is still going, and outside the park is still quiet.

"You were saying," you say.

"I think you heard me," he says.

You look at him. He looks at you. The lamp in the corner keeps doing its minimum.

"I need more water," you say.

"Sure," he says, and doesn't move, and you don't move either, and the movie keeps going unwatched in the blue light of the room.

~~

Saturday morning has the quality of something that hasn't been addressed yet.

He's gone when you wake up. The blanket folded on the couch with the particular neatness of someone who didn't want to leave evidence of being there.

The coffee you make is for one person. You drink it at the window and watch the park wake up slow under a gray sky that hasn't decided what it wants to do yet.

You're on the porch with the second cup when he passes, jacket on, hair still damp, looking at his boots until he looks up.

"Hey," he says.

"Hey."

He stops. You can see the decision happening: his feet slowing before the rest of him catches up.

You hold up your mug. An offer.

He comes up the steps without a word and takes it, wraps both hands around it, and stands beside you at the railing. You look at the park. He looks at the park. The gray sky stays undecided.

After a moment he reaches into his jacket and pulls out a cigarette, lights it, and holds the pack toward you.

"I'm almost out," you say, taking one.

"I know," he says to the park.

You smoke in a silence that has a week's worth of things in it. When the cigarette is done he sets the empty mug on the railing, reaches back into his jacket, and puts a full unopened pack next to it. Marlboros, soft pack. He doesn't look at you when he does it.

"Eddie," you say.

"I noticed," he says simply. "That's all."

The gray sky makes up its mind. The first drops hit the railing between you and he goes down the steps.

Wayne is at the kitchen table with his coffee and the newspaper and the particular stillness of a man who has been awake since five and has already formed opinions about the day.

He doesn't look up when Eddie comes in; he turns a page. Eddie gets himself another coffee with shaken hands. Wayne turns another page.

"Funny thing," Wayne says to the newspaper. "Van was in the garage all night, but you weren’t here."

"Roads were bad," Eddie says.

"Rained at eleven." Wayne turns a page. "Cleared up by midnight."

Eddie drinks his coffee, remembering that at eleven, he was intoxicated by your perfume, your laugh, you.

"She's pretty," Wayne says.

"Wayne."

"I'm just saying, boy."

"You don't have to, please."

"Smart too, from what I can tell." He folds the corner of a page down, thoughtful. "Those books she carries around."

"They're for work."

"Mm." Wayne takes a slow sip of coffee. "What kind of work?"

"The kind that…" Eddie stops. "I don't know, Wayne."

"But you've talked about it."

Eddie's ears go the specific red of a man who has run out of deflections and knows it.

"She seems like good people," Wayne says simply, and picks up his newspaper like the conversation is over, which it is, because Wayne has always known when he's made his point.

Someone knocks on the door.

They both look at it. Wayne looks back at Eddie over the top of the newspaper. Eddie looks at the door, then at his ears in the reflection of the window, then at the door again.

"I'll get it," he says.

"I imagine," Wayne says.

You're standing on the porch with your hands in your pockets and the unopened pack of Marlboros he left on the railing, which you are holding in a way that doesn't quite explain itself.

"Movie!" you say. "Tonight. My place. Eight o'clock?"

He leans against the doorframe. His ears are still red, which you notice and file away for later.

"What are we watching?" he grins.

"Does it matter?"

"No," he says. "Not really."

"Eight o'clock," you say, and go back down the steps.

He watches you cross the gravel. Behind him the kitchen is very quiet. Wayne is still pretending to read until,

"Eight o'clock," he says to no one in particular.

"Wayne!!!"

"Just memorizing," Wayne says. "In case you lose track."

He closes the door. He stands there for a second with his hand still on the knob. Then he does a small, contained, deeply undignified fist pump at the floor.

Wayne doesn't look up from the newspaper. "Just neighbors my ass," he says.

Eddie straightens up immediately. "Yep," he says with great dignity, and goes to his room.

It's ten past eleven in the morning. You have eight hours and fifty minutes.

You pick up your book, read the same paragraph four times and retain nothing. You put the book down.

You clean the bathroom, which didn't need cleaning. You rearrange the books on the shelf above the desk, then put them back the way they were because the original order was fine and you were just looking for something to do with your hands.

At two o'clock you hear the van leave. You don't go to the window. You are a grown adult and you don't go to the window, and when you hear it come back forty minutes later you also don't go to the window, and you are handling this very well.

At four you make tea you don't want. At five you eat something you don't taste. At six you sit on the couch with the television on and watch it without seeing it, your eyes moving to the clock with the frequency of someone who knows exactly what they're doing and is embarrassed about it.

At six forty-five you go to the bathroom and look at yourself in the mirror for a long moment.

"It's just a movie," you tell your reflection. Your reflection doesn't look convinced either.

At seven fifty-eight you sit back down on the couch, criss-cross, with a throw pillow in your lap and look at the door. At eight o'clock exactly, he knocks.

You wait three seconds so it doesn't seem like you were waiting for him at the door, then you open it.

He's showered. His hair is still slightly damp and he's got a clean shirt on, dark, the sleeves pushed up, and he's holding a bag that smells like something fried from the diner two streets over.

He has the specific expression of someone who also waited three seconds before knocking.

"Eight o'clock," he says.

"You're on time," you say.

"I'm always on time."

"You were late on Monday."

"The window was..." he stops. "Are you going to let me in?"

You step back from the door.

You end up where you always end up: you on the couch, him on the floor below you, the food between you, the lamp barely doing its work in the corner.

The food goes, the wrappers get thrown away. He comes back and sits, and you put something on the TV, something neither of you will watch, and the room settles into the specific silence of two people pretending to be comfortable.

On screen someone runs down a corridor. Someone else follows.

"She's going to trip," you say.

"She's going to trip," he says at the exact same moment.

She trips. You look at each other.

He's already looking at you. He has been for a while, you realize. Not at the screen, at you.

Looking in that way he has, the one that makes you feel like you've been read without giving permission. But this time there's no deflection left in him. The playful edge is gone, replaced by a quiet, heavy gravity that makes your breath hitch.

He moves, certain but unhurried. His hand finds your chin, his thumb brushing over your lower lip with a slow reverence that sends a shiver straight down your spine. When he kisses you, it isn't an anchor dropping; it is a total, breathless surrender. His lips touch yours with a gentleness so deliberate it feels almost sacred, as if he is trying to memorize the exact shape of you in the dark.

You make a small sound against his mouth, and the noise seems to undo something deep inside him. His hand slides up into your hair, his long fingers tangling in the strands, tilting your head back just enough to deepen the kiss. It is heavy, steady, and consuming.

He pulls you closer, his other hand anchoring at your waist before sliding down to your hip to lift you onto his lap. He settles you there, his large hands trembling just a fraction against your skin. He holds you with the quiet, desperate intensity of a man who knows he is touching something far better than he deserves, his face buried in the crook of your neck as he breathes you in, completely at your mercy.

His knee slides between yours, slow and certain, his mouth moving to your jaw, your throat, with the specific, unhurried attention of someone who has been thinking about exactly this. For all his usual restless, youthful bravado, here he lets you dictate the pace, completely yielding to a maturity that usually intimidates him.

"Eddie," you say to the ceiling, your fingers tightening in his hair.

"Yeah," he murmurs against your skin, his lips brushing your collarbone. He pauses for a fraction of a second, his breath hot against your throat. "You have no idea what you do to me. How long I've been losing my mind over this."

Your hand finds the back of his neck, the metal of his chain, the radiating warmth of his skin. You pull him back up to your mouth because the ceiling is suddenly far less interesting. He lets out a low, ragged sigh against your lips, a sound of pure relief, before he catches your mouth again. The lamp keeps doing its minimum in the corner, and outside, the park remains completely indifferent to any of this.

At some point he pulls back just enough. His forehead rests against yours, his breath uneven, his hands still tangled deep in your hair as if he’s anchored there, looking at you with a sudden, quiet vulnerability that erases every year between you.

"Okay," he says, his voice a low vow.

"Okay," you say.

Neither of you moves. The space between you is heavy with it.

"The movie," he whispers, a faint, breathless attempt to catch his bearings.

"What movie," you say.

He laughs, a soft huff against your lips, and kisses you again, slower this time. It is a deep, worshipful press of his mouth that belongs entirely to the two of you, while the TV keeps going unwatched in the blue light of the room.

~~

Sunday starts the way things start when no one has officially decided anything, slowly, and without an exit. 

You wake up to warmth. His arm is around you, heavy and certain, his chest against your back, his breath slow and even against the back of your neck. The room is gray with early light. The TV is off, the lamp is off, and the park outside is doing its quiet Sunday thing.

He's awake. You can tell by the quality of the stillness, not the loose stillness of sleep but the careful stillness of someone who has been awake for a while and decided not to move.

You don't move either.

His arm doesn't tighten. He doesn't say anything. He just stays, his hand open against your ribs, his breathing slow and deliberate, and you lie there in the gray light and let the morning take its time, and neither of you acknowledges that you're both awake, because acknowledging it would make it into something you'd have to address, and right now it's just this. His warmth at your back, the quiet park, the specific weight of a Sunday that hasn't asked anything of either of you yet.

Eventually you shift. Just slightly.

His arm tightens. Just slightly.

"Morning," he says, his voice still rough with sleep.

"Morning," you say.

A beat.

"Coffee?" he says.

"Please," you say.

He leaves at ten. You watch the van pull out from the window, which you do now, openly, without pretending you're not doing it.

He's back at noon.

He knocks twice and when you open the door he's holding a paper bag from the bakery on Elm and wearing yesterday's shirt and he looks at you with the straightforward expression of someone who has stopped pretending the van going anywhere was a real departure.

"Thought you left," you say.

"I got pastries," he says.

You step back from the door.

The afternoon happens in pieces, but the light is already changing, the warm amber of morning thinning into something flatter, the kind of gold that means the weekend is running out of air. He fixes the cabinet hinge without being asked, finds the screwdriver himself, does it while you sit on the counter eating a pastry and pretending to read. On Monday it had been a novelty. Today it feels like a countdown.

Later he finds your record player and puts something on, something slow and guitar-heavy, and the trailer fills with it. He sits on the floor with his back against the couch. You sit above him. His head tips back after a while and rests against your knee and you let it, your hand finding his hair without quite deciding to.

The record ends. The needle clicks on the spindle, over and over, a small patient sound in the quiet room.

Neither of you gets up to turn it over.

By the time he makes dinner the blue twilight is pressing hard against the window, making the room feel smaller. Eggs, toast, the last of the tomatoes. You sit across from him at the small table and the conversation is easy the way it's been all day, but underneath it something has shifted, the specific weight of hours that know they're numbered.

He says something that makes you almost laugh. You watch him watch you almost laugh, that warm look he doesn't always let you see.

You reach across the table. Your hand covers his. He turns it over and holds on, and his grip is slightly tighter than yesterday, a quiet reflex against something neither of you is naming.

The lamp is on low, the record back on, the dishes done. He's sitting on the edge of the bed watching you cross the room toward him, and his hands find your waist when you're close enough, and this time it's nothing like Saturday's urgency.

This is slower. This is deliberate. This is two people choosing, quietly, with full knowledge of what they're doing.

His forehead drops to your sternum for a moment, just resting there, his arms around you, his breath evening out.

"Hey," he says, quietly.

"Hey," you say.

He looks up.

You stay.

Afterward the room is dark and quiet and he's on his back with one arm around you, his rings on the nightstand in a small pile, his chest rising and falling in the particular slow rhythm of someone who has stopped performing anything. His other hand moves in your hair, absently, the way his fingers move on strings.

"Don't go anywhere," you say. Not tonight. Not in general. Both.

His arm tightens.

"Okay," he says, and means something large by it.

You wake up before him in the gray early light of Monday.

You get up carefully. You shower. You stand in front of the mirror and cover the marks on your throat with concealer until your neck looks like it belongs to someone who spent the week alone, which is the version of you that needs to exist in approximately two hours.

Then you take the gray blazer from the hanger. The good one, the structured one. You button it to the top. You pull your hair into a neat twist, pin the loose strands, straighten your collar. You locate the lesson plan in your bag. Literature, Hawkins Community College, Room 214. You check it until the words stop meaning anything.

You look like yourself. The other self.

You're pouring your coffee when you hear him stir.

He appears in the doorway a minute later, hair wrecked, eyes half-open, no shirt, and you make a very brief and very private mental note about the tattoos and the line of his shoulders and the general unfairness of the situation before returning to your coffee like a professional.

He pours himself a cup. Leans against the counter beside you. Looks at the lesson plan without picking it up.

"First day," he says.

"First day," you say.

"You nervous?"

"No," you say, which is mostly true.

"Liar," he says, without heat.

He puts his mug down. He reaches out and straightens your collar, which didn't need straightening, his fingers brief and warm against your neck. Then he drops his hand.

"You're going to be good at it," he says. Simply. Like it's a fact he's already confirmed.

"You don't know that," you say.

"I've been paying attention," he says. "Since Monday."

The other Monday. Last Monday. A week ago, which is either very short or very long depending on how you measure it.

You pick up your bag, your knuckles white against the leather. He walks you to the door, four steps, completely unnecessary, and catches your hand before you go down the steps. He turns you back, easy and unhurried, and kisses you once. Not long, not dramatic. Just the kind of thing people do when they've become the kind of people who do this.

"Good luck," he says. That half smile, the real one.

You look at him standing in your doorway with his coffee and his bare shoulders and that smile, and you think, briefly and inconveniently, that you are in serious trouble.

"Lock up when you leave," you say.

He raises his mug. Something between a toast and a goodbye.

You go down the steps. You don't look back, because if you look back you won't go, and you have a class at nine and a lesson plan and a gray blazer and a version of yourself that has somewhere to be.

Behind you the door stays open for a moment before you hear it close.

~~

Monday

The hallway smells of floor wax and coffee and the particular energy of people who haven't yet decided if they want to be here. You walk it with both hands around your travel mug, your blazer buttoned, your heels making a sound you recognize as armor.

Room 214 is yours by eight-fifteen. You write your name on the board in large block letters, set the attendance sheet square on the desk, arrange the chalk on the ledge the way you always do, a small, private ritual, the body taking over when the mind needs to settle. Your territory. The desk is a shield. You know this about yourself: you are good at this part, the standing-in-front-of-rooms part, the clear-voiced and certain part. You built it deliberately and it holds.

The room fills the way college rooms fill, without urgency, people arriving in ones and twos with coffee cups and half-open backpacks, finding seats with the specific social calculus of people who don't know each other yet but are already deciding what they think. Chairs scrape. Somebody drops a binder. You watch them settle with your hands resting on the desk, and you feel yourself shift into the register you know, attentive, warm, contained, and it feels clean. It feels like solid ground.

You pick up the attendance sheet.

The door is almost closed.

"Sorry." A drawling voice, unhurried, slightly out of breath. "Got stuck behind a tractor on route 9. Hawkins thing."

The professional smile is already shaped on your lips when you look up.

The smile stays. It has nowhere to go.

Eddie is standing in the doorframe.

His leather jacket is clean, actually clean, and the denim vest beneath it pressed flat, the patches in careful order, and his dark hair is damp and combed back from his face, which makes him look younger and simultaneously makes every angle of him more visible: the jaw, the cheekbones, the cut above his brow. He has a blue notebook gripped in one large hand, his knuckles white around it, the rings gone. He's already scanning the room for a seat with the slightly defensive posture of someone used to arriving places where they're not entirely wanted.

Then his eyes find you.

His feet stop.

The notebook drops slightly in his grip. His gaze moves down the gray blazer, slowly, despite himself, despite everything, then to the chalk between your fingers, then past you to the blackboard, where your name and your title sit in large block letters that seem, in this moment, to have been written specifically to rearrange something in him.

You watch it happen. You watch his jaw go slack and then harden. You watch the color leave his face and come back wrong, and you watch him run the same math you ran this morning in the bathroom mirror, the window latch, the porch, the laundry shed, the Hideout, Friday's floor, Saturday's couch, Sunday's everything, backward against Room 214 and Literature and the attendance sheet in your hand, arriving at the only answer there is.

The other students are finding their seats. No one is looking at him yet.

He looks at you. You look at him.

There is nothing either of you can do with your face that is adequate to this moment.

You lower your eyes to the attendance sheet first because one of you has to, because the room is full and twenty-three students will notice in approximately four more seconds if you keep standing here. You find your voice where you left it, clean and level, exactly where you need it.

"Find a seat, please," you say. To the room. To him. To no one specifically.

He moves.

He walks toward the back of the room with his steps heavy and deliberate, not looking at you, his jaw set hard. He pulls the last chair in the row with a screech of metal on linoleum that makes three people look up and then look away. He sits. He sets the blue notebook on the desk. He crosses his arms tight against his chest.

You call attendance.

When you say his name, Munson, E., third from the bottom, there is a pause that lasts exactly one second too long.

"Here," he says, to the desk.

Flat. Contained. The voice of someone who has taken everything and put it somewhere it can't be seen.

You move to the syllabus.

You talk about the semester, about Fitzgerald and Steinbeck, about the literature of disillusionment and reinvention, about characters who build themselves into something new and spend the rest of the book paying for it. Your voice is steady. Your hands are steady. You do not look at the back row unless you have to.

You're talking about Gatsby, about the green light, about the particular cruelty of wanting something just out of reach, when a voice comes from the back of the room.

"Does it count as reinvention," Eddie says, not quite raising his hand, "if you didn't know you needed it until it was already happening?"

The room turns to look at him. You don't.

You keep your eyes on the middle distance, on the space above everyone's heads, on the place you look when you need your voice to stay level.

"That's one of the questions the text asks," you say. "Whether transformation is ever truly chosen, or whether it chooses us."

A beat.

"And if it chooses you," he says, quieter now, "and then the situation changes. What happens to the person you were becoming."

The fluorescent light hums. Someone shifts in their seat.

You look at him then. You have to. It would be stranger not to.

He's looking directly at you for the first time since he walked in, his arms still crossed, his jaw still set, but his eyes are doing something else entirely, something that has nothing to do with Fitzgerald and everything to do with Sunday morning and a door closing and a van on route 9 that he drove to a building he didn't know you'd be standing in.

"That," you say, carefully, "is exactly what we're here to find out."

He holds your gaze for one more second. Then he looks down at the blue notebook and opens it, picks up his pen, and writes something you can't see.

The class continues. The ordinary machinery of a Monday morning grinds forward the way it always does.

Fourteen hours ago his arm was around you in the gray early light.

You write Chapter 1 — due Friday on the board.