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Richie was lying awake when he heard a knock at the door. Nothing that wanted to kill him would have knocked, he thought, and quite honestly he didn’t really care either. So he got up and answered it.
But it wasn’t Pennywise the Dancing Clown back for another round after all. It was just Beverly, pale and bruised-up, her hair hanging lank and wet down her back.
“Hey, Richie,” she whispered. “Can I come in?”
“Yeah,” Richie said in a normal tone. “I thought you’d be with Ben.”
She gave him a strange look, and Richie turned away from it and went back to the bed. Moving slow and quiet, Beverly shut the door and then followed. She was wearing a ratty oversized t-shirt that Richie was sure Tom Rogan had never seen before, and a pair of loose cotton shorts. As she crossed the room her limbs flashed pale and ghostly in the faint light, and then she was a dark warm presence by the bed, the mattress dipping under her weight. Richie let her scoot up next to him, and after a minute he sighed and let her put her head on his shoulder, his arm curling around her. Her hair was damp and fragrant against his cheek and her thighs were a solid warmth against his.
“Are you holding up okay?” Beverly was still whispering.
“Not really,” Richie said. His throat swelled up and choked off his voice, and his eyes burned so searingly he would have thought that it was his contacts again, if he’d been wearing them, and if the pain hadn’t been coming from the backs and corners of his eyes, where tears started. Air stuck in his chest; he opened his mouth and gaped for breath like a fish out of water.
“Honey,” Beverly said in a broken voice, and Richie found himself wishing that she’d whisper again; with her voice coming full and rich and wet out of the dark it was too real, it was all too real. She shifted and sat up and he turned and buried his face in her lap. The sob that wracked its way out of him felt like it fisted his guts and just about took them with it. The tears burned like acid. Vaguely he was aware of his mouth open and wet against her bare thigh as he sobbed and he was sorry for slobbering on her, but it was a concern so distant it might as well have belonged to someone else.
Beverly made an odd noise and her arms wrapped awkwardly around him. Richie realized that she was crying too, rocking them back and forth a little bit and crying. Her hair lay against his back and her breasts pressed up against his shoulder, moving with her hitching, panicky breaths.
“I miss him,” Richie mumbled, his mouth moving in a wet sexless kiss against her skin. He shifted his head until the meat of her leg pressed against his eyes, fine stubble pricking him lightly as he squeezed his eyes shut.
“I know, baby,” Beverly said unsteadily. “Me too.” She sobbed and one of her hands lifted from Richie’s back. Wiping her eyes. “It’s not fair,” she moaned, a low plaintive child’s wail. “It isn’t fair at all.”
Nothing was fair but Richie knew what she was saying, that she was raging and grieving against a universe that had taken Eddie away—and Stan too, he realized, he was crying for Stan too, and shuddered as a fresh and painful wave of convulsive sobs wracked him—when they should have had a long time together, a universe that had only given them a few short years in each other’s minds and company when they should have had decades, they should have been friends forever. It wasn’t fair. It was cruel. A gulf loomed in front of him, terrifying: the gulf of the future, the gaping chasm of Eddie’s loss and Stan’s loss that had torn out the floor of his way forward. A week ago he couldn’t have known the difference, but everything had changed since a week ago, and he felt that he would have anyway, somehow. He buried his face in Beverly’s leg like he could crawl inside her and hide away from a universe that hurt, it fucking hurt, it fucking hurt…
Eventually, after a span of time that could have been thirty minutes or three hundred, Richie felt that he was cried out. His mouth was cottony and his head throbbed, his whole damn body ached. The rage and fear and grief and the loss—god, the unbearable meaningless loss of Eddie from the universe—was still in him, ugly and huge. But he didn’t have a damn tear left in him, didn’t have the strength to cough out one single sob more. He lay boneless across Beverly’s lap, the top of his head pressing against the hard shelf of her pubic bone; he realized with a vague sense of embarrassment and a strong swell of emotion that was maybe love or safety or maybe even some kind of desire that he could smell her. It was a sharp animal smell that carried under the softer, sour scent of her sweat gathering in the creases of her hips and the pits of her knees, neither unpleasant nor particularly welcome. He turned his head so that his nose was against her thigh and his ear was in the warm dark hollow between her legs and traced meaningless shapes on her leg, pushing his fingers against the fine sharp stubble. Beverly was done crying too, now just a warm still body folded over Richie’s. Maybe she was asleep.
The dryness of his mouth was unbearable. He wriggled, and Beverly sat up, swaying like a sleepwalker, and gazed silently into space while Richie took a glass and went into the bathroom.
He filled the cup mechanically, drained it with mechanical urgency. Once more he drank, and then filled it again and brought it back to Beverly. Her hand drifted up to accept the glass, pale as a ghost, and she drank it all with a blankness pervading her actions and expression, like a sleepwalker still. But when she lowered the glass Richie saw that it had shifted, passed away to leave her exhausted but awake and present.
She leaned over and put the glass on the nightstand. The sharp clink of the heavy glass meeting the wood seemed like the only sound in the world, and then the rustle as she drew back the bedcovers was the only one instead. They lay down together, tangling themselves up like kids, and Beverly pulled the sheets over them. Richie tried to synchronize his breathing with hers so that when her ribcage collapsed on an exhale he was breathing in to fill the space she’d left, and on the swell of her inhale he breathed out to make room.
“I love you, Bev,” he mumbled. His eyes had drifted closed without his permission. His body felt as heavy and settled as wet concrete.
“I love you too, Rich,” she said, low and throaty. He felt the brush of lips on his chest and her arm tightened around his waist.
For a while they were both quiet, but Richie remained stubbornly awake and he felt that Bev was too.
“Why aren’t you with Ben?” It was a question that had been nagging at Richie. He didn’t think he would be able to stand it if Bev was only here because he’d been so wretched that she didn’t want to leave him alone. Bizarrely he felt afraid that she was only there to comfort him, although he could feel a spot of damp on the back of his shirt from her tears, he’d felt her body wrack itself with sobs.
“I don’t know,” Beverly said. Her voice was hoarse but very lucid. Richie had been right that she was lying awake as well. “I wanted to be with you.”
“But you and Ben are—you’re…?”
“Yeah,” Beverly sighed. It tickled just over Richie’s collarbone. “I think we’re going to sleep together sooner rather than later. He’s probably the one great romance of my life.”
A hard knot clenched tight in Richie’s chest.
“But I felt like…” Beverly drew her fingers slowly up and down Richie’s spine, thinking. “I felt like I needed to be with you tonight. Because I—I didn’t really understand it earlier. There was a part of me that couldn’t make sense of it. I guess I half-thought he’d be waiting for us back here, like he’d just gone ahead because he couldn’t stand not to clean himself off straight away, and he was going to give us hell when we walked in for mucking around in stagnant water. And now I—” Her voice had gotten more and more strained as she spoke and now it cracked horribly. “I mean, he’s really gone, isn’t he? Both of them are. And I just needed to be with you because you understand.”
“What do you mean,” Richie said. His heart was starting to beat faster. If it were possible to slow the heartbeat with one’s mind Richie’s would be stopped dead in his chest, but he was forced to endure it, bracing himself unwillingly.
“You and he were so close,” Beverly whispered.
A horrible sensation filled Richie’s chest. It was like all his guts had been scooped out so that there was cold air whistling through his ribs; he thought crazily that Beverly could reach inside him if she pushed. It was the sensation of absolute vulnerability.
“I’m in love with him,” he said in an awful croak. That aching hollowness worsened, pervaded him down to his gut. There was almost a physical sensation of being open from sternum to pelvis, his empty skin flapping against the bedsheets. Of course there was nothing, just his body whole and well and fine, if exhausted, if bruised and strained and put through the wringer a couple times. But he felt it all the same in a way that was so real it scared him.
“I know,” Beverly murmured. Her voice was kind, there was nothing in it but simple acceptance of the way things were, which was that Richie Tozier was badly in love with Eddie Kaspbrak. Still Richie was afraid. Still he held that awful flayed feeling.
Maybe she sensed it: she lifted her head up and looked Richie in the face. They were almost nose to nose and her eyes were dark and colorless. “I know you like men, Rich. It’s okay.”
“I know you know,” Richie rasped. Somehow his body squeezed out a few more tears. They came reluctantly and rolled down his cheek and pooled in the bridge of his nose. “I could barely—but I know you knew. You and Stan always knew.”
Beverly smiled at him. Good old Bev with her watchfulness, her preternatural ability to hit the mark. Stan the Man with his neat and ordered mind, who was sensitive and who made sense of the world where there was sense to be made. They’d always seen him, Richie remembered, with a kind of easy clarity. Right to the core of him.
Probably all of them had known, Richie thought. They weren’t idiots; probably no one who talked that much about fucking people’s mothers could actually have much interest in girls. But he felt that of all of them, only Beverly and Stan and maybe—maybe Eddie had really known in a reasoning, aware sort of way.
“I don’t know what to do anymore,” Richie said, struggling. “I don’t know how to go back to it all.” A life without him, a life without them, a life that had hardly been a life at all, just treading water for twenty seven years until it was time to go back to what was real, to finish what they’d started.
“Neither do I,” Beverly said, a low note of hopelessness in her voice. Richie imagined what was waiting for her out in the real world—a divorce suit, maybe a lawsuit to send Tom to jail or at least cough up a hefty fine, some long unbearable negotiation to amputate the Rogan from Marsh + Rogan, trying to salvage her company once it got carved down the middle—and shuddered too.
“But you’re gonna go with Ben,” Richie said.
“I don’t know.” There was a note of frustration in Beverly’s voice, and longing. “We haven’t talked about it yet.”
“You know he’ll be there for you,” Richie said, and Beverly shrugged, something scared and unpleasant in her face, so he kissed her forehead and said, half asking, “And we can always go together. If—if Ben doesn’t come through for you—he will, but in a far-off alternate universe where he doesn’t, we can go together.”
“Yeah,” Beverly rasped. Her eyes were bright with emotion. “We can always go together, Trashmouth. Any universe you want.”
“Thanks, Bevvie,” Richie said, feeling a little overwhelmed himself. Before he could talk himself out of it he leaned in and kissed her softly on the mouth.
There wasn’t a moment of confusion or misunderstanding, like Richie had been afraid of. Beverly kissed him back like she’d known it was coming, although she couldn’t have because Richie hadn’t known he was going to kiss her until their lips were touching and it was too late to bail out. It was just a short, chase kiss, like a kiss between kids who love each other but don’t really know what kissing is, or between two old people who have been married to each other for a very long time. When it was over Beverly lay back down with a slightly bemused look in her eyes, but she was smiling. She looked relieved. Richie couldn’t have said why but he felt it too.
“Goodnight, Bev,” Richie said, closing his eyes.
Their foreheads were touching. They were breathing each other’s air. “G’night, Richie,” Beverly murmured.