Chapter Text
Three things about Eddie Kaspbrak were universally true—his pre-med major was giving him ulcers, he treated his undiagnosed attention disorder with obscene amounts of coffee which probably didn’t help his undiagnosed anxiety disorder (after a childhood full of doctors poking and prodding at his outsides, he didn’t want some shrink poking around his insides too), and he was pretty sure that one day he’d strangle his regular barista and dump his body in the Hudson.
Every morning, at 7:30 (sharp) after his 5:45 run and 6:50 shower, he headed out of his shoebox studio and walked about five feet into the coffee shop below it. It was called The Naked Bean, which was a stupid name, but they had good coffee. It was also extremely convenient for his daily commute (what with being literally directly under his apartment). And the prices weren’t ridiculous, he could manage to sustain his caffeine addiction on his shoestring student budget. The décor was cool, without being like one of those corny yuppie hot spots with super zoomed in pictures of coffee beans all over the walls. This place was full of movie posters, and concert posters, and potted plants, and a tasteful collection of figure drawings which were probably a reference to the shop’s name. Their signature roast was just the right mix of light and dark for Eddie’s particular tastes, and they made a mean lemon-poppyseed muffin.
As far as Eddie was concerned, The Naked Bean was nearly perfect.
Except for one glaring detail.
One tall, lanky, dumb detail. With stupid dorky glasses and a stupid goofy grin and a name tag that read RICHIE in a stupid scratchy scrawl.
This stupid dumb gangly detail that Eddie assumed was named Richie had started working there about three months after Eddie discovered the place.
Their first encounter had gone a little like this:
Eddie stepped up to the counter at 7:35 (he’d taken a longer shower than he usually did). The barista that up until that point he’d never seen before had leaned one hand against the counter and the other on his hip and had asked for his order in a stupid fake Southern drawl, and then for Eddie’s name. And once the coffee was ready, even though Eddie was the only customer in the place, he insisted on yelling:
“I have a latte for Edgar!”
“It’s Eddie.”
“Eduardo, here’s your latte!”
“It’s Eddie, dickwad.”
“Elvis!”
“Fuck you.”
Eddie had stormed out the door and one thought replayed over and over all through his walk to the subway station: I am never going back there again.
The next day, he got there at 7:15.
—
Richie had been working at the Bean for four weeks, and Eddie had learned how to tolerate him. Sort of.
He poked fun at other customers, on occasion, but it seemed like Eddie was the focus of a special kind of attention that Richie reserved just for him.
It became a lot harder to get any work done when he could always see Richie milling about in the periphery, could hear him poke the other barista in the arm and tell her bad jokes until she let loose a peal of laughter and said, “beep beep, Richie!” as if that meant anything. Could hear him singing along to himself as he wiped down the espresso machines, the different voices he practiced on customers to make them smile (he was really good at impressions, even though Eddie would rather drink sewer water than ever say that aloud), and all things considered, Eddie’s productivity levels dipped severely.
But it was all worth it.
Because the Bean had the best coffee, of course.
Richie was an annoying, too-tall, walking human tornado, but he was really good at making lattes.
Eddie decided that day to have his coffee there instead of taking it to-go, and settled down into a mid-century looking chair and table set arranged right beside the window, with a perfect view of the street. He had a paperback in his hands—The Bridge, it was a book that Bill hadn’t been able to shut up about, so he lent it to Eddie to read as well. It was a little grim for Eddie’s taste, but the prose was good. And he had to get used to reading the scary stuff considering that none of the manuscripts Bill wrote could be described as easy reading.
There was another customer in the place, sitting in the back and listening to something on their MiniDisc Walkman, and the sidewalk outside was quiet. It was a rare lazy day, and from what Eddie could gather, the lack of excitement was driving Richie crazy. The dial on his jokemeter was turned up to ten, and apparently his zingers were getting mixed reviews from his red-haired barista friend.
Eddie wished he had a Walkman himself to drown out the noise.
He rolled his eyes, took a sip of his latte, and turned the page.
On the to-do list:
A) Get a portable music player and a good set of headphones or B) get a decent pair of earplugs, for days just like this one.
Richie started to sing to himself, and Eddie couldn’t help but look up. It seemed like he never could, like Eddie was always keeping his eyes on him, trying to predict what idiotic antics he’d come up next.
“Ooo-wee-ooo I look just like Buddy Holly,” Richie sang off-key, gently whacking the other barista with a rag. She laughed, and he took one of her hands and spun her in a playful twirl as he sang, “oh-oh and you’re Mary Tyler Moore!” He dipped her a little, and she laughed again, and the sound was contagious because before he could stop himself Eddie was laughing too, and Richie’s head whipped around. He was so surprised that he dropped the other barista a little, and once she righted herself she smacked his arm and said something that Eddie couldn’t hear with a knowing sort of look in her eyes.
Richie smiled, wider and goofier and happier than Eddie knew anyone could smile, looking at Eddie like making him laugh for the first time in four weeks was his biggest achievement, like he was a little kid at Christmas. Eddie felt himself smile back, and then he shrunk beneath that gaze, turning back to his book even though he wasn’t really seeing the words on the page anymore. His cheeks felt a little warm—from the coffee. The coffee was warm. So naturally his face would heat up. Naturally.
Eddie smiled a secret little smile down at his mug and thought—he makes really fucking good lattes.
—
Eddie stopped ordering to-go entirely.
It was probably really good for his stress. Sometimes it was a good thing to just sit down and watch the city go by from the cozy spot by the window, a warm latte in his hand, Eddie supposed.
It could balance out the hectic go-go-go pace of his pre-med life, the routine that was crushing Eddie beneath its thumb, the endless essays and assignments and lab reports and quarterly academic assessments.
And if the days that he spent sitting in that cozy spot by the window, sipping a latte, watching the world go by happened to line up almost exactly with the days that Richie was scheduled to work a shift behind the counter?
Coincidence.
Just coincidence.
—
Midterms were rapidly encroaching, and Eddie just wanted to lay down and die.
Radius, ulna, tibia, fibula, ran through his mind constantly, like the most boring song in the history of forever. Osteoblasts, osteocytes, osteoclasts, osteo-what-the-fuck-ever
He knew that he knew these terms, he knew that he’d committed them all to memory, he knew that this was the easy part—but he also knew that if he failed this midterm his grade for the rest of the semester would completely tank and he didn’t have the money to retake a class and he was barely hanging onto a C+ as it was and—
His head hurt.
He needed coffee.
He burst into The Naked Bean a little after noon, backpack slung over his shoulder, weighted down with books. He looked up to see Richie, wearing his stupid goofy grin, who hip-checked the barista already at the register out of the way so that he could be the one to take Eddie’s order.
It had been four months since Richie started working there, and the two had fallen into a sort of routine.
“Edmundo!”
“Not my name.”
“What brings your adorable face into this fine establishment?”
“Latte,” said Eddie, unable to form any words beyond a caveman’s vocabulary in his grumpy stupor. He threw a five dollar bill in Richie’s direction and without another word stomped over to his usual table by the window. He unloaded his book-bag with a huff, lined up his highlighters, clicked open his pen, and dove headfirst into pre-med hell.
The coffee helped. Cleared his mind a little, slowed the frenzied march of human physiology that swarmed through his skull. Skull—cranial, frontal, occipital, ethmoid, parietal, and…and—fuck. Eddie groaned into his mug, and frowned when he went to take a sip only to realize it was empty. Shit.
Eddie fished for his wallet, about to head back to the counter and procure another hit of sweet, sweet caffeine—but then a latte was already slid in front of him. A hand—phalanges, carpal, metacarpal—cleared his old mug, and Eddie looked up to see that the hand was connected a stupid gangly barista with a stupid sappy smile. “I—I didn’t—“
Richie shrugged. “This one’s on the house. Honestly, I’m afraid to see what kind of tiny angry cryptid you’d turn into if you went too long without it, so.” He backed up towards the counter, gave Eddie a boy scout salute. “Happy trails, Doogie.”
Eddie just blinked, brain too full of body parts to send words to his mouth, so he took a sip of his latte and armed himself with his highlighter, ready to charge back into battle against his physiology textbook.
Hours passed, and the mid October sky began to darken, and Eddie didn’t realize just how long he’d been there, slaving away over his textbooks, highlighter in hand. He and Richie had come up with a sort of unspoken system—Richie would notice whenever Eddie’s latte-supply ran low, refill it without a word, and when Eddie would reach for his wallet Richie would just joke about putting it on his tab.
Richie was still dumb. And still stupid. But he was maintaining Eddie’s required constant caffeine buzz, so Eddie wanted to kill him slightly less than he did the day before.
He was probably on his fourth latte, and sure that he was going to pull out half of his hair if he had to look at his textbook any longer, when he heard Richie say, “I’m Richie, by the way,” as he placed the fresh coffee on the table.
“I know,” said Eddie, pointing at his name tag. Richie looked down like he’d forgotten it was there.
“Yeah, but my friends call me Dick.”
“No we don’t!” The other barista—the pretty redhead with a pageboy haircut that Eddie discovered was named Beverly—said from behind the counter.
“Don’t listen to her, I’ve never seen her before in my life,” said Richie with a wave of his hand. “Anyway, yeah, all my friends call me Dick,” Richie raised his eyebrows. There was a gleam of something mischievous in his eyes. “You know, on account of my huge—“
“Oh my god,” Eddie groaned, flopped his head into his open textbook and banged it three times just to drive his point home. “Where’s his fucking off button?” He said into the pages as Beverly giggled, and he pretended not to notice the fluttering in his stomach when Richie’s laughter joined in.
By his fifth latte, Eddie was pretty sure he was losing his mind.
Every time he closed his eyes, he could still see sentences from his books swirling around on the backs of his eyelids, like they’d made a permanent impression. The other barista—Bev, Eddie had learned—slung her bag over her shoulder and headed out with a danish in her hand, and called out goodbyes to both of them as she left.
There were no more customers. It was just Eddie and Richie. And suddenly Eddie found it very hard to concentrate.
“Hey,” Richie said, and it made Eddie nearly jump out of his skin. “Woah, easy there.”
“Sorry, I just—“ Eddie waved at the open books around him like that was answer enough.
“Anatomy and physiology, huh?” Richie said, making a clicking sound with his tongue. “How’s it going?”
“I feel like my brain is melting.”
“So, as expected.”
Eddie groaned and banged his head against his book again.
“Need some help?”
Eddie snapped his head up. “Help?”
Richie shrugged. “Yeah. I’ve got my closing duties done, there’s no other crabby co-eds here— so, want some help?”
“From you?” Eddie hadn’t meant for it to be an insult, but by the way Richie’s eyes flashed with something he couldn’t name, Eddie realized the words had come out harsher than intended. “Sorry, I—“
“Eh,” Richie stepped back into his easy-going smile, waved off Eddie’s apology, “I get it. People see me and can’t believe that I was blessed with both beauty and brains.”
Eddie tried not to smile. And mostly failed.
“Seriously, I can help out if you want. I’d be bored out of my mind sitting here by myself anyway, and I aced this class when I took it.”
“You did?” Eddie asked, and moved around his books to make room at the table for Richie without even realizing.
“Mmmhmm. I know all 207 bones.”
“There’s only 206 bones—“ Richie waggled his eyebrows at him, “oh Jesus Christ.”
“Quiz me.”
“Quiz you?”
“Yeah. Quiz me. Point to a bone, any bone, and I’ll name it.”
Eddie pointed to a spot on his arm.
“Ulna.”
Another spot.
“Radius.”
Another.
“Humerus—come on, Eduardo, you’re going easy on me.”
Eddie blinked. “So you’re good at anatomy.”
“I’m really good at anatomy.” Richie sat down in the chair opposite from Eddie, sprawled out, checked the watch on Eddie’s wrist instead of the one on his own. “And I’ve got two hours until closing, so take advantage of me.”
Eddie eye’s widened a little, and he felt a light flush—sympathetic nervous response, adrenaline rushing, heart pumping more blood— spread across his cheeks because of the places his mind went when Richie said that. Richie noticed, his own eyes widened a bit behind his glasses, and he cleared his throat. “Um, you know.” He cleared his throat again, coughed the thought away. “So, Eddie Spaghetti, whaddaya say? How about we embark on a journey through the skeletal system together.”
“I’ll break your skeletal system if you ever call me Spaghetti again.”
“I’m hearing a solid yes.”
Richie wasn’t lying when he said that he could help, and they’d gotten so much done that the next day Eddie stormed back in with two more textbooks under his arm. He settled into his spot, opened up his notes, and returned the smile that Richie sent his way.
“What’ve you got for us today?” Richie asked as he handed Eddie his first latte of many.
“Organic chemistry and biology.”
Richie exhaled air through his teeth, “you always know what get's a guy going.”
They fell into a similar routine over the course of the next few hours—Richie kept Eddie supplied with an endless supply of lattes (“Made with loooove just for you, Eds,” Richie had said, poking Eddie in the cheek until Eddie swatted him away), and on his breaks or when the shop was slow he’d pull up a seat and they’d attack the complexities of human biology together.
Richie was just as frustratingly good at this as he was at anatomy, it was like his brain moved a hundred miles ahead, wrapped his mind around concepts in the time it took for Eddie to just read the sentence. And he was so blasé about it, which just made Eddie want to strangle him.
But Richie was his lifeline to scoring a passable grade, so strangling was out of the question. At least until the quarter was officially over.
They spent just as much time studying as they did goofing off—or at least, Richie goofed off and Eddie tried not to show that he enjoyed it—and it felt like they were teetering on the edge of friendship; they were more than acquaintances, almost friends.
And after Richie locked up and they said goodbye on the stoop of the cafe, Eddie pretended that the jittery feeling he felt in his chest was just from a little too much caffeine.
—
“So?” Richie asked him a week later, once the rest of the customers had left and he’d locked the door and flipped the sign, pulling up a seat at Eddie’s table and resting his head on his elbows. Eddie just glanced at him over the top of his book.
“So what?”
Richie let out an exaggerated groan, leaned across the table to snatch Eddie’s book from between his hands. Richie read the title, frowned. “Horror, huh? Didn’t take you for a horror kind of guy.”
“Fuck off.“ The book had actually been lent to him by Bill, one of a whole stack of paperbacks currently sitting on his nightstand that Bill insisted was ‘research.’ “I have hidden depths.”
Richie grinned wildly, like the thought amused him more than anything else on the planet, and gave Eddie back his book. “I hear his endings suck.”
“Shut up, I didn’t ask you.”
Richie leaned his chin on his elbows again, kicked at Eddie’s shin from under the table. He was like a little kid sometimes, and Eddie knew that he should be annoyed, but something swelled up inside his chest instead. He fought back a smile. “Aren’t you supposed to be working?”
“I am working.”
“No, you’re bugging me.”
“Customer service is the most important part of the job, Eds.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Sure thing, Spaghetti.”
“I’ll kill you.”
“I’d like to see you try.”
Eddie reached over to flick Richie on the forehead, but Richie caught his hand before he could. Eddie’s brain stalled for a second, focused on their fingers, and Richie used this moment of weakness to lean across the table and pinch Eddie’s cheek. “Ugh, stop!” Eddie cried once his brain had decided to start firing neurons again. He swatted Richie’s hands away, and Richie fell back into his seat, laughing. “Shut up!”
“I didn’t say anything!”
“That’s a first!”
“Fuck you,” Richie said, but he was laughing.
“Fuck you!” Eddie shot back around a smile.
“Okay, Eddie, now that you’re done flirting with me—“
Eddie kicked Richie’s shin, he felt his face get all flustered. “Fuck off, dipshit, I am not—“
“Let’s get back to the subject at hand.” Richie stilled, looked up at Eddie from beneath his glasses. “So?”
“So?”
“How’d the fucking tests go?”
“Oh.” Eddie closed his book primly, avoided Richie’s eyes and looked at his nailbeds instead. “They, uh…” He trailed off, spoke to the lines on his palm.
He didn’t have to look up to know that Richie had deflated a little. “Oh,” Richie said, Eddie could hear the uncertain half-smile in his voice, “that bad, huh?”
Eddie nodded, took a deep breath. “Yeah, Rich. I, uh…” He looked out the window. “I passed them all.”
“You fucking passed!”
“89 on biology, 91 on o-chem, 97 on anatomy and physiology. And I did fine on English Lit and Calculus, but I wasn’t worried about those.”
“Ninety-fucking-seven!”
“Ninety-fucking-seven.”
Richie leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms over his chest as he looked at Eddie with something like amusement, something like pride. “You had me going there for a second, you little fucking dick.”
“You’d know all about little dicks, wouldn’t you, Richie?”
Richie hollered with laughter, reaching over to ruffle Eddie’s hair before Eddie fought him off, trying to stifle his giggles. “That’s not what your mom said last night!”
“Fuck you!”
“Fuck you!”
“Excuse me,” Eddie turned to the empty counter, yelled into the empty cafe. “Excuse me I’d like to talk to a manager, I’m being harassed by an employee over here, I’d like to file a complaint—“
Richie cleared his throat and put on a fancy manager Voice. Eddie was still surprised at how good he was at impressions. “Hello, Mr. Spaghetti, I am the proprietor of this establishment, would a chocolate chip cookie and a slice of super-crumb coffee cake ease your troubles?”
“Make it two cookies,” Eddie said solemnly, “and you’ve got a deal.”
Richie dutifully stood and put the snacks on a plate, set it between them. Eddie handed one of the cookies to Richie, and they split the coffee cake down the middle.
Richie kept telling jokes, and Eddie kept pretending that he didn’t find them funny, and they fell into a comfortable sort of rhythm. Eddie didn’t know the last time he’d laughed so hard. He felt unburdened, he felt like he was a kid again—or at least the way that he should have felt as a kid, if he could have been like Bill or Mike, running carefree, scraping knees on pavement and tree branches and smiling all the while, unafraid of being dragged out to doctors all across Penobscot county so his mother could get seven second opinions on what virus it was exactly that was eating Eddie’s brain and making him question her infallible authority.
Eddie felt light. It was too easy to get lost in it.
“Hey Spaghetti,” Richie said, brushing crumbs off of his hands, “how about—don’t make that face at me, I know you secretly love the nicknames—how about I take you out for a drink?” He smiled at Eddie. “We gotta celebrate, man! You made those midterms your bitch.”
Eddie ignored the little flip his stomach did. “Yeah, yeah,” his voice was breathier than he expected it to be. “That’d be great.”
“Sweet,” Richie said, that wild smile still on his face, “I know this awesome little dive that doesn’t take I.D. so they’d let even a little munchkin like you sit at the bar.”
Eddie kicked Richie under the table again. “I’m 20, not 13, dickwad. And my birthday’s next month.”
“Like I said, little munchkin.”
“Okay, I’ll go, but only if the first round’s on you.”
Richie gasped like he was appalled, put a hand to his chest. “Eddie, who do you take me for!” He looked at Eddie for a second more, that unreadable smile still lighting up his face, before he stood up and bussed their table. “All right, let me just clean these off and we can blow this popsicle stand—“
Eddie nearly jumped out of his skin when someone rapped their knuckles against the window to his right. He leapt out of his chair so fast that it would have toppled over if he didn’t catch it and right it back onto its feet. “Jesus fuck,” he whispered under his breath.
The person who’d knocked didn’t look like an armed robber ready to storm the place, thank god—she was a girl about their age with long dirty blonde hair, crimped in sections and lightened in streaks by the sun. She had big cornflower blue eyes, and those eyes looked right at Richie.
“Shit,” Richie said from behind the counter, and Eddie waited for him to tell the girl that the cafe was closed, but instead he said, “shit, shit, shit,” as he vaulted across the counter. “Date night, I totally fucking forgot. Shit.”
Oh.
Date night.
Eddie couldn’t move. He felt a little cold, a little heavy all over, like his shoes had sunk right into the tile and were pinning him in place. He racked his brain to identify the symptoms, to diagnose whatever malady he’d contracted that suddenly stole the air from his lungs and the words from his lips and made his heart drop all the way to the floor.
He was probably dying.
Date night.
Richie leapt to the front door, unlocked it with the keys he kept on a carabiner on his belt loop, and ushered the girl—his girl—inside. Eddie made a painfully conscious effort to look casual.
“Hey,” the girl said to Richie. Her voice was soft and deep, kind of raspy. She was taller than Eddie: willowy and thin and although she was dressed in just jeans, Docs, and a denim jacket, Eddie thought she must have been a fashion model or some shit. Because this was New York. Because of course.
Date night.
“Hey,” said Richie, shooting her a smile that looked a lot like the one he’d shot Eddie before, a lot like the smile that felt like something special, something secret. Jesus Christ, Eddie. “So, um, I just gotta wash a dish and then I’m all yours. I, uh, ran behind.”
The girl grinned up at him. “You forgot, didn’t you?” She didn’t sound mad.
Richie smiled, sheepish. “Yeah, kid, I forgot. But just give me like, two minutes, okay? I’ll give you a leftover scone or whatever to make up for it!” He called out as he ran backwards into the back room to wash up.
“You’re lucky I love you!” The girl shouted after him, and he blew her an exaggerated kiss before disappearing behind the door. She laughed lightly to herself, it was a high and pretty sound, and then looked at Eddie. “Hi,” she said on a smile, perfectly pleasant. “I’m Sandy.”
Sandy extended her hand for a shake, and Eddie had to remind his muscles that their job was to move. After a second, he took her hand and shook it. She was warm and soft. Bangles jingled against her wrist as she moved.
“I’m uh, I’m Eddie.”
“You’re Eddie!” Sandy said around a wide smile, like she knew exactly who he was. “Oh my god, you’re Richie’s favorite regular.”
“Don’t tell him that, it’ll go straight to his head!” Richie yelled from the back.
“I am?”
“Yeah, he’s always talking about you.”
Eddie wanted to say, he’s never mentioned you, but that would be bitchy, and Eddie had no reason to be bitchy to this girl who seemed like she was nothing but sweet and warm and wonderful and goddamn fucking perfect. So instead he bit those words back and said, “oh,” instead.
“How’d your midterms go?”
“My midterms?” Eddie echoed back, like he was incapable of forming a coherent sentence on his own. Stellar first impression.
Date night.
“He killed it!” Richie yelled.
Sandy grinned at him, and Eddie felt caught in her smile. It was sunny, brilliant, a flash of even white teeth, and it made her cornflower eyes go all crinkly. “You killed it?”
Suddenly bashful, Eddie looked at the toes of his shoes. “Yeah,” he said to his Converse. “I, uh, well I passed them all.”
“Ninety-fucking-seven Sandy!” Richie yelled.
Sandy kept grinning at Eddie like she’d known him her whole life. “Hell yeah!” She cheered, and held her hand out for a high five. Eddie laughed a little, hollow, and gave her one. Her bangles jingled.
Something still coiled in his stomach, crawled beneath his skin. He felt all jittery.
Richie finished up whatever he was doing in the back and vaulted over the counter again. “Sorry, Eds,” he said, an apologetic half-smile on his face. His cheeks were a little flushed beneath his glasses. Richie picked up their jackets from the coat rack by the door and handed Eddie’s back to him. “Do you think we could do a rain check?” He asked, slinging an arm around Sandy’s shoulders and pulling her in for a brief sideways hug. Sandy giggled, and Eddie looked out at the street.
“Sure, Rich,” said Eddie, feeling like his stomach had turned to lead. “We can do a rain check.”
It was like the sun had come out on Richie’s face, and he nodded his head. “Rain check. Great. Tomorrow okay?”
“Tomorrow’s okay.”
“Great. Tomorrow.” Richie smiled at him for a second more, and then opened the door for the three of them to walk through. Eddie went first, stood awkwardly on the pavement, kicked at a loose pebble with his shoe. Richie didn’t move his arm from where it rested comfortably across Sandy’s shoulders, even as he locked the door behind them, and Eddie pretended not to notice, and pretended not to notice the easy way their bodies moved together.
Date night.
He felt really fucking dumb, he felt a dull ache behind his eyes.
“All right, tomorrow,” Richie said again, “meet here at closing, okay?”
“Sure.” Eddie stuffed his hands in his pockets as Richie and Sandy set off with a wave, he tried to look anywhere else but his eyes could only focus on the casual drape of Richie’s arm around her thin frame, on the way Sandy wrapped her arm around his waist, the way he bent his head to murmur something to her, the way her laughter drifted back to Eddie on the wind, carefree as anything.
He walked inside, locked the door behind him, trudged up the stairs, and screamed into his pillow without knowing exactly why.
The next day, Eddie didn’t go down to The Naked Bean. He didn’t wait outside after closing.
He drew his blinds so he couldn’t see Richie out there, standing alone on the street.
He didn’t go the day after that, or the day after that.
A week went by before he stepped foot into the cafe again. It was busy, during peak morning hours, and there were five people in front of him in the line up to the counter. The whole time that he waited, date night date night date night ran on repeat in Eddie’s head. Richie noticed that he was there while taking the order of an extremely stressed out man in a business suit, and kept glancing over in Eddie’s direction while helping other customers. Eddie didn’t glance back.
“Hey, Eddie,” Richie said, once it was Eddie’s turn. “Long time, no see.” His voice was too casual, too practiced.
“Yeah,” said Eddie.
“The usual, then?”
Eddie nodded and then said, “and make it to-go, please.”
He decided that he must have been mistaken when he saw what looked like a flash of disappointment fly across Richie’s face. “Oh,” Richie said, and he smiled, but it was dampened, like when someone throws a blanket over a lantern to dim the light. “Yeah. To-go. Sure thing.”
Beverly was working that day, she was the one making the drinks as Richie took the orders, and when she passed him his latte she tried to pass him a meaningful glare along with it, but Eddie just mumbled a “thanks” and looked at his feet. He glanced at cup on his way out, expecting to see the usual Edgar or Elvis or Edwina, but instead EDDIE stared right back at him in a familiar scrawl. Eddie pretended like it didn’t hurt as much as it did—because what the fuck, it was his name, after all—but still. There was an ache.
He shook off the feeling, brushed through the crowd and made it halfway down the block before he heard footsteps behind him.
“Hey! Eddie!”
He paused, inhaled through his nose, wrapped his hands around the cup and tried to draw all of its warmth into his body.
“Eddie.”
He turned around.
Richie stood there, about ten feet behind him, apron still tied around his waist. He looked a little lost, and a little sad, and maybe a little mad. Eddie pretended not to see.
He was getting pretty good at pretending.
“Hey, Rich.”
“Hey.”
They stared at each other for a too-long moment.
At the same time that Eddie started to say, “I’m sorry I haven’t been around,” Richie asked, “Are we good?”
Eddie blinked. “Yeah, yeah we’re good.”
“Okay,” Richie nodded, licked his lips. He turned slightly, like he was about to go back inside, but changed his mind halfway through the movement. “Because, well, I thought we had plans.”
“I’m sorry.”
“We’re good?”
“Yeah, we are, it’s just, something came up.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Yeah, I just,” the lie shot into Eddie’s mind immediately, and he couldn’t stop himself as he said, “something came up with my girlfriend.”
“Girlfriend,” Richie repeated, not a question directed at Eddie but more like a confirmation of something. Eddie couldn’t tell what emotion ran beneath his words, but he wanted to stand there, figuring it out.
Jesus fuck, Eddie, he’s just your barista.
“Yeah, my girlfriend,” Eddie mumbled. Richie just stood, still as stone on the sidewalk, nodding almost imperceptibly to himself. It made Eddie want to squirm, so he clutched his coffee tighter. A moment passed, and then another. “Well, I, uh, I gotta—“ He jerked his thumb down the street behind him, a helpless gesture.
“Yeah, yeah, for sure, I, uh, I gotta—too.” Richie nodded again, and then turned around and disappeared back inside the café without looking back.
Eddie walked to his subway station, date night date night date night still swirling around inside his skull, and he hated himself for caring.
For the next two and a half weeks, he only ordered lattes to-go.
—
“Eddie, absolutely not,” Bill said around the lip of his beer bottle, eyes wide with panic.
They were sitting on the tiny couch in Eddie’s studio, a take n’ bake pizza heating up in the oven, re-runs of The X-Files filling the silence of his apartment. Subtitles scrolled across the bottom of the screen—somehow someone (Bill) had toggled that setting and none of them could figure out how to turn them off, and when someone (also Bill) gave the sage advice of just kicking at the T.V. until the subtitles went away, Eddie decided he could live with them just fine.
Eddie didn’t meet Bill’s eyes.
“Seriously, Eddie. Do not call her.”
“Why not, Bill? You’re the one who’s always telling me to get out of this place, to live a little?”
“Yeah, Eddie, but Jesus fuck, live a little with literally anyone else.”
Eddie worried the little slip of paper between his fingers—it was torn out of a pink notebook, a phone number written across it with a metallic purple gel pen, along with “call me” in a careful, loopy hand. He’d held onto it in his backpack pocket for three weeks and was about seventy-seven percent sure he’d never use it. Until now.
“Eddie,” Bill warned.
“Some of us aren’t like you Bill!” said Eddie. “Some of us don’t have fucking Alpha Kappa whatevers throwing themselves at us every other month! This is the only phone number I’ve ever gotten, so screw you, man.”
“Eddie, if that’s what this is about, you can get other phone numbers, trust me dude, the big brown eyes work so well for you—listen, Sarah’s got a friend, how about I set you up with—“
Eddie stood up and strode over to the landline in one fluid motion. The number was already half-way dialed before Bill managed to get off of the couch, and he immediately lunged for the phone. “No! Fuckin—fuck you, Bill!” Eddie held the phone above his head with one arm, shoved Bill away with the other.
“Dude, come on, she’s crazy.”
Eddie pretended like he couldn’t hear him and finished punching in the digits.
“Eddie—“ Bill started, but Eddie held up a single admonishing finger.
The line picked up after one and a half rings.
“Hello? Uh, I’m Eddie Kaspbrak, from organic chemistry? I, um,” he looked over at Bill, who was miming frantic frenzied gestures that Eddie assumed translated to hang up the fucking phone right now you fucking dumbass. “I’d like to take you out to dinner sometime.”
Bill shoved his hands against his face and murmured, “Motherfucker,” from between his fingers.
“Great,” Eddie continued, “it’s a date. See you on Friday, Myra.”