Archive of Our Own

When Eddie gets off his call just before 2pm, he first lays his head down on the desk and takes a few deep breaths, in and out, counting to five each time, until he feels dizzy. But at least he doesn’t feel quite as angry anymore. Then he stands up and walks downstairs, following the sound of booming laughter out to the backyard pool.

The pool is large and shaped like the number eight, two lobes stretching out, surrounded by tile and then lush, overwatered lawn. Floating on inner tubes and laughing as they pass a joint back and forth, are Richie and Eddie’s dad, Frank.

Richie laughs as he paddles with his hands, spinning himself closer to Frank so he can take the joint back. Richie wears Hawaiian-patterned swim trunks, but Frank is wearing a speedo, which is– honestly, Eddie can barely cope with any of this, the father he never really knew suddenly back in his life is already too much to fucking deal with, but this is particularly terrible.

Frank has pale hairless thighs, a smattering of wiry hairs on his lean chest. He’s a fit sixty-eight, somehow, despite everything Eddie has learned and assumed about his lifestyle. His hair is completely white, and sort of mad-scientist fluffy, haloed around his head. He wears an extra pair of Richie’s aviator sunglasses; they’re reflective, oil-slick shiny, so Eddie can’t see his eyes.

It’s a Friday afternoon. Eddie is working from home today, as he does every Friday. Richie ‘works’ from home most days, and Frank doesn’t work.

“Hey,” Eddie calls to them, standing at the edge of the pool and peering down. He lifts one hand to shade his eyes from the blinding white glare off the shimmering chlorine-pure water. “I can hear you all the way upstairs, you know. I just got off a call and it was… really distracting.”

Richie paddles his hands more, spinning until he’s facing Eddie. He gives him a grin that’s somewhere on the goofy to contrite spectrum. The Richie Tozier apology spectrum. “Oh, sorry, Eds.”

Frank echoes it: “Sorry.” He’s less sincere than Richie, even. He coughs up some smoke that he was evidently keeping down for a while. The sputtering coughs turn into laughter.

“Okay, well. Keep it down, please.” Eddie turns on his heel and walks back inside.

He hates having to be such a buzzkill (no, seriously, he does) but Frank has been staying with them for nearly three weeks now, and it’s only gotten worse.

It was supposed to be a transitional arrangement, until he found a place of his own. But apparently Eddie’s father has practically no retirement savings. So, yeah, that must have been the reason he was so eager to meet up with his adult son after an entire lifetime of no contact. Would have been nice for Frank to be upfront about that, but…

It’s fine, Eddie and Richie can afford to help him out, and they’re looking to buy a place for him as soon as possible. They have another showing tomorrow morning. It’s… fine.

In the kitchen, Eddie starts gathering the requisite pieces of a late-lunch BLT. A second after his toast springs forth, startling him from a zoned-out reverie, the glass door to the backyard slides opens. Richie steps inside, offering a sheepish smile, and closes the door behind him. He’s got a towel wrapped around his waist, his chest hair wet and plastered to his skin, the long ends of his hair damp around the nape of his neck.

“Hey,” he says, approaching the kitchen counter and tracking water across the floor as he does. “I’m actually sorry. I forgot that you had a call. But I also… thought you couldn’t hear us up there. Did you leave the window open?”

Eddie suppresses his first-worst instinct and doesn’t snap back something petty like: Oh, it’s my fault for leaving the window open? For wanting some goddamn fresh air? Eddie can’t really get away with that kind of thing anymore. Because if Richie thinks he’s joking he’ll just laugh at him—and if he realizes he’s serious, more often than not, he still laughs at him. Richie finds Eddie’s anger funny the majority of the time, which is usually disarming, and allows Eddie to laugh at himself enough to calm down. But every once in a while, when Eddie is particularly wound up, Richie laughing at his emotions is like dumping gasoline on a fire.

So instead of answering Richie’s question, Eddie says, “Don’t you have work to do, Richie? All you’ve done this week is get high.”

Richie gives him a level but distinctly amused look. “Eddie. It’s Friday afternoon. Used to be you’d be ‘working from home’ out by the pool with me.”

This time Eddie isn’t quick enough to stop his first-worst reaction, and he says, “Yeah, and now Frank is, like, your best friend.”

Richie presses his lips together very clearly trying not to smile and that only makes Eddie angrier. It’s bad enough when Richie openly finds his anger funny, but it’s almost worse when he tries to hide it. Because that means he knows it’s gonna piss off Eddie, and that means Eddie is as predictable as he fears.

Richie asks him, in the tone of how one might ask a grumpy child if they need a nap, “Do you… want an edible?”

Before Eddie can respond, Frank comes sauntering in, wondering aloud what’s for lunch, and tracking pool water all over the floor. He’s not even wrapped in a towel.

“I’m going to eat at my desk,” Eddie announces. He takes his plate of unassembled BLT parts and retreats upstairs.

Eddie never really mourned his dad’s death. He was young, and one day his dad was there and the next he wasn’t. His mom told him that his father had been sick for a long time, and that he passed away. And Eddie contextualized this over the years. He didn’t remember his father ever being in the hospital, or ever seeming particularly sick. But he was gone a lot of the time. Leading up to his ‘death’ he was gone for a week straight. (In retrospect, Eddie realized this was because it took his mother a few days to come up with the lie and commit to telling it.)

He processed it more, when he was older. At age eight, he harbored some suspicions, which he knew, even at the time, were stupid. Stuck in the ‘denial’ stage of grief, perhaps. (But he couldn’t for the life of him remember having been to a funeral. He had never seen a grave. And those details stuck with him, but if he dared to bring it up to his mother she cried so hysterically that it frightened him. She was more willing, however, to talk about how he died. Lung cancer. He did smoke, Eddie could remember that, the sense memory of the acrid smell of cigarettes, how it clung to his dad’s clothes and fingers. Eddie promised his mother he would never smoke, and he never did.) At age ten, he had idle fantasies about his dad coming back to rescue him. About finding a larger family, a different one.

And then, shortly before he turned fourteen, he and his mom moved away. As he forgot Derry, as it all faded away—the walls of his childhood bedroom, the grid of the city streets, the names and faces of his friends and teachers—he forgot the finer details about his dad, too. Privately, he rationalized it. He was an unhappy kid, so of course he wanted to cling to the hope that his dad might be not only alive, but better. An escape. He didn’t remember the funeral, which was a nagging detail that made it hard to fully move on, but he didn’t remember a lot of things. Maybe he didn’t even go. Maybe his mother figured it would be too painful for him, and he was so young after all. (But a grave… Maybe his father was cremated. Although he can’t imagine she wouldn’t have kept the ashes. She clung so tightly to everything.)

If Eddie would have ever uncovered the truth on his own, or let his suspicions fester long enough to solidify, that chance was lost when he left Derry. He didn’t think much about his father at all for some twenty-seven years.

Then, a lifetime later, last November, for Eddie’s forty-second birthday, Richie bought him one of those DNA kits. It was kind of a joke, to tease Eddie for his health-related neuroses, and also to find out if he really was as Polish as he always claimed to be. (He actually isn’t. He’s mostly German, which he wishes he never learned.) But he agreed to use the test to connect with relatives in the database. He was on the fence about it, and Richie seemed completely confused as to why he’d ever want to do that. But Eddie’s family had always been small. His mom and his aunt were all he had, and they both died a long time ago. Eddie’s horizons had been expanding recently, and this seemed like another promising step.

Through the test, he connected with a Frank Kaspbrak who lived in Berkeley. That was alarming at first, especially considering his age, but he figured it was some more distant relative. When Eddie reached out, things spiraled very quickly from there. He remembers reading the first email from Frank that said he thought he would never reconnect with his son and how happy he would be to meet up. After reading that, Eddie descended into a panic attack, and Richie found him sitting on the floor, curled up against the bed.

Crouched in front of him, letting Eddie squeeze the life out of his hand until his fingertips turned white, Richie silently read the email and said, “Wait, but… Your dad’s dead. Is this guy just fucking with you?”

“How would… He mentioned my mom,” Eddie wheezed, now gripping Richie’s hand with both of his. Richie stayed remarkably steady. “He asked me if Sonia is still in Derry, for fuck’s sake. He knows. How the fuck would he know?”

Over the next couple days, Eddie got some answers, and gave some of his own. He told Frank that his mom died ten years ago. But he didn’t tell him that he spent his entire life thinking his dad was dead.

For some reason, this felt humiliating to admit. That he bought this ridiculous lie hook, line and sinker. How could he be that fucking gullible? There was never a funeral. Never a grave or even an obituary. He didn’t even think to look for one. (“You were a kid,” Richie reassured him, in that wide-eyed, bewildered way that means he thinks Eddie is being unreasonable, but somehow it never feels condescending. He needs Richie to gently shake him from his own delusions sometimes. “This is not on you. Your mom was certifiably insane, and this is… This is really a whole nother level of fucked up, Eddie. I mean, Jesus.” Richie seemed really angry, and Eddie was glad to let him carry that emotion for a while. He wasn’t ready for that quite yet.)

When the two of them began making tentative plans to meet, Eddie quickly revealed that he’s gay. “If he has a problem with that, I don’t want to meet him anyway,” Eddie told Richie. What he wrote in the email, very subtly, was: My partner Richie and I live in L.A. He and I would like to meet you sometime. (Eddie spent about twenty minutes workshopping this bit; he added the second sentence with the awkward male pronoun just in case ‘Richie’ could be charitably interpreted as a woman’s name. He worried whether ‘partner’ was clear enough, but Richie laughed at him for this. “Just add, ‘P.S. I’m gay,’ if you’re so anxious about it.”)

Turns out, Eddie’s worries about Frank were misplaced.

The reply, which came barely ten minutes after Eddie finally worked up the courage to send his message, read, in part: Like father, like son! I wish you could have met my partner Paul but he passed four years ago.

Eddie paced the house for an hour after he read that one, muttering to himself, “Like father, like son? Is he for real? What the fuck? Is he fucking with me?”

“I mean,” Richie’d said, clearly quite amused with this revelation, but knowing better than to actually laugh, “It would explain why he left your mom.”

Eddie stopped pacing and, for the first time in his adult life, outside of run-ins with the supernatural, actually screamed. Maybe it was more a frustrated, anguished yell than a scream. Either way, Richie flinched, muttered, “Jesus,” and then crowded in on Eddie, holding his arms and wrestling him into a hug. Like one might attempt to subdue a panicked animal by restraining it. The Temple Grandin method.

And that’s when Eddie started crying. Which was already humiliating, and only made worse by how heartbroken (and confused) Richie looked as he held him and soothed him. “Hey, shh, it’s okay.”

Frank said he told Sonia he was gay when he left her. Eddie never came out to her. Of course he didn’t. Worse than that, he married Myra after his mother died. At twenty-five, if you’d asked him why he was closeted, he would’ve said mostly because of his mother. At thirty-five, he had to acknowledge that that was nothing but a comfortable delusion, a way to displace blame for his own cowardice.

When they actually met Frank, Eddie was determined to stay calm and collected.

Eddie and Richie flew to San Francisco for a weekend and got a hotel room in Berkeley, a few blocks from Frank’s long-time apartment. He had scored himself a rent frozen unit early on, obviously the only reason he was still able to live in this neighborhood at all. They met Frank at a cafe that had a lot of vegan food on offer. He was already sitting at a table on the outdoor patio, under a vine-laced veranda. A half-empty glass of Sangria sat on the table in front of him, and he wore chunky black-plastic framed glasses and a loose linen shirt that was unbuttoned nearly to his breastbone. Sort of a shipwrecked pirate or a cover-of-a-romance-novel look.

“Eddie!” he called when he spotted them, getting to his feet.

Eddie reached across the table to shake his hand, smiled tightly and said, “Hi, Frank.” He felt like he had vertigo, or like he was watching this encounter happen from underwater. “This is Richie.”

Richie leaned in to shake his hand as well, smiling warmly. “It’s so nice to meet you.”

Then they sat down and, for the first twenty or so minutes, Frank told them some convoluted confusing stories about this restaurant (he and the owner go way back), and this neighborhood and how much it’s changed, and how he was vegan for a while, but now he just eats what makes him feel good and gives him energy (that’s all food is for, really, and people overthink diets). Maybe, charitably, Frank was rambling out of nerves. That thought didn’t cross Eddie’s mind at the time. At the time, he was too blinded with rage at the fact that he’d just reconnected with his dad who he thought was dead his entire life, and his dad decided to start that conversation with an anecdote about how he was vegan for six years.

To make things worse, Richie seemed charmed by the small talk, and said, laughing and resting one hand between Eddie’s shoulder blades, “When I met Eddie, he was on paleo.”

Frank burst into laughter at this. “Paleo? Seriously? How long ago was this?”

“No, I wasn’t–” Eddie shifted uncomfortably in his seat, leaning forward and away from Richie’s touch. “I wasn’t on paleo, I wasn’t eating fucking raw meat–”

“He was gluten free, though,” Richie said, winking at Frank. “And, what, no, uh… legumes?”

“I wasn’t on paleo,” Eddie grumbled into his wine glass. “I thought I had a gluten sensitivity at the time.”

“How did you two meet?” Frank asked them. His smile was warm, cheeks deeply dimpled, gaze fuzzy.

“I’m from Derry, too,” Richie answered, resting a hand on his own chest. “Actually.”

And from there, Richie told the story of their long road to being together. Frank was surprised to hear that they’d only been in a relationship for less than a year, but when he learned they were childhood friends he hummed knowingly and said, “Ah, that explains it.”

It was probably a nice sentiment to express, that the two of them seemed so comfortable and settled together. That much was apparent to anyone who met them, however briefly. Hell, the waitress probably thought they’d been married twenty years. But Eddie’s only feeling at the time was bitter resentment toward Frank for acting like he knew them at all.

Richie told the whole tale, summarizing their thirty-year epic in fifteen minutes flat, and fumbling around a couple references to It when he came up to them. When Richie mentioned Eddie’s divorce, Frank piped up to say, “Eddie, you were married? What, to a woman?”

“That’s exactly what I said!” Richie crowed, cackling.

“Shut up,” Eddie hissed at Richie, who was actually making a scene, before he turned to say to his dad, “Frank, you were married. To a woman.” He gestured at himself. “Remember?”

Frank only laughed at this and said, “Technically still am. Never got divorced. Except– well. If she died, I guess… I guess I’m not… anymore.” He at least had the good sense to wince uncomfortably after making it to the end of that train wreck of a sentence.

After a beat of silence, Richie offered a tentative, “Congrats?”

Their food sat in front of them now, mostly eaten, in between the tangled threads of the conversation. Richie, actually, hadn’t made much progress on his own meal—some kind of grain bowl salad with tempeh—because he had spent the most time speaking. He also may have discovered he doesn’t like tempeh (or grain bowls, or salads).

As the silence stretched on, Eddie decided to capitalize on the awkwardness to take care of some other unpleasant business. Before their meeting, he’d spent a lot of time considering how to tell Frank that Sonia lied about his death. Or whether he even wanted to tell him at all. He had a whole spiel in his head, explaining the situation from his own point of view, and breaking the news as gently as possible.

But in the moment, all he said was: “My mom told me you were dead.”

Frank choked a little, coughing and slapping his chest. Richie said, quiet and tense, “Eddie.”

“Yeah, she didn’t tell me you left her,” Eddie continued. “She told me you had died. I was five years old, so I believed her. I thought you were dead until I found you on fucking 23 and Me last month.”

Frank looked stricken, his brow furrowed; the resemblance to Eddie was stronger like that. His face seemed longer and thinner when he wasn’t smiling.

Richie let out a little sigh and muttered something unintelligible under his breath. He reached for his water glass to take a sip.

The movement seemed to let some air back into the space. The world unpaused around them, the bustle of the waitstaff and buzz of other diners’ conversations resuming. Frank looked to Richie. “Is that–?”

“Is that true?” Eddie interrupted, incredulous, guessing at how he was going to finish the sentence. “Why are you asking him?”

“I don’t–” Frank started, and Richie said, “Eddie,” again. He reached a hand toward Eddie’s shoulder and Eddie jerked away from him.

“It is true,” Eddie said to Frank. The two of them made brief eye contact before they both chickened out, looking back at the table. “I’m sorry to spring that on you, but, you know.” Eddie crossed his arms over his chest and shrugged. He kept his shoulders up at his ears, tense. “Your being alive was sort of a shock to me. As you can imagine.”

Frank nodded, still staring blankly. He dragged his thumb through the condensation on his glass of Sangria; all the ice had melted. Then he laughed, just once, sadly. “Shit,” he said. “If I had known that, I might have…” He shook his head and looked up meet Eddie’s eye. “I’m sorry. I obviously had no idea.”

“We were going to break the news more gently,” Richie said with wry humor, and Eddie kind of wanted him to get lost for a moment. Like, maybe go to the bathroom or take a walk around the block. Just leave him alone to talk through this without judgment.

“I just…” Frank was still shaking his head. He rubbed one hand over his mouth. “Huh. I mean, I– I sent her money every month for… two years, I think?”

“What?” Eddie asked, very quietly, because this was news to him. He could feel Richie tensing up next to him.

“Yeah, and,” Frank said, “I told her I was leaving her because I was gay. She wanted me out, after that.” He seemed to realize something, glancing up to look at Eddie. “Shit, did you ever…?”

Richie answered for him, as he’d been doing all night: “No, he never came out to her.”

“Good,” Frank said darkly. “I only stopped sending the checks because she stopped cashing them, at a point. And…”

He trailed off, eyes wide and distant behind his glasses. Eddie had speculated about this with Richie, the impact that the Derry amnesia might have had on him. It seemed he remembered his family for a while after leaving, enough to send money. But maybe, after he fell out of the habit, the memory began to fade, too. Maybe that was what he didn’t want to say, that he forgot. And Eddie, frankly, didn’t want to hear it.

What Frank did say, eventually, was: “I can hardly believe this. Did everyone in town just… go along with the lie? Clearly there was someone that… knew. And there wouldn’t have been a funeral, or a grave, or– or an obituary.”

“Frank,” Richie had said, shooting him a look of warning. “You probably wanna…” He made a silencing motion, slicing a finger across his own neck.

“Okay, sorry,” Frank had said, without much remorse. “I’m just trying to understand your thought process.”

“Well, I was five, for one thing, when you left,” Eddie said, sharply. “So, like. Not much of a complicated thought process there.”

Frank just laughed a little at that one and said, “Fair enough.”

And, yeah, Eddie was being an asshole by putting on the blasé act in the first place. But at that point, he’d grown so accustomed to his acts going ignored (Richie never takes him at face value anymore) that he forgot the reason for it in the first place. Eddie learned to act like this because he didn’t want anyone to dig any deeper. (Or, well, he did, but he wanted people to do it of their own volition so he could claim he didn’t ask for it. Asking for attention is cloying and desperate, and Eddie’s never done it.)

So, Frank taking his words at face value was as infuriating as it should have been predictable.

After that, somehow, they dug themselves out of the hole, clawing their way toward a lighter conversation. Throughout the night, Richie made himself useful by paving over tension and smoothing out the conversation, filling in gaps where needed. This is something he’s great at, and Eddie usually loves it—he’s never had an awkward dinner party with Richie in attendance—but that night it left him feeling sort of hollow and alone. Because Eddie felt very uncomfortable and Richie, apparently, did not.

At the end of the night, Frank was a little drunk, and he expressed his intention to possibly move to L.A. Richie immediately offered the guest room as an intermediary step. Eddie stomped on his foot under the table, way too hard, and Richie yelped. Eddie apologized right away and turned to fret over him, but Richie only laughed as the initial shock and pain faded. And he said to Frank, “Well, I guess the two of us will have to discuss this privately, but I’m okay with it.”

Back at their hotel for the night, they had an actual fight—this is rare for them—and Eddie instigated it. He was pissed at Richie for offering a room to Eddie’s estranged father—who’s apparently kind of a dick—without even talking to Eddie about it first. And for acting like Eddie was being the unreasonable one? Seriously? Richie was mostly tired and confused in the face of Eddie’s anger and kept trying to go to sleep, only for Eddie to and-another-thing him.

In the morning, Eddie apologized for yelling at him. Richie mumbled, “S’okay,” into the pillow and waved him off so he could catch another half an hour of sleep. They saw Frank again for brunch (at another hip restaurant, where Frank once again name-dropped the chef and owner), and Eddie told him, sure, he’s welcome to visit whenever he likes. And if he needs a place to stay for a while, in the middle of his move, then that’s fine.

This is Eddie’s problem. He gets angry and acts in ways he regrets; then he overcorrects and further racks up his regret-debt. Because it was only a month and a half later that Frank showed up in L.A., shacked up in their guest bedroom, and didn’t leave.

After Eddie finishes his BLT and his work for the afternoon, he slinks back downstairs. Richie is already prepared for the evening, cleaned up from the pool, his hair fluffy in the way it only is when it’s freshly washed and dried. He’s dressed in dark slacks and a light blazer. Smiling, he watches Eddie cross the kitchen and place his empty plate beside the sink.

“Are you wearing that?” Richie asks him.

Eddie glances down at himself, but the answer is an obvious no. He’s wearing a polo shirt and khakis. He looks like he works at Best Buy. “I’ll get changed now,” Eddie says, flashing him a smile as he moves past him to go back upstairs.

“Oh, hey,” Richie calls after him, snapping his fingers with sudden recall. “I gave your dad one of my coats. It doesn’t fit him great, but, you know. Better than yours. And he didn’t really have anything.”

“Okay. Thanks.” Eddie jogs back up the stairs to focus on finding something to wear, rather than Richie’s ongoing bonding with his father.

Tonight, Richie has some hobnobbing party for the show he writes for. There are a lot of these events, as is to be expected for an industry built almost entirely upon connections. Eddie generally enjoys being Richie’s date; he doesn’t love making smalltalk with self-important strangers, but Richie promised to never leave him alone and he’s kept that promise. Plus, Richie will always tease him and call Eddie his arm candy and Eddie will grumble something in response about how he’s actually the higher earner. They’ll engage in some performative, deeply fond and familiar bickering to the amusement of Richie’s friends and colleagues, who are always thrilled to see someone bring Richie down a notch, or so they profess. They have fun, genuinely.

Bringing Frank along changes the dynamic somewhat. The party is at some producer’s house in the hills; Richie drives them, and Eddie is relegated to the cramped backseat of the two-door Audi, since his dad isn’t agile enough to climb over the front seats. Frank wears one of his own brightly patterned shirts beneath Richie’s blazer, slightly too large for him and tented over his shoulders.

When they arrive, and Richie hands over the keys to the valet, they step out onto the circled driveway and peer up at the modern, glass-walled mansion.

Frank whistles, standing there with his hands in his pockets. “This is quite the place. Your boss lives here?”

“Yeah, the big boss,” Richie tells him, grinning self-consciously. “I don’t know him that well.”

When Richie gives his name at the door and they’re ushered inside, Frank makes another small noise of awed approval. The interior is spacious and high-ceilinged; a broad staircase cascades into the middle of the space, more set-piece than function; well-dressed people gather in pockets, chatting and drinking. Eddie plucks a wine glass off the tray of a passing waiter and Frank follows his lead. Richie declines a drink with a small smile and shake of his head, and the waiter moves on.

“Well, well, kiddo,” Frank says, raising his glass. “You’ve made it, huh? Cheers to you.”

Richie laughs, wrinkling his nose, and lifts his empty hand to give Frank’s wine glass a knuckle bump. “This is nice,” he says, still smiling, his cheeks pink from the praise. “Eddie was never impressed, not even at first. Too many Wall Street parties, I guess.”

Franks turns to Eddie, his eyebrows raised as he takes a sip.

Eddie sighs a little and says, “Yeah, I mean, a lot of my coworkers had places in the Hamptons.”

“Oh, so this is…” Frank makes an ‘eh’ gesture with his hand, waggling it back and forth.

Richie laughs loudly and slings his arm around Eddie’s shoulder, jostling him in the rough, jokey way they used to touch each other before they were together. It seems sometimes like Richie forgets and reverts back to that, especially in public. “At least I know he’s with me for me,” Richie declares, putting on a wistful voice. “And not for my vast wealth and influence. Because moving out here was a real downwardly mobile move for him.”

“Hey, I’m proud of your career,” Eddie snaps, with too much bite for what is, ostensibly, a kind remark. Richie rears his head back a little, blinking. “And I like my new job,” Eddie continues. “And you know that, so you can quit it with the whole…” He wiggles the fingers of his free hand, making an unenthused jazz hand as he says, “‘Eddie is so annoyed by me,’ thing.”

“But that’s our schtick,” Richie protests, laughing a little as he glances over at Frank, then back to Eddie, his expression more serious. “I’m just messing around. Sorry.”

“Yeah, I know, I just…” Eddie backtracks, and regrets saying anything at all now. “I just don’t want anyone to think I don’t support you.”

Richie’s face does a complicated flip, starting with amusement before it’s eclipsed with fondness and emotion. “Well, that’s very sweet,” he says, grinning. “But I’m pretty sure everyone knows we’re joking. Um. I’m gonna go find something for me to drink. Sit tight.”

He gives Eddie a parting shoulder pat before he turns and disappears into the crowd. Eddie watches as he tries to cross the room and gets stopped halfway by someone he knows. Eddie can hear his loud, chipper, “Oh, hi!” rise above the din of the party. Richie stoops to hug the woman, who’s quite a bit shorter than him.

“I think he’s great, you know,” Frank says. They’re standing side by side and staring in the same direction, out over the room.

Eddie enjoys a no-eye-contact conversation as much as the next repressed guy, so he nods a little and mutters, “Yeah, thanks. He is great.”

“And he looks at you like you hung the moon.”

Eddie laughs a little, surprised and amused, and glances over to him. “Haven’t heard that one in a while.”

“Yeah?” Frank grins back at him. “I have more where that came from. Uh, what did my dad used to say.” He gestures broadly at the swanky room before them and declares, “It’s just like downtown!”

Eddie snorts a laugh into his wine glass. “Downtown what?”

“Not sure. But my dad used to say that a lot. My mom would make something special for dinner—which was, you know, pot roast—and he’d say, ‘This is just like downtown.’ And, right, what was his point of comparison for ‘downtown’? Bangor? Maybe Portland.”

Eddie chuckles and glances over to Frank, quickly, before he looks away again. Eddie never met his paternal grandparents. They died before he was born. Really, he doesn’t know much of anything about Frank. His family, his life before Eddie was born, or his life since he left.

“Hey, I was wondering,” Eddie starts hesitantly.

But they’re interrupted by Richie, returning with a can of sparkling water in one hand and already telling a story as he approaches. “You don’t even want to know what I had to do to get this,” he complains loudly. “How hard can it be to find a La Croix in L.A.? You’d be surprised.” He shrugs and takes a swig, then nods across the room. “Shall we?”

Richie leads them across the foyer and to the deck that looks out over the hills and to the glow of the city below. As they make their way outside, Richie gives a quick greeting to a few people, but he doesn’t stop to chat with any of them. He said before that they don’t have to stay very late if they don’t want to. Richie enjoys the social aspects of his job, and he genuinely likes many of his frequent colleagues, but ever since he stopped drinking a few months ago—for good this time—he’s seemed more strained at these events. At the beginning, Eddie refused to drink in solidarity but this only seemed to make Richie more uncomfortable, so Eddie has tried his best to just act natural.

As soon as they step out onto the deck, in the cooling air where the sun is beginning to set, someone calls Richie’s name. He spins around and his face melts into a grin when he spots his publicist, Carolyn. She’s been on Richie’s team since before he came out and switched career tracks, but according to Richie they get along better now. She’s older than him, in her early fifties, and almost everything she says sounds condescending. Their relationship has never been that personally friendly, but she doesn’t interrogate Richie about his personal life anymore, at least not since he began dating Eddie. And Carolyn really likes Eddie, or at least professes to, which sort of weirds Eddie out since they barely know each other.

“Richie, how are you?” she asks rhetorically as she gives him a hug. Then she turns to Eddie and gives him the same treatment, throwing her slender arms over his shoulders, the bracelets on her wrists clattering together. “Eddie, wonderful to see you.”

“Yeah, you too.”

Once Eddie has extricated himself from the hug, Carolyn’s eyes fall on Frank. Immediately, and horrifyingly, she says, “Richie, you didn’t say your dad was in town.”

There’s a beat of awkward silence and everyone stays still. Then Richie seems jolted to action, sort of lurching forward on his feet, as he says, “Oh, no, Carolyn this is– this is Eddie’s dad. My dad died? Three years ago? I told you that? This is Eddie’s dad.”

“Frank,” Eddie supplies, from where he’s standing beside Richie and trying to keep his soul tethered to his body.

“Oh,” Carolyn says, as she reaches to shake Frank’s hand. At the same time, he opens his arms for a hug, and they laugh before haltingly negotiating something between a handshake and a hug. It’s not quite either. “Sorry about that,” Carolyn says. (She doesn’t seem nearly as embarrassed as she should, in Eddie’s opinion.) “They have a resemblance,” she adds, directing this part to Eddie with a slight smirk that he really does not care for.

Frank laughs jovially and says, to Richie, “It’s the glasses, son.”

The two swap their frames, laughing as they squint at each other through incompatible prescriptions.

“How do we look, Eds?” Richie asks.

Eddie grimaces. I’s not just the glasses, is the thing. It’s their physical build, broad shoulders and chests. Frank is a couple inches taller than Eddie, closer to Richie’s height. They have strong square jaws and tall foreheads. Frank looks like Eddie in some of the subtler details of his face (his brown eyes and slanted brows, the flat ridge of his nose, and the deep dimples of his smile) but at a glance, he shares more of a resemblance with Richie. Enough so that it’s apparently noticeable. And isn’t that a fucking nightmare.

But what is Eddie supposed to do? Explain to this relative stranger that he didn’t know his father growing up so there was no possible way for Eddie to—what?—sexually imprint on him? God, he feels nauseous. The only thing keeping Eddie from walking into the ocean to never return is that Richie has had the grace to not bring this up. Richie could destroy him simply by pointing out that, wow, isn’t it funny that Eddie already married his mother, only to end up in a relationship with a guy who’s a lot like his father? Take that, Oedipus. You’ve got nothing on the tragicomedy of one Edward Kaspbrak.

Richie hasn’t said it, but Eddie figures he must be thinking it. Especially now. And that’s the problem with having Richie Tozier in his life, even a reformed Richie Tozier who thinks before he speaks some of the time. When Eddie wants to cut himself really deep, he assigns those thoughts to Richie.

Richie and Frank trade their glasses back, still chuckling, and Carolyn exchanges a few more words with Richie before she disappears into the party.

They only stay for two hours. In that time, Eddie drinks enough wine to get decently buzzed, and Richie keeps snagging appetizers for him that Eddie refuses to eat. “Suit yourself,” Richie says each time, before eating them himself. Frank wanders off at some point, but Eddie thinks he can hear his voice now and then, rising above the din to say something to whoever he’s roped into a conversation: “When I was living in Portland–” or “I met Alan Alda one time–”

Eddie does what he usually does at parties which is: drink, stay by Richie’s side (and get progressively clingier throughout the night), and listen to the conversations Richie has with other people, throwing in a comment here and there.

“Well,” Richie says decisively, once there’s a gap between conversations, and they’ve stayed long enough to fulfill his duty. “What do you say, Eds? Time to call it a night?”

Eddie shrugs. He’s sort of loose-limbed and floppy. Richie’s arm is over his shoulder, and Eddie holds it firmly in place with a grip around his wrist. “Yeah, I guess.”

“Okay, I’m gonna track down your dad–”

“Frank,” Eddie corrects before he can bite it back.

Richie rolls his eyes. “Yeah, we all get it, you have father issues, you’re pouring it on a little thick.” He pats Eddie’s back, says, “Stay here,” and slips off to find Frank.

Eddie stays there, leaning against the railing of the deck, and staring unfocused into the mingling crowd. He tries to play back Richie’s words, tries to replicate the tone in his head. How much was he teasing? How much was he serious? It’s always a mixed bag with Richie. His jokes always have a ring of truth to them, otherwise they wouldn’t be funny—according to Richie. It’s just a matter of figuring out what the balance is.

No matter what the balance, Eddie doesn’t find this particularly funny. Richie hasn’t been as sensitive to Eddie’s feelings ever since they met Frank, apparently more concerned with smoothing over tension than supporting him. And now teasing Eddie for having father issues? Well, yeah, sure he has father issues. Excuse him for having fucking father issues, when his dad abandoned him at age five to grow up with only his–

Richie and Frank return. Frank holds Richie’s blazer draped over one arm, and he’s grinning broadly. “What a night,” he says. “Where to next?”

“Home,” Eddie says.

“No afterparty?” Frank teases, as he follows them out.

“No, sorry, we’re old and boring,” Richie tells him. “But I can hook you up with some people?”

Back at the car, Richie wrestles the front passenger seat forward so that Eddie can crawl through and into the back. As he pulls out of the driveway, he catches Eddie’s eye in the rearview mirror and asks, “Doing alright back there, Eds?”

Eddie nods, says, “Yeah,” while he rests his head against the edge of the window.

“Richie,” Frank says, and pauses a moment until Richie makes a noise of acknowledgement. “I’m curious. When did you stop drinking?”

“Oh, well,” Richie begins, laughing in the lightly self-conscious, self-deprecating way that he does when he’s forced to talk about himself. “Six months ago, most recently. There were previous attempts.”

He says it rather flippantly, stressing the words previous attempts, drawing out whatever comedy lies in his past failures. He does this kind of thing in interviews all the time, the self-deprecation, and he does this sometimes with Eddie, when he’s tired or sort of closed off. It’s how Richie handles vulnerability, how he can show some of himself without giving it all away. Eddie used to get frustrated with Richie’s tendency to laugh off serious things, things that obviously hurt him, but it doesn’t bother him as much anymore.

Because, at the end of the day, at least Richie can talk about the serious things. Even if he needs to laugh in order to do it.

For the duration of the short drive home, Richie tells Frank about his past alcohol abuse, cycles of sobriety and relapse. His voice gets quiet and strained with embarrassment here and there, but he’ll laugh it off and get back on track easily enough. Frank says, when Richie is wrapping up, “I’m glad you’re doing better now. It’s not easy. You know, Paul, he had some problems with pills, for a time.” Richie says, quietly, “Yeah, that’s tough. I had a buddy who… Yeah.”

Eddie, in the backseat, almost asks Frank about Paul. He’s been meaning to. He feels awful that he hasn’t yet, and has only absorbed the bits and pieces of information that Frank has volunteered, unprompted. Eddie opens his mouth, sorting through the questions in his mind (How long were they together? How did they meet? What was he like? How did he die?) but in the end he doesn’t say anything.

Later, in bed, when Richie comes back from the bathroom, he crawls in beside Eddie with a kind of wound up energy that communicates he’s not quite ready to sleep yet.

When they got home an hour ago, Eddie trudged up the stairs right away to go to bed. For a while, he could hear Richie and Frank in the kitchen, eating snacks and having a respectfully hushed conversation, their voices drifting up the stairs. Eddie lay awake, listening, and straining to make out any words, but he couldn’t. Then Richie crept into the bedroom and through to the bathroom, pausing for a moment to strip off his suit, down to his undershirt and boxers.

Now, Richie settles into bed and presses up behind Eddie, shaking the mattress with his restlessly shifting legs and snaking an arm around his middle. Richie hums close to ear and presses a kiss to the back of his neck. “Eddie,” he whispers, as his fingers tangle in the hem of his t-shirt, pulling it up to brush over bare skin. “Are you still awake?”

Eddie feels… not particularly turned on, at least not yet, mostly kind of tired and grumpy, and he’s sobering up unpleasantly, leaving him dry-mouthed and foggy. But if he can take an opportunity to get out of his head, maybe that’ll be worth the effort. Besides, Richie seems more than willing to do all the work right now. So he turns his head to return the kiss, opening his mouth to let Richie lick at his teeth and bite at his lower lip. Richie tastes like toothpaste, too much like it; he must not have rinsed very thoroughly after brushing his teeth.

But it doesn’t last long enough to really bother him, because soon Richie pushes Eddie flat to the mattress, on his back, and crawls on top of him. Now, his mouth goes straight to Eddie’s neck, sucking at a tender spot at the hollow of his throat. Eddie’s hands glance down Richie’s back before he settles them on his shoulders and digs in with his nails. Not because he’s feeling very passionate—he still feels mostly lethargic and grouchy—but because he knows Richie really likes that.

The move works too effectively, maybe. Richie responds by hiking up one of Eddie’s legs, knee hooked over his arm, and says, muffled against his chest, “Fuck, Eddie, I’m so turned on.” To punctuate this statement, he rolls his hips, his clothed erection grinding against Eddie’s ass. Eddie squirms a bit, not in a good way, and taps his arms.

“Rich, hey, sorry. Can you–?”

Richie lifts his head, his expression at first bewildered before it settles into disappointed resignation. He rolls off and onto his back, landing on the mattress beside him with a defeated huff.

There are a couple beats of excruciating silence. Eddie can hear traffic noise and the distant thumping of bass from a neighbor’s party. They left the windows open tonight—there’s a cool front coming through, the air dry and crisp—and everything sounds so loud all of a sudden.

Then Richie says, “Hey, so…” His voice is pointedly casual in the way it only really gets when he’s mad at Eddie. “This is, like. Not a problem, per se. But we haven’t had sex since your dad got here.”

“I am super aware of that fact, Richie.”

“Okay, just checking.”

“I haven’t been in the mood, okay?”

“Yeah, I, uh, picked up on that.” Richie laughs without humor. “Do I need to go jerk off in the bathroom… again…?”

Eddie scrubs his hands over his eyes and sighs. “I’m sorry.”

“You know that it’s fine, obviously. I get it. But it’s been… a couple weeks now… and it sorta feels like something else is going on. And maybe we should talk about it?”

Eddie thinks of Richie and Frank exchanging their glasses earlier that day, laughing with each other. Carolyn lightly remarking on their resemblance. Richie’s right; there is something else going on. But he can’t explain this to Richie without dredging up a lot of dark, deep-seated resentments, that are so twisted and irrational that it would be humiliating to shine a light on them. But, god, he’s starting to really resent Richie, in a misplaced way, and he hates that the most. That it feels like a physical reaction, one outside of his control. Like a pit that gravity is pulling him into despite his best attempt to resist. This scares the shit out of Eddie because, for his entire life, once he sours on a person, he has a hard time feeling entirely positive about them again. But he’s not souring on Richie, really, he just… God, he just really has not wanted to fuck him recently.

Eddie sighs and turns to look at him in the dark. Richie’s eyes are wide and unblinking, the whites glowing. His face is bathed in a blue-tinged light from the window. Eddie whispers, “I’m in a… weird place.”

Richie nods slowly. “Are you trying to get out of it or are you getting comfortable there?”

Eddie doesn’t say anything for a moment; his stomach drops. Richie raises his eyebrows, waiting, until he apparently realizes that Eddie isn’t going to say anything.

“Okay,” Richie says with a sharp, surprised little laugh. “That answers that question.” He rolls over onto his side, facing away from Eddie, and goes silent.

On Saturday morning, they get up and moving early—well not early, but early for a Saturday and for Richie—to go check out their real estate agent’s latest find. It’s a condo in Sherman Oaks. Eddie drives the three of them, swinging through a Starbucks drive through on the way. Each weekend since Frank arrived, they’ve looked at a few places, and each time Frank has found something irreparably wrong with the place. The first place, the location was bad—not walkable enough—and Eddie agreed that that was a real problem. The second place was a third floor walk-up and that was also an issue; if Eddie’s going to buy a place for his dad, he wants it to serve him for as long as possible. The third place seemed just about perfect but Frank insisted it was too pricey. Eddie thought that that was considerate, so he agreed and kept the search going. But the problem was, the search just kept going.

Now, Eddie parks in the visitor lot of a large condo development. They step out of the car, lattes in hand, and the real estate agent, standing by her Prius, flags them down. Her name is Grace Kim (she has a series of bus bench ads), she always wears big dark sunglasses when she’s outside, and she wears her black hair in a short bob.

“Good morning,” she greets them, already leading them along the tile pathway through the condo development. Keys dangle from a lanyard around her neck. “I think you’re going to love this place.”

They step inside while Grace rattles off the amenities: first floor, private entry, windows with plenty of sunlight—“I know Frank likes his plants”—in-unit washer-dryer, a pool and communal spaces, walkable to stores and restaurants, convenient to a bus line, across the street from a park and a rec center.

The interior isn’t huge, but there’s plenty of space for what Frank would need. A single bedroom and bathroom, a living area. A generously sized kitchen with modern appliances and lots of counter space. A nook with bay windows, perfect for a kitchen table.

“This is great,” Eddie says, running his fingers along the window sill and then up the seam of the glass. He’s not sure what he’s looking for, but it seems like something he should do.

Richie opens the empty fridge and squints at the bright-white barren interior. “Yeah, it’s nice. What do you think, Frank?”

Frank kicks his feet at the carpet in the bedroom, really the only thing that shows any wear-and-tear at all. The tread of the carpet is flattened around the edge of where a bed would go. “It’s pretty nice,” he says.

They spend a few more minutes poking around, but the place is small so it doesn’t take long. Grace leads them back out for a quick tour of the pool and community spaces.

Back at the car, when Eddie slides behind the wheel, he says, “Well, I think it’s perfect. If no one objects, I’ll call Grace and say we’ll take it.”

After a beat, Frank, sitting in the passenger seat and stretching the seatbelt across his chest, says, “Yeah, it’s good. I wish I could combine this kitchen with the location of the place in Silver Lake.”

“Yeah,” Richie says from the backseat. He wrinkles his nose. “This location is kinda… strip-mall-y.”

“Strip-mall-y?” Eddie repeats, deadpan.

“It’s not hip,” Richie explains. He reaches to pat Frank's shoulder. “We can keep looking. There’s gonna be a place that’s perfect.”

“There’s not gonna be a perfect place,” Eddie says. “There are just places, and Frank has to live somewhere, so let’s start prioritizing what’s important. Is the hipness of the place important? Can’t be within a mile radius of a strip-mall?”

Richie and Frank both laugh at that, and Richie says, “That should be a sorting option on Zillow.”

“No, I’m serious,” Eddie says. He’s got his seatbelt on and the keys in the ignition, but he hasn’t started the car yet. He twists in his seat to face Frank. “You find a problem with every place we’ve looked at. We’re doing you a favor by letting you stay with us, you know, and by helping you find a place to live, and by literally buying a house for you– And you’re making it more difficult at every step. I’ll give you one more week, or I’ll just make the decision, okay?”

Eddie regrets saying all of that before he’s even finished. For a long second of silence, he stares at Frank, who stares back at him. His veiny hand grips the sash of his seatbelt; his skin looks thin, almost translucent. The beginning of a beard is forming around his chin, the hair just as white as that on his head. “Fair enough,” he says finally. “I’m sorry I’ve been making this difficult.”

“Eddie,” Richie says from behind him. “Come on.”

“No,” Frank interrupts, waving a hand. “I know it’s shitty that I came back into your life only to be a burden.”

“You’re not…” Eddie starts. He turns the key in the ignition, just for something to do. “You’re not a burden,” he says, and backs out of the parking spot.

The ride home is predictably awkward. Eddie focuses on driving and tries to unpack why exactly he feels so shitty—besides the usual guilt-hangover that follows being an asshole. It doesn’t take him long to figure it out.

His mother used to say that she was a burden all the time. It was her go-to line whenever Eddie strayed a little too close to freeing himself, or made too much progress toward building a life of his own. But, as Eddie realized after many years and some therapy, it wasn’t ever a true expression of contrition on her part. She said she was a burden, or she said Eddie didn’t love her enough or that he wanted to hurt her, so that he would have to reassure her that she wasn’t and that he did and that he wouldn’t. He was trapped in that cycle of guilt up until her death.

Now Frank, he doesn’t know Frank well enough yet to know if this is his usual M.O., or if this is an isolated incident. Eddie doesn’t want to overreact to what might have just been an offhand, forlorn remark Frank made after his son was, admittedly, treating him like a burden.

Eddie figures it’s likely that he’s the one being an asshole here. Either way, he’s been sensitive to this type of thing for the past couple years since Derry. In the early days, when he and Richie were still dancing around each other, Richie would do some of that guilt-trip thing, but unintentionally. (One time in particular, when Richie was still frequently drinking and getting himself into trouble for it, he said to Eddie, “I’m sorry for always making you take care of me,” and Eddie had a hard time explaining the fight-or-flight reaction that that triggered. But they worked through it, because Richie wasn’t making Eddie do anything, Richie was just being self-deprecating and despondent, but not in a manipulative way, and Eddie chose to take care of him. Everything he has with Richie, he freely chose.)

So Eddie’s no stranger to having to parse more nuanced situations. Even if Frank was trying to guilt-trip him a little, that’s not necessarily indicative of a problematic trend. Eddie probably deserves to feel a little guilty for snapping at him.

And he does feel guilty. Which is why he stays silent for the rest of the drive home.

When he parks in the garage, Frank hops out of the car and says, “You should call Grace. Tell her we’ll take it,” before he closes the door. He’s inside the house before Eddie has unbuckled his seatbelt.

Richie, graciously, doesn’t say anything.

It seems that Frank has gone upstairs to his bedroom. Once they get inside, Richie grabs his little bag of marijuana paraphernalia—this is what Eddie called it once, and now what Richie calls it exclusively (he also wants to name a band after it, print it on t-shirts, and title his next comedy tour after it)—from the drawer in the kitchen and says, “I’m gonna go out by the pool.”

Eddie says, “It’s not even eleven yet.”

Richie says, “So? It’s just a pool, Eds.” Then he grins goofily and he ducks out the door to backyard.

After a minute, Eddie follows him. Being alone with his thoughts isn’t doing him any favors. Richie sits by the edge of the pool, discarded shoes next to him, bare feet kicking in the water. A white puff of smoke rises and drifts away on the breeze, dispersing into nothing.

“Hey,” Eddie says as he sits down next to him. He rolls up his pants to his mid-calf before slipping his feet into the water. “Thought I’d join you.”

“Do you want an edible?” Richie asks. “What happened to your before-noon rule?”

“No, I’ll smoke,” Eddie tells him.

Richie quirks an eyebrow. “Really?”

“Yeah, I want to.”

“Okay, but explain.”

“Well, I don’t have a family history of lung cancer. Evidently.” Eddie shrugs. “And that was why I stayed away from it. So, now, I figure… Why not.”

Richie watches him skeptically for another moment. Then he shrugs and offers the joint to him. “Okay, go for it. I never thought I’d see this day. Need any pointers?”

Eddie rolls his eyes and brings it to his lips. The paper is a little damp from Richie’s mouth. He breathes in as long as he can, trying to look nonchalant under Richie’s scrutiny. Then, just as begins to exhale, he collapses in hacking, sputtering coughs.

Richie laughs and rubs his back. “Did you inhale?”

“Did I–” Eddie coughs. “Yes, I fucking inhaled, what does it look like?”

Richie laughs harder, and dodges when Eddie tries to take the joint back from him. “No, man, we’re gonna let that settle. Give it a minute.”

Eddie pouts while Richie keeps smoking and kicking his feet in the pool. There are a couple leaves and dead bugs, a moth and beetle, floating on the surface, rolling away from them on a wave every time Richie splashes. Eddie grimaces and pulls his feet out to sit hugging his legs to his chest instead.

“Eddie,” Richie says heavily. “You need to apologize to Frank. You were a real dick to him today.”

“I… did apologize,” Eddie says weakly. He’s barely convincing himself.

“You really didn’t, though.”

“Well, okay, I kinda lost my cool and I’ll apologize for that, but it is absurd how entitled he’s acting. I mean, we’ve known him for, like, two months and we’re buying him a house.”

“Yeah. We are.” Richie shrugs. “And it’s no skin off our back. We can afford it. He needs some help. I thought you’d be happy to get him out of here, at least.”

Eddie sits for a moment, puzzling over how to reply. He can’t rebut Richie’s words, so he lets a more emotional argument punch up from his chest. “Richie, how are you not on my side on this?”

“There aren’t sides!” Richie protests immediately. “I’m just calling it as I see it, you’ve been a dick to him. Not just today, either.”

“No, Richie,” Eddie says, turning his body to face him. Richie looks sort of unmoved, leaning back on one hand, the joint dangling lazily from the other. “It’s actually shitty that you can’t back me up on this. I don’t need you trying to be like, ‘Oh, Frank’s not that bad, give him a chance.’ That’s not your role here!”

“He’s not that bad and you should give him a chance. Okay?” Richie sits up straighter, pulling one foot from the pool as he turns to face Eddie. “Like, I let you wallow for a pretty long time, we both did, and we’ve talked about how you–”

“You’ve talked about me?” Eddie’s eyebrows shoot up as his mouth falls open. “Richie, he’s not your friend and he’s not your dad.”

“I mean, he’s my father-in-law.”

Eddie scoffs. “We’re not married.”

“I know we’re not married, but it’s really kinda fucked up for you to throw that out as fight ammo?” Richie’s voice climbs in pitch all the way to the end of that sentence, his shoulders up at his ears. “When you were the one who didn’t want to get married because you’re ‘opposed to the institution of marriage’ or whatever.”

“Oh,” Eddie says, blinking. “Are you… mad about that?”

“No, I’m not mad about that,” Richie says, one arm flopping out in exasperation, “I’m mad that you’re taking this out on me.”

Eddie sighs. “Okay, you’re right, and I’m sorry I’ve been shitty to you lately.”

“Thanks for that,” Richie says dryly. “Now, please just grow up. You’ve had your teen angst moment, if you really don’t want to have a relationship with him, just tell him as much. He’ll leave, and he’ll never reach out to you again, and it will be sort of shitty but it won’t be different than before.”

“I…don’t…” Eddie stammers.

“But,” Richie interrupts, holding his hand up to him, “I think you do want to have a relationship with him, you’re just not willing to move on from being hurt.”

“Because he hasn’t fucking acknowledged it!” Eddie snaps, anger rushing in quick enough to leave him light headed. Hot tears sting at his eyes and he blinks them back, embarrassed by how quickly they sprang forward. Richie’s face is frozen in a mix of surprise and dread. That makes Eddie’s anger burn a bit brighter, because Richie can’t provoke him like this and then be surprised when he gets a reaction, the fucking asshole. Eddie keeps sputtering, the words clawing their way out of his emotion-tight throat. “Maybe I– I– I could move on or whatever if he showed even the tiniest hint of remorse or– or just fucking acknowledged that he fucked up my entire life. But he won’t even do the bare minimum so I don’t see why I have to be the bigger person here.”

In the ensuing silence, as Richie blinks at him, Eddie hears the sliding door to the kitchen ease shut. He turns and catches a glimpse of Frank, slipping back inside, making his escape but not quite evading detection.

“Shit,” Eddie mutters, rubbing his hands over his closed eyes.

He doesn’t see it, but he feels Richie pat his bent elbow before he hauls himself to his feet to go after Frank.

Eddie sits for a few more minutes poolside, listening to the lap of water against the concrete wall, feeling the reflected glare off the surface of the water hot on his skin.

When Eddie finally gathers his courage to go inside, he finds Richie and Frank sitting in the living room, in arm chairs across from each other. It feels very intervention. Eddie nods a greeting and makes his way to sit down in the center of the couch between them.

“Frank,” Eddie starts slowly, staring desperately at the coffee table. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to hear that. And I’m sorry about today.”

“It’s fine,” Frank says quickly. “I guess I’ve overstayed my welcome.”

Richie says, “Maybe we should put this on pause and pick it up later when we’re not high?”

“I’m not high,” Eddie says, before he pauses and waggles his hand. “Okay, a little, but I think we should just do this now? Like, get it over with.”

Richie mutters, “Well, this is gonna be fun,” and leans back in his chair, crossing his legs.

Frank waits with wide, glassy eyes, his hands folded in his lap.

“I never really… told you about my mom,” Eddie says, very slowly, enunciating each word carefully. “What she was like.”

Frank swallows, and opens his mouth. “I– I don’t– I mean, your mom was… kind of controlling about some things but she was–”

“She was abusive,” Richie interrupts quietly, the stern edge in his voice that always sharpens when he talks about Sonia. And Eddie huffs in the embarrassed, dismissive way he always does when he’s asked to acknowledge this fact.

“Oh, kid,” Frank says, his mouth jumping into a frown, dimples deepening. Eddie bristles at the pet name, and more at the pitiful expression. “I didn’t know. I really had no idea. Did she–?”

“She made him think he was sick,” Richie supplies. He continues, his tone like he’s reading from a grocery list. “She gave him fake prescriptions. She kept him from his friends and from doing things he wanted to do because he was too ‘fragile.’ She gave him no privacy or actual support, just–”

“Richie, stop,” Eddie interrupts, his voice wavering. Richie stops immediately, leaning back in his chair.

“And she told you I was dead,” Frank says. “I mean, that’s… That speaks for itself I suppose.”

“And I thought,” Eddie says, looking up at the ceiling, the blur of the fan blades overhead. “You know, if you had died, from cancer, that explained it, at least? That she was… dealing with that. I could understand that. I’ve been to– a lot of therapy.”

Richie huffs a little laugh.

“But now, I– I…” Eddie stammers. “I have no fucking clue where any of that came from. It doesn’t make any sense. She was just…” He trails off, waving a hand in a gesture that somehow signifies all of it. “I need to reprocess all of that, now. So, that’s… great.”

Eddie risks a glance down, to make eye contact first with Richie—who’s smiling a little, but it’s his intensely uncomfortable therapy-smile—and then with Frank. Frank is leaning forward, his eyebrows knit together. His eyes are huge and brown beneath his glasses, like Eddie’s eyes. He doesn’t say anything so Eddie looks back up to the ceiling and continues.

“I used to…” Eddie starts and stops. He takes in a shaky breath. “I had this daydream when I was a kid, that you weren’t dead, and that you would– I dunno, come rescue me, or something? Fucking stupid. I knew it was stupid, but…”

“Eddie.”

Eddie looks back to Frank; his nose is red, and he rubs it on the back of his hand.

“Shit, we probably should have started with this conversation,” Frank says. He’s smiling but his eyes are wet. “I’m so, so sorry.”

“Yeah, we probably should have talked over a few things before now,” Eddie says, smiling a little too. He scrubs at his own eyes. “That’s why this is hard for me. Just so you know why I’ve been… struggling with this. I don’t know why I thought we could skip this part.”

“Kaspbrak men are emotionally stunted,” Richie says in a voice like a gameshow host.

Eddie throws him a look and Richie grins guiltily, like a kid who’s been caught goofing off in class.

“Better late than never,” Frank says.

“Yeah, I wanted to ask you, too–” Eddie pauses, braces himself. “About Paul.”

“Oh.” Frank nods warily. “Okay. What about him?”

“Can you just tell me about him?” Eddie asks. “How long you were together, how you met him, what he was like… Everything, I guess. I want to know.”

“Okay. Um.”

So Frank does, and it takes the better part of the afternoon as it spirals into, really, the story of his entire life: before he met Sonia and after he left her; his own childhood and family; Paul, who was ten years older him, and who he met through work two years after Eddie was born. Paul was a chef and restauranteur who spent his life working at and running a series of variably-successful restaurants. Whatever money was salvaged from the wreckage of the last one became start-up seed for the next. Frank, who worked for a bank in Bangor, met Paul when he came in to inquire about a loan. (“And the rest was history,” Richie joked, while Frank told the story. “I have heard that business loans are a good way to meet guys.”) Frank took a ‘personal interest’ in the restaurant—his words—and they became friends at first, before it turned more serious. After Frank left Sonia, the two lived in Bangor for only a few months until that restaurant failed, then they moved to Portland to try something new, and then, when Eddie was ten, they moved clear across the country to San Francisco and stayed in the Bay Area ever since.

At some point in the storytelling, Richie gets up and goes to the adjacent kitchen, listening, while he makes them lunch. He brings back sandwiches on the seed-encrusted whole-grain bread that Eddie buys, and iced tea to drink.

It sounds like a good life, to hear Frank tell it. He had Paul, and they had friends and an apartment and a series of cats, and they worked in the restaurant business together. Then a few years back, Paul got sick. Frank doesn’t go into a lot of detail, and Eddie doesn’t pry, just listens. It leaves him feeling wounded and raw with empathy; he’s barely just started his life with Richie, and any time he considers the fact that it will one day, inevitably, come to an end, he feels like he’s free-falling and the ground never gets closer. Richie himself stays uncharacteristically quiet, his hands still in his lap.

“I’m glad you got to, um.” Eddie’s voice breaks and he laughs at himself a little, to steady himself. “To have that.”

“Thanks,” Frank says, smiling sadly. “I’m glad you get to have this.” He makes a small gesture, encompassing the house and Richie, their life.

Eddie rubs at his eyes, chuckling again, to cover for the fact that he’s totally crying. “God, okay. Let’s, uh…” He wipes under his eyes decisively. “That’s enough for today.”

“Eddie said no more emotions allowed,” Richie says, smiling fondly.

“I’m good with that,” Frank says, laughing as he sniffs back his own emotions. He plants his hands on the armrest, about to stand up, then he pauses. “But, um– if you wanted to call about the condo… It’s a nice place.”

Eddie considers it. “Well, we can keep looking a little while longer. The location was sorta lame, and, after all, you’re accustomed to Berkeley…”

Frank laughs as he pushes himself to his feet. “Right, I used to live within blocks of Chez Panisse and you expect me to live across the street from a dry cleaners?”

“Is Chez Panisse good?” Richie asks as he gets up to follow Frank through the kitchen. Eddie trails them, out onto the patio.

“Is Chez Panisse good?” Frank repeats, lamenting as he stares skyward. “That’s it, I’m taking the two of you. Your anniversary is coming up, right? I’ll call Alice.”

“Nice namedrop,” Eddie says, chuckling. “But somehow I doubt she’s the one managing reservations.”

They sit on chairs on the patio, under the shade of a large umbrella. Eddie is vaguely aware that he has no idea what time it is, or how long they’ve been talking. The sun still hits the pool, not yet blocked by their neighbor’s house, so it must be before three.

“You better get on that soon, though,” Richie says to Frank. “Don’t you have to make a reservation, like, three months in advance?”

“No, Rich,” Eddie says, grinning. “That’s where personally calling Alice Waters comes in.”

“Oh, right.”

“I have her number in my phone,” Frank says, fumbling into his pocket for it.

While he scrolls through his contacts, apparently determined to prove the point, Eddie leans back in the chair, hands folded behind his head, and laughs. Because it’s funny that his dad is trying to brag about this, especially in present company—Richie’s contacts are far more impressive—and because he feels relieved and light and airy.

“There,” Frank finally says, shoving his phone toward Richie.

Richie frowns and squints at the screen, lifting his glasses to peer under them—Eddie’s been trying to get him to try bifocal lenses for the better part of a year now—and he says, “This could be just a random phone number that you saved in your phone as ‘Alice Waters.’ Inconclusive. This could be anybody.”

While Frank sputters a response, eventually saying, “Fine, I’ll show you our texts,” Richie leans back in his chair, grinning lazily. He catches Eddie’s eye and winks at him.

“He’s just fucking with you,” Eddie tells Frank. “Don’t fall for it.”

Frank stops scrolling through his phone and laughs. “Okay. Fine.”

“Took me years to figure that out,” Eddie says. “I’ll save you the time.”

“I resent that,” Richie says mildly. “I have never fucked with anybody.”

“I’ll make the reservation, though,” Frank says as he slips his phone back into his pocket. “If you want. It could just be the two of you, I don’t have to tag along.”

“Sure,” Eddie says, glancing to Richie who nods his assent. “That’d be nice.”