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The restaurant is one of those annoying, converted-warehouse LA places, with an open kitchen and vaulted ceiling and a communal table, pendant lights hanging from the crossbeams and a wood fired oven on center stage at the heart of the kitchen.
Richie knows he was lucky to get reservations at all. As it was, he had to ask Steve to book the table as a personal favor, which had been something of a gamble on Richie’s part and embarrassing enough in its own right.
At least he and Eddie don’t have to deal with the two-hour wait the hostess promised the couple ahead of them, and they’re not stuck on stupidly uncomfortable backless bar stools for the entire meal. Or -- god fucking forbid -- seated at the communal table. Richie hates shared seating. He can only imagine what Eddie would have to say about it.
And it’s worth it, when Eddie shows up in shiny oxblood loafers and a paisley shirt tucked into cropped trousers. He’s showing a good six inches of leg and for second there Richie is pretty sure he’s going to succumb to the vapors at the sight of Eddie’s shapely ankle, the peek of leg hair. He manages, somehow.
Richie has to duck to avoid a heavy velvet curtain barely restrained by a thick tasseled rope as they follow the hostess from the foyer to their table. He starts to feel like he’s made a mistake -- he should have taken Eddie to the diner, somewhere familiar, somewhere not so fucking obvious, the site of bashful first dates and birthdays and anniversary dinners and fucking proposals. He’s a little awkward, sweaty-palmed and nervous, through ordering drinks and waiting for their first round of food, chatting about Eddie’s new job, his new apartment, his whole new life here in LA.
Maybe in all that newness there won’t be enough room for him. Old, familiar, boring Richie. Maybe the novelty borne of nearly 30 years’ absence will have worn off.
But then, the food comes, and Eddie smiles at him as he shakes out his napkin, honest and relaxed, for once. Like he’s comfortable with Richie. Happy, even. And then he takes a bite.
“Oh my god, Richie. What the fuck?” Eddie almost looks angry and for a moment, Richie’s scared he’s fucked everything up somehow, like Eddie somehow looked at him and knew everything. “What the fuck?”
“What, Eds? I didn’t fucking do anything--”
“This is the best thing I’ve ever eaten in my entire fucking life,” Eddie declares, and takes another bite, and now Richie can see he’s definitely angry -- at the food, somehow, and how delicious it is. “I lived in New York City, the culinary capital of the world, for twenty years and this is the best food I’ve ever had,” he spears another bite with his fork. “Fucking LA.”
It just looks like a pile of vegetables to Richie, but he makes some half-assed joke anyway, trying to distract himself from Eddie’s intense, rage-filled joy at discovering something he spent his whole life not knowing he wanted. He’s trying not to extrapolate or daydream, or think too closely about what it might be like to be the cause, the locus of that feeling.
The whole meal is like that, all the way up to dessert. Eddie orders the chocolate pot de creme -- a wildcard choice, honestly, Richie never would have expected him to pick something so decadent, but apparently Eddie’s thrown caution to the wind. Richie likes it, unexpected as it is.
He watches Eddie lick bitter chocolate and honeyed whipped cream from his spoon, eyes closed, and swallows hard.
“Here,” Richie says, clearing his throat. “Try this.” He untucks one of the arms folded across his chest and pushes his dessert across the table.
“Is this what you ordered?” Eddie raises an incredulous eyebrow. “A bowl of cherries? For dessert?” He laughs incredulously, a short bark of a chuckle that Richie’s been hearing in his dreams for the better part of three decades.
“Just trust me,” Richie says. He ignores the long, expressionless look Eddie gives him before nodding and reaching for the bowl.
“You know I do, right? You know I-- oh, shit. What the shit.”
“What the shit, Eds?” Richie asks lightly, because he knows exactly what: that the restaurant only buys fruit from specific trees in specific orchards, perfectly in season; that they have an entire pantry in the back devoted entirely to storing fruit sorted onto flat, wide racks; that there is someone whose is employed solely to select the most perfectly ripe cherries and dispatch the platonic ideal of early summer, sublime sweetness with the slightest tart edge, to the table in a humble earthenware bowl. Just like he knows Eddie used to eat cherries by the pound all summer long, staining his mouth and fingers, until he was so full his belly ached.
“What did they do to these?” Eddie’s almost shouting but the noise in the restaurant has grown to a dull roar and no one even bats an eyelash in their direction. Not that Richie would notice if they did, absorbed by watching Eddie lose his goddamned mind. He’s flushed pink all the way down to the collar of his sensible, offensively boring navy polo, glaring at the half-eaten cherry still in his hand. Richie’s only ever seen Eddie look at him that way before. “How is this so fucking good? It’s just a-- it is just a cherry, right?”
Eddie looks at him suspiciously, and Richie nods, plucking his own cherry from the bowl. He pops it into his mouth and bites the fruit from the stem.
“Just a cherry,” he confirms, smiling with all his teeth. He knows they’re probably stained disgustingly pink with juice, like the faintest hint of blood, but Eddie doesn’t cringe back the way Richie expects him to.
Instead, he blinks, mouth slightly parted, gaze shifting between Richie’s eyes and his mouth, and something about his stunned expression binds something so tight in Richie he almost can’t fucking breathe -- this is what it must be like to need an inhaler, he thinks wildly, distantly, caught up in the way Eddie Kaspbrak is looking at him from across the table, silent, for once, as dazed as if he’d just been clocked in the head by an errant baseball.
The moment doesn’t last long -- the cacophony of the restaurant around them presses in, a server drops a glass, a driver at the intersection outside lays on the horn. Richie’s breath catches up with him. Eddie blinks and looks down at the half of a cherry still dangling from the stem in his hand.
“Well, it’s a fucking good cherry,” he mutters. He won’t look at Richie, but Richie nods back anyway, playing with the hem of his napkin and biting his lip.