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Eddie can’t be sure the harsh lights of this Target tins and jar aisle aren’t re-burning the sunburn he’d managed to get on the very last day of Mexico—the sunburn he still has, despite being back in San Francisco for a week now, because Venom thinks it’s real fucking funny that humans suffer such a thing from the only star in their solar system and so won’t heal it at his usual hyperspeed for them—but Eddie can’t not be sure, either. Either way, he’s feeling prickly, uncomfortable, and mildly in pain.
...He’s got his oldest, softest cotton long-sleeve on, and he’s wearing his leather jacket with the collar up over that. So as he aimlessly picks up a tin of tomatoes and stares at the label, he knows it’s not the stupid sunburn. The real issue?
He really wants to postpone the dinner he’s organised for tonight.
And for that, loop back round, because he’s got Mexico to thank. Because what happened in Mexico was—a lot, for a lot of different reasons. Reasons that, practically speaking, should involve the whole interdimensional teleportation thing way more and Venom’s love confession way less than they do. And no matter how quickly Venom normally bounces the physical things back (apart from the sunburn, because Venom sucks), the symbiote can’t do much for head spaces and trains of thought; probably because he can’t see or feel or hear them with any real acuity beyond the smudged outline of the emotions driving them.
Which is merciful in this case. Because Eddie still hasn’t said it back.
Three-ish weeks and counting, where it stands right now. It’s—something he’s been thinking about, somewhere in those blurry recesses of his mind that Vee doesn’t seem to have full access to, because while Eddie falls easily and wouldn't usually think himself in circles about this, this is with an alien, and that should be bigger and stranger to him than it is, but then—the interdimensional thing happened! And then the general grievances of air-travelling back home, and now—the dinner.
So, yeah. Eddie’s somewhat mentally up-to-his-ears right now. So no, Eddie doesn’t want to deal with that dinner tonight. But Eddie’s standing in a Target tins and jar aisle despite all of this, because Eddie had promised Anne and Dan—throw two more fucking hats in the ring!—the dinner would happen, and because the dinner was meant to be an apology for everything he’d put them through another three or so weeks ago: when Eddie’s rejection of Cletus Kasady, the psychopathic serial killer who’d unwittingly imprinted on him, resulted in Annie’s and Dan’s lives being used as part of the dowry for Kasady’s rebound wedding. The various wringers Eddie has just gone through in Mexico objectively pale in comparison to that; and even if they didn’t, Eddie is well overdue putting Anne and Dan first for once.
He can still see Annie’s smile when he’d first told her, in her kitchen at nearly 2AM that same night they’d dealt with Kasady, that he wanted her and Dan round to say thanks and sorry for everything. It had been vacant except for two lone tenants—tiredness, and skepticism. The first one had made him feel guilty. The second one had made him feel like shit.
As Eddie continues his staring match with the tin of tomatoes’ label, only just registering what it is he’d picked up, he can maybe feel some of that skepticism in Annie’s wan smile coming back to bite him on the ass like some portentous street mutt. Because Eddie doubts any dinner he could put together would make up for any part of the Carnage-Kasady-Shriek threesome mess. Eddie doubts it’d even make up for Venom’s by-proxy punching of Dan, and that’s the lowest thing on the apology list; if it should really be there at all, because Eddie will maintain he was just being used as a meat puppet and so had nothing to do with it. He lets the hand holding the tomato tin flop to his side and goes back once more to scanning the shelf in front of him with desperate eyes, begging for a can of something, anything to jump from its sentinel spot and give him an idea for an apology-meal showstopper.
Not for the first time, TAKE-OUT PIZZA! Venom offers.
“No!” Eddie replies, aloud and loud, because Venom’s voice had startled him out his miserable reverie; which he’s first glad of and then not, when, like a bad joke of body language dominoes, the random guy next to them in the aisle (who, like the tin of tomatoes before, Eddie is only just registering the presence of) also startles, then cuts Eddie a look of concern from under his baseball cap—LA Dodgers, really?—and cringes away, making for an evacuation down one end of the aisle.
“Sorry!” Eddie calls out to his retreating back, “I just really hate—” he glances at the shelf for a jerk of inspiration, “low-sodium pasta sauce!” And yeah, he’s gone. Eddie should probably just go back to using the panic attack excuse. At least that one, although wildly unbelievable unless he’s extra sweaty that day, garnered him some amount of magnanimous, arms-length sympathy.
WE COULD EAT HIM, Venom says, immediately.
Eddie sighs. To show his stock disapproval of Vee’s stock suggestion, but also to serve as belated catharsis for his miserable reverie from before. “No, buddy.”
BUT HE’S A DODGERS FAN. WE ARE A GIANTS FAN. YOU SAID THAT WHEN SOMEONE IS A GIANTS FAN, DODGERS FANS ARE BAD PEOPLE.
“No. I said they’re terrible people—”
THEN WHY CAN’T WE EAT HIM!
“Because he’s walked off already,” Eddie says, and yeah, he’s gonna have to give it a bit more effort and clarity than that. “...And also because while Dodgers fans are terrible people, they’re not the kind of terrible where I’d be fine with you murdering them. It’s only baseball,” he explains, totally not having an issue with saying that last bit at all, nope! not at all, “so, yeah. Capiche?”
Venom only growls; specifically the low, contemplative one that means he’s thinking real hard. Hard enough that Eddie can see him taking out his mental list of ‘people that are bad but not bad enough to eat’, running it all the way to the end, and adding Dodgers fans as its newest entry. Unfortunately, since the symbiote doesn’t have the same sense of morality as humans do, getting him to learn who’s murder-worthy and who’s not is proving to be a case-by-case thing. As in, case-by-every-single-slightly-different-case thing. Which is proving to be a long fucking process, because while there’s many people that Eddie’d deem total fucking jerkwads, there’s honestly not that many he’d deem murder-worthy, and Venom can’t seem to discern where the line separating these two sits. Eddie’s tried cutting corners with the alien, making what he himself thinks must be instinctive generalisations, but then the lack of human morality really kicks in and Vee just—never gets them.
Not that such reasoning really stops Eddie from trying, he knows. He tacks on, “You can apply that one to anything related to sports, by the way. Nothing in sports is bad enough to eat someone over.”
Venom sinks his way down to Eddie’s lower back, like something thick and gluey sliding down a wall. Definitely deep in thought. And that’s because Venom tries, too. Which is maybe why reasoning doesn’t stop Eddie from trying in that first instance.
There’s a resulting little burst of warmth from that—Eddie holds it for a second, testing the feel of it. Like he has been these past three or so weeks, ever since Venom first said those words. And, yeah. Feels right.
Still feels right. Like it always has since he started making himself test it out, getting bolder with each turn, and getting a just as strong feeling in return—because while Venom was the first one to say it, Eddie honestly can’t be sure Venom was the first one to feel it.
Crazy, right? Eddie’s pretty sure this has been written into the whole thing ever since Venom first wrapped himself round the centre of Eddie’s brain, plugging himself into every connection, making all Eddie’s lonely thoughts in the wake of his break-up with Anne become a desperately needed two-way conversation—but Eddie’s still taking this long to say it out loud. Still only just letting himself come face-to-face with these thoughts, the ones that he knows, from retreating into those same blurry recesses of his mind, that he’s had for a while. Still—
Ah. At what point did his perception of Venom go from gatecrasher he’s begrudgingly glad of, to a welcomed need?
Probably sometime way earlier than he’d first think. Something he can break down later. Because Eddie’s suddenly sure he’s nearly there.
Vee asks, THE GIANTS ARE PLAYING TONIGHT, AREN’T THEY? and Eddie blinks himself back to his surroundings, again. He places the tin of tomatoes back on the shelf—a bit symbolic of a thought finally fitting into place, he thinks wryly—and looks back to the rows of tins in front of him again, back to the impossible task of staring at one and trying to visualise how to get a whole meal out of it.
“Against the Brewers, yeah,” he murmurs in reply. Is it worth trying to make something with beans in when, no matter what else he puts in it, Venom is only going to whine that it’s something only a vegan would eat? Eddie would absolutely understand, if not for how much he fucking murders a burrito every now and then. “I’ll put it on for you.”
A skitter along the top of his shoulders, from one end to the other. Eddie’s smile goes with it, from one corner of his mouth to the other. THE PLAYS ARE HARD TO UNDERSTAND, Venom complains.
Eddie snorts a laugh. Forget human morality, the thing Vee has been trying his hardest to get since becoming a citizen of Planet Earth has turned out to be baseball. Eddie doesn’t fully know why. It is the thing he has on the TV the most, when Venom actually lets him choose the channel. It is also one of the only things Eddie puts on the TV that he’s actually interested in watching other than having as background noise. One time he’d had it on, a big game that was gonna affect more than just the two teams playing, and he’d had to tell Venom to stop being an annoying prick and either go quietly chew on the tyre swing until last pitch, or shut up, follow suit, and focus on the game. Which, now Eddie thinks about it properly, is actually exactly when Venom started throwing himself into baseball the way he does now.
...So maybe that is the reason why. Honestly, Eddie would kinda like that to be the reason why.
Yeah. He’s definitely nearly there.
“Mhm, the plays are hard, bud, but there’s no easy way round ‘em. You just gotta learn,” he says to Venom. “Actually, here’s a thought—get Annie to talk you through ‘em. She’s always been better at explaining shit than me. Been a Giants fan longer than me, too...”
ANNIE IS A GIANTS FAN?
“I wouldn’t have dated her if she wasn’t.” Eddie laughs a little, a reflex resulting from an old memory coming unbidden. A big old memory. He can tell Vee’s curiosity is piqued; can feel in his brain the symbiote prodding at the memory’s edges and hoping it’ll divine what’s inside, like a kid with an ambiguously-shaped Christmas present the night before Santa’s due down the stack. Eddie says, “It’s actually how I got that little hotshot to go out on a date with me in the first place,” and under his skin, Venom ripples from the pinch of his shoulder blades outwards, spanning his upper back like a cloak. “She was at the courthouse, because one of her big time corporate clients was being sued for gross negligence over something they’d kept complete mum about without her, and obviously, with a trial like that, I was there too, hanging around it like a creep—or a bad smell—or both—putting together a story. Or, trying to... I ended up getting a little distracted by the cute strawberry blonde lawyer, who happened to be entertaining my advances just enough to get my hopes up... It was like, second day of proceedings when I said something like, ‘I’m missing the Giants game for this shitshow of yours’, and then she’d made things wrap up quick enough that day for her to drag me down to the nearest sports bar right in time for first pitch. Just to prove me wrong. ‘Cause she knew I was otherwise right on the shitshow part.”
Eddie shakes his head, an ache of a smile in his cheeks.
Because the thing is, right after finding out Annie was engaged to Dan, Eddie was doing stupid, unstable things, like failing to jerk the handlebars of his bike back when they started to wander into the path of an oncoming car, like getting involved in Kasady’s clearly oil-slicked ploy without taking a single vigilant step back to assess things along the way, like lashing out at Venom’s usual irritations with last-straw-and-then-some-wrath—so it must have gotten easier, this pain, if he could speak about her like this now, only a month and a half or so on, without getting too twisted up on the inside. He doesn’t think it’s a result of any change in his feelings, because he still loves her; and he probably always will, in some shape or form. He doesn’t think it’s all from time passing, either, because there’s no way less than two months would cut it for him; not for this, and not to get him to this level of mostly-comfort. There’s only one thing that really leaves. Eddie smiles with the thought.
Vee had said that he was gonna help Eddie through it. Eddie wonders if he knows just how much he’s helped, and then some. And then a lot of some.
Venom says, YOU WERE PUNCHING, and Eddie smiles harder, then laughs, a little uncontrollably because maybe he’s not smiling, laughing, over just Venom’s jab.
“Yeah. Yeah, I totally was.”
He’s there.
“Vee, listen, we have to cook the chicken all the way through—”
THIS IS NOT COMPROMISE!
“Because there can’t be compromise! This isn’t like beef, where you can cook it for—I don’t know, a fucking picosecond—and still eat it without risking anything worse than tapeworms! There’s no such thing as—as rare chicken, okay?!”
Venom pitches into some angry, whiny yell.
Back at the store, Eddie, completely desensitised to any kind of tin-derived food inspiration after staring at the same tins for so fucking long, had just blacked out and picked the first recipe he could remember trying to make for Annie with his usual very limited success. It had been some roast chicken and chanterelle mushrooms risotto thing. He’d hoped that maybe this time he could manage to caramelise, rather than burn.
In the kitchen, the mushrooms are burning. The risotto rice is sticking to the bottom of the pan, which means it’s on its way to burning. The chicken, meanwhile, is half-cooked, Eddie has already gotten through half the bottle of white wine he’s supposed to be using for the recipe, Venom keeps siphoning off the ethanol from Eddie’s brain cells to keep their mind right for cooking which only makes Eddie get through even more of the bottle, and Eddie has to lean down to place his forehead on the cool, albeit slightly greasy edge of the counter.
Did he really have his first I’m-finally-ready-to-say-I-love-you-back over this fucker only an hour ago? It seems hard to believe.
It doesn’t seem hard to believe. At all, actually.
To the floor, Eddie says, “D’you wanna give Annie salmonella? ‘Cause that’s what rare chicken would do to her. It’d give her salmonella.”
Venom asks, WHAT IS SALMONELLA?
“Food poisoning, Jeopardy. And uh, a bacteria, I think?” Eddie stands back up, slips his phone from his shorts’ pocket, stabs salmonella into the safari search bar, and slides across into the pictures tab. “This guy,” he says, about the weirdly-rendered, hot-pink jelly beans populating his phone screen. One of Venom’s tendrils materialises and reaches out, scrolling through until they reach a more realistic picture of the little beasts under a microscope.
AH, THOSE. I HAVE SEEN THOSE.
“You’ve—what?” Eddie’s spine straightens. “Where?”
IN YOUR INTESTINES. I ATE THEM FOR US.
“Oh. Th...anks?” Some people’s partners clean up the dishes without being asked, his partner discreetly cleans up bacterial diseases, Eddie thinks, feverishly. He coughs. “Thanks.”
YOU’RE WELCOME. THE MUSHROOMS ARE STILL BURNING, EDDIE. Eddie lunges for the spatula and rasps out some reedy string of curses. Venom continues his commentary. YOU ARE TERRIBLE AT THIS! WE’RE A MUCH BETTER CHEF WHEN I’M IN CONTROL.
Eddie doesn’t think that’s true at all, he’s still finding dried ‘catsup’ in places, but he’s too busy hacking at the mess in the pan that’s supposed to be 200g of delicately sautéed chanterelles but instead looks like a hot, steaming pile of road tar to properly contest that point. He does manage to say, “Could you shut up?”
But Venom does not: WHAT DID I TELL YOU, EDDIE? THAT YOU SHOULD’VE JUST STOOD STILL LIKE A GOOD BOY WHILE I TOOK OVER US. BUT YOU DIDN’T, YOU INSISTED YOU DO IT YOURSELF, BECAUSE YOU SAID I’D RUIN IT AND MAKE A MESS. AND NOW LOOK. THE MUSHROOMS HAVE BURNED!
It devolves pretty quickly from there. Eddie yells something about initiative and the numerous tentacles Venom could’ve stepped in with at any point in this entire process. Venom finally makes a physical appearance, but only his head, and only to lick off whatever splashed seasoning had made its way to Eddie’s cheek. Eddie waits for him to finish and then makes a pointed comment about how he thought that, after the cathedral shitshow, they’d shown they could actually do teamwork these days, and then:
Venom purrs, “WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO HELP, EDDIE?”
Eddie clamps his jaw and balls his mouth up into one corner. Asks himself whether, even if he’s finally ready to say it, Venom deserves to hear him saying it. Says, “You’re really gonna make me ask, huh? Say pretty please? You gonna be a petty bastard?”
Venom, smug as can be and with the stalactite grin to match: “WE CAN ALWAYS JUST ORDER PIZZA.”
“Please,” Eddie seethes, “Pretty please, can you use your slimy little talons —”
An offended screech of, “THEY ARE NOT SLIMY!” and then, the front door goes.
Eddie throws his hands up. “I’m just gonna turn everything off. I’m just gonna turn everything off!”
With a truly disgusting amount of hypocrisy, Venom says, DRAMA QUEEN, back inside their head, as Eddie does just what he’d said he’d do, fingers slipping on the oily stovetop controls, and then stumbles forwards to the door. NO! WE ARE NOT DRESSED! Venom also says, frantic again. Eddie, shoving away the part of him that gets a little bit fond whenever Vee fusses over how they look, mutters back that it’s a too damn late to do anything about that now, because his hand’s already on the door chain, unlatching it, fully committed to swinging it open.
Behind it is Anne, and then a half a step behind Anne, is Dan.
Anne’s in a cocktail dress, a dark green one that goes real nice with her hair, and when Eddie realises the pang he feels over seeing her look so pretty isn’t one of yearning but one of pride, he’s flooded with relief. Because that’s good; it’s really good—in the sea of strangeness that is falling in love with the alien using his body and brain as a host, consistency and congruence are key to keeping his head above water, and his love for Annie not being a storm to churn that sea up is exactly that. Because he does still love her; but it’s slipping into a different, mellower kind of love. Something calm. Something he can do from a distance, and from the distance she’s asked of him.
Swallowing that run-on metaphor whole and smiling with the force of it, he nods to Dan, who’s wearing dark wash jeans and a crisp powder blue dress shirt, and is holding a bottle of what is probably really nice red wine in one hand and a cardboard neck of beers in the other.
“Hey!” Eddie says, smile growing into a wide grin. “You look great, Annie. So do you, Dan the Man.” Eddie shoves down the voice that excitedly crashes his brain party to yell, like the ex-fratboy he looks like but never was, threeway! —something that happens every time he manages the rare normal, sane, adult interaction with Anne and Dan—because, no. Not an idea that needs feeding!
ANNE DOES, Venom says to him, pulling him back, DAN DOESN’T.
Was that a smear of jealousy he just felt from Venom, or is he honest to god developing a guilty conscience about having thoughts about a threeway that includes Dan and not Venom already? He always has moved fast once he’s fallen, he reasons. He taps a finger at his temple. “Vee says hi.”
Annie’s face does something uncomfortably knowing, before moving onto doing the weird look through him rather than at him, the one she does when Venom’s making his presence known only in Eddie’s head. “Hi, Vee,” she says, which makes Eddie shift on his own two feet and that Dan follows up with a good-natured, but slightly awkward waved hand. Annie looks back to Eddie, smiling, and Eddie’s chest reflexively warms. “Weren’t expecting us yet?”
“What? No, yeah, I was—I said seven, right? It’s seven.”
“You’re still in your shorts,” she says, by way of explanation. Venom roars in Eddie’s head, more unhappy than smug, I TOLD YOU SO! “Is something burning?”
“Was burning! Shouldn’t be anymore. Might be residually burning? But the stove’s off! So...”
Annie’s smile grows, and her brows raise, and he knows she’s thinking he’s a helpless case right now. He wonders if he should step forward and give her a kiss on the cheek. But it wouldn’t be read the right way; not yet. Instead, he steps aside, well clear of the doorway.
“Coming in?”
By the time they’ve all cracked open a bottle of Dan’s beers each—some type of pilsners from one of San Francisco's many, many microbreweries, to which Eddie realises tracks a little too much for Dan for him to appropriately curb his amusement over—the smell coming from the stove has gone from ‘dubious whiff’ to ‘do we need to consider starting from scratch and also maybe breaking into the building’s janitor’s closet for the fire extinguisher’. Dan, the helpful son of a gun, offers to go check things out, and, wielding the spatula, stations himself in the kitchen.
Eddie tries to distract Anne from the fact her fiancé is fixing her ex-fiancé’s dinner by corralling her over to the lounge area and onto the sofa. He flicks on the TV, switching it over to the baseball, because the way Annie’s looking at him is making him nervous. Like she’s got a scent in her nose and the urge to follow it through. He’d rather she do that with Giants’ plays.
“So,” Anne starts, word as slow and drawn out as the swirl of beer she’s conducting in her bottle. “How was Mexico?” Not the Giants’ plays then, and really, why would it be. He hasn’t seen her since he and Venom have come back from Mexico.
Mexico.
“Oh, you know,” Eddie says. “It was good. Mexico was good.”
Anne nods. She’s after more information. He swallows. She knows him; she’s probably going to figure everything out from his microexpressions alone.
“We drank a lot, swam a lot, it was—” he shifts in his seat, and tries to grin reassuringly. “It was Mexico.”
She’s still after more information.
Maybe he could tell Annie about the whole slipping-briefly-into-an-interdimensional-Mexico-and-freaking-a-bartender-out thing? He should probably tell Annie about the whole slipping-briefly-into-an-interdimensional-Mexico-and-freaking-a-bartender-out thing.
He cuts her a look. She’s looking back at him like she’s all geared up to go veering dirtbike-style down the uneven path of concern. Like she often does with him since Venom happened to him. Like he doesn’t want her to do, because when she’s concerned about him, fatalistic danger to her as a result of her concern about him often follows. Which is what this dinner she’s at right now is supposed to be fucking apologising for.
So, no. He’s not going to tell Annie about the whole slipping-briefly-into-an-interdimensional-Mexico-and-freaking-a-bartender out thing.
So no, there’s no getting out of it. He’s gonna have to go with the other big thing. And it’s a jump, probably more like a leap, but he’s committed now. Fuck it.
“He, uh,” Eddie says, swallowing hard; harder than before. Fuck it! “He told me he loves me?”
A few things happen. Inside his head, dead silence. Annie’s brows shoot up in shock. Eddie’s focus homes in on that like a missile, suddenly desperate for something external and not what’s happening inside his—their—own head.
“Wow,” she says, and nods slowly, maybe a tad anxiously. “And your response was?...”
And inside his head is dead silence, which—isn’t surprising, actually. Because Eddie really did only decide that he’s ready to say he loves Venom today, meanwhile, Venom had said it first three weeks ago, in Mexico. So Venom’s been waiting around for a while now to hear anything back.
“Well,” Eddie says, “I love him, too.”
The dead silence is replaced by something alive; a rushing of blood and chemicals and electricity that Eddie knows is all Vee. Eddie watches these cascades from behind his eyes with something like pure, sheer relief.
YOU MEAN IT? Venom asks from within them, at the same time that Anne mutters to herself, staring off into some blank space on the wall, “I don’t know why I’m not more freaked out by this. I should be more freaked out by this.”
Eddie laughs at her and shakes his head. Not sure what else to do.
YOU MEAN IT, Venom says again, louder, and Eddie says, softly and under his breath, “Yeah, buddy.”
Anne refocuses and stares at Eddie’s face, her eyes wide and targeted. “I should be worried,” she whispers. “You two are—are fucking messes. And, y’know, two wrongs don’t make a right, that kind of thing—” she laughs, some kind of manic yelp— “I should be worried!”
“...But?” Eddie ventures. She shakes her head, laughing some more, for real this time. He grins at her and presses, “That was a but, right?...”
And then Venom makes an appearance, slithering out with a magma-like crawl from Eddie’s shoulder. Just as his usual head-on-a-stalk deal, like a pompom with googly eyes on the end of a pipecleaner—but it causes a real shift, because he hasn’t properly made an appearance yet. Obstinate asshole that he is, he always has valued her opinion very highly.
Annie seems to be thinking the same thing. She stops laughing, gets serious, and takes a weighty moment to look between the two of them. Under his t-shirt, Vee wraps himself round the trunk of Eddie’s upper arm.
“But,” she says eventually, “I don’t know—I’m not. Maybe it’s because I saw you two figure things out just in time in the cathedral,” Eddie fights back a wince because of what they were ‘just in time’ for, “Maybe it’s because you’ve come back from a three week stint in Mexico with only an epiphany on love to tell me about,” Eddie fights back a wince harder because of what he hasn’t told her, “Or, maybe, it’s because I’ve seen it coming the whole time. Or at least ever since I saw, and felt, how desperate Venom was to get back to you during the Life Centre mess, and then—when he should’ve been dead and you should’ve been back to normal but you two somehow found each other again. It—it could be a lot of different maybes. Either way, I’m just... not.” She looks at him, and then at Venom, and then shrugs, and smiles plainly. “Which is probably the best way to leave it. Right? My ex-fiancé and an alien from outer space are in love with each other—seems like one of those things you’re better just accepting as is rather than getting granular about it. And I mean, I guess it makes sense anyway. You two are symbiotic or something, is that what you call it?”
“There or thereabouts,” Eddie says. “Depends on how annoying he’s being in the moment.”
“I WILL BITE YOU!” Venom roars, and rears up to do exactly that, the little fucking weasel, but then Dan’s on the approach, somehow looking like both the bearer of bad news and good news all at once. They all turn to look at him.
“Sorry, folks—” Dan is a guy who is an enthusiastic user of the term folks— “Unfortunately it was unsalvageable.”
“Boo!” Annie catcalls, brandishing her beer at him.
Dan’s hands sweep out in earnest apology. “Listen, I tried, but it turns out I can only save lives, not risotto.”
Anne raises an arched brow. “You got a solution, Dr. Dan?”
“Yes, actually. I ordered pizza. With a range of toppings, to suit all tastes.”
“DR. DAN! YOU ARE ONE TO BE TRUSTED,” Venom yells, and emerges further to slap Dan heartily on the back. Dan lets out something that’s a bit like a scream, and Eddie wonders, guiltily, if that’s because the guy was worried he was about to get dealt another punch. Eddie also wonders if this is all it’ll take for Vee to decide he likes Dan now, or if it’s just a fickle, for-one-night-only moodswing because it suits Venom’s current best interests (pizza), and he’ll go back to being a Dan hater as soon as the guy’s gone. Eddie genuinely does hope for the former.
“R-Right. Thanks, Venom,” Dan says, smiling nervously. He gets some composure back, and then looks between all three faces. “Uh—was something going on in here before I came through?...”
“Well—” Annie starts.
“—Anne’ll tell you later,” Eddie finishes.
Annie looks over to him, and he smiles, and then she looks over to Dan, and smiles at him. Dan smiles, and nods. “Okay. Sure,” he says.
And then Eddie looks between the two of them, and decides to make it this evening a three-for-three. Bad things come in threes, but who's to say good things shouldn’t too? He’s on a streak—and after what all of them have been through recently, it’s a much-needed streak. So a three-for-three: on telling Venom he loves him back, on (sort of) managing an apology dinner, and now on saying something he should’ve affirmed Anne of ages ago:
“Hey, I know it’s laughably late, but—I’m happy for you both.”
Annie tilts her head pointedly at him. “Should I be reading into that?”
Eddie laughs at her dry smile. “No,” he says, “no, you did that the first time I said it.”
“And was right to...”
He laughs harder. “Stop being such a pessimist! I just mean it. Simple as.”
Though, she’s right. He didn’t exactly mean it the first time, not because he wasn’t happy for her happiness, but because he was yet to catch up with his own. But he has now. And it took him a while—Mexico, and then a little bit more—but he has now.
Anne smiles. “Okay. Well, thanks, Eddie.” She punches him gently on the arm, and says, quieter, “I’m happy for you two, too.”