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1
The thing about Nancy Wheeler is that, well. It’s that she’s great.
This shouldn’t be an issue, because he’s trying to date her. Or at least get her into bed, and he’s doing a damn good job, yeah? So it’s fine, that he thinks she’s great, because sure okay Tommy may drawl about the chase and hard to get and shit but Steve does actually want to think a girl is great if he’s getting into her clean-pressed skirts. Standards, and all.
The problem is it’s not just the wavy dark hair or the stubborn sharp chin or the nimble, deft fingers. It’s not even the soft swell of her breasts or any of the other things that would make his mother call him crass - ugh, no, why did he even think that, he would never say this shit around his mother, what the hell - point is, it’s not just the stuff he tips his head back against his pool chair and describes at length to a snickering Tommy and Carol, when they look at him like he needs a reason, to want Nancy instead of anybody else. It isn’t about dirtying the pristine, meticulously studious package that is Nancy Wheeler, which is kind of awful, because that’s what it’s supposed to be.
Pristine. That’s new, since he met her. Meticulous. Words that wouldn’t even be between Steve’s ears if they weren’t there neatly printed on color-coded flash cards, Nancy’s impeccable - impeccable, is another one; it sounds funny enough to make him snicker, which makes her glare - Nancy’s impeccable nails delicately pinching the corners.
It is about the meticulousness, the studiousness, is the thing. It is about the way her mouth twists and her brow furrows when she’s trying to get something perfect. It is about the binders and the folders and the neat stacks of notes. It’s about the fucking flash cards, okay, and it’s not about messing them up.
He just. He just likes it.
He likes it when she talks about math class, or chemistry terms. He likes it when she says words he doesn’t understand. He doesn’t even want to understand them, not unless they also describe her, and it has nothing to do with her being nice about it when he doesn’t know them - he just. He just likes it when she says them. He likes her color coded everything - not in an oh look how proper, let me fuck you up way, just in a…way. He likes the way that there are books all over her room, neat in rows. He likes when she gets single-minded about homework, and deadlines, and the prim lines of her skirt and being right. He likes the firm, steady confidence with which she aims a gun at his head, those deft fingers on the trigger. He likes how her essays always go at least two pages over the minimum limit, and how she blushes but doesn’t back down when he points it out, just calls herself thorough.
One of these things is not like the others; Steve recognizes that. He just kind of adds that onto the pile next to the whole freaky monster near-death experience thing, which is currently buried under the thing where he cuts all his apparently-yeah-okay shitty friends out of his life, right next to his attempts to get spraypaint off a theater marquee which is, it turns out, just un-fucking-godly tough to do. It’s a lot. It’s all a lot. It’s fine. It’s a one-time trainwreck life-altering thing, sure, but it’s over. It’s over, and the monster is gone, and a girl is dead but it’s so much easier to panic about how maybe chemical compounds are hot as hell.
Which is a pun, probably, maybe. If he made it out loud, Nancy would take it as enough of a pigtail-pull, probably, to keep it from denting his cool-boy rep. He never does.
2
“Hey, Jerry! Kim!”
“Parsons, there the hell you are. We’ve been looking all over.”
“Seriously, Der - we were about to call out a search party.”
“Shit, guys, yeah, sorry. It’s just - you will never guess the day I had, alright? 'Cuz, okay, remember how my car was making that noise? The weird one? Well, it was again, and then it wouldn’t fucking start, son-of-a-bitch, and that was after practice so I bummed a ride to the shop from Harrington—”
“Steve Harrington?”
“Yeah, Kim, Steve Harrington.”
“What other Harringtons do you know, Kim?”
“Anyway - so I’m getting in Harrington’s fancy-ass car, right? And I go to chuck my shit in his trunk, and there’s like this bat—”
“Like a bat bat? Ca-caw, ca-caw?”
“Fuck’s sake, Kim, bats do not caw.”
“What’d they do then, huh, Jer? Chirp?”
“No, Kim. They, like…they do this silent-screech-echo thing.”
“That's so stupid, Jer, you can’t silently screech—”
“No, no! Shut up! What’re you two, high? A baseball bat!”
“Ohhhhhh.”
“Oh, cool! I didn’t know Harrington played baseball.”
“He doesn’t.”
“How do you know that, Kim? Maybe he’s picking it up.”
“Are you two even listening to me? Because I asked him, right, and that’s what he said - that he’s picking it up, and all, but—“
“Okay, cool, Harrington’s a baseball guy now. What’s got you all freaked?”
“—but, you don’t understand, Jer. The bat - it had like. It had nails in it. All hammered in the top, stickin out like this.”
“Shiiiiit.”
“Fuck me.”
“Not with that thing, he better not.”
“Oh my god, Jerry, don’t be crude.”
“I’m just saying, that’s no good for any kind of balls.”
“That’s what I—”
“Ew.”
“—said! But then Harrington - Harrington gets all weird and, like, flustered and shit—”
“Steve Harrington does not get flustered.”
“How would you know, Kim?”
“Eat shit, Jerry.”
“Now who’s crude?”
“—So Harrington gets all shifty and I probably shoulda stopped asking but like it’s a nail bat in his goddamn trunk, shit looks fuckin insane, right? So he gets in the car and I get in the car and I’m like the fuck you need a thing like that for?, and he starts driving and starts throwing out shit left and right all edgy-like, like I dunno man and shit comes up and squirrels.”
“Squirrels?”
“Squirrels.”
“Squirrels.”
“I mean, if the squirrels have, like, rabies—“
“There aren’t rabid squirrels in Hawkins, Kim—”
“How would you know? You don’t know—“
“So he says squirrels, and he’s laughing all high pitched and he’s all twitchy ‘round the eyes and at this point I’m like, maybe I shouldn’t have gotten in the car at all? And then he’s like I dunno man, what if there were, like, monsters or something and I’m like monsters, where the fuck would you find monsters and he’s like I dunno man in the walls and then we pull up to my house and I’m about to get out and he grabs my arm and he’s like wait, shit, I just told Nance not to talk about this shit, don’t tell my girlfriend, and like, what the fuck, right? Anyway I booked it the hell out, but then I’m at the shop with no ride, and—”
“Dude. Dude, shut up. Dude, you’re so stupid.”
“Who you calling stupid, stupid?”
“Dude, Derek, man. Der, he was high.”
“What?”
“Jerry’s right, Der. Gotta been, right?”
“…huh.”
“Right?”
“Yeah. Yeah, shit. Yeah, he was probably high.”
“As a kite, man. Betchya he got in on that shit Munson’s selling back in the woods behind the school.”
“Munson? Like - weirdo Munson from the Hills? Didn’t he graduate?”
“Nah, got held back.”
“Ugh. Not worth it, man - you could not pay me enough to go into the woods alone with that guy.”
“Bet Steve Harrington did, though.”
“Hey - hey, bet that’s what the bat’s for.”
“High. Fucking - yeah. He must’ve been high. Shit, man, at practice, too.”
“Guy’s got balls, tell you that.”
“Steve Harrington, man. Steve Harrington.”
“Mmm. Steve Harrington.”
“Oh my god, Kim, shut up.”
“No one wants to hear it, Kim.”
3
Steve has another, smaller crisis over the fact that weirdo-Jonathan-Byers-who-beat-him-bloody is basically his only non-girlfriend friend now, but it’s only a short one, because pretty soon he doesn’t have a girlfriend anymore and doesn’t have any friends at all. (He doesn’t have a keg record either, which should feel less like a failure than it somehow does.) And then he does have one friend but he’s thirteen. And then he’s not doing anything with his goddamn life and he’s working in a goddamn sailing themed ice cream shop and getting accurately shit on for striking out by an okay-fine-yeah pretty girl who okay-yeah-fine probably also has very nice organized binders if this whole graph-chart-scoreboard thing she has going on is a sample of what she’s like outside the ice cream shop.
Okay, not such a small crisis. It’s a big crisis.
A big, fat, who-the-fuck-am-I crisis.
And this one - this one just keeps going and going and going. Popping up when he least expects it.
He thinks, sometimes, that it won’t ever end.
(It will. A year from now, Steve will try to explain it to Robin via an overwrought - that’s a Robin word - metaphor about death and ghosts and Jonathan Byers’ front door, and she will look at him like he’s gone mad. Two months after that he'll do the same thing to Nancy, who will hum thoughtfully, then say the drawer where I keep my guns - I totally forgot, you know, that I used to put flashcards there.
I liked those flashcards, Steve will say.
Of course you did, Nancy will smirk her reply, tapping a pen briskly against a character sheet on the table beside them, right over a messy scrawl that is not Steve’s, which, fair enough, Steve has definitely proved a habit of spending time with fuckin nerds. He’ll smile about it and she’ll smile back and then they’ll be smiling at each other, rueful and confused and honest at the Wheeler family kitchen table, and Steve will think that this is it, this is the last one. This final round of self-exploration or whatever, Steve Harrington, and then - and then you’ve fought monsters four times in as many years and got beat up by the Russians who live under the local mall and been to hell and fallen as far as a high-flying popular king of high school with a charmed future can fall, and here you’re still alive sitting back at home with no desire to kiss the girl you should have tried to marry and this is your world now, this is it, you’ve become this guy and you like him and the people who matter like him too and it’s good, it’s so good, so pat yourself on the back and take a load off, man, you did it, you’ve figured it out, you're done.)
4
Steve Harrington likes boys.
5
“I’m never going to touch boobs again,” Steve says, staring up at the ceiling.
The lump of blankets beside him emits a noise. The noise is a groan.
“I mean, unless we break up. I don’t want to break up.” Steve turns on his side and props up on one elbow, feeling his eyebrows squish together involuntarily as he peers at the lump. “Do you think we’ll break up?”
The lump shudders and grumbles. Steve can tell there are words but can’t make them out, so he flips the covers back. The resulting growl-lunge-snatch has them yanked out of Steve’s hands and flipped up again almost immediately, but not before Steve catches a flash of tangled darkness over stubborn chin and scrunched tight eyes.
The once-again-lump squirms, tucking itself back into its cocoon. Steve huffs, then prods at it over the sheets until it emits a louder, more enunciated mutter of “...thought’chyou done this meltdown a‘ready.”
“About breaking up?” Steve narrows his eyes at the blanket folds. “I haven’t had a meltdown about breaking up. Should I be melting down about—”
“Nuh-uh,” there’s a bobbing-rustle that Steve recognizes from experience as a shaking head. “‘Bout boys.”
Steve blows a hard breath out through his nose. “Not about boys, this isn’t about boys.” He clarifies, “It’s about boobs.”
There's a pause. Then, the blankets tent upward just enough to reveal exactly one grudgingly open eye in the darkness, alongside an equally grudging, prim grumble. “I cannot overstate how disinclined I am to discuss women’s anatomy, let alone your predilection towards it.”
Steve makes a noise.
Eddie drops the covers and says, muffled, “‘m saying ‘m not in the mood to hear you pine over boobs.”
Steve makes the noise again. Eddie understands it correctly this time.
“God,” he groans, finally fully flipping covers back to raise his bedhead and give Steve a wild, both-eyed look, somewhere between exasperated and awestruck, “you’re so horny.”
Exasperated is a Nancy word, Steve thinks later, splayed out naked with the blankets twisted at their feet. A Nancy word, even if all of them take it out for a spin, now and then. Eddie’s on his back with his head tipped into the pillows, too hot and sweaty to touch Steve anymore but radiating undeniably from a bare three inches away. Steve rolls onto his side to halve that space and watches dark curls tangle hopelessly into a halo, nimble fingers twist into the frayed holes of the overused and underwashed bedsheets and dark eyes scrunch closed like a pleased cat. A bit of drool catches on the side of Eddie’s lips; Steve watches as he licks at it unselfconsciously and squirms the same way until he can dig a crumpled ball of paper out from under the small of his back, give an unattractive, sloppy snort at it, and chuck it carelessly onto the floor beside the bed. Steve knows without looking that it’ll be full of cramped, frenetic (Eddie word) handwriting, meticulous in its content: meticulous but not pristine, because there is nothing pristine about Eddie Munson.
“You’re not worried I’m gonna break up with you for boob time, right?” Steve asks, tucking both hands under his cheek.
Eddie doesn’t move and doesn’t open his eyes, though his mouth quirks very slightly. “Nah,” he says, “you’d miss dick too much.”
Steve hums in thoughtful agreement. “Okay, but even if you didn’t have a dick.”
“And I had boobs?”
“Or boobs. Either. Neither. Whatever.” Steve thinks about it. “It’s weird, like, I’d miss them, but I don’t think I’d miss them miss them. I’d think about it - I’m thinking about it - because I do really like boobs. And dick, yeah. But - I dunno. I’d have you.”
Eddie squirms a little, twisting onto his side to tap his forehead onto Steve’s shoulder. “Steve,” he groans, weighty and groggy and a lot like I love you, even though that’s not something they’ve yet said, “go the fuck to sleep.”
+1
Eddie comes to in fits and starts. Eddie is a fits and starts kind of guy, conscious or otherwise, so this is to say Eddie wakes up basically the same way he does in bed, except for how it’s completely unlike that because they’re not in bed, they’re handcuffed to the kitchen floor.
Well, Eddie’s handcuffed to the kitchen floor. Steve’s only handcuffed to the kitchen floor emotionally, which is to say not going anywhere anytime soon, though he does lean forward to steady one of his mother’s exhaustingly minimalist ceramic vases before Eddie’s ungraceful thrashing can somehow shake it off the counter. He dodges another flail while he smooths out the duct tape covering the oven door - the oven door handle being what Eddie is actually handcuffed to, to be specific, which Steve is trying not to be concerned about since Jonathan did the Eddie-proofing and Nancy, Robin, and Dustin all approved it. He settles back onto his knees, then adjusts the padding both around Eddie’s wrist and the mess of blankets under him, and then can't help but linger on a bit of hair that’s thrashed its way across his face. It’s only by physical intuition and quick reflexes that Steve manages to yank his hand back away from Eddie’s mouth as it jolts forward in a snap, teeth clicking together on air in unconscious dissatisfaction as Eddie’s eyes flutter into waking.
“…’teve?” he groans.
“Wake up, sleepyhead,” Steve sing-songs, though he reluctantly pulls back to sit against the vertical of the kitchen island opposite. He tucks the mutilated wooden spatula the kids had left him around a corner - Eddie doesn’t need to see that - then picks up his beer from where he left it. “It’s like 4pm.”
“Mmm…whazzat?”
Because he’s hopeless, hair tangles all over again as Eddie groans and shakes like a dog. There is an aborted, whole-bodied motion that Steve knows would have involved rolling over if they were upstairs under - or, more likely with Eddie, twisted up in - the sheets. Instead, Steve finds himself thanking Dustin’s foresight to prop couch cushions up along the base of the stove; Eddie grunts as he bangs gently into them, after which he rockets upright as he recognizes the jingle-and-pull of the handcuff and chains. The duct taped oven door holds closed - points to Jonathan - which is about where their victories end as Eddie’s “Ow, ow, ow,” shifts from surprised to pained because—
“Oh, shit,” Steve pushes forward to try to sort out the place where Eddie’s hair has tangled into the cuffs. Which would be fine and he’s making real headway, but then Eddie’s head twists up and his eyes go all sharp and his teeth go all sharp, too, which Steve knows because they manage to graze the thin skin of his neck even as he yelps and flings himself back to his original seat, putting a fair few feet of space between himself and his boyfriend. His boyfriend, who is staring at him with wide, confused eyes from under a mass of still half-entangled hair. His boyfriend, who slowly, ever so slowly, without so much as shifting his horrified gaze, runs the tip of his tongue over the point of first one fang and then the other.
Eddie pants. Eddie tongues his teeth a little longer. Eddie lets out a sound that might have considered being a word once it was done being a breath, if only it could figure out how.
Steve collects himself.
“Congrats!” he announces brightly. “You’re a vampire!”
Silence.
Steve takes a sip of beer.
Eddie’s gaze jumps at rapid fire pace - hey, nice, at least he’s really awake now - from Steve’s wrist to his neck to his face. He splutters. “I’m…what?”
Steve pauses with the can lifted for another pull, then grimaces. “Yeah, I kind of made that sound like a baby announcement thing, didn’t I?”
Eddie is gaping at him. “Steve,” he emphasizes in that way of his that Steve likes very much, even when it’s frazzled and stressed, “I’m not a vampire.”
“My neck would disagree, man.”
Eddie’s eyes skitter-jump, and Steve what he sees. He hadn’t bothered to fix it, seeing the mess of his throat in the mirror and fucking with his collar for less than a minute before he'd given it up as unsalvageable. He doesn’t think it's the best time to share that he hadn’t really minded, even if it had been a surprise; that he’d sat here waiting for Eddie to wake up and multiple times let his fingers drift up to press against the riot of punctures and bruises, just to feel them ache. He will not mention how his whole spine had thrilled when Eddie had grabbed at him, back when he’d gone all fangs-and-bloodsucking mid-makeout.
Eddie Munson when he’s dangerous is sharp and jagged and transparent, improvised and desperate like a broken bottle to the jugular. Tactile (that’s an Eddie word; Steve has committed it to memory). Immediate. Steve never wants him to have to be like that and also likes that about him, and does not trouble himself to reconcile the two.
(Reconcile isn’t really an anyone in particular word, but Steve still knows it, which he guesses makes it a Steve word. He wonders if that means he isn’t just hot for nerds, he is one. Probably. He couldn’t make it through the endless descriptions of Lord of the Rings, but he has a vague idea what an Elrond is at this point. He plays Dungeons and Dragons and doesn’t fuck up the name of the game even intentionally when he talks about it. Last week - forever ago, which is to say back when Eddie still wanted to eat Steve but only in ways Steve would absolutely never discuss with Dustin Henderson - he had submitted to wearing an extremely stupid hat and a cape for a full two hours before he at least made them take the feather off so it would stop tickling his nose.)
“Steve,” this Eddie says, and this Eddie is somewhere in the middle, sweet and concerned and also flashing those new fangs like he doesn’t know how not to with a hungry look in his dark, dark eyes. “Steve, I didn’t— Did I,” his throat clicks, “Did I hurt you?”
“I’m fine,” Steve says, because yes, now do it again is definitely the wrong answer. “Won’t lie though, we lost you a bit there. Dustin and Max had to basically scrape you off me.”
“Steve.”
“I’m fine,” Steve insists, honestly.
“And, and,” Eddie glances around the empty room, “the rest—?”
“Oh, no no, everyone is fine, Eddie. You’ve just been out for a while.”
“I didn’t—“
“Go up against Nancy and her gun? You totally did.”
Eddie’s eyes widen, and he immediately looks down sharply, which is a mistake because he shrieks as it pulls on his hair in the cuffs. Steve winces in sympathy, but resists the urge to help this time. “Oh. No,” he says, when he realizes what Eddie is looking for, “she just hit you in the head with it.” Steve shrugs, “We’ve been taking shifts since.”
"...in the kitchen."
"Easy clean-up."
Eddie makes a strangled sound. Then another one, and a third one that is closer to garbled speech before he manages to get out, "And I suppose it's a...coincidence...that you're the one on shift?"
“Some shifts are longer than others,” Steve replies airily. “Anyway, Dustin has this theory—“
“A theory?”
“A theory, Munson. We ran some tests while you were out, and—“
“Tests?!” Eddie’s voice is up about two octaves.
“What are you, a parrot? Yeah, tests. Anyway, his theory is that you’re kind of starving, so you should chill out as long as we can get you enough blood in small doses until you’re full enough to not to get all crazed about it.” There's the strangled sound again. And some more thrashing, alongside a painful-looking attempt to stand up that makes Steve wince. It's all still pretty normal for Eddie, so Steve presses on, “You don’t seem much stronger than you were before you went all pointy - rough deal, man, Sinclair was disappointed as fuck - so as long as I’m far enough to pull away real quick—“
“You!?” Eddie stops his flailing to stare.
“Yeah, ‘cuz there was this whole thing with dead people blood maybe fucking you up and we don’t know shit about, like, raccoon blood or whatever, and we figure if we know what’s working—”
“Steve. Steve, I can’t—You—”
Oh hell no.
“No! Nuh-uh. No, you agreed to be, uh. Fuck. What’s the word? Starts with E, it’s, uh,” Steve snaps his fingers repeatedly as he tries to remember, “the one where we don’t fuck around, you know, with—“
“Steve!” Eddie’s gone high pitched again. That can’t be good for his voice, and he’s a singer and all. “Steve, exclusivity is not about blood drinking!”
“Well it’s not not about blood drinking!” Steve insists. “I think I’m plenty drinkable!“
“Steve,” Eddie says. He tries and fails to get up again.
“—most drinkable guy out there! And I really thought you, of all people—“
“Steve!” Is he breathing right? Eddie might not be breathing right. Do vampires even breathe? “I can’t be a vampire, Steve!”
“Yeah, you can,” Steve corrects, because he knows this one, “Dustin has a thing about this too. Apparently it’s uh - a chemical process? I think he said. And you’ve been latex since the bats.”
Eddie stops moving. He stares at Steve with wide, wild eyes. He opens his mouth once, twice; jerks his chin and blinks four times. “…latent. You mean latent.”
“Ah, yeah!” Steve agrees after a long pull from his beer. He uses his sleeve to wipe his mouth while the hand holding the can points encouragingly at Eddie, “That’s the one! Hey, do you still breathe?”
“Steve!”
“What?” And then, “You’re freaking out.”
“You’re freaking out, he says.” Eddie says, clearly freaking out. “You’re freaking out! Of course I’m freaking out!”
Well that’s no good. Steve thinks. “Is it the blood drinking?” he asks. But no - “It can’t be the blood drinking. Like, the blood drinking is not a the worst thing we’ve had, remember that first time you came back to life and you were all kinds of fucked—”
“It’s not the blood drinking!“
“Okay, so it’s about trying to kill me? I’m pretty sure you’ve done that at least twice already, if we count Rick’s and all. Or I guess the chains and shit, but that’s kind of just a Tuesday for—”
“No!” Eddie shouts. There’s an emphatic, angry jingle as he hoists himself higher up against the stove, once again straining the - once again, well secured, goddamn, Jon - duct tape on the oven. “I’m freaking out, Steve, because we have done this twice. I have been here before. I—” his voice breaks, and he pulls his knees into himself, and Steve's parents took him horseback riding once when he was a kid and the way Eddie tosses his head makes him think about when one of the horses got spooked by a snake, and Steve hates that. So he gets up and sets back down, bumping their hips close despite Eddie’s half-assed protest, which doesn’t even matter because the moment Steve settles Eddie slumps like his strings have been cut, head falling heavily on Steve’s shoulder. He bangs his head repeatedly there, but only a little on account of the hair snag issue. In a tired voice, he asks, “How many times are we gonna do this?”
Steve snorts.
“Fuck you,” Eddie whines.
His nose is oddly cold against Steve’s neck, and it nuzzles there once, twice. Then, Eddie opens his mouth.
“Nope!” Steve announces, throwing himself away again but this time without leaving the stretch of cabinets beside the stove. There’s only so much space this will allow, but it’s enough to have Eddie all but falling into the empty spot, catching himself on one manacled arm and looking out from under his pinned hair with big round eyes and sharp teeth and a whimper that nearly makes Steve scoot right back.
He’s almost mad about it, actually, because Eddie isn’t usually the loud one. Or well, he is, but it’s not the way Steve is loud, most of the time. Steve has, as Eddie puts it, the volume control of a man used to thick walls, while Eddie’s loud primarily out of theatricality and spite. It’s a privilege, as far as Steve is concerned, to get him out of his head enough to forget the chip on his shoulder and go near-silent, and best - though rarest - is when Steve can circle him back around, get him through the quiet and back around to noises that are so unperformed that they’re practically mindless. Getting one of those out of him like this feels like cheating.
With nothing else for it, Steve uses a stretched leg and his ankle to snag his half-empty beer can and slide it over the floor back to himself. He holds it up to Eddie, who snatches it, guzzles a bit from the awkward position of can’t-move-head-hair’s-stuck, and then spits out the mouthful in a spray like the overdramatic slob he is. He looks at the can like it's betrayed him until Steve takes the can back, which he does delicately between two fingers.
He takes a sip.
“…Small doses, yeah?” Eddie says it hoarsely, after a moment.
Steve nods. “Small doses.”
Steve shifts around, careful of his beer as he kneels up to scrounge around on the counter and sink above. Eddie lets his head thunk back against the silver tape. “Well,” he says. “…one way to avoid conformity, right?”
Steve turns to look down, damp hand towel nearly dripping directly on Eddie’s head while Steve raises an eyebrow. “You sure about that?”
“Nope.” Eddie pops the p. His eyes dart a little shimmy, and both his eyebrows and his mouth do a thing. Steve shrugs.
"Good," he says. He runs the cloth over his face. “‘Cuz I think this might be just, like…life.”
“What, for everyone? Steve Harrington, are you trying to tell me we’re not special?”
“Eddie, you’re a vampire,” Steve points out. He sits back down, shoulder-to-shoulder. “But also…well, yeah. Like, the way I see it, things just keep changing, you know?”
Eddie’s head bobs something too mindless to quite be a nod. He does it again, with more intent. “Yeah,” he says. And then, more firmly, with a snort and a rueful tilt to his lips, “Yeah.”
They sit together. Steve stops mid-wipe of the cloth against his inner arm to narrow his eyes suspicously at Eddie, who is still nodding like a bobblehead left the dashboard of his rickety fucking reclaimed van. He accuses: “You’ve had this meltdown before, haven’t you?”
Eddie startles. He casts a sheepish look from under his lashes as his long fingers give an aborted twitch, and Steve’s sure he’d be dragging his hair across his face if it weren’t still stuck to the handcuffs and - ah, yeah, that’s duct tape. It’s stuck to some duct tape. Jonathan you suck, that’s gonna be a bitch to get off. “Yeah,” Eddie admits. He runs his tongue across his lower lip, one corner to the other with the points of his teeth in between, like he’s tasting the words and might spit them back out, too. Instead, he says, “...and according to you, I’m going to have it again. Here’s to the next time, right?”
He grins, sharp and a little feral. Improvised, frenetic. Warm. Faking it, maybe, but genuine just the same.
Steve picks up his beer. In a silly move he’s pretty sure he’d never make if he hadn’t met an Eddie Munson, a Robin Buckley, a Dustin Henderson, he taps it ostentatiously (definitely not his word) against his wrist, then holds the wrist out to Eddie and the drink in the air. “Hear, hear.”