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It was supposed to be banana bread.
Eddie was on a gluten free kick—they’d established that he wasn’t allergic to gluten, but it was the newest diet he was trying out. Richie wasn’t sure how much healthier Eddie could get, but he was fine with the experiments as long as Eddie didn’t do anything to his stash of shitty junk food in the back of the pantry. As long as he could go foraging for Fuego Takis in the middle of the night, he was fine with eating vegan, or gluten free, or paleo-whatever during the day.
So it was supposed to be gluten free banana bread, but it was definitely supposed to be bread. The website said so.
At least, he was pretty sure the website said so. He’d definitely read the ingredients, but then his phone died and he couldn’t remember where the chargers were, so it had been a while since he’d seen the recipe, but he was pretty sure it was supposed to be bread.
At least it was loaf shaped, he thought. And yellow, probably because of the bananas. Or the eggs. Definitely not the strawberries, unless he’d done something even more wrong than he thought. Strawberries didn’t turn yellow when baked. Probably.
It jiggled where it sat, ominously.
Richie would be the first to admit he didn’t spend as much time as he probably should in the kitchen as, well, a technical adult. He lived on ramen and Taco Bell during his earliest years, when he was just starting out and he had neither the time nor the money to throw at expensive things like “vegetables” or “spoons”. When he’d made it, or whatever counted as making it when you hated your life and spent most of your career dissociating out of self-defense, he hadn’t had the energy or the interest to change anything except the places he got his takeout from. Steve made him eat enough oranges not to get scurvy (after a close call during his first year touring), and his neighborhood Uber Eats drivers knew him better than anyone else in his life. He was fine, or if he wasn’t fine, food was so far down the list of not-fine things it never even made it onto his desk.
When Eddie moved in, they tried. Really, they did. Eddie was determined to do things without the help of an overbearing spouse, and Richie was determined to Turn His Life Around.
About two weeks into the new resolution to cook more they had a fight over how long to hard boil eggs that nearly ended their relationship. To preserve and protect their sanity and also their not-quite-matrimonial bliss, they agreed to only go into the kitchen if they wanted to, and otherwise use one of the many meal services around LA to keep them alive and at peace. Eddie took charge of ordering meals, Richie kept up his Uber Eats account for his snacks, and all was well in the Tozier-Kaspbrak kitchen.
It was the first anniversary of Eddie’s divorce, though, and Richie wanted to do something special. Hence, the banana bread. Or, what was supposed to be banana bread.
He poked it dubiously with one finger. It was very wet. He may not have been an expert chef, but he was pretty sure bread wasn’t supposed to be wet. Or have the same consistency as jello.
It was sort of like a breast implant, he thought, and then wondered why he was so confident he knew what a breast implant felt like.
It had the making of a good joke. Something something, I’m gay so you’d expect me to compare it to a ball-sack, but actually, it’s boobs all the way down.
Eh. He’d workshop it. Surely in a room full of LA comedy writers he could find someone who knew what a breast implant felt like.
He wasn’t sure if he had anyone to workshop the banana bread with, unfortunately. None of the people he knew in LA knew how to cook. In the Losers group chat, Ben, Bill, and Bev all got their food delivered without shame, because they were busy enough without adding cooking into the mix. Mike ate well wherever he traveled, but Richie was pretty sure he was more of a restaurant-hound foodie than a cook-in-the-kitchen foodie. Eddie was obviously right out.
He hesitated. There was a correct answer, he knew, but he also wasn’t sure if the help would be worth the cost.
It was for Eddie. The bread was for Eddie. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and made the call.
It was picked up on the third ring. “Stanley Uris speaking.”
Richie leaned back against the counter with a grin. “Is that really how you answer the phone to me? Your very best friend? Your closest compadre? Your dearest—“
“This is my work phone, Richie, you know it doesn’t have caller ID,” Stan cut in. “And Patty is my best friend.”
Richie made a noise like he’d been shot, clutching at his chest even though Stan couldn’t see him. Stan would know what he was doing, and that made it worth it. “Staniel! Stannathan! My heart! I am wounded! Ow!”
“You have five seconds,” Stan said, dry as dust.
Cold blooded bitch. Richie loved him so much.
“Five,” Stan continued, ruthless. “Four.”
“Fine, fine. What do you know about banana bread.” Richie turned around to face the counter, looking down on his... thing. Creation. Abomination.
“Not much? Patty’s mom makes a good one, but sweet bread isn’t really my thing.”
“Okay, but you’ve eaten it before, yeah?”
There was a pause. “Yes?”
“On a scale of one to rubber duck, how yellow should it be? And how. Uh. Jiggly?”
The pause was significantly longer. “Not at all? Neither of those things?”
“Oh.”
“Jesus, Richie, what did you do? Why are you even in the kitchen? I thought you were perma-banned ever since the al dente chicken incident?”
He winced theatrically, still facing his cabinets, but he could feel his smile creeping up his face, ruining whatever contrition he managed to drum up. “Look, Bev and I both agreed chicken was the one that people eat all chopped up and raw, it wasn’t just my fault—“
“Any google search would tell you steak tartare is made of beef, Richie.” Stan sounded as exhausted as he had when they’d tried to serve a “lightly toasted” chicken piccata at the last Losers reunion, but unless his ears deceived him, Stan was fighting a smile too. “What did you do to the banana bread?”
“I don’t know! It’s very yellow. And bouncy. Like I don’t think it would bounce if I threw it but I really want to try because it looks like it’ll bounce.” He prodded it again, and watched, entranced, as it rippled. There was a slowly growing pink splotch on one side that gave the impression the banana bread was bleeding internally.
He could practically hear the hand pinching Stan’s nose as he sighed. “Okay. Okay. I’ve got ten minutes before my next client meeting, so you need to keep this short. What did you do. Walk me through it.”
“Well, I put the bananas and the eggs in the blender, and then put it in the pan, and then I added the strawberries in the middle, like a surprise? And then I baked it.”
The silence on the other end of the line was damning.
He waited, and when Stan still didn’t speak, offered, “I could send you a picture, if you think that would help?”
Stan’s voice was very thin, sort of wavery, and Richie honestly couldn’t say if it was because he was laughing or on the verge of tears. A true Tozier specialty. “Did you use any flour? Any at all?”
“It was supposed to be gluten free,” he admitted.
The waver resolved into a reluctant laugh, almost like a wheeze. “It’s everything free. What the fuck, Richie? You made, like, sweet scrambled eggs and you thought it would turn out like bread? Without flour?”
“The recipe said—“
“You used a recipe?”
“I mean, the ingredients were from a recipe, but then my phone died.”
He could hear the click-clack of Stan’s awful analogue keyboard Richie wanted to touch so much, and then Stan started laughing harder. “Richie, the only recipe that comes up with those ingredients is a baby food recipe!”
“Oh.” That did explain some things, like how soft it was, and also why it was maybe sentient. Babies would eat fucking anything, he was pretty sure. “Well, hey, my manager’s brother’s wife just had a baby, you think—”
“Richie, if you try to feed that to an actual living child I will personally ensure you never work in comedy again.”
“Because of my thriving baby food business?”
“Because you’ll be in prison for child endangerment.” An alarm went off somewhere on Stan’s side. “Fuck. Okay, I have to get to my meeting, but do not try to feed that to anyone. Take a picture to remind yourself never to bake again, and then dispose of it. Maybe in a hazmat bag.”
“You’re so mean to me, Stanmantha,” Richie said mournfully, leaning against the countertop and putting as much quiver in his voice as he could manage when the situation was this ridiculous. “You don’t want me to grow. To learn. To improve where once I failed. To—”
Stan hung up on him.
Richie immediately called him back.
“Stanley Uris speaking.”
“Don’t hang up! I love you! Thank you!” He said it as fast as possible, tripping over his words before Stan hung up on him again.
The pause was shorter, but he could hear the silent war waging in Stan about whether to indulge him or not.
Even all grown up and at his grown up, boring as hell job, Stan was still a Loser. “I love you too. Goodbye. Please never go into the kitchen again.”
“Roger.”
“Don’t call me Roger. You need professional help. Ask Bev where she got that cake for Ben’s birthday, and stop fucking around.”
“Oh, you’re a genius, Stan the Man,” he breathed, clutching the phone like a lifeline. “I owe you my firstborn.”
“I’ve seen what you do to baby food. No thank you,” he said, and hung up again.
That was okay. Richie was secure in the knowledge he would always pick up, even for the stupidest emergencies known to man.
It was a startling thing to remember sometimes, how sure he was that there would always be someone on the other end of the line. How sure he was that he was never actually alone. It was the worst thing stolen from him in those twenty-seven years apart, he sometimes thought, worse than the years in the closet, worse than his crippling cowardice, worse than the time he’d lost with the love of his life, the theft of security. Of safety. Of love. He could be at his most annoying, he could be so trapped in his own brain he could barely stand to live with himself, but no matter what, there would always be six people in the world who would pick up the phone, no questions asked. What riches. No one could have asked for more.
Armed with Stan’s wisdom and the number Bev’s cake guy had given him for a gluten free bakery across town, he took some time to set up a miniature photoshoot with the Banana Breadn’t. He set it up on the kitchen island, positioned all of the lamps he could liberate from the living room around it, trying to draw on the vague memories of how studios set up lights when he was on set. He took pictures from every angle, first on his phone, and then on the polaroid camera Mike had gotten him for his birthday last year.
One of the sides was openly weeping red fluid, and the whole thing was slowly melting out of its loaf shape into an undefined puddle of yellow and red and, oddly, small specks of grey. Now that he had better cake on the way, he could really take time to appreciate what he’d wrought. It was glorious.
“What the fuck is that?”
Richie jumped in surprise, cracked his head on one of the lamps and, in his haste to pick it up, knocked over two more. Eddie swore explosively and dropped his gym bag, diving to rescue both lamps while also trying to get an arm around Richie, teetering on the edge of a fall. It ended with them face to face, breathless, three lamps trapped at various points between their bodies.
“Hi, honey, welcome home!” Richie said on the edge of a laugh, delirious with the adrenaline rush.
Eddie’s face was slowly turning red as his eyes darted from Richie to the lamps, to the admittedly slightly wrecked counters littered with eggshells and abandoned bowls, to the Great Blobnana quivering under the lights.
Richie took a moment to appreciate how lovely Eddie looked, with his face beet red and his hair still wet from the cursory gym shower he always took before he came home to take his real seventeen-step shower. They could have been thirty years younger, standing in the quarry after Richie pushed Eddie in, seconds before Eddie launched his entire tiny body into Richie’s knees and took them both out in a glorious tangle of gangly teenaged limbs and smooth, slick skin and swiping, pinching, grasping hands.
His stomach swooped a bit in expectation.
“Richie. What are you doing in the kitchen?” Eddie asked in a remarkably level voice, given the vice-like grip he had on Richie’s elbow.
“I was trying to surprise you,” he said honestly, and when Eddie’s eyebrows furrowed in confusion he leaned over very carefully, trying to be mindful of all the lamps and cords and hot lightbulbs between them, and planted an off-center kiss on Eddie’s nose.
Eddie wrinkled his nose immediately, which made the frown lines disappear, and Richie’s mouth curved into a helpless, hapless smile.
“For fucking what?” Eddie finally asked, and began, awfully, to untangle their bodies and the lamps.
Richie decided to make it as difficult as possible for him, and eeled around to flop against Eddie’s shoulder, conveniently pressing his face into the damp crook of Eddie’s neck where he smelled like generic gym soap and sweat. “It’s your one year-aversary!” he said, mouthing thoughtfully at the place behind Eddie’s ear. Much better than the banana bread probably would have been, he thought.
“My—Richie, quit that, I haven’t showered—my one year of fucking what?” Eddie rolled his shoulders, jostling Richie but not dislodging him, and—critically—not actually pushing him off.
“It’s your one year Divorcaversary! And I think you mean your second shower. I could join you! It would conserve water!” He snaked a hand underneath Eddie’s shirt and enjoyed the ripple as his stomach muscles clenched in surprise. “I’m a mess,” he added, leaning into the tragic note. “I need help.”
“My divorca—You need professional help,” Eddie muttered, still twisting to get a good look at the kitchen now the lamps were all stable, but he was just a hair breathless, and Richie knew he’d won.
“Stan said the same thing,” he admitted, leaning more of his body weight on Eddie as they both gazed at the wreck of the kitchen.
“Stan had—Jesus, Richie, stand the fuck up—Stan had something to do with this?”
Richie leaned a hair harder. “No, no, just the aftermath. I called him when my banana bread didn’t bread.” He gestured in front of them both to the plate in the middle of the island, and Eddie’s eyes followed his wave.
“What the fuck is that?” Eddie demanded, shoving Richie off for real to go inspect the Amazing Banana Bread That Wasn’t.
“It was supposed to be banana bread,” Richie said, trailing after him. One of Eddie’s hands was still behind him, reaching back, and Richie took the invitation to plaster himself against Eddie again as they both gazed at the pool of mush.
“How did you...”
“Well, it was supposed to be gluten free. So I didn’t use flour. Which was probably where I went wrong, Stan says.” Richie tactfully decided not to mention it was also possibly a baby food recipe, because admitting that would mean saying goodbye to any possibility of shower sex.
“But why did you—” Eddie swiveled to look at Richie, with his face all scrunched up and puzzled, like a tiny little grandpa, and Richie loved him, loved him, loved him, more than he’d ever known it was possible to love someone.
“Hey, marry me?” It just slipped out, the words smeared a little against Eddie’s cheek, where he pressed a sloppy kiss.
Eddie went rigid in his arms. “What?”
Richie’s heart was pounding so hard he felt like he was vibrating with every beat, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. The kitchen smelled like bananas and a little like rotting strawberries, Eddie was in his coming-home-from-the-gym clothes with a wet patch forming at the base of his neck where his hair dripped onto his shirt, and a banana bread that looked like someone had already chewed it up and gotten halfway through digesting it before spitting it out stared at them from behind Eddie’s head, and he didn’t care about any of it.
This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go. There was a ring box in Ben’s sock drawer, because he knew Eddie well enough to know he would find it if it was hidden anywhere in the house. There was a reservation in three weeks for a restaurant that accommodated all dietary restrictions and had a Michelin star to boot. Stan and Patty and Mike were flying in, and Bill was driving down from his writing retreat, and everyone was under strict instructions to tell Richie to shut the fuck up and focus if he called them in a panic the night before. It was planned as hell. It had been planned for, conservatively, a year and a half.
It didn’t matter. Eddie’s cheeks were glowing, not purple with rage but brilliantly, beautifully pink. His mouth was hanging open a little, his hand clutched reflexively at Richie’s waist, and Richie had never been more sure of anything in his entire life.
“Marry me?” he asked again, more intelligible, and then, because he couldn’t help it, he leaned down and pressed his mouth against the skin of Eddie’s jaw, where his flush ran down to his collarbones. “I love you so much,” he told the freckles under Eddie’s eyes. “I never want to live without you,” he whispered to the dusky sweep of Eddie’s eyelashes, blinking furiously against tears, close enough to tap at Richie’s cheek in soft, tickling little strokes. “I am the worst banana bread baker in the world, but if you’ll have me I promise to never go in the kitchen ever, ever again.”
Eddie grabbed his face between both hands and held him steady for a moment. “Good,” he said emphatically, and then kissed Richie square on the lips, as aggressive and angry and so, so good as he always was.
Richie broke the kiss after a moment. “Wait, is that a yes?”
Eddie made an inarticulate grumbling noise and dragged him back down. “Yes,” he mumbled against Richie’s lips. “Yes, obviously.”
Richie laughed in delight, and pressed closer. They scrambled for leverage for a moment, and then Richie grabbed Eddie by the hips and lifted him up onto the island for a better angle.
There was an almighty crash, and they broke apart, panting.
Eddie looked behind him while Richie pressed against his shoulder, shaking. “It’s the fucking banana bread,” Eddie told him, trying to sound stern and failing miserably.
Richie howled with laughter, and after a moment, Eddie joined him.
“It lived… a good life…” Richie wheezed when he could speak.
“It fucking did not,” Eddie returned, and Richie collapsed into laughter again.
While Richie was distracted, Eddie managed to push himself off of the counter. He applied his horrible sharp knees and elbows in order to get Richie, who’d sunk almost to the floor as he laughed, to give him enough space so he could make his way out of the kitchen.
“Wait,” Richie said, struggling to his feet, “wait, no, counter sex?”
Eddie leveled a glare behind him, completely undercut by his red face and the way his mouth wouldn’t quite bow down out of its manic smile. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m filthy, you’re a mess, and I don’t even want to think about the last time that counter was cleaned.”
“Matilda was here on Tuesday!” Richie protested, trailing behind Eddie as he went off down the hallway towards their bedroom.
“That was four days ago,” Eddie said, and turned into the ensuite.
“Shower sex?” Richie asked hopefully as Eddie began to unbutton the stupid little buttons at the top of his shirt.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Eddie snapped, and threw his shirt at Richie’s head. Richie ducked. He wouldn’t trade this view for the world. “We,” grunted Eddie as he bent down to deal with his socks, “are having—” the socks went in the direction of the shirt, and Richie wisely stepped to the side “—engaged sex.” He started on his pants, and then raised an eyebrow at Richie’s gaping expression. “Right?”
Richie moved so fast it was a miracle he didn’t pull anything. “Right!” he said, tearing off his shirt and also trying to squirm out of his pants at the same time, which mostly meant he didn’t do either thing very well.
He paused, shirt hanging off one arm as he hopped out of his boxers. “What about the banana bread?”
Eddie was already turning on the shower, and he looked back at Richie, naked and incredulous, and it was incredibly fair, because a naked Eddie Kaspbrak had actually never not shut Richie up, but he knew how weird Eddie got about food sometimes, and leaving out something like that to be a congealed mess on the floor, baking underneath all of the lamps in their house, was so likely to set him off later that he couldn’t bear the thought. “I just mean, you won’t want to be in the kitchen while it’s on the floor, and I know you’ve got those protein shakes that you made last night, and—”
Eddie’s face did something incomprehensible and soft, and he left off fiddling with the shower settings to cross the room and pull Richie into a decisive kiss. “I love you so much,” he said, fierce and a little angry, almost, when they broke apart. “I’ll call Matilda later and schedule an emergency appointment.” He kissed Richie again, until Richie’d pretty much forgot every single thing he’d ever wanted to say. “I am so excited to marry you,” Eddie announced as they breathed together for a moment, “and thank you for thinking about the mess. Now get in the fucking shower.”
Richie got in the fucking shower.
Later, when they established engaged shower sex was, in fact, better than normal shower sex, and also established engaged in-a-bed sex was also better than normal in-a-bed sex, and half established engaged couch sex was better than normal couch sex, they ate the gluten free cake Richie got delivered from the bakery Bev’s guy recommended. Rather like sex, engaged cake was, it turned out, also much better than normal cake, and so much better than divorce banana bread the two could hardly be compared.
When the final bite was taken and the plate was carefully lowered to the ground Eddie asked, sleepy and content from where he was sprawled on top of Richie, “So, where’s my ring?”
“Hmmm?” Richie asked, focused mostly on patting the little curls that stuck up at the back of Eddie’s head when he’d spent time on his back with wet hair.
“My ring, dipshit, my engagement ring?”
“Oh, fuck,” Richie remembered, sitting up and grabbing for the phone lying on the floor near the couch. Eddie made an angry cat noise as he almost tipped off of the couch, and Richie soothed him with one hand while frantically flipping through his texts with the other. “It’s at Ben and Bev’s house,” he admitted.
“I knew it! I knew you couldn’t have kept it here without me finding it!”
“I had this whole plan,” he said mournfully as he tried to one-handed text the news to the Losers’ group chat. “There was a restaurant, and everyone was gonna come down, and it would have been so nice, Eds, I swear.”
Eddie laughed, and the feeling of it vibrated through Richie’s chest and set all of his nerve endings tingling. “You mean you didn’t plan for it to happen after you failed at baking worse than anyone I’ve ever seen before?”
“No!”
Eddie laughed again, and then reached up and knocked the phone out of Richie’s hands. “I’m glad,” he said, soft and as sweet as he ever got. “Don’t tell them yet. Do your big plan. That one can be for everyone.” He leaned up to press a kiss against the underside of Richie’s jaw. “This one can just be for us.”
Richie wrapped his arms around Eddie and breathed in deeply. His breath caught in his throat, and he realized he was close to tears. He’d gotten unbelievably lucky, there was no way around it. “Okay,” he murmured into Eddie’s hair.
They lay together for a long moment.
“I’m still gonna use this in my act, though,” Richie said finally.
“Fuck no,” Eddie said immediately, raising himself up on his horrible pointy elbows to glare down at Richie.
“Not all of it!” Richie protested, dodging a halfhearted swipe Eddie aimed at his face. “Just the banana bread part. That’s comedy gold.”
“Comedy yellow, at the very least,” Eddie acknowledged, flopping back down. Richie let out a mostly performative oof, but when Eddie stretched up to check on him he dragged him back down.
“I’m really looking forward to spending the rest of my life with you,” he murmured.
“I’m really looking forward to you never going in the fucking kitchen ever again,” Eddie murmured back. “I’m walling it off. Putting you in a shock collar or something.”
“Kinky.”
“Shut up,” Eddie said reflexively. “But also, you know. The other thing. Me too.”
Richie grinned up at the ceiling, and pretended he didn’t notice the bit of banana-yellow splotch on the overpass leading to the kitchen. They could deal with that later.
After all, they had the rest of their lives to be bad at cooking, together.