#endless summer fanfic

[anthemofgvf]

Endless Summer: Josh Kiszka x Reader Fanfiction

Part Three

description: you and sammy have been best friends since you were kids, and being around his family was the norm your entire life. when invited to a trip to their family lake house during the summer, you find yourself spending more time with his brother than your best friend. and, one thing has been clear your entire friendship: brothers are off limits.

warnings for this series: alcohol and marijuana usage, explicit content (18+, minors dni), angst, swearing

word count: 7.5k

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The next two days consisted of more physical activity than the prior week. One of the only things you all hadn't filled your time with was a hike, so slotting those into your guys' mornings every once in a while would ensure keeping boredom away.

The morning after the second day, your muscles were beyond sore, barely letting you move from your mattress. It was as if you had fully sunken into the sheets, enveloped in the silk cloth and held hostage willingly by your exhausted body. Your eyes flickered open only for a moment, until realizing that sleep was the only thing that kept you from the aching sensation that ran throughout your legs.

Once you flipped over to the best of your ability, you tapped your phone screen and read the time: 8:30 AM. You exhaled deeply while the back of your hand rubbed the sleep out of your eyes and figured a soak would do your body justice.

And your assumption of just that proved itself to be true once you worked up the strength to maneuver yourself to the bathroom and strip from your clothes. If you had to push yourself through one more day of hiking, you had to soothe your muscles to the best of your ability. Although a slight wince escaped your lips as your toes dipped into the icy hot water, you just continued to clench your jaw and fully submerge yourself in the tub and felt relaxation wash over your whole being.

Whether or not a cold bath would've been more fitting for the current state of your body, that wasn't on your mind. The heat that steamed off the water and created a spa-like aroma was soothing enough, so you just lolled your head back and let your eyes rest shut.

But relaxation can only last for so long, especially if you're trying to achieve it in a house full of boys. Whistling rang throughout the upstairs, along with small steps to accompany the melodic blowing. You were unsure of who was awake, but Sam usually woke up before his brothers, so you ditched another ten minutes of soaking and slipped on the first things you could find in your suitcase.

Your head poked out of your bedroom with your hand finding its way to undo the lazy up-do you had worn to keep your hair from getting wet. But looking down the hallway, left and right, no one had made their appearance known. Sam's bedroom door was shut, and there was no sight of the twins.

Stepping out of your room, you quietly made your way down the stairs and the whistling ran through your ears again. It was coming from outside, and your curiosity led you to open the back door and follow it without thought.

To your surprise, Josh had his hands pressed flat behind him on the ground, propping his body weight onto them and swaying his head from side to side as he continued the melody. The warm wind hugged your body but sang through yours and his hair, and you watched from afar as the curls he spent hours perfecting just defying the position they were supposed to stay in. Your calves did argue with your body to hold you up but propping yourself on the side of the lake house seemed to be beneficiary to the calls from your tense legs.

Josh's whistling faltered, and his head turned over his shoulder. With squinted eyes, his face lit into a content smile, and he returned to overlooking the mountains that contained the lake you all enjoyed.

"Thought I heard someone." He kept his focus in front of him as he spoke. "Surprised to see you up so early."

"Me? I'm surprised to see that you're the first one awake." You repositioned yourself on the exterior of the house, with your back pressed onto it instead of your shoulder and upper arm. "Figured it was Sam out here."

"Are you disappointed?" He let his words sink into sticky air before turning his head to find your expression, and through squinted eyes, he saw you roll your eyes and huff a laugh. Your reaction only let his infectious grin fully display itself and turn back to the scenery. "Glad to know you don't have favorites, y/n."

"Don't tell your brother." You joined Josh on the grass with your legs extended in front of you and resting on your elbows. The temperature of the grass alone allowed you to adjust to the heat that was quickly rising with the sun, but not at its full high.

With the same scrunched expression, you shielded your eyes with your hand and looked to Josh, who had mastered a relaxed face despite being almost directly blinded by the sun. "You excited for another day of hiking?"

Josh tilted his head down, which casted a shadow over your eyes and reduced your scrunched face into a normal state. "My legs tell me no, but I know the view will be worth the pain." His curls slightly shook with the movement of his head as he spoke - always animated. "What about you?"

"My legs are killing me, to be honest. Might stay here while you guys go."

"And do what? Nothing?"

"Possibly. Or go down to the lake on my own. Haven't figured it out yet." You gave him a shrug, removing your eyes from his and looking out into the mountains.

"Well, I'd like it if you went with us." His eyes lingered on you, which was a nonverbal cue for you to look back up to him. "Just think about it, alright? And, if you don't want to go, I don't mind staying back with you to keep you company - if you'll have me."

You gave him a singular nod, mouthing, "okay" before you looked off into the distance and tilted your chin down enough to examine the trees that lined the waters in the small canyon of mountains.

You and Josh basked in the silence, interrupted once or twice by the whistling wind or the birds singing their infamous tune, but it didn't bother either of you. There was something comforting about the silence held between you and Josh; feeling as if there is no need to speak because each other's company was just enough. But although the world was quiet, your mind wasn't.

You remembered that Sam would be awake soon, and you didn't want his morning to be started off with a view of you outside with Josh. Whether he relaxed his feelings about your friendship with Josh, or just learned not to show them as much, you knew it bothered him, nonetheless. So, you left Josh quietly and made your way up to Sammy's bedroom, clinging onto the railing to drag your legs up each step that seemed to be more painful than the one before.

You left a few soft knocks on the door, and with no response, you cracked the door slightly to see your best friend still sound asleep laying on his stomach.

Hushed snores rumbled against his pillows as you tiptoed around the bed and crawl into the other side. Even your movements didn't stir his sleep, which didn't surprise you, so you pressed your palm onto his bare back and spoke his name.

After you shook his body a few times, he sharply inhaled, pushing his body up and whipping his head towards you. When his eyes allowed him to make out the figure in front of him, he was satisfied to see it was you.

"I was sleeping, y'know?" He relaxed his head back onto the pillow and turned away from you.

"Shh, you've woken me up plenty of times. I get a turn, right?"

Sam hummed, rotating his body and letting his eyes flutter shut again. "What time is it?"

"9:30. Not too bad of a time to start your day." Your hands ran through his knotted hair and brushed the stray pieces back behind his ear.

"Guess it's nice of you to have woken me up." He leaned his head into your touch. "Anyone else awake?"

You had to make a quick decision of whether or not to tell Sam that you had just gotten back from hanging out with Josh, or to just say you were just leaving your bedroom for the day. But, without knowing if Josh would say something about this morning, you figured telling Sam the truth was the best decision.

"Yeah, uh, Josh is. Heard him outside when I was taking a bath. So, I joined him for a bit after I got changed and talked with him." Your face slightly squinted as if you were trying to reflect any puncture, but to your surprise, Sam just nodded.

"He's awake?"

"I know! I was surprised to see him, too." You continued to toy with his hair. "Think he's still out there."

"Well, then that means neither of you have eaten yet." He said with a grunt, pushing himself off the mattress and hopping out of the bed. If you and him hadn't been friends for so long, seeing him in his briefs would cause a lot of discomfort on your end. "Do you have any preferences on breakfast?" He slipped into a loose pair of joggers.

"Preferably not limited to vegan." You shrugged.

Sam rested his hands on his hips, tapping at the bones with his pointer fingers. "Well, I guess I'll need some help then if I'm making a grand meal, huh?"

"Sam, I'm not a cook. Can't you recruit your brother?" You said in reference to Jake, who you had known to love cooking since he was little.

Although Sam sighed in defiance, he rolled his head towards the door and his body followed, leaving you to follow him downstairs and into the kitchen.

Jake was already awake, sitting on the couch and absent-mindedly scrolling through his phone when Sam discussed the plan of the first meal of the day with him. He just nodded, waiting for Sam to fully leave the room before he stood up, passing you by with a light smile and tousling the hair on top of your head. While you flattened your hair out, Josh had entered the room quietly, and joined his brothers.

Josh barely helped with the meal, just handing them things they asked for or mixing whatever concoction Jake had whipped up. You just rested your chin on the back of the couch as you watched them all work together, noticing how their work dynamic never really changed from when they were kids. You figured their arguing would lessen, or their teamwork would improve, but they still had hints of their old ways. It was special to see them act as if time never passed, and they were still the same normal guys that you grew up with in Frankenmuth.

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Over breakfast, Jake had mentioned staying another week or two at the lake house, admitting he's missed the second home more than he's realized and doesn't want to let the feeling of serenity go just yet. They all agreed with hums, mouths stuffed full of food, and their eyes landed on you. You were the only one who didn't follow their course of plans, so your decision mattered. Jake had said there was no pressure staying, but you insisted that you were enjoying yourself and the time spent with them, to which they all smiled gratefully to you that you chose to stay longer. However, you did mention that after today, you wouldn't want to take another hike, and Jake hummed in agreement.

After breakfast, you helped the three of them clean up the multitude of dishes they compiled while making the grand meal. You stook to the sink and washed the dishes thoroughly, then handing them to Josh, who dried them. Although there was a dishwasher that could make the job easier, there was something sentimental about making the one-man job into a two or three-man job. Sam only stuck around for so long when helping put away the dishes, until he ran off to take a shower. Jake, who helped you wash the plates and bowls for a few, chose to clean the pans instead and then leaving to get ready for the day himself.

Then there was just you and Josh... again. You swore you promised yourself you wouldn't stick yourself in situations as such that would leave you and Josh alone. Sam seemed to have gotten his feelings about your friendship with his brother under control, and that didn't help. Sam was like a barrier that did annoy you at some points with his aggravation of the platonic relationship between Josh and you, but it helped to keep your feelings sunk into the back of your mind and hopefully forgotten about.

Sure, it didn't help either that Josh came into your bedroom nightly to spend time with you but talking helped keep your thoughts at bay. It's not like you minded hanging around Josh, since he exuded the closest feeling to euphoria you could get. But it was easier to be upset about Sam getting in the way than for him to fully step away and let yours and Josh's relationship take its course.

You didn't let the guilt override your positive mind, and just took a few glances at Josh every now and then when he was putting a dish away or drying them off. His focused face was quite adorable, and not a part of you felt ashamed for thinking that. You chose for at least today to let yourself think or say whatever you want to in your mind about him, since it was the only place that was trustworthy enough to hold such a secret.

His eyes flicked at you once, or at least to your knowledge, and quickly shot his eyes down to the white mug he was drying.

"Were you ever taught that staring was rude?" He teased you with a smile, earning him a bump into his shoulder from your elbow.

"Were you ever taught about sunscreen? Your cheeks are red."

Josh just simply shook his head with a grin that only raised at the right corner of his mouth, taking a few steps to open the wooden cabinets to place the cup into its original spot and returning to your side.

"They always get burnt, no matter how much sunscreen I put on. It's annoying, y'know? Have to walk around looking like a fucking tomato." His hands flew to motion to his face, returning back onto the counter and waiting for you to hand him the next dish. "With that being said, have you decided whether or not you'll be joining us today?"

You placed the small plate into Josh's hands, fiddling with the next bowl and running it under the hot sink water as you thought about the proposition. "Haven't really thought about it to be honest. I'll probably go for the sake of not having to explain myself."

"Well, today's trail is the shortest one. And it overlooks this beautiful forest. You'll enjoy it, I promise." His hand patted your back. "And, if your legs go numb, I'm sure one of us can carry you back down."

"I think one of you will need to carry me the whole way." You giggled, to which Josh returned a light chuckle.

Leaving Josh in the kitchen, you got yourself ready for the day and mentally prepared yourself for the hike. Although you enjoyed the activities and spending time with the boys, your legs were telling you that you should stay in and ditch them. But something interesting always comes out of the day when you're with them, so sucking it up was your best option.

Dressing yourself in a light tank top and a pair of denim shorts, you threw on your tennis shoes and stumbled your way down the stairs, gripping onto the railing with each step you took.

Two bottles of water were laid on the island, to which you chose to grab your own and assumed the boys had claimed those two as their own.

"All ready?" Sam popped into the kitchen, joining you at the fridge.

"Yeah, you?" You closed the fridge door, setting your water bottle on the counter and crossing your arms once you rested your back against it.

"Yeah. Think they're still getting ready, but I've been waiting about 10 minutes." His eyes flicked down at his watch. "Can't wait to do nothing tomorrow."

"Couldn't agree more. Maybe me and you can go out and do something. Just us."

His lips curled into a smile, nodding in agreement at your words. "I'd like that. What would we do?"

"Depends. There's not much to do here, but whatever it is, I'm sure it'll be fun." You took your water bottle off the counter, bouncing it between your hands. "You don't think they'd be upset if we didn't invite them?"

"I'm sure they'll want to go do something on their own, so I doubt they'll feel left out." He opened the fridge, grabbing his own water and shutting the door swiftly. "We haven't had much time alone together. We've got some time to make up for it."

"It's hard when you're constantly on the road and I'm stuck here." You brought your inner cheek into your teeth as your lips turned into a frown. You didn't want him to feel guilty for traveling, or the fact that you and him rarely spent time together. It wasn't his fault that he had a career that called for constant travel. "Just wish you had more time home, that's all."

He rested against the counter across from you, folding his arms as he spoke. "As much as I like touring, I wish I got to stay here more. You don't realize how much you miss home until you come back. I mean, yeah, I get homesick, but it's worth it when I get to come home."

"You've got to have a favorite place you've been to, right? I mean, if I got to travel as much as you, I would be revisiting the places I liked the most."

"We try to hit the best spots that we come across on tour." Josh said from across the room, strutting into the kitchen and joining the conversation. "My personal favorite was probably France. Lovely language; French."

"Eavesdropping in on our conversation?" Sam pushed himself off the counter with a grin splattered on his face.

"Don't talk in a public room if you don't want me joining." Josh mimicked Sam's smile and gestured at his brother with his pointer finger.

Sam just gave him a weak shrug before leaving you two, saying he was checking on Jake after he gave you a pat on your shoulder.

Josh joined you at your side. "What's the best place you've been to, travel-wise?"

"I haven't been out of the country before, so I'd probably say California, which is a basic answer," you admitted, turning your head to him, "but Paris sounds nice. Oh, or London."

"Been to both." Josh gave you a cocky smirk, wiggling his head and straightening his posture. You pushed his shoulder and watched him laugh with a toothy expression. "Maybe I'll take you someday."

You shook your head with a puzzled expression. "Just you and me?"

"I meant when you come on tour with us, if you ever do, that is." His eyes averted to the cabinets in front of him before returning back to your eyes. "Or if you'd prefer an exclusive excursion with just me, I think I'd make the perfect tour guide."

You tilted your head back with a giggle. "I think you'd get us lost."

"Well, I think your expectations of me are too low. You're going to have to fix that if you want to travel with us one day." He positioned his body facing you, resting his hand on the counter beside him.

"You've got some time to prove yourself. Still time to change my mind, Josh." The corners of your lips fell into a downturned smile. And, with the muscles in your face moving so much into that joyful expression, you realized how much your cheeks hurt from smiling so much. It didn't help that the blood quickly rose to your cheeks and flushed them to a bubblegum pink.

"I'll take that challenge gratefully." He gave you a singular nod with a comical smile and wink before grabbing his water bottle and walking off to Jake's room.

You watched him leave and found Jake and Sam meeting him halfway, sharing a few words before they all announced that they were ready to go.

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True to Josh's words, the trail was quite short, so your muscles decided not to give out on you just yet. And, even better, the view was beautiful. The slightly cool breeze whistled through your hair and the leaves of the trees that rested below the hill you four stopped at.

Josh took the liberty to snap a few photos of everyone, a few of himself, and plenty of the view that stood before you four. You couldn't help but watch his eyes light up at the view, seeing him discuss with his brothers how nothing beats the atmosphere of home. His joy for life and everything that surrounded him was contagious, and you couldn't help but feel warm and comfort from the energy that radiated off of him. His wide smile that reached his eyes and created wrinkles at the sides, his animated movements when he spoke or how he deeply examined everything that stood below him and that rested above him. How he felt no shame in just sitting near the edge of the cliff, seemingly trying to meditate, but he was just taking everything in and trying to be one with the environment.

You considered joining him, but you chose not to when Sam pulled you into a conversation with Jake. Josh was just in his own world, appreciating life even if the activity of the day was a small one. You'd say it from time and time that you admired his outlook on life, and aspired to think the way he did. Appreciate things the way he did. See things the way he did. Loved things the way he did. He was always an inspiration to you in the way you should live your life everyday as if it were your last, and just live in the moment.

And that's all you thought about during the hike. You tried to respond to his brothers when they asked you a question, or the conversation grew quiet and you decided to add something or give them your input, but your mind was somewhere else. It wasn't necessarily a bad thing that you loved the way Josh loved the world, but it was a bad thing that you loved the way Josh loved. You had gotten yourself back to square one, and digging yourself out of that hole was going to take longer than you pictured. Because, no matter what he did, he always knew the right things to say or do. It's like he could read your mind, or just knew you more than you knew yourself. And that's another thing you loved about Josh.

And loving those things about Josh was one thing, but loving him, was another.

You four decided after an hour or so that it was best to head back for lunch, so you all made your way down the trail and headed back towards the lake house. While Jake offered to make lunch and started before anyone had any input, you decided on a quick shower to wash off the sweat that accumulated on your body from the hike. Stepping into the cool water felt nice on your sunburnt shoulders, so you let the water run off your back for a few moments as you faced the wall in front of you.

Once you were satisfied with scrubbing your body and your head of hair long enough, you stepped out of the shower and wrapped your towel around your bare body as you ran your brush through your wet hair.

A few knocks tapped at your door, and you peaked your head through the bathroom door.

"Who is it?" You questioned with your ears tuned to any sounds that came from behind the door. When waiting for a response and receiving none, you made your way to the door and opened it.

Josh stood at your door, eyes immediately shooting to your white towel before looking at you with his lips curled into a quizzical grin.

"Lunch outfit?"

"Ha, ha, very funny," you rolled your eyes, "just got out of the shower."

"Didn't quite get that from the towel. Thanks for clarifying, though." He shot you a wink. "Food's ready by the way."

"Thanks. I'll be down in a second." You nodded with a quick flash of a smile, then shutting the door on Josh and let your towel fall to the ground.

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After you all ate lunch and the rest of the day consisted of simple relaxation around the house, Jake came into your room and said that you all were going to watch the sun set around the fire. It had been a few days since you all sat around the firepit, so you gratefully walked with him outside of the cabin and noticed that Josh and Sam were already in their chairs with beers accompanied in their hands.

Sam stood from his chair and embraced you before letting you sit down, handing you a beer after you sat crisscross in the seat.

The routine was the same as it always was: Jake playing a few songs, Sam talking to you about whatever it is he had to say, and then you all splitting off into the cabin after the sun fully rested under the waters and the moon casted its glimmering light. You didn't mind the continuous formula that you all grew accustomed to doing, mainly because you enjoyed relaxation more than constantly being on your toes doing something. Especially since you were surrounded by the three of them, it made the activity that could be taken as boring into something interesting.

And you could say you enjoyed the ritual more because you knew Josh would be joining you for a bit afterwards. It didn't matter that you two talked about nonsensical topics, it was just his presence that made everything feel better. Even if you both smelled of smoke and amber and it would've been best to wash it off, you both didn't care. You had come to enjoy the familiar scent.

He entered your room without knocking, figuring you were decent and just waiting for him to arrive, and he shut the door behind him and locking it.

He hopped onto your bed with a huff, looking at you with a soft smile and eyes that told you that he was thinking of something.

"Why are you looking at me like that, Josh?"

"I have an idea of something we could do instead of staying in here, even though I don't mind it."

You huffed out a laugh, looking away for a moment. "And what's that?"

"You can say no, by the way. No hard feelings," he crossed his hands over each other, "we take my Jeep and go down to the beach." He shrugged with a confident smile, proud of his plan.

"And do what?"

"What we always do: talk. We could swim, too. What else do you do at a beach?" He pretended to insult you with his question but couldn't keep a straight face, so he reserved to a sly smirk.

"Well, I don't know. I never know when it comes to you," you shook your head, "did you want to go now?"

"We can. Or we can sit in here for a bit if that's what you prefer."

You nodded with a hum, glancing at the mirror and then reverting your eyes back to his. "I've always got to choose, huh?"

"Oh, I'm sorry, would you like me to be a bit more assertive?" He cocked his head, his curls following his motions.

You rubbed your lips together. "Would be more helpful. You're always letting people decide things for you. Gotta put yourself and your needs before others."

Maybe you should take your own advice.

"I'm a people pleaser, what can I say? I enjoy doing things others want to do. We don't have to go the-."

"Josh, I want to go." You cut him off with a laugh. "Let's just head out now, alright?"

He gave you a singular nod and a smile, helping himself out of the bed and walking over to the door, waiting for you.

As you joined his side, he reached for the lock, but quickly halted his movements when the doorknob shook. His eyes widened, looking over to you, and seeing you were wearing the same shocked face.

"Y/n? You awake?"

You both mouthed "shit", turning your bodies frantically to figure out what move would be the best to make next. It's not like you could just open up the door with Josh at your side. Although Sam seemed to have his annoyance with you and Josh's friendship at bay, the door being locked wouldn't help with how his mind works. Anyone could assume the worst in that situation.

"Y-yeah, I am. One second!" You stammered as your eyes flashed from the door to Josh. You could hear your heartbeat ringing in your ears, body flaming intensely as your fingertips began to shake.

"What do we do?" Josh mouthed to you, even though his voice was almost audible.

"I-I don't know." You whispered back, scanning your room and finding a solution. "The bathroom, go."

You pointed over to the door, and he looked at you with a puzzled expression.

"Wait, why can't he know I'm in here?" His voice raised into a whisper, and your heart rattled in your chest.

"Because my door is locked and you know how he feels about us hanging out, especially alone. Bathroom, go." You nodded over there, waiting for him to walk with quiet steps and shutting the door behind himself, taking a few moments to slow your breathing before opening the door with a smile.

"Why was your door locked? You never lock it." Sam pointed at your doorknob with furrowed brows.

"I was, uh, changing. And, knowing you, you never knock. Didn't want to risk it." You dragged the words out slowly, nodding and tapping at the doorframe.

"But you're wearing...never mind. I don't think I want to know," he chuckled, "just wanted to see if you wanted to go do something."

"Right now?" You turned your head to the window in your room. "What did you want to go do?"

"Dunno. I'm not tired just yet. Maybe go take a walk, or something." He gave you a shrug.

And here you were again having to choose between your best friend and Josh. You and Josh had made prior agreements to going out, but knowing that Sam wasn't tired, he was probably going to notice you were leaving. Your brain banged in your head as you tried to come up with a quick decision. Either way, you were going to feel guilty.

But you made a promise to yourself that Josh wouldn't get in the way of you and Sam's friendship. And Josh was also just your friend, so why would it matter?

"Yeah, sure. I'm going to finish changing. I'll be a second or two, alright?" You nodded quickly, shutting the door before Sam had the chance to speak.

You rested your back on the door, sprawling your hands onto the wood and exhaling deeply. Composing yourself quickly, you walked over to the bathroom and opened the door.

"Alright, he's gone." You nodded.

"You think we should wait it out, or?"

Your head fell to your feet as your stomach twisted with guilt. You had never seen Josh disappointed, and you didn't plan on seeing it. Not now, at least.

"I'm, uh, I'm actually going out with him for a bit."

"Oh," he pressed his lips together, "okay then. We'll just go on our little trip tomorrow."

"I'm really, really sorry, Josh. I feel terrible. I know you wanted to go and-."

"Why are you apologizing? I get it, it's okay." He gave you a reassuring smile and placed his hands on the sides of your arms. "Just gives me something to look forward to."

"Are you sure? Because I can just tell Sam I'm too tired or make up some lame excuse to get out of it."

"No, no. Go, I insist." He jerked your body forward, then back, and ran his hands up your arms before letting them fall to his sides.

Josh began to laugh, running his hands over his mouth to try and suppress the laughter.

"What's so funny?" You felt a smile creep onto your lips.

"Just thinking about if Sam saw me in here with you how ballistic he'd react. Think he'd kill me?" His laughter grew, and you tried shushing him, but he couldn't stop laughing.

So, your body reacted quickly, clapping your hand over his mouth and giving him a stern glare. His hand grasped onto your wrist in a swift reaction to your own actions. You peaked outside of the bathroom, then met his surprised eyes.

"It's not like we were doing anything, but you know how he is. Now, stop laughing before I kill you. I don't know how thin these walls are, but if he's out there, there's a good chance he can hear you." You whispered to him, slowly removing your hand from his face.

He was in a state of recollecting himself, but once finished, he let a smirk rest on his lips and ran his thumb over his bottom lip. "There are better ways to silence me than that, y/n."

"Well, you weren't keeping quiet, Josh. Now, shut up and wait a few to leave my room." You pointed at him with a stern face, then leaving him in the bathroom. You turned to him again. "And, shut the door. I'm changing."

He put his hands up in defense, closing the door and wiggling his fingers at you in a quiet goodbye.

You stripped off your clothing quickly, throwing on a pair of grey shorts and the first tank top you could find. You left your room after grabbing your phone, grateful that Sam wasn't waiting outside of you room for you, but in fact downstairs on the blue couch.

Sam's pupils shot up at you with a smile finding the corners of his eyes. He stood up and placed his hand on your back to guide you out through the back door.

As you two walked down the familiar trail that led to the lake below the lake house, silence echoed throughout the air. It had been a while since you two had genuinely spent time together without anyone's presence, and talking just wasn't on your mind. You just wanted to soak up the friendship you've held with Sam in the quiet atmosphere, although it was filled with an owl or two calling in the air and trees whispering in the wind.

You couldn't remember the last time you were with Sam in an area as such. You two sat near the lake, near enough to hear the waves trickle in a dance along the rocks at the shoreline. All you could do was just breathe in the same air as him and let your head fall back, eyes shut and giving yourself to the environment.

Your phone vibrated on the ground, and you unwrapped your arms from around your legs pressed against your chest to turn your device over.

Don't forget about our little secret trip to the beach tomorrow night. Goodnight, y/n. Hope Sam is keeping you good company.

You read the text from Josh with a smile, rereading it over twice before turning your phone off and looking over to Sam.

"Who was that?"

"Oh, just my mom saying goodnight." You nodded with your tongue pressed into your cheek. He pressed his lips together and looked off into the water, returning to his silent state. "Everything alright?"

"Yeah, yeah I'm fine. Just...thinking, that's all." A deep exhale fell from his lips. His eyes lifted to the sky, admiring the night sky lit up by glistening stars.

You pressed your cheek into your knee. "Penny for your thoughts?"

He pulled his eyebrows together, bringing his hand from behind him to massage the bridge of his nose. "Dunno. Just missed this, y'know? I don't get to see you as much, and it sucks. I don't like getting all sappy with you, but I've just been thinking about how much fun I've been having with you and all that." He gave you a weak shrug and glanced over to see your reaction had fallen softly into an admirable one, and kept his eyes held into yours.

"Yeah, it's so weird of you to share your feelings." Your eyes widened for a moment with a light giggle. "No, really, I've missed this too. It's not the same when you're gone. Get a little bored sometimes."

He gave you a single nod. "We used to hang out every night. Remember that?"

"How could I forget? Sam, you were pretty much there for everything. Think we hung out until our parents told us to get home, and until we got older, we just slept over at one of each other's houses and drove to school together." You reminisced in the memories that flooded into your brain.

"Can't believe you never got sick of me. I mean, you get pretty annoying sometimes, but-."

"Do not!" You swatted his shoulder. He huffed a laugh, shaking his head and looking back up to the sky.

The silence filled the air once again, and you two just enjoyed the comfort of that noise in itself. The sound of nothing was comforting, and although it wasn't eventful, you didn't mind it.

It was something that you had in common with Josh. But, letting Josh run through your mind was not something you were going to let happen, at least, not tonight. This moment was about you and your best friend, not his brother.

"Thanks for coming on this trip with us. I don't think I thanked you before, so." He gestured with his hand, then reserving it back behind himself.

"Thanks for inviting me. I was a bit nervous that I was going to be a bit bored. Don't get me wrong, I love spending time with you guys, but, I don't know. Was kind of worried you guys changed after a year."

"A year is a long time, but we're still the same," he shrugged, "maybe Josh is a bit more loud."

You laughed at his comment, letting your mind wander only just for a moment to Josh, although you promised yourself you wouldn't think of him. But this was an acceptable time, so you allowed your thoughts to take over for a moment.

"He's a bit more talkative this time round. I mean, we've always been good friends, but he's actually making an effort to talk to me more. It's nice."

All Sam did was nod and kept his eyes locked into the sky. Reading him normally came easy to you, but you couldn't quite pick out how he felt about your words. He had seemed to cool down after a few weeks and become comfortable with you and Josh's friendship, but you knew deep down it still bothered him.

You were hesitant to speak. You tried to come up with a new topic, something that didn't involve his brother.

"Do you think you'll be back for my graduation?"

Sam's eyes shot down to you with a confused expression. "Why wouldn't I be?"

"Dunno. Maybe you'd be on tour in late May, or something." You pressed your chin in between your knees and let your gaze relax into the lake.

"No, we'll be back. Don't worry, I'm not going to miss your graduation."

He brought you into his arms, letting you relax into his body. You hummed with delight and rested your head into his chest.

"You know I would hate you forever if you missed my graduation?" You said, causing his chest to rise with a laugh.

"Shut up. You can't hate me. I'm going to be around for the rest of your life."

"Sounds miserable." Another laugh rose in his chest.

"As much as I hate to admit it," he spoke with sarcasm laced on his tongue, "I care about you a lot. Gotta be here for you when I can, and as much as I can. Making up the time we lost when I was gone."

"This trip definitely helped. It's nice that we all decided to stay a few more weeks. But we're going to have to find new stuff to do."

"Unfortunately, there's not much to do in this town. But we always come up with random shit to do to pass time. Comes in handy after being on the road with the same people for months on end." His hand ran delicately along your spine.

"Yeah. Maybe we can take a drive somewhere? Go to Chicago or something." You lifted your head up.

"That's not a bad idea, although Chicago is a bit far. Detroit might be a better shot." He gave you an assertive nod with a grin, and you let your head rest into his chest.

His heartbeat drummed into your ear, comforting and warm on the side of your head as you laid in his arms. You and Sam never found being this close to each other to be uncomfortable or weird. It was just a normality in your guys' friendship. And you never disapproved of the action itself. It was something you often missed when he was gone. Although he was difficult with showing his emotions, you were someone that could always bring everything out of him. And that made you feel a bit golden, to be honest.

"I'm just glad we stay in touch when you're gone." You mentioned to him, exhaling the vulnerability that your words held. Truthful words that sunk into your friend's heart and tugged at the strings. Ones that made his heart race just enough for you to feel the change of the beat of his heart.

"Me too. Don't want to lose you, you know that?"

You lifted your head up again and gave him a singular nod to show him you understood. "You won't, I promise. Just, don't do anything stupid."

"Same goes for you, y/n." He tousled the hair that rested on top of your scalp.

And you knew what he meant when he told you that. You knew who he was referring to when he said that. The journey of burying your feelings for Josh was a treacherous one, but you hadn't finished it just yet. Your mind would make you believe that in some circumstance you could get Sam on board with idea and be okay with it. Maybe, just maybe, you could convince him.

But you knew there was no way to do that. Even if you were someone that Sam couldn't stay mad at, someone that could convince Sam of anything, that was the one thing he'd never be in agreement with you on. And you hated to admit it, but your feelings for Josh grew on this trip.

You were just good at masking them more.

"Mind heading back? Getting a bit tired." You unraveled yourself from Sam's arms.

"Yeah, sure." He said and pushed himself off the ground before lending his hands to you and helping you up from the rocks.

On the walk back, he began a small talk about the stars, something he was always fond of. He told you about things he learned about the galaxy that lit up the sky since he's been gone, things he's seen and picked up on his travels. It was one of the only things you never understood about him - his fascination with the stars, that is. But admiration for the world ran in the family, and he chose the night over the day as his pleasurable hobby. It was an escape from his daily life as a musician.

He even mentioned to you that in some places you can barely see them, which you knew, but you didn't let him know that. You liked seeing his eyes light up talking about this kind of thing, and seeing himself feeling accomplished when telling you something you didn't know or chose not to tell him that you did know.

Sam followed you up the stairs into the lake house, pulling you into a tight embrace before saying goodnight to you and leaving you to enter his own room.

The night had turned to be a memorable one, despite your wishes to have gone to the beach with Josh. You realized that your friendship with Sam was irreplaceable. It couldn't be found in anyone else. It couldn't be created with anyone else. So, with that in mind, it was going to be a bit easier easing your feelings of Josh out of your head and heart and returning your thoughts of him to purely platonic.

You still had the beach trip with him, but that could be a possible test for how you could control your thoughts and just letting things be the way they are. And that reminder was enough to help you sleep that night, mind cleared of any thought that dared to enter.

⊱ ━━━━.⋅ εïз ⋅.━━━━ ⊰

taglist: @gvfleetwood @sacredjake @aureatopia @myeyehurtz @alexiagx @objectsinspvce @unhappycylinder @spinthehemmo @carbonwritingthroughtime @thecoldwind @ageofsophgvf @fakeplastiqtree @thepritchardscale @gvfpal @light-myluv @raviolilegs

-part four-

[choicesficwriterscreations]

Endless Summer 2023 Masterlist

✒️= Fanfic | 📱= Text Fics/Edits | 🎨= Fanart Ⓜ️ = Mature Content 18+ | 🔥 = Explicit/NSFW 18+

January 2023

Something Worth Dying For ✒️| Lila Sethi, Everett Rourke - @elfilibusterismo

March 2023

Reunion 2016 ✒️| Jake McKenzie x Sean Gale - @marmolady

July 2023

Sisterhood ✒️| Estella Montoya, Quinn Kelly - @marmolady

October 2023

Estela x Taylor Montoya and Familiy 🎨🏳️‍🌈 by @marmolady

Quinn x MC Fanart 🎨by @oh-so-youre-a-nerd

November 2023

Estela Montoya Fanart 🎨| Estela Montoya x M!OC - @marmolady

[pisupsala]

✨Mila's (Early) Endless Summer Reading List ✨

I'm packing my bags, so I thought I should pack my favorite stories: stuff that's been on my to-read list for too long, stuff I just enjoy re-reading and want you to know about, something to get me through the long-haul flight, something for sipping cocktails on the beach. I'm going to be updating the list with your recommendations and more stuff that I find. So:

Recommendations? 💕 YES PLEASE!

Recommend your own work? FUCK YES! ✨ minors dni, respect the author's tags, and show them some love by commenting and reblogging.

✨ TGM

mostly Bradley Bradshaw tbh lmao * This Love Came Back To Me by @beyondthesefourwalls i love these kinds of plots and it's so sweet *Remember You Even When I Don't by @beyondthesefourwalls i bizarrely never actually finished this and i will have to rectify this pronto *The Younger Kind by @roosterforme im like 20 chapters behind, soooo excited to binge this

*Leave a Light On by @sometimesanalice comfort story right here

*Hey Sailor by @sometimesanalice no notes, just yum

*Less Talk by @tongue-like-a-razor a jake story??? yes and i love this one *Faking It by @tongue-like-a-razor a classic, a must-read

*Little Wallflower by @bradshawsbitch it warms my poor heart and i feel this story on a personal level since I've been dealing with hearing loss

*Mise en Place by @bradshawsbitch hands down on my favorite AUs

*(christmas) baby please come home by @gretagerwigsmuse this fic influenced me so hard i bought a theragun *and even when we’re wrong in every way, we come out the other side okay by @gretagerwigsmuse actually just anything Jordan has ever done with the Smart Alec universe, you should read it

*Concerned Neighbor by @mothdruid this is just hot and you should enjoy it

*The Boyfriend Experience by @notroosterbradshaw i swear this is the fic that got me writing again, so if you like anything I've ever done you should go show Cass some love. *Don't Hang 'Em Till Noon by @sailor-aviator Jake western!AU? I knew I was rewatching Deadwood for a reason. Excited!! recommended by @goldenseresinretriever *Fool's Fare by @sailor-aviator A Jake pirate!AU while I'm on a beach in the Caribbean? Sign. me. up. Also recommended by @goldenseresinretriever *You Catch More Bees With Honey by @goldenseresinretriever I've seen this on my dash so much, but I shamefully never got around to it. How did you know I like hockey?

✨

Masters of the Air

Trust by @blurredcolour yeaaaaah, im obsessed. im deceased. this is so good.

prettier than a peach by @honeyskywitch reading this on my flight, so excited!

Oblivious by @sagesolsticewrites saving this one for the airport~

[bizaar]

Endless Summer ✧

Part 1: Our Lips Are Sealed

Cruel Summer Masterlist

- Next

pairing: eddie munson x afab!reader

warnings: sexual content (18+ minors dni), virgin!reader, mentions of drug usage, swearing, bullying, self-deprecation, masturbation (f)

word count: 10k

a/n: so I may or may not have been writing a few chapters of a semi-raunchy little prequel to Cruel Summer, this is the same babysitter!reader at the beginning of her relationship w/ Eddie - reader is hopelessly obsessed in a totally uncool, sweaty palms sort of way and Carol Perkins is the meanest girl in school.

Carol Perkins has been talking endlessly about … something, for the better part of the ten minutes it’s been since you sat down with your lunch tray.    

You aren’t exactly sure what about, because you’re not listening, you’re just sitting there watching her lips flap.    

You might have felt bad about that even as recently as last week, but somehow you can’t seem to muster the feeling today.

Maybe it has to do with the recent events that have more or less soured your opinion of your so-called friend, or maybe it’s just that her conversations these days are not exactly the stuff of edge-of-your-seat intrigue, especially considering you can be fairly certain in the knowledge that whatever she is saying probably has something to do with her stupid boyfriend, Tommy Hagan.    

Tommy said this, Tommy did that, oh my god Tommy is so funny, Tommy Tommy Tommy, who has been Carol’s singular topic of conversation for going on two years now, much to your agonizing boredom.    

Tommy is fine, if you like snot nosed bullies who never matured past age twelve and whose idea of trying to divert attention away from the fact that he’s more into Steve Harrington than he is his own girlfriend is by feigning some kind of bullshit interest in you — decidedly not your type, especially when his idea of flirting is giving you a hard shove in the back and calling you Princess while Carol is sitting there in the crook of his arm.    

Yeah… so not your type.  

Then again, you never would have thought that was Carol’s type, considering her interests have always swayed more Han Solo than anything else — (read: The Empire Strikes Back poster she has secretly taped to the inside of her closet door) — but you know she would deny that to her dying breath if you dared to remind her of it, so you keep your mouth shut and do your best to focus on moving the watery canned green beans around your tray with a plastic spork while she talks and talks and endlessly talks.     

You’re on probation with Carol after last week’s debacle in the quad, anyway, so you’re not sure she would even allow you to speak if you tried. You’re supposed to just sit there and listen to whatever it is she has to say and nod along dutifully without interrupting.

That’s your whole job here, nothing more, nothing less.  

You wonder idly if she would even notice if you slipped away, whether she would keep on talking until someone worth noticing, like Tina or Nicole, arrived at the table and finally implored her to shut the fuck up. Once upon a time you might have done so yourself, but you haven’t been brave enough to speak so directly to Carol since the eighth grade.     

One too many times getting your head bitten off has conditioned you to wire your jaw shut and tune it out, for the sake of self-preservation, which is exactly why you’d just stood there and took every bit of vitriol Carol had to give you that morning last week.    

Rumors spread like a disease in this town.

Nicole said something about hearing Tommy talking big in homeroom about something that happened over the weekend at a party you didn’t attend, which Carol knows because she gave you such shit over it, but facts aren’t important to her when it comes to things like this.  

Someone suggested that you’d tried to grab his dick or something, and worst still, that he was into it, and Carol went nuclear.    

Never mind that Tommy was the one spreading the rumor around, all that mattered to Carol was that it was you he was trying so desperately to incriminate.   

Literally anyone else, and it wouldn’t have been such a big deal. If somebody had said that it was Vicki Carmichael or Tammy Thompson, Carol wouldn’t give a shit. She’d throw her weight around, make a show of girlie dominance, and that would be that. But no, it had to be you.   

Why oh why did it have to be you? You imagine she’s asking herself the same question.  

You’re fairly certain she would be less angry if she thought Tommy liked boys than she is at the mere suggestion that he might be interested in you and you’re not sure if your ears are ever going to stop ringing after the way she’d shouted at you, in front of God and practically everyone in school.     

Tommy just stood there, smirking, of course, everyone just stood there, even you stood helplessly staring at your sneakers, just waiting for it to end until you noticed another pair of dingy reeboks appear beside your own.     

“Good God!” A voice as familiar as childhood rang out, loud enough to cut the air and silence her mid-stream, startling you into snapping your head to attention.    

Suddenly, there stood Eddie Munson, like a knight in leather and denim, sidled up beside you like you were old friends or something and it was the most natural thing in the world, like this wasn’t the first time something like this had ever happened in the history of cool kids and losers interacting at Hawkins High.  

Tommy and Carol were speechless, you were speechless — Eddie was not.  

“What on God’s green Earth is making that awful racket?” He said loudly – theatrically – and then he turned his blinding attention to you, “Sounds like someone’s skinning a cat out here,” he mused, giving you a gentle nudge with his elbow, like it was some kind of an inside joke between you, as if you were supposed to have any idea what that meant.  

You stared back at him, wide-eyed and still too stunned to speak — you don’t know what you said following that if you even said anything at all.

You can’t remember, you don’t even remember what Carol said, what kind of vicious back and forth was volleyed between them before a staff member eventually arrived to break up the huddle and cart Eddie off. 

Carol was pissed that you didn’t defend her, of course, and you’re still paying for that imagined slight with a concentrated cold shoulder from most everyone you know, but you can hardly make yourself care about being so summarily iced out like that.    

Because Eddie Munson stood up for you.

You still can’t wrap your head around that. Nobody’s ever stood up for you like that before, nobody over the age of twelve, that is, but Eddie did.     

That’s twice now he’s stepped in and saved you like that, and you have to resist the urge to shake the thought loose before it can take root in your mind – you can’t think about that right now, not with Carol sitting right there, but thankfully, she has not noticed the way your attention has begun to stray.

She’s too busy talking.    

Deep down, somewhere in your subconscious, you know you ought to try and put a little more effort into listening to her, because she’s your best friend, even though she regularly puts you on probation like this for imagined slights.

Even though your friendship has conditions and stipulations that only seem to apply to you.

Even though you have nothing in common anymore except for the fact that you’ve been best friends since you were eight years old.    

So, perhaps the better phrasing is you know you ought to try and put a little more effort into listening to her, because you used to be best friends.    

Nostalgia is the ancient, flaking paste keeping the walls of your friendship standing, but the wallpaper has long since begun to peel to reveal the rot beneath.     

Carol is still going on about who said what and who is dating who and all the latest gossip, talking at you more than talking to you, talking just to fill the air and you’re doing your best to at least try to pretend to look interested – really, you are – but there’s not much you can do to stop the way your gaze has begun to wander…    

Because Eddie Munson has entered your periphery, Eddie Munson has suddenly jumped up onto his lunch table, Eddie Munson stood up for you.     

Good God, indeed.    

He’s standing on his table and violently demanding your undivided attention – not yours specifically, but rather the attention of anyone who just so happens to be bored enough to get caught watching his frenetic display … which is to say, you.   

But you’re happy enough to let him have your attention, whatever he’s up to is bound to be vastly more enticing than anything Carol has to say. You’re not sure you’d be able to resist giving it to him even if you didn’t feel that way, if you were being honest – because you’ve had your eye on him from the moment you’d stepped in the lunchroom.    

Not because you’re minorly obsessed with him or anything as uncool as that. Certainly not because you’re harboring a bizarre gargantuan little crush on him or that when you tune everything else out and let your brain switch tracks, it’s him your mind shifts to.   

No, nothing so embarrassing as that.     

He’s a rebel with entirely too much cause, standing tall on the flattop, talking big and proselytizing to his minions about something with all the fire and charisma of a bible belt preacher – you’re hopelessly lost on context, but you’re all but ready to convert to the church of Eddie Munson.     

A shock of chills wracks your body as he raises his voice as the passion of whatever it is that’s got him going today seemingly overtakes him, and it’s almost enough to draw Carol’s attention, but considering this is not new behavior, most people tend to tune it out.     

Normally you would lie to yourself and say you did too … normally, if it hadn’t been for the way you’d spent the night previous tossing and turning, restlessly caught in the throes of a decidedly raunchy REM cycle, the subject of which just so happens to be standing on a table across the room. 

So what if you had a sex dream about him last night? So what if your skin is buzzing where you can still feel his hands pulling at you, the gentle fanning of his breath on the nape of your neck where it had felt so real...

“Sweet Girl,” he’d whispered to you in your dreams, on a wracked, heady exhale, voice thick and shot full of holes in a way you can only imagine it would sound – it sends a bolt of heat lancing through your core and forces you to shift in your seat and avert your gaze.     

You are an island to your own fantasies, sitting there, feeling your heart throbbing between your legs, and trying to be subtle about the way you’re pinching your thighs together as you become a little hotter under the collar than you were a moment ago.   

You wish you were still close enough with Carol to divulge the specificities of your dream in bowed heads and hushed sordid tones, but lately, you’ve started to feel like little more than an out-of-trend accessory, kept around simply for nostalgia’s sake.    

Once upon a time, you might have been free to share, but you are entirely certain that were you to try that now, to lean across the table and whisper conspiratorially:

“Holy shit, you’ll never guess who I had the filthiest dream about last night,” you’d be immediately crucified, socially speaking.    

Carol doesn’t care about the yearnings of your most secret self. Not anymore. Now she only cares about Tommy and who did what at Tina’s party and how embarrassing it was, and quietly sidling up to Steve Harrington.    

She doesn’t have much use for you these days besides using you as a buffer to avoid submitting herself to the humiliation of doing things on her own.   

You’re not friends, and your secrets are positively unsafe with her. You would cut ties if you had a little more self-respect, but high school is hard enough with bad friends, you know it would be that much worse with no friends.

The concept of starting fresh and trying to make new ones halfway through your sophomore year is a Sisyphean Hurdle you have no idea how to even begin to tackle, so you grin and bear it, and swallow any biblical yearnings you happen to harbor for the town pariah — besides, if you told her, all she would do is ask you what it is you think you know about anything raunchy before dutifully reminding you that you’re a virgin.   

Actually, the technical term would be “still a virgin” and would be followed up with the demand to know “when you’re going to do something about it” — like somehow the untouched state of your being is a bad thing and that you are on a ticking clock.   

You suppose it’s just one more patently uncool thing about you hampering her — her loser best friend doesn’t put out, has never had a boyfriend, never even been kissed.    

You would remind her that it’s hard to put out when nobody knows you exist, but it would only be an exercise in her rattling off an endless list of names you’d so much rather eat glass than accompany anywhere socially.     

So, you watch, fixated on the way Eddie stalks down the length of the table like a catwalk, very carefully picking his long-legged steps as he goes, and you might feel a little embarrassed about how poor a job you’re doing masking the blatant way you’re gawping at him, if it weren’t for the fact that you know you aren’t the only one watching.   

Not that he would notice even if you were.

Who are you but Carol Perkins’s excessively boring beige shadow? Nobody notices you, because you’re not a real person. You're invisible. You don’t exist.  

You don’t know when your stupid little crush began. Eddie’s always been there if you really think about it, a fixture in the background of the swirling miasma that is your social circle, suddenly much larger than it has ever been now that High School has become your habitat.    

Hawkins is a small town, and Eddie’s lived here his whole life, same as you. He’s a year older, but that wouldn’t be enough distance to remove someone from your orbit under normal circumstances, let alone someone like him in a town like this.    

Some part of you has always been mildly obsessed with him from a purely academic standpoint — forbidden knowledge is perhaps the most tantalizing thing to a young mind, and the mystery of Eddie Munson has always been completely off-limits to the likes of you.   

You’ve known the Munson name since you were old enough to listen in on your parents’ conversations, same as anyone who has spent long enough in Hawkins to learn a thing or two about the local population.

Al Munson has always been something closer to a Universal Movie Monster than a real person in your mind, like Dracula or the Wolfman — the local boogeyman. Sure, he didn’t have a haunting playground nursery rhyme like Freddy Krueger, but the man was to be just as feared by schoolchildren and good Americans alike.   

He was “bad news” — that’s what your parents always said — even now, you can still hear your father’s lecturing voice warning you that if you so much as spoke to a Munson you’d get instantly hooked on drugs, knocked up, and end up living out of a cardboard box by the time you are twenty.    

Which is stupid, of course, because you’ve gone to school with Eddie since first grade and you’d seen him talk to plenty of people over the course of that time, none of whom had gone on to suffer such a dismal fate.     

Still, there’s nothing so tempting as forbidden fruit – you’ve known that since you were old enough to recognize there was a difference between boys and girls.        

Life went on as the notorious Munson patriarch finally went to prison, and with the streets safe again from the likes of the car-jacking drug-dealing town drunk, everyone was happy enough to force his son into the void he’d left in the zeitgeist.    

People start to get bored when there are no local pariahs to blame all their misfortunes on. As far as the locals believe, Hawkins is not cursed by anything other than the Munsons.    

You remember a time when it wasn’t like that, when your parents spoke about Eddie with a heavy dose of sympathy.    

When you were little, it was “that poor kid,” but as you got older and Eddie started getting into more and more trouble, it became “stay away from that boy – he’s no good,” as if he was banging down the door for your attention.    

You’re fairly certain he doesn’t even know you exist.   

There wasn’t much danger in becoming corrupted by someone like Eddie Munson before Carol got popular, and that hasn’t changed just because you’ve won a golden ticket to the cool kid’s table… by proxy — you're more of an unwanted plus-one than anything else.    

Not Charlie Bucket so much as Grandpa Joe.   

But of course, you’ve never personally subscribed to the generalization that Eddie is evil or something.    

He isn’t the boogeyman or Dracula or any of those things that go bump in the night, no matter what your raunchy little dreams might dictate.   

As far as you’re concerned, Eddie isn’t even all that mean or scary, and maybe that’s just because he’d treated you so sweetly last autumn at Tina Burton’s Not-Quite-Halloween party….    

You’re not supposed to be thinking about that, the first time Eddie came to your rescue. That memory is not safe within Carol’s proximity, but it is the ambrosia that has been singularly sustaining you for the better part of a year now. It is a shining jewel that you keep tucked safely in the spot behind your lungs, and you just can’t help but pull the curtain back to take a peek at it.   

It was your first high school party.    

You’d never partaken in anything before that night, never even been offered, but suddenly and unceremoniously finding yourself shoved up against Eddie in a game of puff-puff-pass, you let yourself be pressured into playing.   

He must have realized you were nervous — maybe your fingers were trembling when he passed you the blunt, but suddenly, and for perhaps the first time in your life, he was speaking directly to you.    

“Have you ever done this before?” Eddie asked you quietly, a heavy dose of concern shadowing the wry quirk of his brow.   

It was startling, to realize the curse of your invisibility had so unceremoniously been lifted, leaving you suddenly exposed to a person you were never meant to speak to. You had to resist the urge to whip around and ask, “Who me?”.    

Yes, you.    

Eddie Munson was staring at you, asking you if you knew what you were doing.    

Like something out of one of those anti-drug campaigns, you suddenly felt like you were caught in a situation you’d been preparing for your whole life: if Eddie Munson offers you drugs at a party, just say no kids.    

Only you could not help but notice that he wasn’t nearly as scary or dangerous as McGruff the Crime Dog had led you to believe. In fact, he was entirely too enticing, and you were suddenly desperate to make a good impression.   

You opened your mouth in the fanatical hope of saying something cool and casual — yeah, of course. You’ve done all kinds of shit — and were naturally horrified to hear the truth squeak out.    

“No.”    

Eddie’s brows crept toward one another forming a deep crease of concern between them, and suddenly you could read his mind - yeah, that’s what I thought, he seemed to say.   

You watched as he stole a quick glance over his shoulder, and then licked his lips before leaning in, almost conspiratorially. Your heart was beating so aggressively in your chest that you were convinced he must have been able to hear it.    

You still remember the way his lips brushed the shell of your ear when he whispered to you, how the fanning of his breath made you shiver with the tantalizing suggestion of nicotine and spearmint secrets.    

“You don’t have to breathe it in if you don’t want to.” He mumbled, “Just puff it and pass — you’ll be fine.”    

It was the last little bit that really did you in.    

Not the overwhelming pressure of your peers insisting that just one hit won’t kill you, but the kind assurance from the person who provided the drugs that you didn’t have to partake if you didn’t want to.

It was the suggestion of a choice in your fate that ultimately lured you out of your field and into the underworld — sickly sweet pomegranate promises, dripping from his tongue to yours.   

Just like your father and McGruff the Crime Dog and all those insufferable after-school specials had warned you, Eddie Munson turned his gaze upon you, and you were instantly hooked.    

He passed you the blunt, and you tried not to get too stuck on the way his fingers brushed yours when you took it. You curled your lips in as you brought it to your mouth, and you puff puff puffed, holding your throat closed against any swirling wisps of smoke, subtly giving the impression that you knew how to handle your shit before you quickly handed it off to the next person.

It still burned in a funny sort of way, but nothing happened. You didn’t slip down the rabbit hole, and you didn’t burst into flames, though most importantly no one seemed to notice the wool being pulled over their eyes, and you dared to steal another cautious glance at Eddie.    

His lips twitched in the faintest hint of a satisfied smile, and you bloomed under the approval of someone whose attention you never realized you so desperately craved.

Before you could think of something to say to extend that moment, even just a little bit, you watched your hopes get dashed to oblivion as he turned away from you, taking with him the bright light of his attention and leaving you shrouded in darkness.    

Tragically, invisible again, just like that.    

If only you could have been so lucky — trust Carol to call you out on faking it when you remained sober after three rounds of puffing and passing.    

“You’re supposed to inhale, Dummy!” She shrieked, causing everyone in the circle to laugh at your blatant inexperience.   

Everyone but Eddie, you would have noticed had you been able to look, but shame-faced as you were, you kept your gaze fixed firmly to the floor and you inhaled deeply on your next turn.

You coughed, of course, and choked on the musky smoke as it filled your lungs and seared them medium rare. It only took a handful of minutes before you quickly faded out of the room to the soundtrack of everyone laughing again.    

The rest of that night remains a mystery to you to this day.    

You don’t remember what happened after the game or how much longer the party lasted or even how you got home — you do remember how being under the influence set your mind to spinning, and how you hadn’t been able to stop thinking about how long Eddie’s eyelashes were. How he wet his lips with a smooth pass of his pink tongue before he spoke and how good he smelled when he leaned in to whisper to you.    

You also remember the way he looked at you every time he passed you the joint when your turn came around again, like he was actually seeing you instead of the person-shaped placeholder you’d become since bridging the gap from adolescence to adulthood, but you chalk that up to nothing more than a potent cocktail of narcotics and your ever-present desire to be perceived.  

That’s not what stands out most about that night, however, because it’s not all you remember.   

Somewhere, hidden back in the furthest reaches of your subconscious, you swear you can still feel the press of his body as he held you caged in the crook of his arm, with your head resting on his collarbone, tucked neatly beneath his chin.

You don’t know how, but you swear you know what his lips feel like, brushing the highest point of your cheekbone, and the long line of his nose bridge pressed flat against your temple with his breath gently fanning the side of your face.

You’re sure you can feel the deep rumble of his voice filling you with warmth, a low timber in his chest calling you Sweet Girl as he smoothes your hair back.

He told you everything was going to be okay, and you believe him to this day.      

You don’t know how you know all that, but you do. You feel it with every fiber of your being in a way that is so goddamn real it can’t just be an effect of your stupid little crush and unchecked libido.    

The things you remember from that night, and the things you don’t combined with a handful of particularly banal run-ins with him over the course of the last few weeks has left you itchy and starving for a fix, though not from anything he might be able to sell you.    

That night at Tina’s party, academic fascination bloomed into something new, fueled entirely by teenage hormones and the need to be seen.    

Like a door that once opened cannot be shut again, you find yourself more or less always thinking about Eddie.

Attention is the high you crave like nothing else, and you desperately want Eddie’s attention, his undivided, unfiltered, unwavering attention, fixed solely on you.

Selfishly, you want him to be as obsessed with you as you are with him, and it makes you feel like at any moment you’re going to implode on yourself like a dying star.    

Your parents would be appalled.   

Carol is still talking, and you’re still not listening, because Eddie is still going. And going. And going.   

Eddie Eddie Eddie.    

Your stomach does a cartoon flip-flop, and you hold a wheezy breath in your lungs when he vaults down from the end of his table furthest from his seat and closest to yours. Your eyes meet as he straightens up, and you avert your gaze immediately, feeling your face flush hot enough that you’re half surprised it doesn’t melt right off of your skull as you shift your focus back over to Carol.    

Suddenly, Tommy Hagan is the most interesting person in the world, and you desperately want her to tell you everything about Tommy and Tina and who said what and how embarrassing it was.   

You’ve changed your mind. Eddie’s attention is blinding – it makes you feel exposed, like he’s a spotlight shining straight through to your innermost self — your secret self, the one that thinks about him in the wee hours of the morning when sleep eludes you and deft fingers creep their way down your body, edging toward the wanting apex of your spread thighs and slipping past creamy slick barriers to pull soft, lilting breaths from your parted lips as Eddie calls you Sweet Girl … Sweet Girl...Sweet Girl until you’re going hot and cold, body wracked, seizing, and trembling and you have to clamp your jaw shut to stop the sordid sounds of your orgasm from escaping your lips…   

Jesus Christ –    

No, actually, you’re much more comfortable remaining a wallflower, letting someone else get wrapped up in that undivided, unwavering, fixed-solely-on-you attention.

Better to stand aside for someone made to withstand that kind of heat from someone like Eddie, someone edgy and cool, who gives the middle finger to the world and dresses the part — not some midwestern babysitter from a town no one has ever heard of.    

He’s from that town that no one has ever heard of, too, you think watching Carol’s lips move and hearing nothing but your own heartbeat. You’re looking at him again before you’ve even realized your attention has begun to stray – your guts seize, because he’s looking too.    

Your heart spasms in your chest and scrambles up into your throat, punching an airy breath out of you and flattening your lungs. Suddenly, you’re winded and desperately trying to catch your breath in a way that you hope is at least subtle.   

Fuck.    

There’s that blinding light, that feeling of indecent exposure — it’s like looking into the sun, and somehow you can’t bring yourself to look away.    

You’re painfully aware of how you’re staring at him again, though this time it is because he has your eyes and he absolutely refuses to let go.    

Somehow it doesn’t feel even the slightest bit aggressive, more like an understanding – he sees you.   

He sees you.   

Eddie Munson sees you, so that means you must be real, right?   

You’re blushing, you know you’ve got to be bright crimson — beet red even. You’ve got no idea how Carol hasn’t already clocked your hormonal distress but thank God she’s too busy looking at her nails to look at you.    

You dare to steal another glance, and when you do Eddie flashes you a brief, goofy smile, all crooked lips twisted up to one side, the faintest suggestion of teeth poking out. It’s contagious, that smile, and suddenly you feel the corners of your mouth twitching in response, daring you to try to resist.    

“Hello? Ground control to Major Tom—”    

Carol snaps her perfectly manicured fingers in your face, breaking the spell and bringing the quiet din of the lunchroom rushing back in on you.    

It feels like getting swamped at the beach, swept off of your feet by the tide, and rolled in the undercurrent. You have to remind yourself to breathe.   

“Are you even listening to me?” She snipes, scrunching her nose in aggravation.     

You blink stupidly at her as she comes back into focus, but you don’t answer.    

You very clearly hadn’t, and it feels foolish to try and lie about it because Carol loves to remind you that she always knows when you’re lying, and Eddie is still standing there.    

You can’t stop yourself from looking, because of course you can’t, and he rewards you with that same big smile when you do. It makes your insides go tight and squirmy, and you have to clench your teeth to keep a straight face.    

The change in your demeanor is unfortunately not lost on Carol.      

She narrows her eyes, and you feel your heart seize with panic as she slowly begins to turn to see what could possibly be so important to hold your rapt attention. You have to grip the edges of your seat to stop yourself from reaching out across the table and pulling her back to face you.    

And when she sees Eddie standing there, you brace yourself for the sky to come crashing down on your head.   

Carol physically recoils - dramatically so - like she’s been suddenly doused in ice water.    

It takes her a moment to recover, but when she does, she has nothing but vitriol for him, much to your chagrin.    

“Take a picture, Freak, it’ll last longer.” She snaps.    

Something indiscernible crosses Eddie’s features as his gaze flicks over to her from you and back again. His brows marry in the middle and he pulls a face that is tinged ever so slightly with something that looks a little too much like hurt than you're comfortable with and you’re suddenly possessed with a violent and desperate need to make him understand that you are not with her, despite how stridently untrue that is.     

The flash of vulnerability makes your stomach go tight, especially when Carol continues.    

“Seriously, what the fuck are you looking at?”   

The hurt look is gone before it has time to even settle, and Eddie wrinkles his nose, quirking a disdainful brow as he stares poison daggers down at your friend.   

She hates him and he hates her right back — circle of life. All you can do is desperately hope beyond hope that you’re not lumped into that circle by association.    

“Nothing,” Eddie drolls, “Just wondering what Bulimia Barbie is doing wandering around without her Ken doll.”    

Had she been facing you, you’re sure you would have seen her blanch.   

He turns to make the stilted walk back to his seat at the head of his table, electing to take the floor rather than the table top this time.    

Eddie gives you one last parting glance, and you pull a face that you hope looks at least halfway as apologetic as it feels.    

It was a mean thing to say, if not entirely deserved.    

There are a lot of ways to get under Carol’s skin, she’s never been exactly easygoing, but perhaps the quickest way to cut her deep is to do so by mentioning the eating disorder she’s been not-so-privately struggling with since the eighth grade.

She’d been devastated when word of it got out, and thoroughly convinced you were the snitch — you didn’t have the heart to tell her it was Tommy who’d let that information slip. Not that she would have believed you.     

Carol makes a harsh sound of indignation in the back of her throat.    

“Asshole!” She shouts, then twists back around just in time to see you watching Eddie go. “—and what the fuck are you looking at?” Carol bites.   

You snap back to attention and do your best to curl in on yourself.   

“Nothing.” You say quickly, only you don’t fool her for a moment.   

“…Oh, gross —” she scoffs, “What, are you swapping eyes with the Freak?”    

The adrenaline of being caught bursts in your midsection and fires lightning down to the tips of your fingers as she gapes at you, eyes as big as dinner plates and practically bugging out on stalks. She admonishes you with a disappointed utterance of your name, and your cheeks burn with shame.    

“I was just being friendly.” You stress, averting your gaze and picking idly at your lunch despite how you’ve since lost your appetite.    

“With Eddie Munson? Ugh — gag me!”      

The unchecked disdain in her tone doesn’t sit right with you, because it’s not like she’s ever even said two words to Eddie that weren’t hurled as insults, and you can’t help yourself clicking your tongue.    

“Oh, he’s not that bad,” you say.   

Carol snorts out an undainty sound of disgust.   

“He’s a freak.” She says flatly — so you keep saying, you think — “He worships the Devil or whatever — everybody knows that.”    

There is nothing you can do to stifle the bitter snort of laughter from bubbling up out of you, a harsh sardonic sound that escapes before you can reign it in.  

Carol gives you a hard look, almost like she’s daring you to disagree, and much to your own surprise, you evidently dare.  

“No, he doesn’t,” you press, wrinkling your nose in a quiet defiance.    

A brief flash of hatred colors her features, and you can’t help but feel that the curtain has been pulled back and you’re suddenly looking at her true self.    

Suddenly, Carol is all but shouting at you as her eyes go bright and her skin flushes a blotchy crimson.      

“Oh please, like you know any better, Little Miss Babysitter!”   

She hurls it at you like a slur and you flinch as the intention strikes you.   

You don’t know precisely when Carol became so mean, only that it happened sometime between the transition from seventh to eighth grade, right around the time she’d gotten her first training bra and started to notice how boys were noticing her — right around the time Tommy showed up.

Since that day, everything between the two of you has been a competition that she is determined to win, despite how clearly uninterested you are in participating.    

Still, you feel the strangest sense of righteous indignation rising in you – she doesn’t know Eddie, never even bothered to try, and here she is condemning him right alongside everyone else just because it’s what’s currently on trend.

You want to ask her how that’s fair, how she would feel if the shoe were on the other foot, but you swallow the urge as you can suddenly hear the condescending tone of your mother asking you if you’d jump off of a cliff the same as everyone.

Because at the end of the day, you don’t know Eddie any better than she does, not with all your wishing and hoping and fantasizing, and certainly not after the way he’d looked at you at Tina’s party – Sweet Girl…  

“Yeah okay, whatever,” You mumble, because there’s no point in arguing with Carol when she gets like this.   

Only your submission doesn’t apparently sit right with Carol - her face twists into a displeased scowl as she snatches up the can of coke that is the entirety of her lunch and begins to raise it to her bubblegum pink lips before thinking better of it and setting it back down with a harsh sigh.    

You don’t know what’s got her so flustered, or what you did to embarrass her so badly. All you did was smile at Eddie, it’s not like you invited him to come and sit at the table with you.    

“Why do you care anyway?” She demands then, clearly not done fighting.    

By now, you know the telltale signs of this game: she’s probing for a flaw, something you’re sensitive about that she can pick at until it’s raw and oozing and she feels better for having taken you down a notch.   

All she needs is a scrap, something she can run with until it snowballs out of control.    

But you won’t give her the satisfaction, not after the way she’d screamed at you so publicly last week.      

“I don’t,” You say flatly, sitting up a little straighter.    

“Then how come you’re defending him?” She posits.    

You cross your arms.    

“I’m not.”    

“You are though.” She insists, like she’s caught the scent of something, and is trying her best to sniff it out. “You’ve got that stupid look on your face like you’re about to get all self-righteous or something. What’s the deal? Do you like him or something?”   

Your heart seizes and suddenly you can feel color bleeding into your cheeks as your armor creaks under the stress of her accusation. How could she possibly know that?   

Because she’s your best friend, she knows everything about you…   

“No…” you say, though even you are not convinced by the quavering tone of your voice.   

Carol stares at you, briefly uncomprehending before it dawns on her, and suddenly her eyes are blazing with malicious delight.   

Shit.   

“Oh, nasty!” She shouts, then gasps, mouth falling open in scandal, “You do! You totally do!”   

“I don’t – I mean, I don’t even know him.” You stammer, kicking yourself for how your resolve has begun to waver.     

“Doesn’t mean you’re not into him! Oh, that’s so gross!” Carol sneers, she is loving this all too much, “Oh, my God, look at you – you’re blushing!”   

Your hands fly reflexively up to bracket your face, and you hate yourself for the heat you can feel billowing off of you, betraying you.

Carol squeals with malevolent glee and you know you must be sweating for the way she is looking at you, eyes bright, teeth bared, wet, and shining in a hungry grin like a predator getting ready to make a meal out of you.   

“Oh-kay, that’s enough.” You say, trying and failing to be firm as you are suddenly unable to keep your voice from shaking as you speak.   

She doesn’t hear you – that or she just plain ignores you because she is getting too much of a rise out of your misery.    

“Jesus Christ, what are you, like, in love with him?”    

“Carol – stop.”   

“You are! You totally are!” She cackles, “Jesus Christ, you want to marry him and have a hundred of his freak babies!”    

She is practically shouting and you are this close to panicking about it, glancing anxiously across the room to the table where Eddie is sitting with his arms crossed over his chest, talking and laughing with his friends about something.

You have to force yourself to believe that they aren’t laughing at you because there’s no way they could possibly be clued into your conversation with Carol … who has started play-acting that she is you, moaning loud and wantonly.

It's shockingly apropos in the worst possible way, almost like somehow she’d found the time to steal away, slip back into your bedroom where she knows you keep your diary tucked safely beneath your mattress, and read the mad scribblings you’d left smeared across the pages that morning.   

“Oh, God–!” She cries, igniting a burst of cold anxiety in the pit of your stomach like a firework going off. “Oh, Eddie! Don’t stop! Right there – Yes! YES! YES!”     

You could die. You could literally die.    

People have started to look over at you, stare at you, and all of that would almost be fine if it weren’t for the fact that you are currently imploding like that dying star.   

You can’t be certain if its a result of your friend’s whorish display or just the nagging feeling of someone staring at him (because if you weren't watching him like a hawk before, you certainly are now) but you watch in horror as Eddie’s attention snaps back over to your table, to you.  

Your heart spasms in a bright bolt of panic, and you’re on your feet with a loud squeak of chair legs on linoleum – much louder than anything Carol had just kicked up. If people weren’t staring before, they’re certainly staring now, watching you frantically attempt to gather your things and make a break for it before your brain can catch up with you.   

"Seriously? You're leaving?"   

“I gotta go,” you say quickly.    

“Oh, come on, I was just kidding.” Carol sighs, still sitting there wrought with mean giggles, “Where are you going?”    

You can hardly hear her over the blood rushing in your ears. Your heart is hammering so violently against your ribcage that you can barely catch your breath to try and stammer out an excuse.   

“I just remembered,” You begin, aimlessly, “I have this… thing I have to do for class, I gotta go work on it.”   

You shove the last of your belongings haphazardly into your backpack and slide your lunch tray into the nearest trashcan – the entire tray, hitting the bottom of the bin with a loud thump that has the lunch lady shouting indignantly at you from the other side of the room.   

You don’t linger to rectify your mistake or apologize or do anything of the sort, because your frantic attempts to escape the lunchroom have drawn more attention.   

One cursory glance reveals to you that, devastatingly, Eddie’s entire lunch table has turned to watch you go.

You nearly stumble over your feet. 

“Liar.” Carol shouts after you, “Where are you really going?”   

“I’ll see you later!”    

You twist at the waist and wave when she calls your name again, and you can’t help but get stuck on the way you notice Eddie leaning back dangerously in his chair, craning his neck back to watch you go in a way that makes your heart seize against your ribs.

His eyes go wide when he sees you looking, and he lurches forward to right himself again, briefly losing his balance and just about toppling out of the chair as he does.       

Jesus fucking Christ.     

You twist back around and pick up your pace, desperate to get out of there before anyone gets the bright idea to follow you.   

You move through the halls without really knowing where you intend to go, but before you realize it, you’re in the gymnasium, stalking across the empty floor to tuck yourself back beneath the bleachers.   

It’s not the most covert hiding spot, plenty of people come down here to make out and the braver, hornier couples around campus have been known to steal away and engage in the odd session of heavy petting or dry humping back here where they can get their rocks off more or less removed from prying eyes.

You’ve got no such plans to follow suit, despite the ruined state of your panties, as you scramble to slip out of sight with a gentle squeak of Chucks on clear coat.  

Your heart is pounding as you pull your knees up to your chest, face absolutely burning over the way Carol’s stupid play acting has left you slick and throbbing with the memory of your stupid, stupid dream, but you bite the inside of your cheek until it hurts and violently will yourself to get a grip.   

You pull your bag into your lap and begin rifling through its haphazard contents, desperately searching for some kind of a distraction – something to take your mind off of the lingering sensation of full lips and scarred fingertips and hot fanning breath – Jesus Christ, get a hold of yourself.    

You need your book, you need to lose yourself in thick text, hard science fiction, and worlds and histories and glossaries of outlandish names… only your book is not here. 

Your well-loved, annotated copy of Dune, whose cover is hanging on by a thread with how many times it has been bent backward as you pour over the familiar text, whose pages are creased and dog-eared and littered with notes and doodles and all the little lines and themes you never want to forget.   

It’s not here, even after you dig and dig and dig, even after you dump your bag on the gymnasium floor and spread all your things out in a neat fan in front of you. Your book is still missing.   

Where the hell is your book?  

You hardly get the time to stress about it much further than that before the school bell rings with a shrill, metallic clanging cry, startling your brain back into working action and sending you scrambling to shove all your things back into your bag.   

You’re almost relieved. You’d been sitting there, just biding your time until Carol eventually sniffed you out and you would have to brace yourself for round two, but your schedules are thankfully far removed from one another.

She’s got Mrs. O’Donnell for fifth period, whose classroom lies mercifully on the other side of the school from your fifth-period chemistry class, and the ringing of the end of lunch bell is a Godsend, solidifying your escape and requisite safety from another bout of humiliation.   

Your lab partner is a freshman, Gareth Emerson, who just so happens to be a newer addition to Eddie’s roving gang of minions. Somehow, that is much less terrifying than you’d half expected it to be when you first noticed him in the lunchroom, sitting tucked neatly into the chair at Eddie’s side and hanging on his every word.   

It had just been nice to know that you’re not the only one so affected by him.   

Still, you’d often wondered how Gareth was lucky enough to win such a coveted spot so early on in his tenure, considering Eddie Munson tends to be a particularly terrifying entity to the newest additions to the Hawkins High student body, but as you’d gotten to know him, you stopped wondering about that.   

Gareth’s a sweetheart. He’s nice, funny, and reminds you a lot of your neighbor, Dustin Henderson, if he were a little older and just a little bit cooler, that is. It’s no wonder he’s so quickly found himself at a place of honor at Eddie’s side, how could anyone resist him?  

You wish you could hang out with Gareth instead of Carol and the others.

You wish you could sit comfortably at lunch and talk about the things that actually held your interest, that you could make afterschool and weekend plans without a hint of dread, safe in the knowledge that a trip to the movies or to the arcade was simply that, with no ulterior motives or hidden agendas, no fear of being humiliated or abused for the amusement of the people who were supposed to be your friends.

You wish you could be real friends with Gareth, but Gareth hangs out with Eddie, and the thought of joining them at their lunch table is enough to send your insides twisting into acrobatics, so at the end of the day, you just have to settle with the friendship you have, limited to the confines of the classroom.  

“Hey,” Gareth says, frowning quizzically at you as you unpack your things and hop up onto the metal stool beside him, “What happened to you at lunch? You looked like you were about to pop.”  

Your insides clench with shame.  

“You saw that, huh?” You mumble.  

“Everybody saw that.” He scoffs, pulling a face.   

Everybody. The word clangs around your ribs and you have to blink back the image of Eddie leaning so far back in his chair, watching you run from the lunchroom. Literally run, like some kind of scared little kid fleeing the monster that lives under their bed.   

Great.  

“What does she think you did this time? Sell her firstborn child for concert tickets or something?”  

You sigh, slumping forward to prop your head up on your elbow and level Gareth with an unimpressed look.  

“Nothing – I don’t want to talk about it.”  

He takes the hint and offers you his hands in a show of surrender before turning back to the blackboard, where Mr. Kapz has stepped up and begun scribbling formulas with a hard squeak of chalk.   

You watch without really seeing, trying to keep your mind from drifting too far with all your classmates sitting around you.

There is a cold lump in the pit of your stomach as a hundred different things whisk around your mind, all fighting tooth and nail for the limited real estate left in your brain with so much of Eddie stuffed up in there.

It’s always like that though, and it leaves you feeling particularly pathetic, thinking about yourself, sitting beneath the bleachers on your own, like the loser you are, hiding from your friends, wishing things were different, wishing you could be the person they wanted you to be, wishing you could be free of them.  

You suck greedily on a sharp intake of air and shake your head to dislodge that line of thinking before it can take root and pivot to a much more pressing matter, for the sake of your own self-preservation.         

“Hey, weird question,” You start, tilting your head down toward your shoulder and speaking in a loud whisper, “But have you seen my copy of Dune?”   

Gareth’s brows are pulled tight over his eyes when you glance at him, and you are quick to elaborate,   

“It’s all beat up and annotated…?”    

“Yeah, no— I mean, sure I’ve seen it—” 

You hardly let him finish.

“That’s great! Where is it?” 

“...Eddie’s got it.”   

It hits you like a fist to the gut, punching your lungs flat and forcing the air out. Your heart thumps a heavy beat like it always does when someone mentions Eddie and you feel your tongue go fat in your mouth.     

“Ed-Eddie Munson?” You splutter, voice an embarrassing octave higher than normal, and barely manage to get the sound out over the way your throat is closing up.    

You can feel your cheeks heating just from the sordid act of speaking his name aloud.    

If Gareth takes any sort of hint from your bizarre reaction, he doesn’t let on.  

“Yeah.” He says.   

You blink back at him, waiting for him to elaborate and feeling your chest go tight when he doesn’t.  

“…Why does he have my book?”   

“He said you left it in the parking lot after you dumped your stuff last week—”    

Oh, right…  

In the wake of everything else that happened that day, you’d almost completely forgotten about that… 

You’d been running late for school, having spectacularly slept through your alarm and been so rudely awakened by the thunderous hammering of two little fists, doing their best to bang down your bedroom door – Dustin, shouting at you to get your ass up out of bed.  

You’d forgotten you were supposed to be carpooling that morning, and you're sure you must have broken some kind of a land speed record with how you burnt rubber to get the both of you to school on time. Gas pedal to the floor, you made the distance in five minutes flat.   

You’d been too caught up in your sudden prospective future as a Formula One driver to notice how you were headed for disaster, jogging across the parking lot and trying to stuff your Walkman into your backpack as a wall of denim, patches, and studs stumbled haphazardly out of the open door of a semi-shitty beat-up panel van and directly into your path.   

You barely had time to look up, let alone pivot to try and avoid the sudden six-foot obstacle before you, so naturally you collided, shoulder checking broad, leather-clad shoulder and knocking you sideways.

You managed to keep your feet and even catch your Walkman with an incredible feat of feline grace, but it came at the expense of your bag, which went tumbling topsy turvy, upchucking its contents all over the pavement at your feet.   

Fantastic.  

They stepped into your path, whoever they were, they crashed into you, but you still stammered out an apology, because how could they have been expected to look out for you when you’re running around under a cloak of invisibility.

Then, you dropped to your knees in an attempt to catch your pens and pencils before they could roll away. You fully expected to be ignored, to watch whoever it was that had just knocked your shit into the dirt skip off to class like you didn’t even exist, but when you looked up, there was Eddie Munson, crouched on the asphalt right alongside you with his head bowed toward yours, stacking your books and muttering his own apology.   

It just about damn near knocked the wind out of you, suddenly finding yourself so close to him again after spending so long quietly yearning for his proximity.

You couldn’t help but breathe deep, trying to get a sense of him, refresh the waning memory you clung to – he still smelled the way you remember, like camels and spearmint gum standing out over the notes of whatever cheap cologne he’d obviously dusted himself in, and Old Spice.

It made your mouth water, and then go completely dry when he looked up at you, turning that honey-warm gaze on you and bathing you in his spotlight. 

You weren’t invisible anymore, you were blushing, and you’d missed whatever it was he’d said to you – fuck. 

You weren’t listening, you were staring into his eyes, at the faint dusting of freckles across the bridge of his nose, at the plush spread of his lips, and the pink tip of his tongue darting out to swipe a slick sheen of moisture across them.   

Somewhere, distantly, you could hear your Walkman still playing, Ann Wilson imploring you to get a little more lost in him than is rightly wise…  

Oh, he’s a magic man, Mama…  

And he was waiting for you to answer him.

Fuck. What the fuck did he just say?      

“My fault…" Eddie mumbled thickly, "Didn’t see you there,”

Oh, thank God for that.   

“Oh – God, are you kidding?  It happens all the time.” You scoffed, dismissing the notion with a flippant wave.

It was almost a cool, collected thing to say, but then you just kept talking,

“Like. Way more than you would think,”

And talking.

“It’s actually kind of ridiculous how often people bump into me like that–”

And talking,

“Honestly, at this point, I feel like I should start wearing a bell.”   

Shut up shut up shut up already! You screamed at yourself, but before you could well and truly condemn yourself for being such a goddamn awkward weirdo, Eddie’s face twisted up in amusement and he laughed out loud.

A little too loud for something that wasn’t even halfway to being a joke – he was obviously high, the whites of his eyes were tinged an angry swollen pink, hooded and nearly closed as he peered over at you with his face split up in that crooked smile of his, but it was still so wildly endearing you couldn’t help but giggle yourself.  

You can’t believe you’d nearly forgotten that, that wonderful almost perfect moment of brushing fingers and traded looks and semi-meaningful silences.

If you really think about it, it makes perfect sense that he has your book. You haven’t seen your book since that day, haven’t even thought about it. It had been all but washed away under the bell clanging effect of what happened later that morning between classes, with Carol jumping down your throat and Eddie riding in to pull you out of her line of fire.   

Good God!  He shouts in your memory, and you can’t help but agree with him.    

“Didn’t he give it back to you?” Gareth asks, brows marrying over his eyes.  

You give your lab partner an incredulous look because never mind how this new information is ever so subtly breaking your brain, but why on Earth would you be asking after your copy of Dune if Eddie had already given it back to you?  

The lack of logic there seems to dawn on Gareth just a tad too late to save face.   

“Guess not, never mind,” he hums, twisting back in his seat to face the blackboard.   

You sit, staring at nothing in particular as you try and fail to wrap your head around the concept of Eddie Munson carrying around your book.   

There’s something incredibly personal about an annotated book, and you can’t decide if you ought to be embarrassed about that, hoping that he didn’t stop to take the time to read any of the inane things you’d written there.

Suddenly you’re wracking your brain to try and remember if you’d gone and scribbled anything too incriminating in the margins, whether you’d absently scribbled out a dopey “Mrs. – Munson” alongside all your little love notes to Paul Atreides. You imagine it written out in loopy script, replete with doodles of hearts and clouds and all the stupid cupid bullshit that is typically kept strictly within the pages of your diary. 

You’re suddenly burning with hot, whorish shame as you think back to the pages you’d frantically scribbled on in the aftermath of the wet dream you’d woken from that morning, fingers trembling as you fought to get it down on paper before the vivid images and sensations slipped from your grasp and left you with nothing more than faint memories of calloused hands and full lips, burning your skin with the suggestion of phantom touches.    

Yeah, you’re going to have to go back and revisit that when you get home this afternoon, thank God you’re not babysitting tonight.   

You realize after a moment that in staring off into space, trying simultaneously to banish the feeling and relieve it, that you’ve actually been sitting, staring at Gareth, watching him wrestle with something like he’s trying to decide whether or not to let more information slip.   

Truly, you’re not sure how much more truth you can stomach here in fifth period chemistry, sitting perched on your metal stool and trying oh-so-subtly to shift over to the edge and give yourself a little relief from the way that your heart is throbbing in your panties again. 

Your guts seize like you’ve been caught red handed when Gareth twists back around to face you and ducks his head conspiratorially.   

For lack of anything better to do, you mirror his movements and hope beyond hope that, if you’re blushing, he doesn’t notice.     

“Okay, so…” he begins softly, “You didn’t hear it from me, but... he likes you,”   

You do your best not to react as your heart leaps into your throat – you don’t dare to hope to know who he means.    

“Who does?” You ask, playing dumb for the sake of your poor, nervous heart, because what if you’re wrong?  

You’re probably wrong.  

“Eddie does.” 

Then again, maybe not… oh, shit.

Gareth continues. 

“Like… a lot.” 

OH SHIT.  

Oh shit oh fuck oh sHIT be cool be cool be fucking cool!    

It takes every fiber of your limited willpower not to react, because honestly, you could scream. This is what it feels like to have your wildest dreams come true.

Eddie Munson likes you, Gareth said, like a lot, he said. 

Maybe it’s just the wrecked state you’ve been existing in from the moment you snapped into consciousness that morning, but suddenly you’re desperate, giddy, feeling the hard push of the urge to run and go find Eddie.

Find him and seize him by the shoulders and shake him and scream and shout and cheer and... and and and... and do what?

Confess your feelings?

Make some sort of grand declaration then drag him off somewhere to hop on his dick?

That’s what your ovaries are currently imploring you to do. Finally do something about that goddamn virginity of yours so Carol will climb down out of your ass.

But that’s ridiculous, right? And not at all practical, fantasizing about running off and trying to consummate what, as far as you can tell, is only a rumor before it can slip from your grasp.  

Where would you even go?  

Under the bleachers, where the braver, hornier couples go to rub up against each other and get their rocks off. 

No, no that’s stupid… and yet? 

You’ve heard the talk about Eddie, how he’s supposed to be easy or something — some part of you is pretty sure he’d be game to take you out to the back of his van if you went over and asked him nicely... just ask him nicely to lift your skirt and help you out with that pesky little virginal problem of yours, Christ, how embarrassing. 

He’d probably laugh in your face if you did. How do you know for sure that he even really likes you? What makes you think that there’s even the slightest chance that your stupid crush on him could ever be reciprocated?

You’re not a real person, remember? You don’t put out because you don’t exist.   

No, Eddie doesn’t like you, you decide in an instant, how could he? He doesn’t even know you.  

Gareth is wrong, and worse still, he’s teasing you – he has to be. It is, after all, the opening line to the oldest joke in the Hawkins High popular kid book: so, Eddie Munson wants to take you to prom…what do you do?   

It makes your chest hurt, and you have to pull your lips into a tight line to keep them from wobbling.    

Ha-ha, real funny joke, tease the loser virgin for the big stupid crush she has on the local Freak.   

“That’s mean, Gareth.” You say quietly.   

“What is?”   

You shake your head because you almost can’t bear to say it.   

“Teasing like that. That’s not nice...”   

He gives you a horrified look, like you’ve suddenly got bugs crawling out of your ears.   

“What? No, Dude, it’s not like that at all!” Gareth stresses, “I promise I’m being so serious right now. Eddie likes you. He really likes you.”     

It feels risky, but you can’t help yourself. Gareth’s a sweetheart, why would he lie to you?  

“…Really?” You ask, ever so slightly embarrassed at how small and hopeful your voice suddenly sounds and trying so, so hard to play it cool.    

“Yes… and it’s super goddamn annoying — no offense,”   

You shake your head, because in the absence of the ability to form rational thought you rely on deep-seeded pleasantries.   

“Oh, no, of course.” You say, “None taken … I think.”   

You suddenly can’t make your brain work, it just sits there like a fat grey lumpy pile of worms in your skull. Part of you is suddenly so sure that you can smell the smoke wafting up off of it as it overheats in your attempt to jumpstart it again.  

Eddie likes you. This is all really happening.  

It takes you a moment too long to realize that Gareth is still talking, and a moment even longer to clue yourself back in to what he’s saying.

“— he’s been going around in circles trying to work up the courage to talk to you, but he’s chicken shit, so he won’t do it unless he has some bullshit excuse to make it all casual — giving you your book back was supposed to be his excuse, but that was clearly a bust,”

And then, “Also, he basically threatened to kill me if I said anything so just do me a favor and be cool, alright? Pretend I didn’t say anything.”   

“…So why tell me?” you ask, almost startled by the sound of your own voice and how far away it sounds.

You’re having an out-of-body experience, that’s what this has got to be, sitting there, floating, watching yourself have this conversation with Gareth.   

Eddie Munson has your book, Eddie Munson stood up for you, Eddie Munson likes you...  

“Because he freaked when he found out we were lab partners and he’s being a huge creep pressing me for information about you, like he expects me to spy on you or something... Anyway, I figured with how fucking weird he always acts around you that you probably already knew.”   

You shake your head and hope to God the movement doesn’t cause your eyeballs to fall out of your sockets. You can’t remember if you’ve blinked over the course of the last five minutes.   

“I didn’t.” You squeak.    

His eyes go wide and you watch the color drain from his face.   

“Oh. Shit,” He says, “— well, like I said, you didn’t hear it from me.”    

You didn’t hear it from anybody. As far as you’re concerned, this conversation isn’t actually happening. Any moment now you’re going to snap out of whatever fugue state you’ve obviously just slipped into, and you’re going to find that this is all a dream – only your thigh is going raw from where you’ve been subtly pinching yourself. 

Still, you still don’t completely believe Gareth isn’t teasing you – this feels like dangerous ground and suddenly your guts are churning because you don’t know what to do with this information.

You don’t know how to make yourself understand that the one person who has always been wholly off-limits to you could suddenly be within your grasp.   

Possibility makes you ravenous and you have to fight to resist the urge to seize Gareth by the front of his torn flannel shirt and shake him, demanding more more more, that he tell you everything there is to know about Eddie and everything he’s ever said about you among the safety of friends.    

With a sharp pang, you realize that you’re suddenly violently jealous about the confidence he has to freely speak about the objects of his affections – evidently, you.  

The thought has warmth bleeding through your abdomen and filling up your chest cavity. You’re floating again, and you’re suddenly so, wickedly pleased.    

Carol would shit her pants if she found out.    

The rest of class comes and goes without incident, and you don’t hear a word of the lesson. 

You’re far too busy fantasizing about all your wildest dreams coming true, planning your future with Eddie, picturing your wedding and your first home together, growing old together, and all the road trips and holidays and milestones you’ll hit in between.

By the last twenty minutes of the lesson, you’re even toying with naming your children.   

You’re disgusting and pathetic and so far gone for him in such a stupid, irresponsible way. Only there’s one tiny little obstacle standing in the way of all of that.

Gareth says he’s not brave enough to talk to you, not without good reason, which is so painfully endearing, but a real problem because that makes two of you – you can barely even look at Eddie, let alone fathom trying to strike up a conversation. 

So, therein lies the problem. How on Earth are you supposed to marry him and have a hundred of his babies, as Carol had so eloquently put it, if neither of you can manage to buck up the courage to have a normal conversation?   

The bell is ringing before you can decide how to become a human being again, you’re still more cloud than girl when you catch Gareth as he begins packing up.   

“Listen, tell Eddie…” You start, feeling suddenly too shy to have his name in your mouth – it feels heavy on your tongue, forbidden, and you chicken out, “Tell him… that I don’t bite. If he wants to talk to me … then he should just come talk to me, right?”   

Gareth rolls his eyes,   

“I told him that, like, a hundred times… but I’ll tell him again. I’ll say you said so this time.”   

The promise pleases you immensely, only there is one glaring issue with that plan. He was never meant to tell you how Eddie supposedly feels about you. You’re not supposed to know he likes you.  

You bite your lip and feel your brows creep toward one another, forming a deep crease of worry between them.  

“Is that gonna get you in trouble?” You ask.  

Gareth opens his mouth to speak, then snaps it shut again as the words fail to come, like he too had very conveniently forgotten that the information he’d just passed to you was decidedly not for you.   

He hums thoughtfully, brows furrowed, and face pulled tight into a mask of displeased concentration.  

What to do, what to do.   

Finally, after a moment that feels like eternity, one you spend fidgeting with your fingers twisting them to the point of pain, holding a breath in your lungs almost like you’re afraid if you breathe he’ll take it all back.

Gareth shrugs.   

“...well, I don’t see why he needs to know that I’m the one who told you… people talk.”    

Truer words have never been spoken.   

A hundred years and a short lifetime ago, you and Carol spent an evening trading secrets and the deepest desires of your heart, and you jumped up and down on her springy mattress, screaming along to the Go-Go's and promising one another that, just like the song said, your lips were sealed.

You can’t help but wonder if she ever really meant it, if she would have laughed and recoiled and teased you mercilessly if you trusted her with your secret feelings about Eddie Munson. Only you had made the same decision and elected not to tell her even back then, even when your secrets were still safe with her.   

Can you hear them? They talk about us, telling lies, well, that’s no surprise.   

People talk, Gareth said.   

“They certainly do.”  You hum, shouldering your bag and following him out the door. 

[marmolady]

Grandchildren: Beatriz

Summary: Endless Ending timeline. Middle-aged Taylor and Estela are entering a new phase of their life together, welcoming their grandchildren into the family. In four parts; this is PART THREE.

Word Count: 3496

Tagging: @saivilo, @edgydepressedchoicesthot, @sceptilemasterr, ​@mauvecatfic @rhemenway888

Thanks for reading!

__________________________

2060

Taylor placed down a plate of cookies on the coffee table, and sat alongside her heavily pregnant daughter.

“I know it sucks for you to not be able to fix everything,” Liv said, looking up to her mother with a grateful smile, “but don’t think your tending to my cravings isn’t appreciated.”

Liv was some seven months along, her belly huge and rounded. Heavy bags under her eyes gave away her lack of sleep, the worrying that had kept her awake long into the night. Her unborn baby, a daughter, had long passed the danger period where a miscarriage was a high risk, but she would not truly relax before the infant was in her arms. After all, the last time… the baby had been four months along, she should have been okay…. Most days Liv felt she was barely functioning, even with all the support her family, and Jeimy, could offer.

“I’ve felt so awful,” Liv admitted. “I let the blonde fade out… I’m sorry.”

“What do you mean--?” Then Taylor realised. The blonde streak Liv had always dyed into her hair… making the point of having at least a bit of her look like the mom she had no biological link to. “God, Livi, you don’t have to keep doing your hair a certain way to prove our relationship to me!”

Liv winced. “See, I know that logically, but it’s not about logic, it’s about feeling. It’s been since I was so little, it feels like I’m throwing something away… something important.” She sniffed and looked away, lost in a dark place. Was there anyone she didn’t feel she’d let down?

“You’re carrying a lot, sweetheart. Let that one go.” She tenderly stroked her daughter’s short hair. “If it makes you happy, keep in the blonde, but do it for you, not out of any fear of hurting me. I’m secure in myself, and in my role as your mom… so take that load off, all right?”

“I’m just… finding it hard. Harder than I expected, which is stupid, I should’ve known I wasn’t ready for this….”

Taylor kept stroking her fingers through Liv’s hair. There was nothing she could say that would take away the fear, or the grief that still lingered.

“Some people believe,” she said quietly, “that the soul doesn’t fully attach itself to the body until the moment of birth. If the baby’s born sleeping, the soul waits for another little life. I don’t know if it might help… to imagine a piece of Avis might be with you and Beatriz now.”

Liv’s eyes grew wide and watery. “I want her with us,” she whispered. “More than anything.” She sniffed and wiped her eyes. “I feel… I feel guilty sometimes even just for being excited about Bea coming. And I feel guilty that I’ve got this far carrying Bea when Jeimy had to go through that loss….”

“Sweetheart,” Taylor said, clutching her daughter’s hand. “You both went through it. It’s different, but your grief is real. Jeimy loves you, and they love Bea.”

Liv wept and snuggled into her mom’s shoulder, taking comfort there until her tears slowed.

“Mom… there’s something else. I need to check you’re okay with something….”

“I’m listening.”

“Well,” Liv wiped her face, righting herself a little, so she could look her mother in the face and read her. “We’d really like to use ‘Estela’ as Bea’s middle name.”

“Beatriz Estela Montoya? That’s pretty. That’s really pretty, swetheart. You were worried I’d be hurt?”

“I know we named Andi after you, but ‘Andromeda’ isn’t your actual name….”

Taylor laughed, and kissed Liv’s head. “Is this to get out of naming a dog ‘Draco’? You silly goose, didn’t I just tell you I’m secure in what we’ve got? Bea’s name is beautiful.”

Liv breathed a little sigh of relief. “Thanks-- we really like it.”

“She’s going to be really touched.” Taylor stroked the side of Liv’s face, adoring her. She could be a worrywart, her girl, but with what life had thrown at her in recent years, Taylor couldn’t blame her. Through it all, Liv was strong and kind, giving more of herself than she probably should, but somehow retaining her joie-de-vivre, her sparkle, dulled though it was on the darkest of days. “I love you, Livi,” she said. “I love you so much.”

And she hugged her, willing herself to somehow lend strength and courage where her daughter needed it-- if only it were that simple.

“It’s going to be okay.”

_________________________

It was pointless to keep checking her phone-- the message and ring tones had been set to blaringly loud so nothing could possibly be missed-- but that didn’t stop Taylor.

“Who you talking to, Grandma?” Andi asked, peering over Taylor’s shoulder.

Taylor hastily put it beside her on the floor. “No one, no one! Promise.”

Young Sol belly-crawled along the rug towards his grandma, then put himself in her lap.

“Hey, kiddo-- don’t worry, you’ve got my attention.”

“How many hours does it take for a baby to be born? They’ve been at the hospital all day!”

“Well, it depends. Sometimes, a baby will be in a big hurry to get out and it can happen in a couple of hours. Sometimes… it could even be a couple of days.”

“Days!” the two kids said in unison. It always tickled both Taylor and Estela that the two had an almost twin-like connection, their births only two days apart and inseparable since. Andi had often said ‘we basically are twins’ and no one could convince her otherwise.

How would another child fit into this dynamic? From the early days, Andi had been fascinated by her unborn sibling, talking about her constantly, while Sol barely seemed to register that a mammoth change was afoot. Until now, with his mom and nanay in the hospital, and not coming back until they had a baby to bring home.

“But,” Taylor added quickly, “last time your mom had a baby it was only five hours after she got to the hospital that Andi was born, and usually it’s faster once the mom’s already had a baby.”

“So, baby Bea could be being born right now?” Andi asked, reaching for her grandma’s phone. “And then they’ll ring and tell us?”

“She could be. And yes, they will. We’re just going to have to be patient.”

Andi huffed out a frustrated exhale. “Being patient is so hard! I wish we knew what was happening.”

“I know, mija,” Estela said as she came into the room with a plate of cocadas-- just how her mom used to make them. “Trust me, we’re all going a little crazy waiting for news. It’s just something we’ve gotta deal with.”

A tasty treat easily placated the easy-going Sol, who hummed to himself as he chewed, still sat in Taylor’s lap. Andi, though, wolfed hers down in what felt like seconds, and went straight back to asking after her mom and nanay. It was a challenge and a half, Taylor had to admit, to entertain two five-year-olds when one was completely incapable of thinking about anything other than the imminent arrival themselves.

Estela gave her wife a look. An understanding, ‘it’s driving me crazy too’ look. An ‘I’m with you’ look.

“Solito,” Estela said, determined to be distracted from worrying, and to have the kids distracted from worrying, “go and grab some paper and pens-- we can make some ‘welcome home’ posters for baby Bea-- good practice for your writing.”

Sol jumped up immediately, almost clocking his grandma in the chin as he got to his feet as was his enthusiasm. Reading and writing was a new skill, and one he was mighty proud of. He ran off, and as was typical, Andi was not far behind him.

It was hard not to be brought back to the kids’ mom learning to read and write. Liv had started a bit earlier, keen as she’d been to keep up with the older Reggie-- with whom she was inseperable. Liv would forever play with her alphabet fridge magnets; she took them with her from La Huerta, to San Trobida, to the States. Estela didn’t have any regrets about that rather fast-changing period in her daughter’s life… they’d given what stability they could, but it had never been possible to have a single true ‘home’. For these kids, though, home was San Trobida, a vastly different place to that the young Liv had known, and for Estela, it was barely recognisable as the war-torn country she grew up in. For baby Beatriz as well, the civil war and the horrors that came with it would just be a story told by her abuela, and a history lesson as she went through her schooling, as distant and irrelevent as the 2020 pandemic and dial-up internet.

Good for her.

Then Estela perched herself on the edge of the couch, only half-relaxing, for she could need to spring to action at a moment’s notice.

As if it had been waiting for the kids to leave the room, Estela’s phone rang, and she was up on her feet in an instant.

“Jeimy?” she asked too loudly. You’re gonna have to calm down…. She put the phone on speaker, though Taylor was right up by her ear so it probably wasn’t even necessary.

“She’s here-- they’re both doing great!” Jeimy cried down the phone, almost garbled in their excitement.

“The baby’s here? The baby--” Of course, the baby. Estela just laughed as relief and flooded her body. “Congratulations, Lorito,” she managed to get out. “Oh my god….”

“Pretty much what I said!” Jeimy laughed, ecstatic. “Beatriz is here, and she’s just divine.”

“Oh, Jeimy,” Taylor said, “you know it’s torture I can’t send you a hug down the phone, right?”

But even with the distance she could feel the happiness that radiated forth, and knew the same would be received. Then, the inevitable happened, and Taylor had to contend with tears streaming down her face. Her baby’s baby was here-- there was no way she wasn’t crying.

“H-how was it? Quicker than last time at least.”

“Everything went smoothly; I almost can’t believe it. It’s like… it’s like all the tension’s gone now… the scariest part is over. Liv’s feeling a bit wrecked for talking right now, but she’s happy. So, so happy.”

“Can we… can we tell the kids?”

Jeimy laughed, giddy. “Yeah, go ahead! We’ll get you to bring them down to the hospital soon-- we can’t wait to see them, just want to make sure Livi rests a little first.”

“Just… enjoy the peace and quiet with your little baby, okay?”

“And kisses for everyone from us, all right, mijo?”

“I’ll see to it-- I’ll see to it. You’ll give the kids a big squeeze from us as well! Love you-- love you-- bye!”

Estela hung up the phone and squealed, pulling a laughing Taylor into her arms for the tightest of hugs.

“We’ve got another granddaughter!” Taylor wept.

________________________

Liv’s eyelids were heavy as she watched the babe’s chest rise and fall. Their little Beatriz had made it earthside. There was no doubt in Liv’s mind; there would be no more babies for her and Jeimy. She couldn’t handle the rollercoaster. It would be her, and Jeimy, and Andi and Sol, and Beatriz… and that was all she’d ever need.

Safe and swaddled in her crib, an arm’s reach away from her exhausted mother, Beatriz had drifted off easily. Even bruised and swollen from the delivery, there was so much character in her little face.

“She looks like Sol did,” Liv whispered. “Not quite as much hair.”

At Liv’s other side, Jeimy was serene, sat up against their pillow. “I feel like I’ve been holding my breath for nine months,” they admitted. “It’s nice to breathe again.”

“I know the feeling,” Liv said. “At this point I’ll welcome the sleepless nights with open arms-- I’m just so relieved to have her here.”

Jeimy scooched closer and stroked Liv’s face. “How are you feeling? Physically, I mean.”

Liv looked up at them with a loving smile. “Very sore, very tired.”

Worth it, she thought, and she turned back to once again admire the little life she’d brought into the world. Oh my god, you are worth it.

____________________________

“Surely, no parent of a newborn in history has ever thought ‘oh, let’s have a party-- I could use some further disruption of my sleep patterns!” Aleister proclaimed. “And yet,” he added, “here we are.”

“I think ‘party’ is a strong word,” Taylor said. “Just a little get-together; good company, barbecue, and some fruit punch.”

Jeimy came over and hugged their uncle-in-law, welcoming him into the backyard, set up with lights and tables. “We’re not completely crazy; doing this at home means Liv and I can bolt upstairs with the baby and hide away at the drop of a hat. And if anyone was gonna disturb us, Mama ‘Stel would sort them out. Besides-- we’re not entertaining or anything, hence having everyone bring a plate and do their own dishes. Surrounding ourselves with love, but with as little of the hassle as possible.”

Aleister chuckled. “I can’t say I don’t still think you’re quite mad but… I see some of the appeal.”

Jeimy met his eye. “It means a lot Reggie coming home for us. I can’t say how much Liv’s missed him.”

“However all-singing-and-dancing the technology may get, it’s never the same as in person, is it? I hope it does Liv good,” he said sincerely. Aleister had been close to Liv all her life, for she and his own child Reggie had been something of a dynamic duo since before either could remember. She was his niece and he loved her, and through her mental health struggles he’d wished he could do more. It had been easier to be there for Estela, knowing that his support had helped her to be there for Liv. Reggie, he knew, was the healing balm that old Uncle Al could never be.

Thankfully, in the minds of the two parents of the new baby, the gathering had been able to be kept small and quiet-- certainly by the standards set by their ever-growing extended family. Naturally, Estela and Taylor were there, and Rosa with toddler Leo. Diego had made the trip from La Huerta a week prior, an additional support for Liv and Jeimy. Sean and Jake’s son Michael, proud donor uncle to baby Beatriz, as well as Liv’s older two children and Rosa’s unborn baby, was along for the fun; he’d taken up position as Chief of Fun and was keeping Andi and Sol out from their exhausted parents’ feet. His fiance and Michelle and Quinn’s youngest, Conor, was there to offer him assistance with the kids. Reggie was the guest of honour, the reason this whole thing was even happening-- and his sisters with their respective families, and Aleister and Grace rounded out the guestlist.

The back door swung open.

“Here she is!” Liv cried, stepping out with, cradled in her arms, a tiny bundle of baby in a puffy floral dress and a great big bow.

Michael turned to Jeimy and laughed. “What happened to the ‘gender neutral’ thing you were doing?”

“Hey. Flowers are for any and all genders.” Jeimy rolled their eyes teasingly. “Anyway, we gave up with the unisex name-- Spanish names are so damn gendered-- so thought ‘screw it, just put her in dresses if we like them’.”

“She looks cute,” Michael said, “but she’s gonna have to grow into that bow.” He held out his arms. “Cuddle with Uncle Michael?”

Liv chuckled, and carefully passed over the baby. As little Beatriz was placed in his arms, Michael absolutely beamed. There was no doubt he’d be as besotted over this kid as he was Andi and Sol.

“Damn, she’s cute!” he exclaimed. “You people are making me want a baby so bad. I’m pretty lucky to be a ‘donor uncle’ in the meantime, hey?”

“And we really appreciate it,” Liv was quick to say. Michael had basically given her the family she loved so much, and there were simply no words for what that meant. What was more, he’d given Liv’s Mama Taylor a genetic tie to her grandchildren-- a sort of link she’d once only dreamed of. Their family was unconventional, but in Liv’s eyes, it was all the more wonderful for what had been overcome to bring them to this moment, together. “It’s gonna be a pretty good excuse to get out to La Huerta regularly once Rosa’s bub’s here. We may have to tag along now and then-- I’m not having you usurp my position as ‘coolest visiting relative’.”

“I hate to break it to you, Liv,” Michael said, shaking his head in feigned sorrow, “but Jeimy sings, plays guitar, and has a talking parrot. You’ve never had the top spot to begin with.”

“Dude-- I can take my baby back---”

“Geez, touchy much! At least I know when I’m beat.”

“Just enjoy that cuddle, I’m pretty sure madam’s gonna be in high demand this evening.”

Content that her baby was in good hands, Liv felt comfortable enough to move a few feet away to check up on her older two. They’d blown her away with how they’d taken the new arrival in their stride; Sol was easy-going as usual, but Andi she’d been more concerned about, demanding as she was for fun and attention that simply was not in as high supply these days. But Andi doted on her baby sister, and was forever clamouring to be involved and help out. Now, the twosome had apparently roped Uncle Conor into a game of horsey-ride, with Andi was putting her newfound maternal side to use in steadying two-year-old Leonel with her hand as he had his turn, and Sol ripping up handfuls of grass to feed their new ‘pet’. Liv took an exhale and relaxed. Her little family was surrounded by love.

Then she turned, and there was the face she’d been desperately yearning to see.

“Reggie!”

“I told you, I’d be here, I’m not sure what all the fuss is abo--”

Liv flung her arms around her cousin, her best friend, and squeezed him with all her might.

“Steady on! You always have to be over-the-top about everything, don’t you,” he grumbled good-naturedly, but he kissed her the top of her head as she cried against his chest. He hugged her back, and gave a trembling exhale. “Now that I have you in person; congratulations.”

Liv came away to rub her teary eyes with the back of a hand. “I knew you were coming and everything, ‘m just a bit hormonal for this!”

She put her hands on her hips and took a few deep breaths, righting herself, then looked up at Reggie with a massive grin. He’d been with her through it all… both their spouses had been pregnant at the time, but she and Jeimy had lost their Avis, while Reggie and Mariama had brought home their healthy and bright Olivette-- named in tribute to their bond. Even struggling with parenting a newborn as well as his other two kids, Reggie had always found time for his old cousin, and it was a rare week that would pass without a call between London and San Trobida.

“How have you been?” he asked, “And don’t give me sass because I know childbirth can be godawful….”

“You really think I’d sass you?”

“Sure as bloody hell you would…. But are you doing all right? Other than obviously being touched in the head to have a blasted party of all things so soon after bringing a baby home. I just… I’d like to know you’re doing well.”

“We’re adjusting to the new normal,” she told him. “I’m adjusting… slowly but surely. And there’s grief that’s coming up, but I expected that. Mostly… I’m caught up in loving my baby girl, and so, so damn thankful that she’s here.” She grinned. It was as though she couldn’t think about her little Beatriz without doing so. “Do you wanna meet Bea? She’s having a cuddle with Uncle Michael right now.”

Reggie’s eyes lit up. “I did come all this way, I won’t not say ‘hi’. Actually, I may have promised Sammy and Ange that I send a few photographs-- it’s almost as though the need proof I’m actually here and taking meeting the new little cousin seriously.”

Liv laughed. “I’m sure we can manage that!” She took him by the elbow. “Come on-- you flew all the way from London, you get to skip the cuddle queue.”

And she took him to get acquainted with the baby, beaming as she walked him through a backyard filled with the smiling faces of the people she loved so much-- all there for her. Soon, they’d gather together, and raise a glass; to family, to good times, and to Beatriz Estela Montoya.

[starkillerbass]

Check out my ao3 profile if you like rizzles and longer fanfics

[mychoicespb]

Yeah... I'm really depressed...

Also, if anyone has a fanfic recommendation, let me know.

[gaiuskamilah]

choices fanfiction recommendation

my fanfiction rec/bookmarks for myself. will be ever-updating.

BLADES OF LIGHT AND SHADOW

Ashes and Embers by undermounts Mature | Aerin Valleros/F!elf!MC | 299k words | complete [Ao3]

Empire of Light by undermounts Not Rated | Aerin Valleros/F!elf!MC | 50k words | in-progress sequel to Ashes and Embers [Ao3]

and other forgotten things by undermounts General Audiences | Aerin Valleros/F!elf!MC | 3k words | complete [Ao3]

Ghost of You by lawrencebarkley Teen | Tyril Starfury/F!human!MC | 1.7k words | complete [tmblr]

Shadows of Hope by storyofmychoices Teen | Mal Volari/F!human!MC | 3k words | complete [tmblr]

BLOODBOUND

Bound by undermounts Mature | Gaius Augustine/MC | 165k words | complete [Ao3]

i was your insomnia, i was your grief by caligulasavior9 Explicit | Gaius Augustine/MC | 3.8k words | complete [Ao3] | [tmblr]

The Blood Queen & Her King by undertheblue Mature | Gaius Augustine/Kamilah Sayeed | 3.5k | complete [Ao3]

ENDLESS SUMMER

(One in the same) Love and pain by slighter_writer Teen | Lila Sethi/Olivia Montoya | 1.4k | complete [Ao3]

RIDE OR DIE

Mermaid Magic by lovehugsandcandy Teen | Colt Kaneko/MC | 3.1k | complete [Ao3]

we'll find paradise by eeshlyye Mature | Colt Kaneko/MC | 3.2k | complete [Ao3]

THE ROYAL ROMANCE

Love Lies Bleeding by MauveCat General Audiences | Hana Lee/Madeleine Amaranth | 2.5k | complete [Ao3]

Upturns by ilikebeethoven Teen | Hana Lee/Madeleine Amaranth | 997 words | complete [Ao3]

[sulanisun]

[nicnight9]

An Endless Summer Character Profiles: Grace Hall

🎨 Grace, owner of a tremendously big brain, gains her impeccable reputation around college by her genius mindset and her hardwork - things taught to her since childhood. 🎨 As the seeker for knowlodge she is proud to be, Grace came to La Huerta to study more about the island's nature and animals. And, if she's lucky, she might even gain more inspiration to create some masterpieces.

🎨 Grace lives in a tiresome limbo where she isn't fully loved, but also doesn't have many people who hate her. It doesn't matter, Grace doesn't care about getting the love from the people. What she genuinely wants is for her work to be validated, especially by her own family. 🎨 Obsessed with romanticizing her own life, Grace never lived much from life with the exception of theories. But this might change at any minute. 🎨 Like everyone on the island, Grace also has a secret. No one knows how she does it, but Grace finds it impossible to rest for one single second, not even during her vacation. Always worried and thinking, it's like she simply can't relax. Could all that stress cause damage on her mental health?

Basic Data

21 years old Born in 04/04/1999, in Washington D.C Junior at Hartfeld, Architeture Major Uses she/her pronouns

Loves: art exhibits, getting good grades, visiting libraries

Hates: crabs, heights and insensitive people

Fun Data

Is an Aries Her MBTI is ISFJ (aka The Defender) Her Hogwarts House would be Ravenclaw, and her Godly Parent would be Apolo.

Favorite Things

Movie: Pride And Prejudice TV Show: Good Omens Food: Pancakes with strawberries Drink: Affogato Hobbie: Painting Best Friend: Likes Michelle and Aleister the most!

Fun Facts

🎨 Currently works at two places and is already looking for a third job. According to herself, you never know what could happen. 🎨 Grace, even though only a junior, has a perfect academic journey. Great score and grades, has done total five internships, worked as a T.A on her sophomore year and has even won awards.

Moodboard

Some inspiration pictures, characters i relate her to and just overall vibe from the character! Check the moodboard over here!

Grace's Fashion

Grace's entire style gets inspo from dark academia vibes, like the academic girlie she is. That means the whole package. Lots of dark colors, especially browns. Winter clothes, like sweaters, cardigans, overcoats, turtlenecks... I also like to imagine some of her clothing a little splashed with paint and colors, just for the fun of it. Inspo here!

Grace's Playlist

Are You Satisfied? - MARINA

brutal - Olivia Rodrigo

Comfort Crowd - Conan Grey

I Can't Handle Change - Roar

I Wanna Be Yours - Arctic Monkeys

Motion Sickness - Phoebe Bridgers

Riptide - Vance Joy

Soldier, Poet, King - The Oh Hellos

this is me trying - Taylor Swift

When He Sees Me - Waitress

link for playlist here!

"It doesn't matter what i do, i could never be enough"

[captastra]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Endless Summer (Visual Novel) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Characters: Jake McKenzie, Zahra Namazi Additional Tags: Drabble, Tension Summary:

Jake's third trip to La Huerta goes as well as expected.

~

My first drabble! Written for the 30+ discord server drabble event, the prompt being Mayday. Decided to focus on a small moment in the canon divergent fic I plan to write.

[choicesficwriterscreations]

CFWC F/AotW - Jan 21 - 27, 2024

✒️= Fanfic | 📱= Text Fics/Edits | 🎨= Fanart Ⓜ️ = Mature Content 18+ | 🔥 = Explicit/NSFW 18+ 🏳️‍🌈 = LGBTQIA | 🔹Submitted by creator

BLADES OF LIGHT AND SHADOW

Aerin Valleros Fanart 🎨by @storyofmychoices

Aerin Valleros x MC Fanfic ✒️🔹by @skepticalfrogcat

Blades of Light & Shadow Fanart 🎨🔹| Multiple Characters by @phaaz

Promises ✒️🔹- @petalouda85

Things Left Unsaid ✒️Ⓜ️🔥🔹| Mal Volari x F!MC - @dutifullynuttywitch

Tyril Starfury x MC 🎨🏳️‍🌈🔹by @gaiuskamilah

CRIMES OF PASSION

Gabriel Rose 🎨🏳️‍🌈🔹by @lilyoffandoms

Home Without ✒️| Trystan Thorne x F!MC - @thosehallowedhalls

laplace's angel ✒️🔹| Trystan Thorne x F!MC - @inlocusmads

A Tipsy Winter's Tale ✒️🔹| Trystan Thorne x F!MC - @jerzwriter

THE CURSED HEART

Longclaw x Radiance Fanart 🎨🔹by @artbyalz

THE ELEMENTALISTS

Hallway Argument ✒️| Beckett Harrington, MC - @choicesmc

ENDLESS SUMMER

Grandchildren: Leonel 🎨🏳️‍🌈| Estela Montoya x MC - @marmolady

IMMORTAL DESIRES

Snow in Crimson, Starlight in Gold (Series) ✒️Ⓜ️🏳️‍🌈| m!cas x m!gabe x m!mc - @aria-ashryver Chapter 38: Heaven is Not Fit to House a Love Like You and I

IT LIVES SERIES

ILITW Fanart 🎨 by @alleykatart

LAWS OF ATTRACTION

Prelude: Martin's Rise ✒️🔹| Martin Vanderweil x MC - @aces-and-angels

Serving Cunt and Justice 🎨🏳️‍🌈| Multiple Characters by @oh-so-youre-a-nerd

NIGHTBOUND

Loyal to be Royal ✒️🔹| Nik Ryder x F!MC - @ladylamrian

OPEN HEART

Full Open Heart Masterlist Week of Jan 21-27

THE ROYAL ROMANCE

Best Kept Secrets (Series) ✒️Ⓜ️🔹| Liam Rys x F!MC - @ao719 Chapter 18: Maybe We'll Get it Right

Daylight ✒️Ⓜ️🔹| TRR MC x ? - @angelasscribbles

Forevermore (Series) ✒️Ⓜ️🔹| King Marquise (Liam) x MC - @khoicesbyk Chapter 4a: The Princess Diary, Part 1 Chapter 4b: The Princess Diary, Part 2

VEIL OF SECRETS

Jeff Duffy Fanart 🎨🔹by @lilyoffandoms

Veil of Secrets Fanart 🎨🔹Multiple Characters by @lilyoffandoms

WAKE THE DEAD

Angel Savage Fanart 🎨🔹by @gaiuskamilah

Angel Savage Fanart 2 🎨🔹by @lilyoffandoms

Eli Sipes Fanart 🎨🔹by @lilyoffandoms

The Siren (Zombie) 🎨by @lilyoffandoms

Starlit Night ✒️🔹| Troy Hassan x F!MC - @dutifullynuttywitch

Troy Hassan Fanart 🎨🔹by @lilyoffandoms

WTD MC 🎨🔹by @lilyoffandoms for @dutifullynuttywitch

CROSSOVERS / MULTIPLE STORIES

Blades of Light & Shadow/Nightbound

Happy Birthday @ladylamrian! 🎨| Nik Ryder, Aerin Valleros, Mal Volari - by @artbyalz

Crimes of Passion, Nightbound, Open Heart, The Royal Romance

Choices MCs 🎨 by @mariemarieohcontrary

[whatisreggieshortfor]

After Vaanu

Five years after you left with Vaanu, they’re ready for you to come home.

Jake x M!MC

Their faces flashed in front of your eyes. Diego’s bright eyes as he talked about some movie you had never seen, Grace’s cautious smile as she talked about something she was afraid no one would find as interesting as she did, Michelle’s concentration as she worked to help dress wounds on the others, Quinn’s unwavering optimism even as her body fought against her, Jake’s lazy grin as he asked you to marry him- even though no one imagined they’d actually get out alive.

Five years, my child. You are living in your memories again?

“Huh- Oh, uh, I’m sorry, Vaanu. It isn’t that I don’t appreciate that you allowed me to continue living with you, rather than absorbing my energy back into yourself. But I-“ You shook your head.

You miss your friends. You miss your love. I understand. I could not fix the world if I left you behind. My essence needed to be cleared for the world to be repaired.

“It’s okay, Vaanu. They got their families back. They got their futures back. And I- well, I still carry them with me.” Your mind once again filled with memories of laughter, and love. Fear and bravery.

Vaanu looked over at its missing piece, watched the love and grief that filled your eyes, and wished it could be honest about what it knew. But then the surprise would be ruined.

“To five years, everyone.” Diego raised a toast as the rest group raised their drinks in return. The nine other former Hartfeld students, the pilot, and the former Vaanti ely’shar sat on a beach together, reminiscing, “And to Y/N.”

Jake’s eyes were misty, the ghost of a smile on his face, “Do you think Boy Scout’s happy?”

Quinine gave him a gentle smile, “I want to say yes. He made the decision he did to give us a chance to see our families again. And think about what we’ve managed to do since then? Grace and Aleister got married and had a baby. Zahra and Craig, Sean and Michelle, Diego and Varyyn. I think he’d be happy to see us now. And he loved you so much-“

“Loves, Quinn.” Grace interrupted quietly, “Don’t forget that Y/N didn’t die that day. He just left with Vaanu.”

“Right.” The redhead gave a firm nod, “He loves you. You finally got to make your case and earned your freedom to be able to see your family again. I’m sure he’d be overjoyed to know that you finally got to make Rebecca proud.”

“If only he could know, Ariel.” Jake sighed.

“There is a way for him to.” Aleister interjected, gently, as if trying to gauge response.

“What are you talking about, Malfoy? My husband’s lost somewhere in space. We got no idea where. So unless-“ Jake narrowed his eyes at the poorly hidden excitement in Grace’s face, “Unless you two have something to share with the rest of the class…”

“Oh, Aleister, I can’t wait any longer. Can we please tell them?”

The taller man sighed happily as he gazed at his wife, “I suppose we have to know. Zahra, if you would please join us over here while we explain.” He paused as the three of them stood in front of the rest of the group, “Over the course of the last five years, Zahra, Grace, and myself have been at work. As my father was deemed insane by his spouting of Crystal people, I was able to use my access to his DNA profile to assist Zahra in hacking into his systems. I’ve inherited Rourke International. With my financing, Zahra’s technical skills, and Grace’s gift for science and mathematics, well…”

“Last week, we were able to finally track down the end of the trail of Vaanu’s energy!” Grace excitedly interrupted, “Zahra and Aleister have been at work for years developing a ship that will take the willing parties into space. We can get Y/N back!”

Jake’s face was slack, disbelief clear as his eyes welled with tears, “If you’re pulling my leg, Brain Trust, I swear-“ His voice cut out, a choked sound leaving him as Michelle and Sean reached over, each gripping one of his shoulders.

“I assure you, we are quite serious.” Aleister answered, a small smile on his own face, “I will not be taking the mission, as I promised Reginald all the love and care my father would never give. Grace and I agreed that one of us should stay behind with our son.”

“But I rigged up Iris’s old hologram program, made a few adjustments to it, and a piece of Grace will stay behind with him. The hologram will also serve as our communication system, and I’ve updated her to understand your pop culture nicknames. The real Grace will be riding as my copilot, so to speak.” Zahra smirked. “But we aren’t sure how long this will take, so if any of you don’t want to go, or if you can’t get away from responsibilities-“

“Ah, Skrillex, you already know my ass’ll be on that ship. Even if Vaanu absorbed Y/N back into itself, maybe it’d let me see ‘im again one last time.” Jake couldn’t help the hopeful smile on his face, “The rest of these guys might have things they need ta do, but me- I just gotta let my sister know I’ll be back this time.”

“You’ll need a doctor for this trip, no doubt. Space does funny things to the human body.” Michelle grinned, “I guess I can tag along.”

Estela shrugged, “I just took down a dictatorship, I need to get away for a while anyway.” The others blinked at her, unsure if she was serious, before deciding it best not to question it. “Besides, Vaanu may not be the only alien form out there, and most of you are probably still useless in a fight.”

Diego snorted, “I’m coming! That’s my best friend!”

“You’ll need someone to cook food every day! So I’m in! Resident chef back in the hoooouse!” Ran cheered.

“I think all of us are.” Craig and Sean grinned.

Aleister nodded, “For all of you that will need to step away from work, my assistant is already preparing documents to show you taking part in an outreach through my company. There will be virtually no existence of this trip.”

Jake just gave him a watery grin, “When do we leave, Aleister?”

Within two days time, the eleven of them were onboard a shuttle that seemed impossibly large. Grace defended that by saying that Aleister insisted each couple have separate rooms, in case they were on different watch shifts, to ensure one didn’t interrupt the others sleep.

“Okay, everybody!” Grace spoke enthusiastically, “For the beginning of the trip, we’ll just take turns running the show, but after a couple of weeks, we’ll be taking turns in the hyperstasis tubes that Rourke designed to save oxygen and food- but don’t worry! Zahra and I changed them so there won’t be any medical issues upon awaking, and the two of us will be alternating our shifts so that one of us will be able to operate them safely!”

It wasn’t long before they were breaking atmosphere, most of them marveling at the stars, except for one.

Jake sat almost completely still, nearly looking like a statue as he sat in the seat Grace had guided him to. The others shared worried looks, wondering if he was okay, before Quinn finally decided to voice their concern, “Hey, Jake…” she waited, but it was as if he didn’t hear her, “…Jake?”

Sean looked a little concerned, but Diego’s eyes lit up with an idea, before anyone could question it, he called out, “Yo, Top Gun!”

Jake’s head snapped over immediately, retort ready, the old nickname sticking in his instincts to respond before he realized who it was, “What’s up, Pop Culture Petey?”

“Quinn called your name a couple times, dude. Wanna tell us what’s on your mind?”

Jake looked almost pained, like he was still wrestling with the idea to open up to them again, but the words seemed to dislodge from his throat as he realized how much he trusted them, “…what if- what if he doesn’t remember us? Remember me? What if he- what if he doesn’t feel the same anymore?”

Various ranges of shock filled their faces, before a snort rang out and everyone turned to see Zahra trying to hold in her laughter. Craig was the first to follow suit, until eventually everyone was laughing as Jake scowled at them. Quinn took his hand, giving him a bright smile, “The chances of Y/N not still loving you, are about as good as the chances that I had a healthy childhood.” Jake’s scowl vanished at the mention of her Rotterdam’s, but Quinn continued, “From the moment he entered that cockpit to check how much longer the flight would be, we could all see it. The way you both looked at each other. And I know you know that. You two are meant to be.”

“Heh.” The pilot cracked a small grin at her, shaking his head, “I said that to ‘im once. After me and Katniss over there found ‘im, when we got separated after the whole MASADA b.s.” His eyes took on a nostalgic appearance, “We were sittin’ in a time rift of a place that looked like home. You’re right, Ariel. Guess I’m jus’ nervous.”

“And that’s okay!” Quinn beamed, “We’re all right there with you!”

When the hologram announced what would have been night time for them on Earth, Diego wandered over to Jake as they joined Varyyn, Zahra, and Craig for the first watch. “Jake…I’ve got a question for you. And I don’t want you to feel like you need to be defensive or- I mean he’s been gone five years and-“

“You wanna know if I saw anyone else while Y/N was gone. That right?”

Diego gulped back a small number of nerves at the look in the pilot’s eye, “….yes.”

Jake sighed, “I ain’t been with nobody since he left. My sister set me up on a date. Once. About two years back. But I made ‘im uncomfortable. He could tell I was comparin’ ‘im to my husband. He left within the first ten minutes. She ain’t tried since. I’ll be honest with Y/N about it.”

Diego nodded seriously, “I don’t mean to make it seem like-“

Jake shook his head, “Naw, I get it, Petey. He’s your best friend, you’re just looking out. Just…let me wait for a day before I tell him. Just enjoy seeing him first.”

Diego shook his head, “As far as I’m concerned, that wasn’t anything. But I trust you to know what’s best for the two of you. Even if you had- ya know, I think he would have understood. He’s been away…gone, for five years. I don’t think he expected you to go through life alone when he left.”

“I ain’t been alone.” Jake shook his head, smirking, “I’ve had the Odd Squad backing me up.” Your best friend laughed, knocking his shoulder against the pilot’s.

They were getting closer, following the trail Grace had mapped out. It was close to three months, floating around in space and taking turns in hyperstasis. Michelle insisted on staying out of the tube, just in case anyone had any medical issues that would need tending to, and no one was dumb enough to fight her about it. Sean was on watch when a beeping on the control panel snagged his attention, “Hey! Grace, what’s this indicator?”

Grace hurried over, looking over the instruments before beaming back at him, “That means it’s time to wake everyone up.”

You were lost in your memories again when you heard it. The voices, talking to each other as they seemed to be searching for something. Climbing onto a crystal formation, you followed the sound until you saw them. “Vaanu! You promised you’d stop with the mirages!”

It is not me, my child.

“If it’s not you then what else-“ the words lodged solidly in your throat as you stared back at Vaanu.

They have traveled a great distance for you. Are you not going to greet them?

You vaulted off the crystals without another word, racing across the planet’s surface, until you collided with the first body you could reach, “If this is a dream, I never wanna wake up again.” You muttered desperately into their chest.

The laugh that rumbled through felt like your memories, as did the arms that wrapped around you, “Come on, Y/N! We came all this way, let us see your face!”

You pulled back to look your best friend in the eyes, grinning at him with a watery smile, “You’re- you’re real this time.”

“Aw, you’ve been dreaming about us again?” You turned to see Sean, and sped over to wrap him a hug as well, when he pulled back he wrapped an arm around your shoulders, “Come on, now, the others are over this way. We split up to search.”

You couldn’t focus on how long the walk was as you followed the two of them, but you heard Craig clear as day, “Chyeah, boiiiii! Y/N!” He rushed over to you this time, lifting you off the ground, while Zahra offered you a lazy fist bump. Though even she couldn’t hide her grin.

Estela and Quinn were next, and you lifted Quinn onto your back to keep moving when it became clear she wasn’t going to let go on her own. Grace wrapped both of you in a hug when you found her and Varyyn.

“I can’t believe you guys came all this way…” You sniffled, happy but tearful to be reunited with so many of your friends.

And then you heard him.

“Believe it, Boy Scout. I told ya I’d cross every mile of space to get ya back.” You barely registered Sean lifting Quinn off your back as you blinked, trying to clear away the daydream.

“Top Gun…” Your voice was choked, and your feet moved before you could tell them to, carrying you into his waiting arms. “I’m so sorry, Jake. I didn’t want to leave you- but it was the only way and-“

“Shhh, baby, I got you.” Jake pulled back long enough to wipe your flowing tears with his thumbs, even as his own streamed down his face, “I get it. Yeah, it sucked. But at least I wasn’t alone. Thanks to you, we all found a family to hold onto. People we could remember ya with. I would’ve given anythin’ to have ya with me, but thanks to the Brain Trust and Skrillex over there, I get to have ya back in my arms where ya belong.” You sniffled, at a loss for words, and just wrapped yourself firmly around him. Belatedly, you noticed Michelle watching the scene with her own teary smile, and you reached out to clasp her hand in your own, hoping she understood how much you loved her as well without letting go of your long lost husband. To your mild surprise, she threw her arms around the two of you, and you felt the others join, until you were in the center of a group hug of your favorite people. Pulling away, you dabbed at your eyes, keeping a firm hold on Jake’s hand, “I missed you guys more than you could possibly imagine. Vaanu tried to help- it used to make visions of you, but I couldn’t hold them.”

Vaanu floated over, I apologize. I thought it warranted the surprise this time.

“Whoa! Poltergeist can talk!”

You snapped your head over to Jake, “You guys can understand it?”

Unlike on Earth, here in my home planet I can project my words directly to each of you.

“Speaking of your home planet, how is it that we can all breath here and stuff?” You had never really pondered Craig’s question before, assuming that you could because Vaanu could.

Y/N has a body developed for Earth’s conditions. To sustain his form I had to alter the conditions here to match.

“Vaanu…” You hesitated in asking your question, unsure how much the answer would hurt, “How long can they stay here?”

You watched as the ghostly shape cocked its head, They can survive here as long as they like, did you not want to return with them?

“I-I can go back?”

It nodded, and you could almost feel it’s happiness, I could not take you back, without risking leaving an imprint of my energy again. But they have found you. They can take you back.

You looked into each of their faces, tears still streaming down your cheeks. Jake gave you a smile, “What d’ya say, Boy Scout? Ya ready to go home?”

“Home…” you mumbled the word to yourself, “I don’t think I have one.”

Diego shook his head, “Course you do. You’ve had one this whole time, it’s been waiting for you.”

Your brow furrowed as you looked at him, and he just sent a pointed look at Jake. You smirked, “That sounds pretty good actually.”

Jake hadn’t let go of your hand the entire trip back to the ship, until he handed you a bag. You looked at him curiously, noting the way his cheeks flushed and he wouldn’t look at you, “It’s- it’s your clothes and shit from the island. Kept it in case.” He shrugged, but you surged forward and pulled him into your arms. He inhaled shakily, tightening his hold for a few seconds before he pulled away and cleared his throat, “Julio Child is toiling away in the kitchen. Hurry up so we can get down there.” You snorted to yourself, turning around and pulling some clothes from the bag, not particularly caring which outfit you chose, before starting to pull the old clothes off. You heard his sharp intake of breath as you pulled on new pants and tried to find the front of your new shirt, and attempted to suppress the smile you felt twitching onto your face as he fingertips brushed with a featherlight touch over your back. “This is…this is new.”

“Vaanu did it. So I could carry everyone with me. Everyone that had my back is immortalized on it.” Neither of you spoke above a whisper as he marveled at your tattoos.

“There’s Petey’s dog…Katniss’s dragon…Cap’s Eagle…Ariel’s mermaid…Malfoy’s snake…” you followed the pattern in your head as he whispered each one, and you could almost feel the frown in his voice when he reach the end. “You- There’s no wolf?”

You felt your lips curl into a smile as you mused out loud, “That pesky lone wolf. Where did he run off to?” You turned to your husband, face twisted in faux concentration, finger tapping your chin. You recognized the moment he saw it, his eyes alighting on the wolf design emblazoned on your chest, as his fingers slowly reached out to trace it.

Jake groaned, low in his chest, as he buried his face in your neck, “Ya makin’ me not even want to join the others.”

You chuckled to yourself as you brushed your fingers through his hair, “Just for a little while, please? I promise I’ll make it up to you later.”

He heaved a sigh, “The things I endure for ya. Fine. But no shirt. Let them see your pretty new ink.”

You laughed loudly as he pulled on your hand, dragging you out into the hall and toward the dining area.

You felt light for the first time in five years. Back with the people that brought you to life, and gave you the love that made it worth living.

Masterlist

[bizaar]

Endless Summer ✧

Part 2: She Drives Me Crazy

Cruel Summer Masterlist

First - Next

pairing: eddie munson x afab!reader

warnings: sexual content (18+ minors dni), touch starved!eddie, mentions of drug usage, swearing, bullying, self-deprecation, masturbation (m), oral (m receiving), mentions of slight sexual trauma (nothing serious or icky, just soul-crushing humiliation)

word count: 18.5k

a/n: listen, if there's one thing about me, I'm gonna write eddie a little bit pathetic and a little bit more traumatized than is rightly fair. this chapter should really be called "to all the girls who have treated eddie munson terribly before"

There is absolutely nothing rational about the crush Eddie has on you.  

It’s a wickedly cruel twist of fate to find himself yearning like this, especially for someone like you.   

You, who is so untouchable that he feels like he’s going to burst into flames for so much as looking at you, who is so far removed from his league that you might as well be on another planet.    

It’s really not fair. He’s been through this before, he’s supposed to know better by now, but when has life been anything even remotely close to fair for Eddie?   

It’s driving him more than a little crazy. You’re driving him more than a little crazy, because you’re just about the closest thing to popular as you can get, and he’s a leper – untouchable, same as you, only from the complete opposite end of the spectrum.  

You hang out with cheerleaders and jocks and the arguable social elite of Hawkins High, and Eddie skulks around with his group of loser friends, so far down at the bottom of the food chain that their link is not even attached.   

You’re the day and he’s the night – polar opposites. The way he sees it, you should hate him, just like all your shitty friends do, and he should hate you right back because that’s just the way things are, but against all odds, he doesn’t feel that way.       

Against his better judgement, Eddie likes you. He really, really likes you, which is stupid because he doesn’t even know you, despite what happened that night at Tina Burton’s party last year, despite the way you’d turned big watery eyes up at him, despite all the things you’d said back and forth to each other.   

All the things that haunt him at night that he’s certain you don’t remember.       

He knows he’s just going to end up getting hurt over it, letting himself get so attached to someone so far removed from his orbit. He can already feel the beginnings of that pain, hairline fissures forming cracks over the surface of the calcified muscle in his chest that he’s worked so hard to turn to stone.   

He’s always fine until he sees you, then his mouth goes dry and his hands start to shake, and he feels the ominous prelude to the terrible hurt that lies waiting for him just over the horizon.  

You’re going to break his heart someday, Eddie knows that for certain, and at this point he’s just counting the days until you do.      

Maybe he’ll get over you before that can happen. Maybe something will happen that will cure him of the fever he’s got for you and save him from that impending heartache, but for now, he’s completely and utterly obsessed with you in a totally uncool, irrational, sweaty palms sort of way.      

He’s halfway down the road to loving you without ever having held a real conversation with you, all because you went and committed the unforgivable sin of treating him with the smallest shred of basic human decency.       

If that isn’t the crutch upon which Eddie leans, he doesn’t know what is. All he knows is that ever since that party, he’s been desperate for your attention, starved for it, really, and he doesn’t know what to do about that.       

Except make a fool out of himself in front of half the school population, diverting Carol Perkins’s attention away from you and taking the full brunt of her ire just to try and save you.        

He doesn’t know why he did that – it’s yet another thing he should know better than to do, especially considering the bruise he’s got on his kidneys from the way Tommy Hagan shoved him into a locker later that day and threatened major bodily harm for embarrassing Carol like he did.     

Whatever, she’s a bitch and so is Tommy and they’ve both been that way since Middle School. It was high time somebody knocked her down a peg, and if Eddie was the one who had to do it? So be it, especially if that meant coming to your rescue.       

He would do just about anything for you, except talk to you. He’s not brave enough to do that, because for as obsessed with you as he is, as violently as he craves your attention, you scare the ever-loving shit out of him.     

Still, in the deep blue hours of the early morning, Eddie lies awake imagining all the things he secretly yearns for – all that boyfriend-girlfriend shit. Like holding your hand in a movie theatre, taking you out and giving you a chaste kiss on the forehead at the end of the night, making enough money to afford to buy you flowers and chocolates and jewelry and whatever else your little heart desires.   

Then there are his secret aspirations, the ones that live in the safe space behind his lungs like glittering little jewels, the ones Eddie only entertains when he’s safe and solitary, and really down bad for you. That’s when he starts fantasizing about getting on his knees for you, giving you a ring, marrying you – Christ on a bike, he’s pathetic.    

But he keeps those wishes locked up tight, because he knows the circle you run in, the creatures that swim in your tide pool.    

It’s only a matter of time before you go and get yourself a stupid jock boyfriend and the sky comes crashing down on Eddie’s head. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do when that happens, how he’s supposed to endure it. 

He thinks about it a lot, and it terrifies him.  

How it will be bad enough having to watch you go around with him, whoever he’ll end up being, holding his hand, sitting perched on his lap, falling into his arms and letting him stick his tongue down your throat, but worse than that is how you’ll probably end up getting knocked up and married to the bastard right out of high school.    

Because on top of being a stupid jock with a shining future that promises him collegiate glory in the way of sports scholarships and a good job waiting for him the moment he graduates, he’ll probably be a good Christian boy, too, so he’ll do right by you, come hell or high water – the son of a bitch.   

Worst still is how all that plays directly into the vicious cycle of boys and girls that has existed in this town since time immemorial. In the very likely event that this future comes to pass, you’re almost guaranteed to settle down right here in Hawkins, just like everyone and their mothers and fathers do, and Eddie is just going to have to endure the way that cycle perpetuates itself, because this town is a gravity well in the worst possible way.   

 As likely as you are guaranteed to stay, so is he, and it is a particular brand of quiet doom that keeps him up at night.   

Eddie knows he’s got no prospects, no future, no chance of getting out and finally escaping this place. So, in the event that this terrible future does come to pass, he resigns himself to the fact that he’s just going to have to sit there and continue to watch you live your life in the arms of someone else.       

Eddie would do right by you, if you gave him the chance. He’d work himself to the bone to buy you a house with a fence and a yard and a dog, to put presents under the tree at Christmas and raise your kids right, but that’s not in the cards for him. Thats not the kind of American Dream that is afforded to someone like him.   

That’s what’s going to break his heart in the end, and it’s fucking tragic, really.     

Life would be so much easier if Eddie could just find a way to be a little less himself and a little more the deviant everyone makes him out to be.     

If all he wanted was to get you on your knees and ram his cock down your throat, abuse that pretty little mouth of yours, he could find a way to work with that. He might even manage to coax you out to the van so he can fuck you nasty in the back and be done with all these bullshit feelings.   

Hell, maybe he’ll get lucky, and you’ll come to him.    

He knows what people say about him, after all.   

Word on the street is that Eddie Munson is easy, he’ll trade weed for head – he fell for that exactly one time, and it was a mistake that he is still paying for, all because Tina Burton gave him a forty second blow job for an eighth, and then she went and told all her little friends and suddenly it was open season.  

He’s lost count of how many times a deal has ended with some put-together ASB type balancing their open disdain for him with their horny little fantasies, batting their lashes at him and resting a sleazy hand on his thigh.  

He guesses he was just lucky that the talk of the town was the exchange and not the fact that he came so fast, but it’s cold comfort when everybody is suddenly forgetting their money and offering to pay him in “favors” — really, how do all these rich kids expect him to pay his bills? 

It’s not like you can cash orgasms in at the bank... well, not in this little conservative corner of Indiana, at least. 

The only solace he can take in that is that you’ve never been lumped in with that crowd. He’s never had the pleasure of selling to you, so he’s never had to endure the sick prelude of waiting on you in some parking lot, wondering how this deal is going to play out.  

No, with you he’s doomed to walk around yearning like some kind of lovesick virgin.    

Even now, he’s stuck replaying his most recent interaction with you over and over in his head in an infinite loop, analyzing every minute detail, searching for meaning in the brief moments you’d shared.     

He thinks about what happened in the parking lot that morning the week before, or at least what he can remember of it, considering how he’d spent the minutes leading up to your interaction bogarting Adam’s bong in the back of his van.   

Eddie was high as a fucking kite – higher even – and he didn’t see you coming.      

You caught your Walkman in one hand with an impressive feline grace after you collided – thank God, he could barely afford new brake shoes for the van, let alone even begin to try navigating the waters of replacing something like a cassette player.     

Considering he wasn’t immediately aware of who he’d just crashed into, Eddie set his teeth and braced himself for the incoming volley of verbal abuse that was sure to be hurled his way, and he found himself standing a little more than dumbstruck when it never came.       

Even more so when an apology arrived in its stead.       

“Oh, shit— I’m sorry!”       

The sound of your voice shot him full of holes and sent adrenaline like lightning rocketing down to the tips of his fingers and toes.      

Out of everyone it could have been in this goddamn town, the last person he expected to see was you standing there, thankfully without your ever-present group of horrible friends — still Eddie was not prepared to face you, not as high as he was. He couldn’t muster his armor, snap all his carefully constructed shields into place, and it filled him with a blind, bleary panic.    

Why, oh why did it have to be you?        

Because Hawkins is a small town, made that much smaller when you are so painfully aware of someone that you constantly feel like you’re about to fly apart at the seams.       Then again, he’s not exactly sure why he was so shocked to see it was you, considering it’s hard not to feel like he is tripping over you every time Eddie turns around these days. It would be annoying if it wasn’t so terrifying, never knowing where you are going to pop up next – goddamn pervasive is what you are, like a jump scare waiting for him around every corner, only that never seemed to happen before.    

Before Tina’s party, the most he could say about you is that he’d seen you around. At school, in town, at the arcade and the movies, and that he thought you might have been a year or two behind him. He might have even been able to drum up your name if he really pressed himself to think, but before that night, before you turned those big sad eyes up at him and confessed all your sins, he’d never thought of you as more than just a living accessory to the insufferable unit that is Tommy Hagan and Carol Perkins.      

Now, he can’t seem to make himself think about anything but you.       

And then came the impressive dressing down you’d received over something so blatantly untrue that even Eddie is shocked Carol is stupid enough to believe it.       

People talk, and Tommy Hagan’s trying so hard to convince everyone he doesn’t secretly get his rocks off to Steve Harrington that he’s willing to throw you under the bus to do so. He’s telling people you came on to him at a party last weekend (one which Eddie is only slightly embarrassed to admit that he knows you didn’t attend) and that you got a little too handsy.      

He’s saying you tried to grab his dick, or something vague like that.  

“I woulda let her do it,” Eddie overheard him saying from the back of homeroom, “Only she was too drunk to know what it was she was trying to get her hands on.”    

The group of thickskulled meatheads listening in all erupted into braying donkey laughter after that, and Eddie had to bite his lip to keep from correcting them.  

Not only is that ridiculous, considering Tommy’s obvious proclivity toward his own gender (all the signs are there, even a blind man could see it) but that specific Saturday night which he is referring to, Eddie just so happened to see you shepherding a gaggle of manic cheering boys out from the back of your beat up little green Toyota and across the parking lot into the Palace Arcade.    

He’d been parked in that same lot, perched on the hood of the van and waiting around for a no-show hookup who was already twenty-five minutes late.      

Trust Rick to keep him waiting.    

Normally, Eddie operates on a strict policy that gives his clientele ten minutes of leeway before he hits the breeze. Normally he’s not desperate enough to hang around in a parking lot waiting for someone, but he needed the contraband, because he was expected to bring it to the very party that you skipped out on. The one Tommy Hagan is insisting you attended.    

How tragic it is that he’s got the perfect alibi for you, one he’s not free to go spreading around, because Rick never showed and Eddie elected to wander into the Arcade rather than try to show up at that party empty handed – his occupation is, after all, the only reason he is ever invited to those social gatherings at Tina’s big ugly house. Maybe at first it was out of some kind of misplaced obligation for so summarily ruining his reputation the way she did, but any remorse she feels for spreading that rumor about what he will and won’t trade his stock for has long since evaporated. Anyway, Eddie hates parties, so as far as he figured he wouldn’t be missing anything.      

He had an arguably much better time feeding quarters into the machines and fending off Keith when he came wandering over to watch over his shoulder like a dead eyed zombie while Eddie tried to balance playing Dig-Dug and Dragon’s Lair and keeping a very close eye on you.       

You didn’t go to the party, but neither did Eddie, and he’s not brave enough to defend you from the people who did, because doing so would be admitting that he effectively stalked you around the arcade for the better part of three hours. His friends were happy enough to let him know just how creepy that was, and how maybe he ought to keep that information to himself.      

Eddie agreed, because he doesn’t need that extra layer to his already tarnished reputation – people already think he’s a devil worshiping freak, it would do him no good to add “stalker creep” to his resume.     

Still, despite all the time he’s spent sitting around thinking about you, fantasizing about you, fucking his fist to the image of you that now lives burned into his mind’s eye (two weeks ago he’d had the misfortune of witnessing your skirt blow up walking into class on a particularly gusty day and Eddie swears he’s got a friction burn on his cock from all the time he’s spent jerking off to the memory of it) he never in his wildest dreams expected you to be nice, to give him the time of day.     

It’s part of the reason he’d been so frustrated with his stupid crush on you, because you were supposed to be mean and scary, just like all of your friends.    

There has always been a certain safety in that, in how untouchable you were to him, back when there was not a chance in hell that he’d ever be able to act on any of his feelings toward you, but suddenly none of that was true, and there were pitfalls abound.        

In that moment, stoned out of his mind in the parking lot and staring down at you, he’d somehow slipped behind the veil into a world where he wasn’t some creature to be reviled, where he was a human being with thoughts and feelings and fears and dreams. Somehow, you could see that version of him shining through to the real world, and it was intoxicating like nothing he’d ever experienced, being seen like that.  

Before he knew it, Eddie was on his knees for you.      

He knows he mumbled some sort of slurred apology, something unintelligible to be sure, and he knows you made a joke that took him far too long to get.     

He laughed when it finally hit him, too loud to be appropriate, and all of that knowledge would go on to haunt him later that afternoon when he sat revisiting that moment and everything else that had happened that day.     

He’d made a fool of himself, which was nothing new, but his knees still stung from where the gravel had embedded itself in his flesh through the tear in his jeans while he gathered your books.       

That close, Eddie could smell your perfume, something cloyingly sweet that had lingered in his sinuses all morning, though not unpleasantly so. He could also hear the faint melody of the music blaring from your headphones — you were listening to Magic Man by Heart, which somehow felt extremely appropriate, especially with whatever it was steadily going on between the two of you. 

Come on home girl, he said with a smile, you don’t have to love me yet, let’s get high a while...   

It was almost startling, the window into your life that it opened to him, and he is still not sure why except that it’s just not what he expected from someone in the same social tide pool as Steve Harrington.       

Eddie hadn’t been aware of how he was staring at you until you glanced up at him with your big pretty eyes, the same one’s that have held him in a vice ever since that night …      

Then Carol screeched your name from somewhere across the lot and ruined everything.     

You reacted like you’d been caught smoking or something, and snatched the last of your things up, brushing Eddie’s fingers with yours as you did and sending a bolt of electricity shooting up to his shoulder and exploding in a smattering of sparks across his chest.       

You offered him an apologetic smile that was little more than a horizontal stretch of your lips and promised to see him later in a way that was completely absentminded but still made his knees wobble.       

Oh, now, why’d you have to go and say something like that? All it did was leave him hoping, scanning the sea of faces for you between every break in classes, heart pounding erratically in the fear that he wouldn’t see you, and the fear that he would.       

What did he expect to do if he did? Say hi? Wave to you?       

What if he did and you reacted badly? What if you ignored him? What if you laughed at him?   

The possibilities were infinite and terrifying, and it made the promise that you’d see him again feel all the more dangerous. It left him feeling like he was a kid again, going out day after day and trying in vain to win the affections of the other kids who lived on his block and hated him as a rule.        

It wasn’t until the end of the day that Eddie spied the last of your belongings, overlooked and left behind in your rush to answer Carol’s call. It was a beat-up, dog-eared paperback copy of Dune, tucked in behind the front left tire of the van. Eddie fished it out at the expense of its cover, which, wedged beneath the tire, came tearing off.     

Whoops…  

He flipped through the pages, finding them littered in your loopy handwriting, and it opened yet another window into the elusive creature that you are.          

He fully intended to give it back to you, but he just never seemed to get around to it.       

Seeing you, even just in passing as has been an almost daily occurrence over the past year has started to make his insides go tight and squirmy in a very specific way he hasn’t felt in years.   

Eddie can’t remember the last time he wanted somebody as badly as he wants you.      

Yes, he does.       

Stacey Keats. She was a year older and had done away with his virginity one cruel summer in a fumbling press of bodies that didn’t last long enough to make it through to the end of Queen’s Crazy Little Thing Called Love, which Eddie still can’t hear without cringing bodily.       

At the time, he would have thrown himself into traffic for her, head over heels in love by the time she ushered him out the door that sweaty afternoon with a fond pat on the head and a promise to see him again soon. And it only got worse from there, particularly with the way she’d kept him around and tucked snugly between her legs from June to mid-August. He was half surprised he wasn’t pickled by the end of that summer, more surprised though with how bad he was down for her so fast. He went all the way, flowers and dinner with her parents, he even went and embarrassed himself by telling her he loved her. It wasn’t his fault, not really, because it’s not like Stacey did anything to discourage the snowballing effect of his hormones, easily confused for genuine feelings.      

By the time school came back into session, Eddie was all ego. He waltzed back onto campus that first day, fully convinced that he was a sex god with an older girlfriend – big man on campus – only Stacey evidently didn’t get that memo.       

She looked at him like he had two heads when he approached her at her locker, like she would kill him where he stood for daring to speak to her, standing there among her group of tittering friends, and Eddie learned the hard way that now the summer was over, he had ceased to exist in her sphere.       

Oh, God – huah-fuck! – right there, Eddie – don’t stop, don’t stop! turned into …what the hell are you looking at? in less than seventy-two hours, and it left Eddie feeling like he could curl up and die, right there in the hallway.      

Whether he liked it or not, he was not her boyfriend, he was just some schmuck she’d used to pass the time while her friends were away for the summer. Now that they were back, he’d gone back to being less than the worms in the ground.       

“I thought you said you loved me,” Eddie choked on the words as they slithered out from somewhere deep down in the hollow of his chest, and the harsh, unforgiving laughter that erupted from that group of girls still haunts him sometimes late at night when the trailer park gets a little too quiet.       

That summer with Stacey Keats was a very hard lesson he didn’t expect to have to learn, one that took him a very long time to recover from.  

If there’s one thing Eddie knows, it is that time heals no wounds – distance is the only balm that soothes anything, and it’s the only thing keeping him from drowning in the sea of you.       He’s desperate for you, but not so desperate that he’s about to throw himself down on a spear, so Eddie exiles himself to the slow death of playing your shadow, because the safest way to love you is to do so at arm’s length.  

Still, attention is the high he craves like nothing else, and there is no greater fix than your attention, undivided, unwavering, fixed solely on him, but he doesn’t have any classes with you.  

There are no easy excuses to get you to look at him, so he does the first thing he can think of.       

He does what comes naturally.      

He jumps up on the table, he gets loud and obnoxious and theatrical, he makes a scene and gets in trouble, just like he’d done today.      

He’d been slapped with an in-school detention for it, but it was worth every second he spent under Mrs. O’Donnell’s glare, if only because of the way you’d looked at him, the way you’d smiled. 

Wednesdays are for band practice, and because of Gareth’s drum set, they almost exclusively occur in his garage, in among the holiday decorations and mismatched second-hand furniture they’d cobbled together to create a comfortable hang out spot for themselves.    

It’s there Eddie sits, tucked into the corner of a stained and fraying corduroy couch, finger pads throbbing from their recently concluded practice and brain spinning as he scrambles to understand just how the conversation changed over to him so quickly. One minute they were shooting the shit, talking about all the inane nonsense teen boys could be expected to discuss, and then the conversation strayed to girls, as it naturally does in a room so brimming with unchecked teen hormones. Someone said your name and it made Eddie’s guts seize, caught strangely off guard by the hard shift in conversation topics, as if he isn’t always just sitting around waiting for the topic of you to come up naturally.    

His reaction must have been palpable, as suddenly he was getting a lecture on his love life – or lack thereof.     

“Will you just go talk to her?” Gareth sighs.     

Eddie shakes his head, letting the stinging sensation of his hair striking his face ground him.       

“No, I can’t.”    

His refusal does not sit right with the newest member of his group.      

“Why the fuck not?” He demands.     

It’s strange to be spoken to so directly by someone he’s more or less only just met, but it’s Gareth, so Eddie lets it slide. What’s more, he answers truthfully.     

“Because I’m me.” Eddie begins, gesturing vaguely and fumbling for the words to best express the conundrum that haunts him day in and out, “And she’s—” Untouchable, ethereal, and perhaps most important, off limits.   

“Nice.” Gareth presses, “She’s nice and she’s funny and she’s cool – and she wants her book back, so you might as well just go talk to her.”     

Eddie hangs his head in his hands and grinds out a sound of thick aggravated desperation.     

Of course, you’re all those things, and it would be slightly reassuring to hear all of that confirmed by an inside source if it weren’t for the fact that you were hopelessly and irrevocably out of his league.    

There is the soft whisk of a lighter being flicked over and over somewhere to Eddie’s left as Adam tries and fails to light his nasty, tar caked bong.     

“Quit being a pussy, Man.” He huffs.     

It ignites a fire in the hollow of Eddie’s chest, and he snatches the lighter out of his hand, leveling his bandmate with a hateful look.       

“What am I supposed to do?” He demands, “Just waltz on over and ask her how her day is going? Just say something stupid like, what’s a girl like you doing in a place like this? I’m sure that's exactly what she wants.”    

Gareth hardly lets him finish.     

“Yes, it is! Trust me, Man. I know her, I talk to her basically every day.”     

As if Eddie needs any reminder of that, as if he isn’t already violently jealous of the easy proximity Gareth shares with you by complete and total accident. He suddenly can’t help but picture the way he’d seen the two of you sitting with your heads bowed together when he wandered past Mr. Kapz’s room earlier in the year, taking the long way back to class from the principal’s office in a blatant attempt to try and steal a look at you. Imagine his surprise to find the door wedged open, giving him the perfect vantage to see you and Gareth, snickering over something Eddie was desperate to be included in on — he’s not proud about the way he iced Gareth out over that in the days that followed, but that green eyed monster has a funny little way of making an ass out of people, and Eddie is in no way immune to its clutches. 

In fact, jealousy claws ravenously at his heart thinking about it now, about what should be his moment, passing pipettes back and forth and leaning over beakers and Bunson burners – stealing glances as he pours over textbooks with you, intimate one-on-one study sessions … it makes his ears burn just thinking about everything he’s missing out on, everything he’s sure Gareth is taking for granted. 

Lucky bastard.      

It’s not fair, but it’s just one more thing in a long line of unfairness that has punctuated every beat of Eddie’s natural life since the day he was born. 

“Seriously. You ought to just go and talk to her. I mean, really, what do you have to lose?”    

Everything.      

Eddie grits his teeth to try and bite back the venom pooling on his tongue.    

“Why don’t you go talk to her since you’re such good friends?”    

Gareth pulls a face, like it’s the stupidest thing he’s ever heard.      

“Because I’m not the idiot pining over her.” he says, prodding Eddie in the center of his chest with an accusatory finger.     

He snorts.      

“I’m not pining over her.”     

A loud rumble of dissent washes over the table, startling Eddie.    

“I’m not!” He insists, and it only causes the group to erupt into a fit of booing and hissing.     

They’re quickly talking among themselves, tossing playful handfuls of things at each other and making commentary on what complete and utter bullshit that is.          

“What’s it been, a year since that party?” Jeff starts, “All we ever get from you is oh, woe and misery, she’s so cool and I am but a pathetic loser, however shall my withered heart go on?”    

He clasps his hands and tucks them at his jaw, tilting his head down and batting his eyes to affect the wistfully theatrical look of a maiden asking after her Romeo as he says it, voice jumping up an octave or two.    

Eddie’s face goes hot with righteous indignation, and he opens his mouth to try and say something to defend himself, but the guys are already speaking over him, trading snide comments back and forth at his expense. Something squirms in his midsection as he comes to the sickening realization that this is apparently a widely discussed topic of conversation. It’s one thing to talk about it as a group, but behind his back? He won’t deny that it doesn’t sting a little.     

Before Eddie can make the effort to silence them, Gareth takes it upon himself, shouting something unintelligible, just to try and get a word in and taking his chance when there is a lull in the heated conversation.  

“Look! I wasn’t gonna tell you this—” he starts, “But… she knows, okay?”     

The vagueness of the statement is startling like the clanging of a bell, and suddenly Eddie’s ears are ringing.     

“She–she knows?” He echoes, “She knows.” Eddie’s mind is suddenly crawling with spiders as he tries to balance the question over what that could possibly mean and the knowledge of what he is certain it means.     

If he’s right, he’s going to kill Gareth, right here, right now.     

Eddie sits there, waiting for his friend to elaborate, watching unblinking as the freshman sits fidgeting, pursing his lips and looking anywhere he can, anywhere but directly at Eddie.     

He grits his teeth and braces himself for the answer to a question he already knows.     

“What exactly does she know? Gareth?”     

Flannel clad shoulders jump up to his ears.     

“Obviously that you have her book…” Gareth hums with a flippant shrug, then he grows sheepish, and he drops his tone as the words come tumbling out in a rush, “And … it may or may not have come up that you feel a certain way about her…”     

He might as well have stood up and kicked Eddie in the teeth with the way it hits him. Like getting swamped at the beach, like the rush of the undertow pulling him down to crash against the rocks.     

Eddie is flayed alive as a deafening roar of dissent kicks up from their little huddle.     

He doesn’t hear it though, because he’s too busy feeling his brain melt out of his ears.     

His vision goes spotty and for half a moment he is sure he is about to keel over from the shock of such violent betrayal.       

“YOU TOLD HER?” Eddie shrieks, fisting his hands in his hair and feeling his lungs go flat in his chest.    

He could die. He could literally lay down and die right here on the floor of Gareth’s garage.    

Thankfully, the outrage is a mutual thing.       

“Judas!” Jeff shouts, drowning out whatever curse Adam is busy laying at the junior member of their group’s feet.    

Gareth throws up his hands in a lame attempt at defending himself from the onslaught of vitriol suddenly being hurled his way.     

He has to shout to be heard over the others.     

“She pulled it out of me okay!” He cries, as if that makes it any better.     

Eddie slumps forward, elbows braced on his knees, and scrubs his hands over his face miserably to try and hide the way his cheeks are burning with shame.    

This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to him.       

“Oh, God!” He moans pitifully between his fingers, flinching with every new shock of humiliation that strikes him like bolts to the chest, one right after the other, “How could you do this to me?”    

Gareth is the worst. A thousand curses upon Gareth. Eddie hopes he fucking dies, he hopes something falls out of the sky and crushes him flat, and pitifully, he hopes the same for himself.    

“Explain yourself.” Jeff demands, and when the boy hesitates, he raises his voice, “Now, Gareth!”      

“Okay, okay. Her exact words were: I don’t bite — if he likes me, he should just come and talk to me.”      

A dissenting groan rumbles through the garage as Adam and Jeff exchange disappointed glances. What Gareth did was unforgivable, Eddie is furious, but somehow the feeling is a little more muted than it was a moment ago.    

Because he can’t help but get caught on one tiny little, microscopic detail in your words, parroted from Gareth’s stupid, flapping mouth. A word suddenly materializes in Eddie’s mind and clangs around the planes of his skull, beating his brain into submission as it does.    

Permission.     

He suddenly has permission to approach you.     

Eddie sits in a stunned silence – or at least he thinks he does, the words are tumbling out of his mouth before he even realizes that there is a question forming in his mind.     

“Well, what the fuck am I supposed to do with that?!” He shouts.    

And Gareth has evidently had his fill of the abuse being hurled his way.       

“Fucking ask her out!” He fires back.    

The room goes oddly silent as his demand bounces back and forth between the bodies and the walls and the ceiling and the floors.    

The mood shifts, and suddenly Eddie can’t help but notice the way his friends have changed sides. They’re not on his team anymore – what’s more, they’re agreeing with Gareth.    

You know, he’s right, they’re saying. That idea’s not half bad, they’re saying.      

Eddie’s tongue goes fat in his mouth and suddenly his palms are sweating at the mere suggestion of asking you out.     

He’s barely bridged the gap of talking to you, and now suddenly he’s expected to … to what?    

Ask you out.     

Jesus Christ.        

“Sure,” He huffs, feeling his face get hot as his voice cracks, “Sure, I’ll just do that. I’ll just go up to her and ask her out in front of Carol and Tommy and-and-and fucking Steve, right? What could possibly go wrong?”    

“Quit being so dramatic, Man. What are you so afraid of?” Gareth demands, and Eddie’s insides go tight.     

Everything. Everything and anything he can imagine. Breaking the invisible rules very clearly set into place for him and being skinned alive for it. Tarred and feathered and ridden out on a rail, pushed further into the fringes than he already exists and condemned for having the audacity to approach you. Hunted down and killed for the simple act of speaking to someone like you, who by all rights he should not even be allowed to look at, let alone think about the way that he does. In a nice little town like this? Eddie would not put it past them.      

Even if he were brave enough, even if he had the audacity, what is he supposed to even say to you?    

Hi, I’m Eddie. I don’t know if you remember me, but we met at Tina Burton’s party last October, and I’ve been obsessed with you ever since — here’s your book back. D’you want to go to the movies or buy drugs or something? Can I hold your hand or should I just go and deposit myself into the nearest dumpster for your convenience? Great, thanks for your time, I’ll see myself out.      

Somewhere Stacey’s friends are howling with laughter and Eddie is sinking further and further beneath the tide.       

“She’s not like that dude,” Gareth presses, almost as if he’d been privy to Eddie’s inner turmoil, “I swear on my life! She really, really wants you to talk to her…”     

“Oh, fuck off — you know you just ruined my life, right? Do you understand that?” He snaps, slumping back into the fraying couch cushions, arms crossed tight over his chest, grinding his teeth and doing his very best to kill Gareth where he stands, “Jesus fucking Christ – I’m gonna have to change schools after this.”     

Somewhere beside him, Adam snickers.      

“Dude, you’re gonna have to change towns.”      

He shuts up quick when Eddie socks him hard in the shoulder.      

“Alright, fine,” Gareth says, throwing his hands up, “You know what? Fuck it. She’d kill me for telling you this, but she likes you, okay?”    

Jeff and Adam kick up another one of those roaring cries of dissent.      

“Whoa!”     

“Holy shit, just like that?”     

Only once again, Eddie doesn’t hear them. He’s too busy trying to get his bearings again after being knocked off his feet from the impact of the truth bomb Gareth just dropped on him.    

You like him? You like him… he doesn’t understand.   

“... what do you mean she likes me?”    

Gareth pulls a face.    

“What are you, stupid or something?” He scoffs, “I mean she likes you!”   

He keeps saying that, like it’s going to clear things up for him, like he’s speaking plain English and spelling it out for him, which, as far as Eddie can tell, he is, but he still doesn’t understand.   

Maybe he is stupid, but he just can’t seem to make sense of that information. It does not compute.    

Before he can ask after it again, however, Adam shrugs beside him.    

“Actually, I heard about that too.” He says, like it’s the most casual thing in the world.    

Eddie’s heart seizes in his chest and explodes. There are spots and colors dancing across his vision and his head snaps over so quickly he feels something pop in his neck.     

He’s only half surprised when his head doesn’t roll right off of his shoulders, when his eyes don’t pop out of his skull.    

“You what?”     

“There’s a rumor going around.” He says, rolling his eyes and gesturing vaguely, “You know how it is, there’s always a rumor going around.”    

“... that bullshit about the party on Saturday? I already told you guys, I saw her at the arcade–”    

“No, not that one. This one’s new.” Adam says absently, suddenly wrist deep in a can of Pringles as he explains, “Word on the street is she’s into you,”       

Eddie feels himself pulling a face.  

“Who says?”  

Adam shrugs and pops a handful of potato chips into his mouth. 

“Carol Perkins.” he says, chewing noisily.      

It hits him like a fist to the gut.    

“She told you that?” Eddie gasps and feels himself go hot and then cold when Adam’s thick shoulders jump up toward his ears.    

“Well, not exactly. I heard her talking to Tammy Thompson about it in fifth period, apparently that’s what all that noise at lunch was about–”   

It just about breaks his brain with the way it makes perfect sense. Eddie didn’t know what could have happened to turn Carol so fanatically giddy back in the lunchroom when only moments before she’d been trying with every particle of her being to awaken her latent psychic abilities and kill him where he stood. Whatever happened was distressing enough to send you running from the cafeteria, and Eddie had only spent the rest of the afternoon wondering about it, wishing he’d gone after you.  

Of course, with the information that has just come to light, that wish is amplified tenfold.  

Oh, God – why on Earth didn’t he go after you? Especially now that he knows what he knows?    

Then again, he doesn’t really know anything, does he? It’s just a rumor, but it doesn’t make it any less terrible to hear. It’s not the knowledge of what is evidently making its way through the student body like chicken pox that haunts him so much as it is the fact that he almost followed you right out of the lunchroom this afternoon, but he chickened out, like he always does.   

Adam is still going, elaborating on the specificities of his latest foray into eavesdropping on popular girls, who said what and all that good stuff.  

“Wait a minute, wait a minute! This doesn’t make sense.” Eddie says, “This doesn’t make any goddamn sense.”   

Then Gareth huffs out a sigh and braces his hands on his knees before starting again, much slower this time.     

“Think about the way you feel about her.” He says, “You like her, right? You’re crazy about her? You sit around all day imagining doing all that fluffy boyfriend-girlfriend shit with her like holding her hand?”    

It makes him suddenly and painfully shy, and Eddie moves instinctually, snatching a snarled lock of his hair to drag across his face to try and guard against the way he is sure he must be blushing beet red.   

“You don’t have to make it sound so weird…” he mumbles.     

“It’s not weird, Dude. It’s mutual.” Gareth stresses, “I guarantee you she’s sitting around thinking about all that ooey-gooey stuff too, when I tell you she likes you, I mean she was practically vibrating when I told her.”    

Eddie can hardly stand it. He suddenly feels like he’s about to burst.  

“Stop.” He says, “Just… just shut up and give me –” He can’t think, his brain is turning to mush in his skull, “Just gimme a second to think…”     

Gareth does as he’s told, despite the look of stark confusion etched across his face. He sits there and he waits for Eddie to say something, same as everyone else.    

Even Eddie is just sitting there, holding his breath and waiting for his brain to click back over, for the other shoe to drop and for a big stupid shit eating grin to spread across his friend’s face, because he’s fucking with him … right? He’s got to be.     

Only Gareth is still just sitting there, staring back at Eddie and growing more and more nervous the longer he stares at him.    

Eddie looks to Adam for assistance, then, begging him to explain it to him, clear things up where he’s evidently too goddamn stupid to understand. He does this silently, however, because he can’t get the words out around the way his throat is closing up.   

You like him? How can you like him? What’s wrong with you?     

Then, devastatingly, Jeff tilts his head down and pushes his shoulders up.     

“Yeah… I heard something about that too.”    

And that solidifies it. Three for three. Matching slots that send glittering little coins spilling out of the machine and all over Eddie’s feet with a loud DING DING DING!    

Somehow all it does is send a sick feeling bleeding into the pit of his stomach.    

“Jesus Christ!” Eddie’s brain is melting again – you like him, “Why didn’t you tell me? You all knew, and none of you told me…”    

“Well…” Jeff starts, opening his mouth to explain and coming up short. “We were gonna tell you, it’s just…”       

“You were busy, Man.” Adam presses.     

“No I wasn’t,” Eddie insists, violently shaking his head, hard enough that the ends of his hair whip around to sting his face, “No I fucking wasn’t, not when it comes to that. You guys should have told me.”    

“Sure, and get our heads bitten off because you turn into such a fucking weirdo whenever she comes up – we definitely should have told you.” Gareth snorts, oozing sarcasm and glowering at Eddie from where he sits among the fraying cushions, clearly still sore about being dog-piled on. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter, because now you know.” He shrugs, “You like her. She likes you. Circle of life.”         

Sure. Circle of life, not Eddie’s life though. Not his American Dream.     

Before he realizes what he’s doing, he’s on his feet and gathering his things - his jacket, his keys, and the heavy bag of weed sitting untouched in the middle of the table where he had so graciously bestowed it upon his friends at his arrival, free of charge, just because he’s that damn generous.     

He picks things up and drops them again, spins in aimless circles as he remembers something and instantly forgets it as another thing crosses his mind and chases it off. He tries to think, tries to approach this from a rational standpoint, but his brain is pulling in four different directions under the duress of this new information.     

He doesn’t know what to do and he’s panicking a little bit.    

You like him? No, you don’t like him. You can’t, he’s a leper. If you like him that means there’s something wrong with you, and there’s nothing wrong with you – you’re perfect, which means the guys are wrong or they are lying to him.    

More than likely, though, Carol is lying, and it’s a trap. For you or for him, Eddie can’t decide, but he knows for certain that if he takes the bait he’s going to get hurt. Seriously hurt.   

He’s smarter than this, right? He knows how to protect himself from something like this, right? So why the hell is he suddenly considering it? How come his heart is beating so fast in that flighty, hopeful sort of way?    

It’s a trap. You don’t like him… but you do.     

You like him and you want him to talk to you, so much so that you went out of your way to make sure he knows. You want your book back, and he’s got to give it to you because you know he has it and you gave him permission to approach you, but how can he do that without giving you his heart right alongside it? With sharks like Carol and Tina lurking in your waters, how is he supposed to do this?   

He’s not, he decides in an instant.     

Eddie can’t do this. He can’t he can’t he can’t.    

I thought you loved me, he’s still whimpering, eyes wet and brimming, lips and knees wobbling, and Stacey’s friends are laughing at him.     

They’re still laughing.     

Somewhere in the muted rationale of his subconscious, Eddie knows he’s freaking out, and that he’d better get out of here if he wants to keep any shreds of leftover dignity he has. So, he snatches up his keys and his jacket and the bag of weed and Sweetheart and everything else that belongs to him here in Gareth’s garage and struggles to fit all his things in his hands as he turns and bolts for the van.    

Behind him, he can hear Jeff shouting at him, asking him where he’s going, but he’s already slamming the door shut and whipping the van into reverse.    

Music blaring loud enough to rattle the windows, gas pedal pressed to the floor, Eddie drives much too fast for how dark the streets are and how little attention he’s paying to the road. But that’s nothing out of the ordinary. That’s just how he learned to drive.    

The next thing he knows, he’s stumbling up the steps of the trailer and falling through the front door.    

Wayne’s not home, which is good – the last thing he wants to do is have to try and explain why he looks like he’s seen a ghost, which Eddie is sure would be the first and exact words out of his uncle’s mouth if he could see him now.   

Pale, sweating, face pulled tight into a thousand-yard stare.      

Eddie’s brain has completely shut off by now, and for the sake of his own self-preservation, he clicks over into autopilot, going through the motions on complete muscle memory.   

He moves aimlessly about the trailer, throwing his things down, kicking his shoes off, sloughing off his jacket and all his extra layers where he’s suddenly become too hot.  

Strangely, he doesn’t feel like a human being right now, he feels like vapor, like at any moment a stiff breeze is going to blow through the room and send him scattering to every corner of the world… because you like him.    

Eddie tries to remember what normal human activity looks like, what he would naturally do when he comes home like this, despite how completely unnatural it suddenly all feels.   

He makes a mental list and goes down the line: shoes off? Check, stuff stashed? More like thrown haphazardly across his bed, but sure, check.   

Now what … dinner? He’s not hungry. Vapor doesn’t need to eat.   

Homework? Pfft, as if.   

It’s sitting forgotten in his locker, wedged between the sheet metal siding and the tattered paperback scribbled over with your loopy handwriting.   

Eddie’s going hot and cold again, skin prickling with ravenous possibility – you like him, he’s got permission to approach you.     

He blinks, and suddenly he’s in the shower, standing under the tap and letting the water pressure blow his brains out in a desperate attempt to try and make his brain stop buzzing and start working again. He watches the water drip from his lashes down to the swirling tide at his feet and tries and tries and tries to make himself flesh and bone again so that he doesn’t go slipping down the drain.   

He blinks again, once, twice, and then suddenly he’s sitting in the Laz-E boy with his knees up, scratching at the fraying fabric and staring unblinking at the fuzzy pictures moving frantically across the television screen.   

Lucy and Desi are arguing in black and white – the laugh track tells him it’s meant to be comedic, but Eddie’s too busy grinding his teeth together to feel anything but static, because you like him. Because suddenly his future is blown wide and open and there’s a chance for something new… something good, for once.     

Blink, blink, blink.        

“Hello?”   

Eddie’s standing at the telephone, garroting his finger with the cord, and just like that he’s human again, trying to remember how he got here and who he’s talking to on the other line.      

“...Did you mean it?” The words are out before Eddie can settle back into himself completely.     

There is a brief pause as the person on the other end evidently processes the question.    

“Oh, hey Eddie.” Gareth mumbles, voice thick with disuse, “...what time is it?”     

He finds the clock on the wall and stares it in the face, watching the minute hand take a steady turn around the sun.   

3:45. Whoops.    

“It’s late.” Eddie says quickly, vaguely, “Sorry – it couldn’t wait.”   

“...Alright, Man. What was the question?”   

He hardly takes the time to wonder what exactly he’s been doing for the last few hours he’d spent as a cloud of vapor, but the question is burning on his tongue like a hot coal and he can’t help but spit it out.    

“Did you mean what you said? Does she really like me?”   

The long suffering sigh that comes through the phone is ever so faintly tinged with static and makes Eddie’s back teeth buzz.    

“Yes,”   

“And you’re not just bullshitting me.”    

“No. I’m not bullshitting you.” Gareth says, and Eddie wonders if he’s finally going to get around to believing him this time.  

It’s still terrifying, but doing things scared is a skill that Eddie has had in his tool kit since he was very small. He clings to the warmth of its jagged familiarity and forces himself to breathe deep.     

“Okay…” He clears his throat, “Okay. So, um… s-so, what do I do now?”    

“You know what to do.” Gareth insists, “You fuckin’ talk to her, Man.”    

Yeah. He was afraid he was going to say that, but Eddie is a blank slate in desperate need of guidance and nods into the phone, conveniently forgetting that Gareth can’t see him do it.    

“When?” He asks.      

“Tomorrow’s always good.”    

His heart thumps against his ribs and Eddie fails to swallow down the lump forming in his throat.    

“Jesus.” He mumbles, “Isn’t that kind of soon? Shouldn’t I like… make a plan or something?”   

Gareth pauses, like he really has to consider it and the only indicator that Eddie has been holding his breath is when his lungs begin to burn. He tries to breathe out as quietly as he possibly can as Gareth answers him.      

“I don’t know,” He hums, “I guess it depends.”   

“On what?”   

“On whether you’re gonna spend your life sitting around just making plans or if you’re gonna nut up and finally do something about it – she’s not gonna wait around for you forever.”    

Eddie knows that. Of course he knows that, he’s got a goddamn contingency plan for that, but for as often as he sits around entertaining that fantasy, he hates it. 

He hates it with every fibre of his being and Gareth is right, but it doesn’t make it any less worrisome. You like Eddie, sure, but only for now, and only until your stupid imaginary jock boyfriend shows up to sweep you off your feet. He's waiting for you, just over the horizon, waiting impatiently. Who’s to say the sands of time can’t be hurried along if the nice young man decides he’s done waiting for you and decides to come and fetch you himself?   

What’s Eddie supposed to do when that happens?      

He’s not so dull that he doesn’t recognize that there is a very brief window of opportunity open to him here, only a crack, but just enough that if he’s quick he can slip through. It’s dangerous. He’s most definitely going to get burned if he does this, but if he doesn’t, he knows he’s going to spend the rest of his life regretting it. Even if that not-so-distant future comes to pass, even if you do eventually end up in his arms and he manages to whisk you away from all that cloying Suburbia, he’ll regret not having run to you sooner, he’ll regret the life he wasted without you.    

“So, what are you gonna do?”    

“Fuck…” Eddie says through his teeth, letting his head slip forward to hit the wall with a muffled thump.  “...I guess I’m gonna talk to her.”    

“When?”    

“Tomorrow…” Today, technically, but he’s not going to waste time getting caught up on the specificities of daylight hours or just how late he’s calling, “At lunch. If she’s not socked in with all her shitty friends? …I’ll go talk to her.”    

On the other end of the line, Gareth makes a pleased sound in the hollow of his throat, and Eddie makes a mental note to punch him the next time he sees him, just to wipe away the smug look he knows he’s got plastered across his face.      

“Good - just be yourself and she’ll love you.” 

Eddie appreciates the sentiment, despite how blatantly untrue it is.  

“I’m seriously doubt that.” 

“Yeah, of course she will, give her that cool line you said earlier,"  

He doesn’t have to work to remember what line Gareth is talking about – What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this – like he thinks he’s Humphrey Bogart or something.  

“Not a chance in hell.” Eddie bites. 

“What? Why not?” 

“Because it’s stupid.” 

Gareth clicks his tongue.  

“Oh, come on, at least it would be different? Seriously, what’s the worst that can happen?”     

“Public humiliation on a global scale.” Eddie posits, “Gut wrenching shame ... Murder.”    

“Yeah exactly, so no pressure.”     

Eddie makes a thoughtful sound in the hollow of his throat to try and humor his friend, but he suddenly can’t stop thinking about how none of this would be happening if Gareth had just kept his big mouth shut. This is his fault, Eddie is taking a chance at something for the first time in his life, putting himself out there knowing full well that he is probably going to get seriously hurt, and it’s all Gareth’s fault.    

“Listen Gareth.” He starts, “I just want you to know, truly and sincerely from the bottom of my heart, you’re an asshole.”    

He snorts.     

“I know.”    

An hour after Eddie hangs up and drags himself off to bed, Wayne gets home. Eddie lies there, wide awake and staring up at his ceiling, listening to the heavy thumping of his uncle’s footsteps moving through the trailer – into the kitchenette where the whine and thump of the fridge being opened and shut again reveals the lack of food in the house, then down the hall and into the bathroom where there is the hiss of the shower turning on, and a sharp expletive muttered under Wayne’s breath as he discovers that Eddie went and used up all the hot water, trying to force himself back into the shape of something vaguely human.  

Finally, the thump thump thumping footsteps recede down the hall, followed soon by the gentle murmuring of the television being flicked on as Wayne cuts his losses and settles in. Eddie lies awake, knotting his fingers together as he worries about what he’s promised to do in only a few hours time.    

He tries to tell himself he doesn’t have to worry about that right now, because that’s tomorrow’s problem, for now, he’s got all the time in the world, but somehow, he just can’t seem to make it stick. 

Then the rain starts.  

It persists all throughout what is left of the night, thundering down into the tin roofing of the trailer and kicking up the right kind of racket to quickly lull Eddie into a deep and dreamless sleep – it’s what seems like mere moments before Wayne is knocking on his bedroom door, startling him awake and rousing him with the promise of fresh coffee brewing on the stovetop.  

Just like that, it is today, and there begins Eddie’s ticking clock, counting down to the impending doom that awaits him.   

It rains all day with absolutely no sign of stopping and it feels appropriate for the dour mood a night spent lying awake caught in the throes of anxiety has twisted him into – the world mirroring his frame of mind.  

When the time finally comes, and the noon bell rings dismissing the student body for lunch, Eddie nearly drops his lunch pail twice from the titanic outpouring of sweat that has decided to pool in his palms. His heart jumps violently between his throat and his stomach as he makes his way down the hall, dragging his feet like they’ve been set in concrete as he takes the long march toward the cafeteria, staring at the oh-so-tantalizing exit sign, shining above his head like a sickly green beacon.      

He could just leave, he realizes. Feign some kind of sudden onset illness and run for the hills, abandon this insane endeavor, and — and …and and and?      

And what?      

Go home and hide under his covers, condemn himself to a lifetime of regret, jerking off and moping around all because he’s too scared to talk to a pretty girl?      

No way in hell. He’d never live it down.        

Suddenly, a strong hand comes down in a hard clap against his back, ringing out and startling Eddie bad enough to send him leaping damn near out of his skin.      

Visions of authority figures pass through his mind at the speed of light, teachers, principals, cops, Chief Hopper himself, all come to cart him away for some perceived misdemeanor Eddie doesn’t recall committing— perfect, hallelujah.      

“You ready, Man?”      

It’s only Gareth – fucker, this is only happening because of him and his big stupid mouth – and Eddie has to remind himself that he’s the one who has spent the last several months needling him for information about you.      

This is nobody’s fault but his own.     

Still, he resists the urge to double over and brace his hands on his knees.      

“I think I’m gonna be sick.” he huffs.     

Gareth grips him tightly by the shoulder and gives him a good-natured shake.      “That’s the spirit,” He says, then steers Eddie hard to the right down the hall toward the cafeteria “Let’s go.”       

The lunchroom is exceedingly crowded, the day’s dreary weather simultaneously mirroring Eddie’s mood and driving the school’s population to pack themselves indoors in lieu of the typically coveted outdoor seating.      

Eddie takes this as a good sign because maybe it means all your nasty little friends will have descended like flies and he won’t have to submit himself to the slow and terrible death of public humiliation – strange how despite the armor he has amassed over the years, something as simple as talking to someone he’s not meant to interact with drives him to the edge of panic.       

He knows the rules, and he knows how to follow them to avoid mutilation.     

The summer is over, and Stacey’s friends are back…      

The crowd parts as best they can when Eddie appears, like they always do, though it’s a little more difficult for everyone to get out of his way, crammed shoulder to shoulder the way they are.     

In an instant he is granted a clear path to the usual lunch table, where Jeff is already seated, grinning stupidly and gesturing less than discreetly toward your table where – Christ, there you are, sitting alone and quietly pouring over a book.      

Great, so that means he knows about what he and Gareth talked about on the phone last night – this morning – whatever.   

Eddie swallows hard and locks his knees to try and keep them from wobbling as he assesses the situation. He’d given himself one condition in talking to you – that he’d only do it if you weren’t socked in with your shitty friends, and lo and behold there you are… alone.   

Why the fuck are you alone when the cafeteria is standing room only? Without even turning his head, he can clock half a dozen people meandering around looking for seats, so why hasn’t anyone asked to join you?      

Because you’re untouchable, that’s why. In the best, most terrifying possible way.   

You need a personal invitation to join that table, one that is not so readily extended to just anyone and will most certainly never be done for Eddie.      

And he’s just supposed to waltz over to you like he owns the place? The thought makes his legs turn to jelly. 

“Muster thy courage, good sir, and proceed!” Gareth says, giving Eddie a neighborly shove. 

He staggers forward and, thankfully, manages to stay on his feet – the last thing he needs is to go sprawling onto his belly in front of God and everyone he knows. There would be no recovering from that humiliation, and he’s almost sorry it didn’t happen, because it would be the perfect excuse to abandon this endeavor entirely. 

Enough of that, he tells himself, Just cowboy up and get this over with.  

Eddie grits his teeth as he takes a step, and then another, feeling the waters of his courage lap at his ankles like the surf – then, a high, braying laughter jumps up above the monotonous drone of all of his classmates talking at once, and Eddie’s stomach bottoms out. There goes his courage, drawing back with the tide, abandoning him.   

Without a second thought, he walks right past your table and straight for his, planting himself firmly into the seat across from Jeff so that his back is to you.  

The silence that lingers over the table is stupefying and heavy, particularly with the way Jeff is gawping at him.      

“What are you doing?” He starts, followed very quickly by Gareth’s long-suffering sigh.    

“Eddie, come on–” He starts, but he doesn’t let him finish.      

“Shut up shut up shut up – just let me think!” He hisses before forcing himself to take a deep, steadying breath.  

Eddie holds it in his lungs until it burns and then breathes out slowly, noisily.  

It's all his friends can do but stand there, staring helplessly, like he’s completely lost his mind. 

Maybe he has, because here he is, actually doing this.  

“Okay – so she’s alone…” Eddie begins.    

Gareth cuts him off.      

“Not anymore, Tina just sat down.” He says sheepishly.      

The name sends a bolt of fear lancing through his midsection. 

“Tina who–?”     

Eddie just about nearly breaks his neck whipping around to see the dark-haired girl who took it upon herself to arrive in the seven seconds it’s been since he took his eyes off of you — Tina Burton.   

Of course. Of all the people in this goddamn town, Carol, Steve Harrington, even his own goddamn father would have been preferrable to Tina fucking Burton, who stripped his walls down so completely that she only knows what his fucking dick looks like – tastes like, even… Jesus Christ almighty.   

Fuck his stupid fucking life.   

Eddie watches you fold your book closed and carefully tuck it into your bag, offering the girl a weak smile that fades the minute she looks away. He lingers too long, and after a moment, like you could feel him staring at you, your eyes flick up and Eddie jerks back around to face his friends, hands clenched into stressed fists, face burning with anticipation.      

“What are you gonna do?” Jeff asks.     

Eddie shakes his head and wishes people would stop asking him that.     

“I don’t know…” He says, “I need… I just – I need a second to think.”    

Easier said than done with the din of the lunchroom pressing in on him, much louder than it typically ever is. He feels like he’s turning to vapor again, first his fingers and his hands, then his wrists and forearms, all dissipating and wafting up toward the ceiling. Eddie rubs his hands together to try and keep himself solid with a little bit of friction, and he pictures his window of opportunity, swiftly slamming shut.    

He grits his teeth and considers his options here. 

He would very much rather avoid public humiliation if he can manage it, but he doesn’t want to spend his life regretting you, wishing he’d been brave enough, wishing he’d followed you out of the lunchroom, wishing he just fucking talked to you.    

Move or die, something inside of him stresses, and the next thing Eddie knows, he’s got his hands braced on the table and he’s pushing up on creaky, wobbly legs.   

“You got this man.” Gareth says in a way that he imagines is meant to be reassuring, the words settle heavily, one by one in the pit of his stomach as he turns.     

Another deep breath, and then another… one more for good measure, and then Eddie crosses the lunchroom on stiff, stilted legs, fighting the urge to wipe his sweaty, trembling palms down the front of his jeans  

He can see you sitting there, enduring whatever it is Tina is saying to you, but her lips are moving too quickly to make out the words. In no time at all, the need to lipread is quickly discarded as Eddie closes the distance between your tables enough to suddenly hear your conversation.    

“I heard a rumor,” Tina Burton is telling you, her voice lilting in a malicious singsong.  

Uh oh.  

“I’m so sure you did.” You mutter, rolling your eyes and very pointedly not looking at her.   

Your feigned disinterest does nothing to deter the other girl.   

“It’s a good one,” She hums, “Carol told me all about it.”  

You and everyone else, apparently. Eddie thinks, watching you closely for any sign of clairvoyant warning of his approach. He’s nearly there now, only a matter of moments before he bridges the gap and really has to commit to this.  

Tina’s taunting is finally enough to grab your attention. Your head snaps up and your eyes go wide as you regard her with a suspicious look that leaves Eddie feeling like he’s intruding on this moment, that he should turn right back around and go back to his seat.  

“What did she tell you?” You demand, and then suddenly Eddie’s out of time, and he’s standing right there, watching your face twist up into a mask of horror as Tina elaborates.      

“She says you’ve got yourself a little crush–”  

“Hi,” Eddie says and immediately feels himself break into a sweat when Tina’s eyes go bright, and she shows him her teeth in a wicked grin.  

“Speak of the Devil!” She gasps.   

Eddie suppresses a flinch, guts seizing and twisting themselves into a Gordian knot to suddenly be under the bright light of your attention when your head snaps over to him.  

He stares at you, mind suddenly and horrifically blank, and watches helplessly as you stare back at him, wide eyed and mouth falling open in what is perhaps the most appropriate response he could think of.   

That’s more or less how everyone reacts when he approaches them unprompted – he told Gareth you didn’t want him coming up to you like this.  

This is the worst idea he’s ever had in his life.  

He’s wrestling with that urge to bolt again, excuse himself and go back to where he belongs, but Eddie locks his knees and reminds himself that this is where he belongs right now.   

You gave him permission.  

She wants you to talk to her.     

Somehow, with every passing second, that seems a little less true, because you’re just staring at each other, wide eyed and trembling as you both wait for the other to speak.  

Personally, Eddie thinks it should be you, considering you’re the one who apparently wanted to talk to him so bad, but then again, he’s the one who just rocked up to your table and interrupted your conversation, so it probably should be him.  

Some wildly stubborn part of him is refusing to break, however, because he’s done his part. He’s here, isn’t he? You sent for him, and he answered the call, so now it’s your turn to meet him out on this limb. Only you don’t seem to have gotten that memo, so the silence endures.  

It’s incredibly awkward, and after an agonizing moment, even Tina begins to feel it.  

She furrows her brow and gives you an incredulous look when you continue to fail to respond to Eddie’s greeting. She clears her throat, trying to prompt you, and when you just keep sitting there staring back at him, she endeavors to kick start you back into working action – literally kicking you under the table.  

You flinch and the spell is broken in a rush of rapid blinking and a strangled sound ekeing up out of your throat as you endeavor to clear it.  

“Oh – hi!” You stammer, an octave higher than your typical cadence, “Hi!... Hi, E-Eddie… hi. Hi, Eddie.” 

Somehow, it’s worse than the stunned silence, and he feels his stomach bottoming out.    

This is going great, no, really. He’s so glad he did this.  

Tina snorts, and the sound makes the two of you jump in tandem. 

“You’re doing great,” She drawls when you look at her, chin propped up on her hand, batting her eyes at you with an unimpressed, half-lidded gaze.  

Eddie feels his guts seize on your behalf, especially when your face flushes with a deep shade of color, and there he goes turning himself into a shield for you again.   

“Hey,” He bites, before quickly rethinking his tone and beginning again, “...would you mind…? Can-can you give us a minute, Tina?”   

Eddie hates the way her name feels in his mouth, and more than that, he hates the look she gives him to hear him say it.  

Her brows come down over her eyes and her lips twist up maliciously. She can see right through him, and how mortifying a thing it is to be so readily perceived by someone like her.   

“Why?” She asks, stretching the word in a teasing lilt that makes Eddie’s insides go tight.   

The subtext behind the question is so unbearably clear it makes him feel like he could be sick right there on the floor all over his reeboks – why, she asks, when what she really means is, what do you want with her? An accusation, more than a question.  

Eddie can practically feel the color creeping up his neck as he is violently assaulted by memories of Tina’s hair, sticky with product, gripped between his trembling fingers – that haunting sound she made when his hips jerked involuntarily forward and he hit the back of her throat, and even worse, the sound he’d made when she choked and the muscles of her throat constricted on him, ripping him right over the edge before he’d even begun.  

He’s never going to get over the humiliation of that moment, no matter how long he lives.   

Why, God, why did it have to be her?   

Eddie grits his teeth, swallowing that same strangled sound he’d made that terrible day, suddenly lurking on the back of his tongue, and does his best to stay calm, collected – cordial.   

“Just give us a minute, okay?” He pleads, hating himself for it.   

She gives him a hard, condescending look.   

“Oh, Honey,” She stresses, brows tweaking up in faux concern as she makes a point to look at you, then back at him, “Don’t worry. That’s all the time you’re gonna need, anyway.”       

It punches his lungs flat in his chest and Eddie feels something cold land heavily in the pit of his stomach.   

It’s about as much as he could have expected from her – Tina’s always got to have the last word, but to her credit, she braces her hands on the table and stands, giving you one last parting look and winking before she shoulders her bag and saunters off.     

No doubt to go and report back to the rest of the Hawkins Elite, which means he’s suddenly on a ticking clock, and it’s almost enough to make Eddie bolt from there, but he’s once again frozen to the spot.     

Cautiously, Eddie glances back over his shoulder to where his friends sit, watching with rapt attention. They offer enthusiastic thumbs up when they see him looking, and he cringes.    

Eddie clears his throat and you whip back around, still looking just as stunned as you had a moment before.  

“S-so… uh,” He begins, scratching at the back of his neck and realizing much too late that he has absolutely no idea what he plans to say to you – why the fuck didn’t he practice something in all the time he’s spend worrying about this moment? 

Christ on a goddamn bike. 

“Do you… I mean – why don’t you sit down?” You ask, and gesture quickly to the seat across from you.  

Eddie’s heart jumps up into his throat. Suddenly, his palms are sweating, and he feels his knees wobble beneath him.    

Relax relax relax. He tells himself, You’re allowed to do this, you’re right where you’re supposed to be.    

“Yeah, okay,” Eddie says slowly, sliding carefully into the seat across from you.  

Once he’s settled, he braces his hands on his knees before second guessing the motion and – stupidly – extends his hand to you.  

“Hi,” He says again, like a goddamn broken record.  

He can’t help it, it’s the only word that keeps surfacing when he tries to think of something to say to you. 

You stare back at him, blinking as the word lingers between you, and Eddie kicks himself for sounding so goddamn stupid.  

“Hi,” You say slowly, the gentlest hint of a smirk quirking the corners of your lips as you reach across and take his hand, and then, “You already said that.”   

Oh, that’s fantastic. Keep going, Moron, let’s see what else you’ve got in that big empty head of yours.  

“Yeah… yeah, I did. Sorry.”  

You shake your head.  

“You don’t have to be sorry,” You insist kindly, and it throws him for a loop.  

He doesn’t? That’s … odd… because sorry has always been the safest thing to be with people.  

Keep your head down and apologize, no matter what, that’s more or less become Eddie’s motto. It’s how he’s survived so long in a town that hates him on principle, but he supposes this is just another instance of you giving him some kind of permission he’s never had before: he’s allowed to come and talk to you, and he doesn’t have to be sorry for doing so.  

The thought alone is enough to leave him feeling lightheaded in the strangest way.  

“Oh. Right. Okay.” He swallows hard as you shake hands, and Eddie quickly releases you, feeling like his skin is burning from where you touched him.     

He curls his fingers into a fist, trying to trap the sensation there in his palm.     

“So,” You begin, tucking your hands neatly together in front of you on the table and pulling your shoulders up to your ears in a painfully endearing way, “What’s up?” 

“Uh… Gareth.” Eddie says quickly, lamely. 

Your eyes go momentarily bright at the mention of his name, and Eddie tries not to succumb to the misplaced sick feeling it causes in the pit of his stomach. 

He suddenly can’t stop picturing the two of you sitting in Mr. Kapz’s class, with your heads bowed together conspiratorially, whispering back and forth to one another.  

Eddie tells himself he’s not jealous, and he’s not going to let the feeling ruin this, but his throat is going dry, and his mind is going even more blank than it already was. 

“Gareth? What about him.” 

“He, uh, he said you guys were talking and … well actually, what he said was that you said – n-not that he’s telling me about the stuff that you guys talk about in class or anything –” 

You smile as he continues to ramble, nose scrunching up in a way that is entirely too endearing and makes Eddie feel fuzzy and much too warm for all his layers of denim and leather.  

“What did Gareth say?” You ask gently, clearly trying to help him get to his point.  

“He said… well he said that I should come over and say hi. So…” Don’t say it, don’t you dare say it again, “Hi, I guess.” 

Fucking moron. 

You giggle.  

“Hi.”  

It’s like that stiff breeze he’s been waiting on, only miraculously it doesn’t send him scattering to the furthest corners of the Earth. Strangely, it’s almost grounding and Eddie can suddenly feel his courage come rushing back, like a crashing wave of the tide finally returning to shore.  

He smiles, glances down at his hands, clasped together, and knocks his knuckles against the table.  

“He also said I should ask you what a place like this is doing in a girl like you, but that’s – fuck, no! Wait a second, that’s not how that goes.” 

As if the giggling wasn’t bad enough, his titanic fuck up causes you to laugh out loud, and it just about blows his goddamn brains out – Jesus fuck.  

It’s the greatest thing Eddie’s ever heard in his life. Fuck Sabbath and Dio and Metallica and all that noise, his new favorite song is the musical lilt of your laughter.  

It makes his heart seize and throb and suddenly he can feel himself smiling so much wider than before, foolishly, in the goofy way where he knows that goddamn dimple of his must be showing. Eddie’s only cognizant enough to be half embarrassed about that, mostly because he can’t decide if he thinks you’re laughing at him – somehow, he doesn’t think that’s the case.    

Your laughter is the furthest thing from malicious he’s ever heard, and he feels himself go hot, then cold as goosebumps break out across the expanse of his body.    

You’re so pretty, he can hardly stand it, and if he doesn’t hear you laugh again, like, immediately, he’s going to drop dead.     

Eddie breathes out an anxious chuckle to match yours and shakes his head, relishing in the way it causes his hair to fall forward and curtain his blushing features.    

It’s quite a thing to be under the force of your undivided attention – he imagines this is what it must feel like for an ant to wander under a magnifying glass.     

“So, Gareth told me a little something too…” You say once your giggling has finally subsided. 

Eddie’s heart jumps up into his throat and he can’t help but get caught on the way you’re looking at him, so patiently with your arms crossed over the table in front of you. He also can’t help but notice the way it pushes your tits up in that pretty little cardigan you’re wearing, but that’s neither here nor there, despite the way it makes his throat feel like it’s going to close up.  

When he doesn’t answer, you tilt your head forward coquettishly and raise your brows at him. 

“...about my book?” You prompt. 

Oh.  

Eddie can’t decide if he’s relieved about that or not, considering for a moment of blinding terror he was so sure you were about to ask him to confess his feelings for you, but of course that’s not what you would mean. Giving you your book back was the whole point of this, wasn’t it? 

“Right…” Eddie says quickly, shaking his head to try and dislodge any lingering haze of panic, “Yeah, of course. I, uh, I have your book.”     

You light up like a kid on Christmas and clap your hands together theatrically. .    

“You do?” You gasp, feigning amazement. It’s entirely too cute. 

“Yeah, it’s in my locker.” 

“Oh.”   

Oh? What does that mean, oh? Was he supposed to bring it with him? Obviously, based on the way your brow is creasing with disappointment.  

And how he hates to disappoint you, he’s suddenly desperate to rectify his mistake, slap a band aid over the suddenly obvious pitfall he’s blundered into. 

“I mean. It’s not a problem,” Eddie says quickly, pushing up from the table, “I can go get it for you – it’ll take like two seconds if you wanna just sit tight…?”  

You make a dissenting sound in the hollow of your throat that he is entirely helpless to comprehend until you begin scooping your things into your bag, like you’ve suddenly remembered that you have to be somewhere.   

“Actually,” You start, shaking your head, “Now that I think about it, Tina will be back with reinforcements any minute now, so it’s probably better if I go with you.” 

“...wait, really? You wanna go with me?” Eddie stammers, hoping you don’t see him flinch as you stand to meet him and come a little closer into his space than he was rightly prepared for.  

“Yeah, sure.” You say, carefully tucking your chair in and shouldering your bag. “If that’s okay with you?”   

“It’s okay.” Eddie says immediately and perhaps a touch too loud, nodding emphatically, “Yeah, it’s totally okay.”  

You smile, all teeth, eyes scrunching tight, and Eddie’s stomach seizes.  

“Great.” You hum, “Lead the way.”      

It takes Eddie three tries to get his locker open, and when he does, he just about whips himself in the face with the door. He’s never been the type of person concerned about the state of the individual spaces that belong to him. His bedroom, his van, they’re both black holes of mess that he’s never been readily concerned about, and least of all the state of his locker with all its crumpled papers and scribbled graffiti, but suddenly with you standing there, peering into the dark little cubby, he’s kicking himself for not keeping it cleaner or more pleasing to the eye in an aesthetic sort of way.   

He tries to tell himself it’s not that bad, and then you see it.  

“Oh!” You say suddenly, scrunching your nose as you peer at the picture Eddie remembers too late that he has taped to the inside of his locker door – the pinup he’d torn out of a magazine. The model lays stretched over a shag rug with her legs pulled up and her arms splayed over her head, arching her back to push her big fake tits out.   

Eddie feels an electric shock of adrenaline rip through his body as he slaps his hand over the magazine spread with a hard metallic bang. How typical would it be to have this going so well, only to scare you off with the goddamn porn he’s got plastered to the inside of his locker? What the hell is the matter with him? 

Only you’re not scandalized, you’re grinning, eyes bright and teasing.   

“Who is she?” You ask.      

“Nobody.” He chokes, absolutely mortified as he watches you bite your lip.  

“It said January Embers.”  

Eddie opens his mouth to make some sort of an excuse – it's just a joke, oh, where did that come from? Those guys got me again, ha-ha, but somehow he can’t muster the ability to cover for himself, not under the heat of your gaze.  

“Pretend you didn’t see that.” he says, brows pulling down over his eyes. 

You give him a wry look, like you’re trying to decide whether or not to play along before tucking your hands behind your back and pulling your shoulders up to your ears in mock innocence.  

“See what?”  

Oh, good girl.     

The thought is startling and makes Eddie’s face burn more than being caught with a nudie photo taped to the inside of his locker. He clears his throat and keeps his hand pressed firmly to the glossy page as he retrieves your tattered paperback with the other before slamming the door shut tight again, once again hiding his shame.     

“Oh, well, thank you very much, Sir.” You chirp when he passes it to you and Eddie feels the tips of his ears go hot and his jeans get a little tighter.    

Stop it, stop it! Get a hold of yourself, Munson.  

He watches as you turn the book over in your hands with a gentle kind of reverence, not inspecting it, he thinks so much as reacquainting yourself with a treasured thing. It makes his insides go warm and fuzzy, especially with the way your eyes flit up and you catch him staring at you.   

“Gareth said you found it in the parking lot?”  

It’s strange to hear his name spoken, your mutual point of contact, the only reason any of this is happening right now. It stirs something in his chest, not that same jealousy, so much as a selfish aversion to bringing him into this moment.  

This is Eddie’s moment with you, and Gareth has no business intruding in on it, despite all the work he’d done to manufacture it.  

“Yeah…” Eddie says thickly, “I’ve been meaning to give it back to you, but…”   

But I’ve been too scared to come talk to you.  

“Never found the right time?”  

“Exactly.”   

You hum thoughtfully and nod, and Eddie is strangely pleased to have satisfied you with the answer.     

He watches you hug the tattered book to your chest, before leveling him with a suspicious look, peering at him through your lashes in stark contrast to the wry quirk of your lips.   

“So, did you read it?”   

“No,” Eddie lies, suddenly unable to stop thinking about the way he’d spent a long evening laying on his bed flipping through its pages, pouring over all your scribbled little annotations, trying so, so hard to look through the text and into your mind, “Absolutely not.”    Your brows come down over your eyes like you don’t believe him, but your feigned annoyance is betrayed by the shy smile pulling at the corner of your lips. Eddie watches your gaze track sideways, and he instantly feels lesser not to have your eyes upon him, but then your features soften, and you get a far away, wistful look on your face that punches his lungs flat.     

“Hey,” you say softly, “The rain’s stopped…”    

Eddie turns to follow your gaze down the hall to the doors he hadn’t noticed.   

They’re standing open, revealing the cold light filtering down from the break in the clouds and causing the pavement to glisten.   

He thinks back to what you said, about Tina and reinforcements and how it was better that you go with him… you’re better off with him… better off than you would be with your stupid jock boyfriend and the vicious cycle of boys and girls.     

Suddenly, Eddie feels a little braver than is perhaps wise, fueled by the promise of a future he’d never once considered. A chance he was never meant to have.   

Eddie knows he’s going out much further on this limb than is rightly safe, but this is already going so much better than he ever could have hoped, and the high of his winning streak makes him foolish.       

“D’you…? I mean, I wanna show you something… if you’ve got time… that is.” he says, bashfully.      

He tries not to get caught on the subtle way your eyes light up before you check your watch, then you shrug your shoulders and glance back up at him through your lashes in a way that makes him feel sick in the sweetest way.     

“We’ve got twenty minutes before the bell rings,” You hum, “Is it gonna take longer than that?”   

Eddie shakes his head.      

“Have you ever been to the picnic table out in the woods?”  

He second guesses the question the moment it leaves his lips.  

Oh, God, why did he ask you that?  

Eddie holds his breath and waits for you to wrinkle your brow and ask the obvious question – you mean where you deal drugs to all the jocks and cheerleaders? You don’t though, you bite your lip and shake your head, and he blesses you for it, feeling the corners of his mouth twisting up as he smiles at you and grows suddenly shy.    

Eddie drops his gaze to his shoes and gives a lopsided shrug.     

“It’s – uh – it’s real pretty out there, especially after it rains.”   

You’re grinning when he dares to steal a glance up at you, a wide stretch of your lips with a hint of your pearly teeth, and you nod.     

“Show me.”      

He’d thought it was enough simply to extend this interaction as far out to his locker, but now, headed out those doors like they were the threshold to everything he never dared to hope for, Eddie’s won the lottery.   

He’s the luckiest man alive, and he’s painfully aware of the sound of your footsteps, crunching in the wet leaves behind him as you follow him out across campus, headed into the woods. He wonders what people would think if they could see you, what kind of rumors that would kick up in the toxic swirling miasma of high school politics. Eddie imagines all his classmates watching you go with their faces pressed flat against the windows, eyes bugging out on stalks.  

Quick! Somebody save that poor girl before he leads her into the underworld! But it took no coaxing at all for you to follow him out here. You came on your own volition, one willing step after the other, down into the darkened hollow with him.   

It’s not all that dark, actually. As the sun breaks free of the clouds, it streams through the canopy to leave dappled little puddles of silvery light embedded across the forest floor, and you’re sliding onto the bench opposite Eddie with no prompting at all.       

For a few moments of nagging terror, you find yourselves sitting there in another one of those awkward silences, avoiding each other’s gazes and looking around like you’ve only just realized that you’re alone out here, really alone, and you have nothing to talk about.  

It’s briefly terrifying, until you thankfully come to the rescue.  

“You know…” you start, laying your palms flat against the splintered wood tabletop, “This isn’t the first time we’ve… hung out.”    

He levels you with an incredulous look.    

“It’s not?”     

Of course it’s not, but that can’t possibly be what you mean, despite the way you shake your head and wait for him to meet you down the path of your thinking.       

“You don’t remember?”     

Of course he does, but he wants to hear you say it, so he plays dumb and shakes his head.     

Your eyes flit down to your hands and you hum thoughtfully in the hollow of your throat.    

“That’s okay,” you assure him with a lopsided shrug, “It was a while ago. I probably wouldn’t remember me either.”    

It physically pains him, forcing himself to sit there and resist the urge to tell you otherwise. Even if he hadn’t spent the last year caught in the clutches of that night, it would be hard not to remember someone when you’ve lived in the same place with the same people your whole life, it’s only just that you’ve been largely invisible to him until very recently.  

And not even for the obvious reasons like you came back to school after having suddenly developed massive tits over the summer, or got your braces off or something stupid like that – as far as Eddie can tell, you’re just the same as you’ve always been – same hair,  same body, same clothes – you’ve only just miraculously happened to stray into his orbit for the first time, and he’s so goddamn pleased you did.     

“Tina’s party.” You prompt, “Last October–” 

“I remember.” He says, perhaps a little too quickly, and wonders just how much of it you remember.    

That night, the one that haunts his every waking moment – the one that arguably ruined his life, if he was speaking bluntly, getting him so fucked up over you.  

You had no business being at a party like that.  

Eddie knew you’d never smoked from the second someone suggested they pass the blunt around. Probably never even been offered anything like that, judging by the way your eyes bugged out of your skull when the contraband came out. He couldn’t help but feel sorry for you, looking so small and scared standing next to him, but try as he might, Eddie couldn’t save you from the crushing pressure of your peers. One thing almost no one tells you about smoking weed is that it’s worse when you cough – that’s the sort of thing you have to discover for yourself, taking a hit and coughing and choking and spluttering and somehow ending up so much higher than everyone around you, which is exactly what happened to you.  

He found you slumped over against the wall a little while after the game ended, barely conscious and subsequently abandoned by your shit-ass friends.  

Ever the soft-hearted moron he is, he endeavored to take responsibility for you, because he didn’t need that kind of heat if something happened to you while under the influence of something he was pedaling, and you oh so desperately needed his pity.     

So, he made you drink water, and then he dragged you outside for a few deep breaths of fresh air.  

At first, all he was trying to do was keep you upright, holding you pressed against his body like that, but then your brain started working again and you came unglued. You pressed your face into the front of his shirt and wailed about how nobody likes you and he commiserated with an awkward pat to your back that you melted beneath. Eddie remembers the smell of your shampoo when you snuggled up against him, and being so starved for basic human contact, he’d only gone and put his nose in the crown of your head before turning his cheek to rest heavily on you. He held you, and you held him right back, and just like that Eddie felt something healing inside of him, something he didn’t realize was broken until it was put back together.    

You called him nice and nuzzled up against him — he called you Sweet Girl and petted your hair back from your face, and he felt the gentle brush of your lips on the taught columns of his throat when you told him you liked that.     

There he sat, crouched between the trash cans on the side of Tina Burton’s garage, still so fresh off of that humiliating afternoon with her, cuddling with some overly-stoned girl who, up to this very moment, had only lived in Eddie’s fantasies, dredged up to torture him with the memories of someone clinging to him so sweetly and saying such nice things.    

“You were so kind to me,” You say softly, bringing Eddie back to the moment, the here and now where you are a creature of flesh and blood and not something out of his imagination, “… I never got the chance to thank you for, you know… looking after me. Being so nice.” You shrug your shoulders in a way that is almost shy and Eddie feels his heart begin to swell painfully in his chest. “I mean, it’s more than I can say for my friends…”     

And if that isn’t the truest thing anyone has ever said.  

He remembers how they came stalking around the corner and found him there watching over you, and how Carol said something nasty about date-rape that scared the shit out of him.   

Eddie skipped school the entire week following that party in the gut-wrenching fear of that rumor taking root, but thankfully, after he bolted, someone drove the Burton’s Cadillac through the fence and into their pool, and all was mercifully forgotten, including all traces of the moment you’d shared. 

But you’d called him nice, and you’d done it again just now….     

Sweet Girl, he thinks.     

Eddie’s throat is going tight, his palms are going sweaty… he’d throw himself into traffic for you…     

Oh no…     

“Hey… it’s, uh — it was-it was my pleasure.”     

He tries so hard to remind himself that he doesn’t know you — that he didn’t know Stacey Keats and he got his heart broken for it.     

This is not his beautiful house, this is not his beautiful wife, and this most certainly is not his American Dream.  

He doesn’t love you, and he most certainly isn’t suddenly trying to picture what you look like first thing in the morning with a cup of coffee or last thing at night, face scrunched up in a yawn as you say goodnight. He’s not thinking about the way he’d match his tie to your dress for Prom or homecoming or whatever dance he’s certainly not imagining taking you to, he’s not trying to remember the name of that wine Wayne told him he ought to order if he ever takes a girl out to a fancy place like Enzo’s, and he’s definitely, definitely not thinking about getting you out of that nice, soft cardigan of yours… popping the buttons slowly, one by one, teasing you within an inch of your life and holding you at bay while you do everything in your power to try and rub up against him, to steal yourself a little bit of pleasure where he’s oh so tenderly denying you… 

Patience, Sweet Girl, he’d tell you, curling a gentle hand around your throat and holding you there, All good things to those who wait… 

Yeah… Eddie’s definitely not thinking about that… 

He feels his tongue dart out to drag a sheen of moisture over his top lip, and his guts seize when — for the briefest moment — your eyes flick down to watch.     

Did he imagine that? Christ, is he already so far gone for you that he’s hallucinating the possibility of reciprocation?     

It would be so easy to kiss you right now, all he would have to do is lean across the table, or maybe come around to your side of the bench. The thought is intrusive and startling, but when Eddie doesn’t burst into flames for having such an untoward thought about someone like you, he lets himself wonder if you’d let him do it. Probably not, maybe you’re just playing nice, counting the seconds until he offers you weed at a discount or turns you loose so you can go scurrying back to your friends.    

But you’re still here, nothing’s stopping you if you want to leave, and you’re sitting there so pretty, just batting your lashes at him.     

“You’re not what I expected.” He says suddenly, before he even realizes the words were forming on his tongue.   

Your features twist up quizzically.    

“What do you mean?”    

Eddie fumbles for the words, gesturing vaguely as he does.    

“It’s just… you’re so approachable, and — and… nice?”    

You snort out an undainty sound of laughter and he can’t help but laugh right along with you, goofy deep throated giggles bubbling up from inside of him and twisting his face up in what he knows has got to be a big stupid grin. He can’t help it. Sitting there, grinning back at you, Eddie is suddenly convinced he’s in love.       

“Who says I’m not nice?” You ask, tilting forward in a way that Eddie is powerless to help but mirror.     

“Uh, nobody. Nobody says that, it’s just… I mean aren’t you supposed to be popular or something?”     

You scoff.  

“Ah— so, here’s the thing about that — Carol’s the popular one … you know Carol, right?”    

He feels the corner of his mouth twitch as he exercises every bit of willpower he possesses not to react. 

“Sure, I know Carol.” Eddie says slowly, “She’s… fine.”      

“It’s okay, you can say it.” You tell him.  

“She’s awful.”     

And then you go and flip everything he thinks he knows off of the table with one simple gesture, and you nod.  

“Yeah …she’s pretty much the worst.”    

He has absolutely no idea what to think after that, so Eddie makes the diplomatic decision to keep his mouth shut and only offers you a tight-lipped smile when your eyes flit up to regard him.  

Without question, there is understanding there, lying quietly between you – you didn’t ask him why he was inviting you out to the spot where he sells drugs to all your friends, and he doesn’t ask you why you hang out with them in the first place. Suddenly, you’re simpatico in the fact that you don’t understand each other, and neither of you care.   

“Anyway, she’s only popular because of who she hangs out with and I’m just the lucky fella who gets dragged along for the ride.” You say, “I don’t think people really notice if I’m even there half the time – they certainly don’t notice when I’m not.”  

Case and point, that rumor Tommy is touting about what you apparently did at a party you didn’t even attend, and suddenly, Eddie understands how all your shitty little friends could believe it.  

Well, he doesn’t understand, but he supposes it at least makes a little more sense, in a totally vapid, head-assed sort of way.  

“That’s … bizarre.” He says, “So you’re just out here hanging out with the cool kids on complete and total accident?”    

“Pretty much.” You hum, rolling your shoulders and heaving a wistful sigh, “...Anyway, what about you?”   

“What about me?”   

You bite your lip and the way you turn suddenly shy, averting your gaze down to your hands has Eddie’s stomach turning in knots. You like him, you like him, you like him… Eddie has to resist the urge to say it out loud, less a question than an accusation, a point of fact he has no business thrusting upon you.  

“You’re nice too.” You mumble, almost like you’re confirming what he’d just elected not to say to you.  

It leaves him feeling just a little bit winded, because, Christ, you’re gonna give him a big head if you keep talking so sweet like that… and you’re gonna give him a raging hard on if you keep looking at him like that, all shy, glancing up at him through your lashes.  

Maybe he should kiss you. 

Maybe he’s reading the signs wrong, maybe this is one of those lessons he never got around to learning, like that afternoon when Tina Burton put her hand on his thigh and gave him the same look when she suggested she pay for the weed “some other way” but try as he might, Eddie can’t get a sense of any hidden danger here, and he can suddenly hear Gareth posing that ominous question to him over the phone.  

What’s the worst that can happen? 

Then, in the distance, the bell rings bringing with it a bright burst of panic surging through his chest and sending stinging shocks all the way down to his fingers and toes. 

No, not yet, he silently pleads to no one in particular, Five more minutes... please... 

Eddie watches with a sick anxiety as you twist around to stare back through the hollow, back toward where you’d come from, where the school sits waiting for you, and he mourns the impending end of this moment — this perfect, perfect moment, everything he ever hoped it would be.    

More, because he hadn’t been stupid enough to dare to hope it would be this good. For one giddy moment, he briefly entertains the idea of inviting you back to the van, but he stops the thought in his tracks.    

 Invite you back to do what?     

Smoke?     

Fuck?     

Neither, honestly, all he wants is to talk to you some more, but there’s no way he can properly express that, not with his reputation being what it is.     

And even if he tried? What kind of a reaction is that going to get out of you, if you suddenly start to think this was all some convoluted ploy to get into your pants or something? Or worse, if he opens up to you and it turns out you’re just playing nice and very good at faking it.  

But that hasn’t been the case so far. He’d already pushed his luck much further past the breaking point asking you to come out here, and somehow, against all odds, you’re still sitting there.  

You could have bolted the second the bell rang, but you didn’t, and a bigger part of Eddie than he is ready to address is sure that’s got to mean something… that you actually want to be here with him.     

You’re going to be late going back if he keeps you any longer, and that same part of him wishes you wouldn’t go back, that you would stay and linger a little longer in this moment.  

Stay here with him, just for a little while. 

“Well… I should go,” You start, spreading your palms flat across the table, and he feels a sick wave of disappointment wash over him like a fever as he watches you stand, “Chemistry calls,”    

The statement is punctuated with your slow rise from the bench and a goofy, overexaggerated show of jerking your thumbs over your shoulder, just like the way he’d done back in the cafeteria but so much better on you.     

He really does think he might love you and it turns his tongue to a fat, useless thing sitting heavy in his mouth.     

“Do… d’you want me to pass any messages on to Gareth?” You ask suddenly.     

Yes, tell him I could kiss him. That he’s the greatest man to ever walk the face of this Earth, that he’s my goddamn hero.     

“When he asks how it went, tell the smug bastard to mind his own business.”     

You pull a face, features scrunching, brows knitting over your pretty eyes.     

“How it went?” You echo.     

Eddie dismisses the notion with a flippant wave.     

“You’ll know when you know.”    

You snort undaintily and roll your eyes.  

“Okay… I’ll see you later,” you hum, and this time, the promise is hopeful. 

“Sure.” He says, nodding. 

You reward him with another one of those bright smiles, all pearly teeth and crinkled eyes, and then you turn and start out back toward the light.  

Eddie watches you go, feeling his heart thumping solidly in his chest as you reach the end of the hollow and turn to leave him with one last parting glance, a shy wave, and then you’re gone.  

He misses you already. 

“You like me,” he says quietly to himself, testing the words on his lips and feeling a warm satisfaction flood his body when they come out sounding right.  

Eddie lingers a little longer after that, basking in the afterglow of everything that just happened, everything he’s spent so long wishing and hoping for, and wondering too late whether he ought to have followed you, or maybe even walked you to class. It’s probably best that he didn’t, he decides. The scandal of seeing you steal away into the woods together was probably shocking enough for anyone who cared to notice, he can’t imagine what seeing the pair of you walking back together would do.   

He turns his gaze down at the table, to where you’d been sitting only moments ago, and there he sees it.   

A tattered, heavily annotated copy of Dune, missing its front cover.   

Permission. Eddie thinks reverently as he snatches it up and folds it in against his chest.   

He supposes he’ll just have to give it back to you the next time he sees you, and the promise of an impending next time fills him with joy – he’s positively giddy with it, and practically skipping as he makes his way back out of the hollow.  

Christ, he’s such a loser, and he’s down bad for you. 

--

baby taglist: @thrutheburnout, @vintagehellfire,

[marmolady]

Grandchildren: Aurora

Summary: Endless Ending timeline. Middle-aged Taylor and Estela are entering a new phase of their life together, welcoming their grandchildren into the family. In four parts; this is PART FOUR.

Word Count: 4421

Tagging: @saivilo, @edgydepressedchoicesthot, @sceptilemasterr, ​@mauvecatfic @rhemenway888

Thanks for reading!

________________________________________

2061

Rosa smoothed out the gown with a hand. Her Mama Estela’s beautiful wedding gown, a gift from an old friend, Seraxa. Georgie’s wife, Taamina, had made the necessary alterations to accommodate seven months’ worth of baby bump-- something that Estela had insisted they try out rather than have Rosa write off her dream dress. Guilt remained over doing anything to change it at all when there were such precious memories attached….

“You look nervous. Are you nervous?” Luz, Rosa’s other best friend, had been by her side since early that morning.

Most of the Catalyst kids had gotten permission to bring their significant others in on the secrets of La Huerta… but Rosa hadn’t the need, Vaanti fiance and all. With her looking to spend as much time on the island as possible, Varyyn had suggested he consult with the elders to gain approval for her to share her world with Luz, who’d been close to both Rosa and Georgiana since their early school days. This was the result; Niala’rei was here, and Rosa would be wed with her two closest friends by her side.

“...I….” Of course, Rosa was nervous. The dress was, admittedly, a factor. A part of her felt it was too beautiful, the kind of gown a goddess would show up to a wedding in. Did she really have the confidence to pull off a dress like that? Her Mama ‘Stel had, twice. But that made Rosa feel like a mouse stepping into a warrior costume.

Somehow, though, Rosa didn’t look like the mouse she saw herself as; she looked proud and confident. Perhaps she held herself differently just with the knowledge that this was her heritage, that she belonged. Perhaps she held herself differently because of the baby… she’d always been more courageous for Leo’s presence, maybe this little one had helped her grow further.

This dress was both Vaanti and Montoya. There was no way she’d wear anything else as she made her vows to Homori.

She had to be the warrior queen. And her fight was with herself, because the greatest fear that lingered, the shadow that loomed menacingly over her, was her inability to speak the words she so needed to speak.

“Wo--oa--oah! I’m having some serious deja-vu right now-- talk about a blast from the past, doodlejumps!”

The appearance of Raj, all wide arms coming in for a bear hug made the skittish Rosa jump, but she recovered enough to take the embrace.

Rosa had hit it off with her larger-than-life Catalyst ‘uncle’ pretty much from the get-go-- even timid and fragile as she’d been back then. He had this magic quality… you couldn’t help but be at ease around him, and the young Rosa had gotten so much comfort from that warm and jovial presence. He’d made sure he had time in his busy schedule for her wedding, saying he wouldn’t miss it for the world.

She smiled shyly. “I had hoped it could fit,” she admitted. “After Livi wore Mama Taylor’s, I thought it would be nice to…. It’s like a family tradition now, isn’t it?”  

“Seems like it,” Raj said. “Gotta pull out the old Niala’rei gowns for a Montoya wedding. You know, when your moms made it official in San Trobida-- you know I basically ran that whole gig, right?-- Estela was pregnant too. We didn’t know it, though, early days. But still, maybe that’s a tradition too!”

“It might be now.”

“Well, it suits you.”

He joined the crowd bustling into the throne room, and Rosa was left alone with Luz. All those people who’d be watching… there was surely no way she could do this….

“You can do this,” Luz said warmly, supportive as ever. “Just… talk to Mori. Look at him, look at the big smile on his dorky face, and speak to him.”

Rosa had never not been able to talk to Homori. Her body trusted him, never felt the need to freeze up. Her childhood challenges with selective mutism had been more or less overcome, but every now and then, usually when she least wanted it to happen, all her words would get… stuck. She preferred writing. Her hand never failed her like her voice did.

She couldn’t screw up her wedding vows, though. There was much that needed to be said; how much it meant to her that she could pour her heart and soul out to Homori and know she was being heard, how he made her laugh more in just a day by his side than she would in weeks without him. How he was exactly the parent to Leo that she, growing up in care, would have longed for as a young child-- sweet, and tender, and encouraging, and loving without bounds. Rosa had to promise him a lifetime of love, given honestly and openly. She’d promise that she’d have his back as they took on the challenges of parenthood, of finding personal fulfilment side-by-side, and navigating the divide between their cultures. She’d share his dreams, cheer his successes as her own, knowing that her joys would be his in the very same way. She had to say all that, aloud, get the words in the right order, and… and….

Luz squeezed Rosa’s hand. “It sounds like they’re ready for you, babe.”

Placing a hand on her belly, Rosa took a deep breath. Breathing techniques had gotten her through some real panics in her time…. She could feel the movement of the baby, and it weirdly made her feel more capable. Yes, she was definitely holding herself stronger and prouder since this little kid came along. For her baby, and for Leo, and for her lovely Homori, she could do this. She could damn well say what she needed to say.

The hall was full. Couples getting married, friends and family there in love and support. Rosa had attended Niala’rei before; when Georgie had taken Faiyara’s hand. She’d imagined it then… having the guts to choose a life far removed from the one she’d grown up with. Stepping into that hall, she was proud. Her and Homori, they were going to make it.

Her breath rattling with nervous excitement, Rosa saw through the crowd that was her family, and her eyes met with Homori’s. Oh, Mori…. His eyes welled immediately, and his face was in his hands.

Rosa giggled as she reached him, and wrapped her fingers around his. They laughed together, tearfully jubilant to be there hand in hand, so close to ever after.

Maybe they’d both have trouble getting the words out after all. It didn’t even matter. They had one another, and they could take all the time they needed.

_________________________________

The front door was ajar, so Liv pushed it open and tentatively stuck her head in. “Hello, Rosa?”

“Auntie Liv!” came the bellow of the small child who charged smack into her legs. Leonel barely even blinked, but wrapped his arm around Liv’s-- probably soon to be bruised-- thighs.

“Oh, hey Leo,” Liv said, recovering quickly. She was used to being almost being bowled over by small children by this point. “I take it your mommy’s in?”

“I’m here!” Rosa said, bustling over. “Thanks for grabbing him-- Mo just went out to the workshop to grab the crib, and I’ve been trying to convince Leo to wait here with me.”

“No worries.” Liv placed down her bags, and scooped her nephew up in her arms. He was a cuddly kid, and she was enough of a novelty that her attention would distract him from getting under his dad’s feet. “I just wanted to drop by the few things I said about. I’ll send more as Bea grows out of things, obviously, but just little little clothes and sleep bags for now.”

She sat her younger sister down and brought her a cold refreshment-- and Leonel a pineapple juice in a sippy cup.

“You really didn’t have to,” Rosa said as she sipped gratefully. The heat was admittedly hard to handle this late in pregnancy, even with all the fans going.

“Yeah, well, I didn’t want to go back home to San Trobida without being totally sure you’re all right,” Liv admitted. “I know first-hand how hard it can be with a newborn, and you’re fresh off the back of a massive life change. I want… I want you to know that I’m here for you. Me and Jeimy. I know we’re swamped with our own kids, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have your back as well.”

Rosa nodded quietly, looking down into her glass. She didn’t want to put anyone out, she’d always struggled with that. Her early life she’d gotten through by making as few demands as possible, well, until she simply cracked. Asking for help was still something she had only found herself able to do with Homori, her moms, and very rarely, Luz or Georgie.

“Rosita, I want to be there for you,” Liv urged.

Rosa exhaled shakily, her breath making the surface of her colourful drink tremble. She placed it down, and looked to the side shyly.

“I am scared,” she said finally. “Not of being a mom again, because I love being a mom, it… feels like it’s what I’m meant to be doing. I’m scared of labour and the birth… you know my pain tolerance is laughable. I’m not… I’m not like you. I’m not tough.”

Liv scooched closer and took her sister’s hand. “I’d think you were batshit crazy if you weren’t crazy. Labour is off-the-charts intense. You’ll cry, and scream, and swear, and probably crap yourself. And it’ll be worth it.” She paused. “They do… have everything on hand to give you an epidural if you need one, right?”

Rosa nodded, wiping her eyes. It was a relief to share her fears with someone other than Homori. What had Mama Taylor always told her?-- ‘you’re allowed to take up space’. The space she took up with her anxiety did not need to be apologised for. Or so she knew in theory.

“Y-yeah. I wanted to try without, it’s not really a thing women here use much.”

“Well, good on you. Just… don’t let other people’s expectations sway you one way or another. You know your body and what you need, and you don’t have to prove anything to anyone.”

Rosa could feel herself blushing.

“Mommy!” Leonel said, “Can I show Auntie Liv my room? I have dinosaurs on my bed, she’ll pro’lly like the dinosaurs.”

“Sure, I like dinosaurs,” Liv said. “Shall we go for this tour?”

Grateful to have the glare of attention off herself, Rosa happily let Leo do his thing. He had his auntie by the hand, and enthusiastically showed her round. So, Rosa took the opportunity to put her head through the door and check in on Homori with the new crib.

“There!” he said, “we’re ready as we’ll ever be!”

Rosa could’ve danced at the sight of that crib, the ornamental fox designs at the head hand-carved by the daddy-to-be. It was just gorgeous, and its placement by the bed signalled that it would not be long until the new family member would be there with them. God, the wait was feeling like an eternity. Naturally, she ran to Homori and kissed him.

A little while later, Rosa and Liv were back in the bedroom, sorting tiny baby clothes into neat piles.

 “I’m so glad you’ve got Georgie with you on this when the time comes,” Liv was saying. “She knows her stuff.”

“She really does,” Rosa said, and she smiled. How lucky was she that her best friend happened to be a midwife? She couldn’t be in safer hands. “Sometimes I think she’s almost as excited about baby coming as we are.

Liv had to laugh. “It’s a good thing she’s going to have her own to keep her busy soon enough, or I reckon you’d have to prise her off the baby with a winch or something.”

Rosa chuckled, but then turned away. She had the best people in her corner, a far cry from what she’d come from. She couldn’t forget that feeling though, the aloneness, and it made letting go difficult. Liv would understand.

“I….”

The words caught.

“No rush, Rosi. You can take your time.”

“I have… Georgie. Helping. But she’ll have… she’ll have her own baby. I have Homori, and he’s everything.”

“Mo is an absolute freaking superstar,” Liv concurred. “Tio Diego would do anything for you as well, you know that, right? Varyyn too.”

Rosa looked at her hands, at the teeny, tiny babygro in them. Teeny and tiny, and representative of oh-so-much. “I… know that. Asking for help is… hard.” She laughed bitterly. “When I need help the most, I can hardly even string a sentence together.”

Liv frowned. “Maybe you could have a codeword to text or something? They want to be there for you-- they love you.”

It was hard to accept, even if logic told her it was true. Old insecurities were not Rosa’s friends.

“And I… I miss Moms.”

“Yeah. It’s a big change.”

“I know they’d drop everything if I needed help, but it still… scares me. I shouldn’t be scared of not living with my moms at twenty-six but I definitely am.” Rosa swallowed hard. “They said… they can stay on La Huerta as long as I need, but….”

“You’re not a burden, Rosita. Not at all.” Liv put an arm around her younger sister and hugged her close. “Worst case scenario? Moms get a month or two longer hanging out on paradise island. Mama Taylor will hang out with Tio Diego watching old episodes of Cinema Therapy and go on their little emotional journeys together. Mama Estela will teach Leony how to put the other kids in a headlock.”

Rosa snorted. “I guess they wouldn’t mind. Worst case scenario.”

“And you probably won’t even need that. You got this.”

_______________________________

There was a slight breeze. A welcome slight breeze, for it had been a muggy day even by La Huerta standards. Estela let her foot dangle.

Try and relax. It’s gonna be a long one.

She and Taylor sat on their porch swing-- it had been built and embellished with carvings by Homori who’d gifted it to them a year prior-- taking in the night, and resigning themselves to the anxious wait.

Rosa had been very afraid. Fair enough, Estela had thought, for childbirth was almost unimaginably painful. Rosi had never had a high pain tolerance. Estela did, and she’d found herself going to pieces in the agony that had preceded Liv’s entrance to the world. Her own instinct was to want to be near to Rosa, to help, but a plenty capable support team was doing that job. In all honesty, Estela had anticipated that Rosa would want her mothers there; she’d always needed their reassurance far more than Liv ever had, even into adulthood. Maybe it was a good thing that Rosa had other supports in place… her independence had certainly grown since Leo came along. Hell, she’d freaking blossomed.

Estela glanced down as her phone screen lit up.

‘6cm, looks like going into active labor. Starting to get a bit scary!’

“Oh, sweetheart…,” Taylor breathed. “That’s good. Good progress. Quicker than I was expecting, to be honest.” She sucked her cheek as she let Estela tap out an encouraging reply. “I’m selfish, but I miss her needing me so much.”

“You’re not selfish,” Estela said with a shrug. “You’d be selfish if you barged in, demanding she hold your hand. You can’t help your feelings, but you’re aware of them, so….”

“...so I guess I’m not making them anyone’s problem but my own. True. Well, apart from you.”

Estela looked her wife in the eyes and smiled gently. “It’s always comforting to know I’m not the only one having an internal freak-out.”

Taylor grinned. “We do our freak-outs as a team like the loved-up wives we are.”

She looked lovely out there in the moonlight, Estela thought. All full of hope and excitement, of tenderness for the frightened little girl who now existed only as a memory-- for Rosa had found her wings and soared.  Taylor was what she’d always been, a carer and protector, an inspirer and a confidant. She’d still be all of those things, but her role would change now as their children brought forth another generation. Time to be ‘grandma’.

Estela kissed her softly, heartbeat quickening at the tender caress of Taylor’s lips upon her own.

“You are never gonna not be needed,” she said in a hushed laugh. “Hermosa idiota.”

That made Taylor giggle. “I guess not.”

___________________________

Leonel jumped up and down on the springy old couch, punctuating his bounces with chanting. “We’ve… got… a… baby! We’ve… got… a… baby!”

In Homori’s arms, a golden-haired infant slumbered, oblivious to the excitement.

“Mind you don’t wake your sister.”

With an extra big bounce, Leo landed on his bottom, and grinned from ear to ear. “My baby sister! I can’t believe she’s gonna live with us now!”

“I know,” Rosa said, and she groaned as she sat down. “No more jumping, okay, sweetheart? I can barely believe she’s out in the world either.”

“She’ll get a name, right?” Leo asked. “We can’t call her ‘baby’ when she gets bigger….”

“I’m sure we’ll think of something, mijo.”

It was even slower than usual to get Leo into his pyjamas, and clean his teeth, and brush his hair. A new baby sister was a significant distraction. The baby joined the three of them in Leo’s room, sleeping through the two requisite bedtime stories, and still not stirring when her big brother gave her a very gentle kiss on the top of her head.

Eventually, though, Leo was settled, and his parents could spend some quiet time with the newest member of their happy unit.

“I guess the next challenge,” Rosa said sleepily, “what’s her name? I think it would be really nice to have ‘Luz’ as the middle after all she’s helped me out… but I’m pretty stumped on a first name. D’you think you can come up with a short-list?”

Homori’s eyes were shining with love for the small infant snuggled against his bare chest. “She should have a human name-- English or Spanish-- like her brother. It’ll be easier for her to keep her secrets if her name does not attract attention.”

Rosa frowned. He was right, but it didn’t sit well. Their little girl was to be raised by a Vaanti father, she had a right to the cultural heritage that came with that. They could maybe even get away with some Vaanti names-- it wasn’t as if humans didn’t get creative when naming their kids, no one would necessarily suspect anything….

“Or,” Homori said, picking up the vibe his wife was giving off, “she could have a Vaanti name and a human name. Maybe we could give Leo a Vaanti name too. Even if they don’t always use them, it would be kinda nice for them to have.”

“Maybe,” Rosa said, thoughtful, “you could come up with some Vaanti names, and we’ll look up human names with an equivalent meaning.”

They sat together on the bed, poring over baby name websites, and a book of names they’d gotten out from the library in The New Celestial weeks ago. Rosa and Homori were on a mission; their baby girl was going to have a name before the night was out.

“Something bright and optimistic,” Homori pondered. “I quite like ‘Tahiyya’, which represents a hopeful future. ‘Hiyya’ is ‘future’, and ‘Tah’or ‘Taa’ is something you add on the front of a word or name�� like a positive thing.”

“What does Taamina’s name mean?”

Taamina was the child of a close friend, who frequently played with Leo.

“‘Mina’ is like… ‘to dance’. So, I guess like a dance of happiness.”

“That’s cute! Pity that one’s taken by a close friend.”

Homori chuckled. “We’ll find her name.”

Rosa clicked her tongue. “Okay, names meaning ‘future’….”

She searched for five minutes, then ten. “Nothing really jumping out, to be honest.”

“‘Laniira’ is the name of the first Elyyshar, who brought our people together from across the island at a time of trouble. I’m not sure of the full meaning, but ‘niir’ is ‘sunrise’ and the ‘a’ sound is feminine. Something beautiful beginning… that’s pretty nice as meanings go.”

That was pretty nice. “Like ‘dawn’ or something….” Rosa pondered. Or how about…. “What about ‘Aurora’? Our new day. Her Vaanti name could be Niira.”

Homori beamed. “That’s it! That’s her name!”

The baby began to stir and whine, woken by his excited cry.

“Oops-- I’m gonna… I’m gonna have to get the hang of being enthusiastic quietly….”

Rosa couldn’t help but laugh. “And this is the kid who slept through ‘Hurricane Leo’.”

“Hurricane Leo is no match for over-excited Daddy Mo!”

Having picked up the freshly named Aurora and begun gently bouncing her upon her arm, Rosa looked up at Homori and grinned from ear to ear. To think she once couldn’t see herself ever so much as having a family… now her family, and the love they shared, just kept growing.

Somewhere along the line, she’d gotten so lucky. And Aurora, and her whirlwind Leony, would never know fears like the ones she’d had.

_____________________________

2062

“Abuela, Abuela!” Sol cried as he ran, feet pounding on the sand.

Taylor grinned, looking up from her drink to meet her wife’s eye. “You’re wanted.”

Estela got to her feet and began limbering up. “Ready to lose, mijo?”

“’Stel! He’s only six! You’re gonna go easy, right?”

“And I’m sixty-five. Pretty damn fair if you ask me.”

Sol grasped his grandmother’s hand and led her to the firmer sand. He pointed up the beach. “To that banana tree that’s sticking out down there-- you see it?”

“I’m racing too!” Andi hollered, dropping her arepa con queso in her hurry to be included. She rarely beat her brother in a running race, but she didn’t tire of trying. Then, tagging along behind her was Leonel-- just another one of the ‘big kids’ as far as he was concerned.

“On my signal….” Raj announced, and he picked up a napkin to hold in the air. “Aaaand… let her rip!”

He dropped his arm, and the four were off… with Estela perhaps going a little easy on her grandkids.

Taylor watched with a smile on her face and in her heart. A more perfect way to spend a day she couldn’t think of; Aurora’s first birthday, and a lively picnic surrounded by loved ones. Joining the Montoya clan, Raj had flown in; he’d taken up the role of ‘cool great-uncle’ with Leo and Aurora as if he was born for no other purpose, though he had Diego as stiff competition. Michael and Conor had joined him; Michael never missed a birthday of one of his donor kids. Rosa’s close friends Georgiana and Faiyara had joined the celebration with children Niraea and Rauan in tow, and Homori’s father had trekked down from Colonnade Cove to be there to commemorate the birth of his granddaughter.

Diego, naturally, was right by Taylor’s side.

“How’s it even been a year?” he asked incredulously. “Look at her-- she’s walking. Walking, Taylor!”

“That’s all of them,” Taylor laughed. “All of the grandkids walking, all walking straight into mischief.”

“You reckon Rosa’s done?”

“Yeah, she seemed pretty certain.”

“I’m not surprised,” Diego commented. “She and Mori seem really content. Rosi always talks about all these things she’s excited to do... easier once all the baby-having’s out the way.”

“You’re not wrong. She’s happy, and she’s just growing into herself more and more.”

“Five grandkids… not a bad effort.”

“Not bad at all.”

Having sat herself in the middle of the largest picnic blanket, Aurora seemed to know she was the centre of attention. All these people around, all the hubbub that came with a party, and she took it all in her diminutive stride.

“She looks like you,” Diego noted with a laugh. “Everyone else revolving around her.”

“Hey! I know I’m not the centre of the universe!”

How could Taylor not smile? So much of the people she loved in those five children, and each of the five was something unique and precious all on their own. Little pieces of stardust, brightening their family’s world.

Sol had joined Aurora on the blanket, and was cuddling Beatriz in his lap-- even as the toddler made a bid for freedom and for the oh-so-tempting cupcakes set out on the camp table. Still out on the sand, Andi was giving Leonel ‘whizzies’, holding him under his armpits and swinging him wildly around in circles until she collapsed dizzily. And Aurora was just taking it all in; chewing on her teething ring, and watching the antics of her friends and family with quiet curiosity. Every now and then, someone-- her mom and dad, of course, had a particular knack for this-- would catch her eye and smile or pull a face, and she’d come alight with a giggle.

“You know what you’ve gotta do?” Diego prodded. “Grannies and grandkids selfie!”

It wasn’t always going to happen that they’d all be together, Liv’s and Rosa’s lives being in different places. Yeah… they should take a picture.

Estela needed little convincing, and she swiftly herded up Leo-- who rushed over to snuggle with Grandma Tay-- and Andi --who was grabbled and dangled upside down as she laughed hysterically.

“You,” Taylor gushed as she squeezed her little Leo, cuddled up on her lap. “Are. So. Huggy!”

“Hugs are good!” he declared.

Hugs are good, Taylor concurred, as birthday girl Aurora came over with wide arms to join in.

Liv held up her phone to take a picture. “Mom, you’ve got Andi-Pants the wrong way up! Didn’t they ever tell you how to correctly assemble a kid?”

The giggling, squirming Andi was eventually tamed, leaning up on one side of Estela’s lap, while Sol took the other. Perched between them, of course, was baby Bea-- a little bewildered by the bustling around, but taking it in her stride.

Over the top of Aurora’s head, Taylor caught Estela’s eye and they shared a smile. Sometimes, it was necessary to take a moment and really marvel in the beautiful thing they’d made together. The odds faced, the fight for their lives… somehow it was a million miles away now. And ‘happy ever after’ just seemed to keep on coming.

[starkillerbass]