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tropes-and-tales · 10 days ago

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Winner Takes All

(Richie Jerimovich x F!Reader)

CW: Slight angst; idiots falling in love; drunken near-encounters but nothing explicit; vulgar language because let us be honest - it's Richie.

Word Count: 2730

AN: This was requested by the lovely @winchestershiresauce for the April Showers event!

Maybe Richie wouldn’t have said anything if you had just shut your mouth.

Maybe he would have gritted his teeth, manned the register, and dealt with the customers while you chattered away with Tina and Marcus in the back of the house. Out front, in the bustle of the lunch hour, he could have ignored you, let your voice fade into the background.

But you don’t shut the fuck up.

You’re talking a mile a minute because you’ve met a new guy. Some fancy asshole who works at the Merc, and Richie starts to get a headache as you talk this guy up.

“He sells weather derivatives!” he hears you say. There’s a clatter of pots, a whosh of flames lighting on the stove.

“What’s that mean?” Marcus’s voice, now.

“It has something to do with insurance and risk,” you explain, and Richie can’t help but half-listen, judging how fucking stupid it sounds. This new guy of yours deals in weather, and he makes a shit-ton of money doing it: a condo with a lakeside view, a fancy car in the garage…

“He sounds like an asshole,” Richie scoffs from the pass-through window.

“You’d know.” The retort is paired with you narrowing your eyes at him.

“He sounds…nice,” Tina tells you, but she pauses enough on the nice, glances at Richie long enough for him to know that she’s thinking the exact same thing he is, deep down.

This guy is going to break your heart. Just like the last one, the tenure-track professor at Loyola. And the one before, the electrician. And all the others before—the bartender, the dermatologist, the trust fund laze, the NGO founder. At some point, Mr. Weather Asshole is going to hurt you terribly, and you’ll come into the Beef in pieces that they’ll have to put back together.

Maybe Richie wouldn’t have said anything, but he fucking hates that he can see your future and you cannot.

“It’s never gonna work out,” he says. “Guy’s gonna break up with you.”

You glare at him again. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“Bet you he will. It always happens, and you’re too stupid to see it.”

“Bet you he won’t.” You pause, stir the sauce you have simmering on the stove. “He’s different than the others.”

Richie sighs because he also knows that Mr. Weather Asshole isn’t different. He’s probably exactly the same as the others, a user who will cut loose the moment he’s done having fun with you. It happens every time, and you have some goddamned amnesia about your own terrible love life—

“I wanna take that bet,” he tells you. He leans back against the counter and crosses his arms, stares at you. “Easy win for me.”

You turn and face him, mirror his body language by crossing your arms too. “Alright. What are we betting? Fifty? A hundred?”

Richie could take your money. He knows it’s a sure thing. Some mean part of him, though, wants to make it hurt. He wants some awareness to finally sink into your thick skull. He wants you to be more careful, to guard your heart closer, to stop leaving yourself open to such hurt from such awful men.

“Make it interesting. Mr. Weather Asshole dumps you within the month, I get your Def Leppard shirt.”

Your eyes narrow to slits. “Which one?”

“You know which one.”

The angry set of your frown tells him you know exactly which one he means. He has no idea how it came into your possession, but you have a cherry vintage concert t-shirt from Def Leppard’s 1983 Pyromania tour. Richie isn’t that big a guy, not much bigger than you, really, and the one time he saw you wear it, it was just a shade too big.

It will fit him perfectly.

He watches the little twitch in your jaw—you’re clenching it, your teeth grinding. “Fine. What do I get?”

“What do you want?”

Your face opens up, softens. You smile and say, “okay, I want your Bruce album.”

“Which one?”

“You know which one,” you reply, mimicking his voice, which makes Tina snort and shake her head.

Richie has a rare vinyl of the Japanese pressing of Bruce Springsteen’s “Tunnel of Love.” He can’t even remember how you found out about it, but you’ve pestered him in the past about how much it would cost you for him to part with it—

It’s a sure thing. There’s no way Richie is going to lose this bet, so he nods. He uncrosses his arms and holds his hand out to shake.

It’s your hand in his, your eyes crinkled as you smile at him…it makes him feel sad all of a sudden. You’re going to be hurt; he can see it as clearly as anything, and you can’t see it at all.

-----

Two weeks, nearly. Twelve days, to be exact: you march into the Beef, and Richie barely has enough time to realize it’s your day off before you toss a plastic grocery bag down on the counter in front of him.

“Here,” you spit out. You’re already turning on your heel and leaving, and you add over your shoulder as you wrench open the door, “I don’t want to hear a word about it, asshole.”

He doesn’t need to, but he opens the bag anyway. Inside is the concert t-shirt, neatly folded. The spoils from him winning the bet that hinged on your broken heart.

“Ah, fuck,” he mutters.

-----

Richie knows where to find you that evening. He helps Carmy close up, and then he makes his way to Kelly’s.

The dive bar is below street level, dark and musty. The beer is cheap, and the jukebox is stocked with a very specific slice of alternative rock beloved by Kelly’s owner. The vibe is grimy but safe, the perfect place for someone like you to drink away her sorrows and stumble out without too much risk.

Still…Richie likes to keep an eye on you. Just to be safe.

Kelly’s is too small for him to hide from you, and he doesn’t bother to try. He finds you belly up at the bar, slouched, and he takes the empty stool beside yours.

You glance at him out of the corner of your eye before you turn back to your drink.

“Come to gloat? You ask.

“Nah.”

“Say ‘I told you so’?”

Richie shakes his head. “I’m not a complete asshole.”

You sigh. “What, then?”

He holds up a hand to flag down the bartender, and he orders another for you and one for himself. Then he turns in his stool at looks at you.

“Wanted to make sure you’re okay,” he replies, and he hopes it rings earnest to your ears because it’s the truth. He’s not a complete asshole but he is at least partially so, and he struggles with his delivery almost every time he tries to be nice to you…but he cares, and he wants to make sure you know it.

Whether you believe him or not, you don’t say. You only tip him a nod in thanks for the drink, and the two of you fall into an evening together of mostly silent companionship and more than a little drinking.

-----

He wakes up fast and rough because he thinks he’s about to puke.

He sits up quick, manages to calm his roiling, sour stomach with deep breaths through his nose. Once the danger of vomiting has passed, he looks around at the strange room.

It’s not his room: not the one in his apartment, and not the one he shared with Tiff when they were still married. It’s a softer space; the sheets underneath him are silkier, nicer than his own. The room smells different too, warm and spicy like something baked with cinnamon, and it takes his hungover brain a beat to realize where he knows that smell…

…it’s your smell. It bothers him every time he has to work with you at the Beef; it seems to seep into his clothes under the smell of the sandwiches and fry grease. He glances down at the figure stretched out in the bed beside him and sees you. You’re fast asleep, your face smushed into your pillow, lips parted as you breathe deep and even.

It takes his hungover brain two beats to realize that he’s naked. No, scratch that—he’s in his boxers only, he’s shirtless, and when he studies you closer, he sees part of the reason why: you’re in his t-shirt, the one with the typo that reads “The Berf.”

Richie scrubs a shaky hand over his stubbled face. The evening comes back to him a little at a time. The drinks that flowed too easily, the realization that you live only a few blocks from him. The stumbling out together at last call, his arm around your waist as much to steady himself as to steady you. Him walking you home, the booze hitting you hard and making you turn pathetic.

Him turning to give you hell and seeing the pitiful way your lower lip trembled as your eyes filled with tears over Mr. Weather Asshole. Richie getting pissed at that, wanting to say something meaningful that would lance through your alcohol-fog to make you understand that Mr. Weather Asshole wasn’t someone worth crying over—

Him failing to find the words and kissing you instead. You kissing him back. You kissing him back with an eagerness that surprised him, and he remembers going upstairs to your apartment with you.

He remembers each of you stripping down to nearly nothing before it occurred to him that you weren’t in any shape to make any decisions, and he wasn’t much better off. He remembers stopping you, taking your hands in his, slurring his words as he told you it was a bad idea. He remembers you tearing up at that, misunderstanding him, feeling the rejection too personally.

Maybe in some respects the alcohol was a boon, because Richie Bad News always fucks it up. Richie Bad News always says all the wrong things. Richie Bad News always manages to mistranslate the feelings in his heart with his stupid fucking mouth.

But Drunk Richie? Drunk-but-Noble Richie who was able to gently turn down the opportunity to fuck you because you were too wasted to make good decisions? That guy seemed to get it right.

He remembers telling you that you shouldn’t cry over him or Mr. Weather Asshole or any other loser who manages to disappoint and hurt you. He remembers telling you what a catch you are, how lucky a guy would be to snag you. He remembers telling you to be choosier, to be more wary of men, to trust them a little less and yourself a little more.

Mostly, he remembers telling you that you have the biggest heart of anyone he knows, and then he remembers saying he wishes you’d guard it closer.

He remembers how you looked at him then, how you seemed to see him through the alcohol haze. You seemed to figure him out in that moment, seemed to piece together all your time together at the Beef, all the frustration he had with his own terrible love life that he vented over Family meals as you listened. You seemed to understand his own hurt, how he came in each day after his own awful dates the night before, how he looked at you on the sly as if he were measuring you against those women while he also measured himself against all those terrible men you dated.

Most of all, he remembers how you reached up and laid a gentle palm against the side of his face, and how he nuzzled into your touch. You had looked him dead in the eyes, murmured his full name like you wanted him to know you really saw him.

“Richard Jerimovich,” you had said. “You might be an asshole, but you’re a good man.”

He remembers how you turned shy then, how you dropped your hand and your gaze, like you were suddenly aware that you were basically naked in front of him. At your words—that he maybe he wasn’t Richie Bad News but just an asshole and a good man both—he felt surer of himself. More certain. He had bent down and snagged his discarded t-shirt, and he had helped you pull it over your head.

“C’mon,” he told you. “Let’s go to sleep.”

And that was all the two of you did. Drunk as you each were, he had kept it as above-board as he could, and you had fallen asleep snuggled against him.

-----

Now he’s awake and nauseous. It’s still dark outside. A quick glance at his phone says that it’s only three in the morning, hours from dawn. He hears what he thinks is a delivery truck rumbling past your building, but the sound is paired with a flash of blue-white lightning, and he realizes that there’s a storm rolling in.

He climbs out of your bed carefully, and he makes his way to your kitchen. He pours a glass of water from the pitcher in your refrigerator, and he drains it in one go. He feels his stomach calm.

Richie stands at your kitchen sink for long moments: it’s dark outside the window there, but each bolt of lightning illuminates the view—the brick wall of the building next door, the street below. It looks lonely outside; the sky spits rain in fits and starts.

He could leave. Maybe he should leave now, while you’re still asleep. He has no idea how you’ll wake up: what if you’re angry at him, or embarrassed? What if you wake up and remember him gently rejecting you and misunderstand it? Because he’d happily, gratefully take you to bed under any other circumstances, but not as your rebound and not with you as drunk as you’d been…but you may not realize that.

He probably should leave, but it looks miserable outside. The storm makes him want to return to your warm bed, so that’s what he does.

You’re still asleep. He stands over you and looks his fill for a moment. The flashes of lightning gild your face in its stark white light, but he thinks you look adorable. Even with your makeup from last night smeared under your eyes and lines from your pillow etched across your cheek, Richie thinks you might be the cutest fucking thing he’s ever seen.

He crawls back under the covers and rejoins you. He tries to be careful about it, but the shifting of the mattress makes you stir. You grumble beside him, and a moment later you open your eyes and fix him with a bleary look.

“Richie? What—”

“It’s fine.” He whispers in reply. “Still too early to get up.”

“Mmm.”

��Go back to sleep.”

You hum again, and maybe you aren’t completely sober yet or completely awake—but he’s glad he decided to stay, because you bridge the slight distance between you and snuggle up against him again. You press your head against his shoulder, gently headbutting him until he huffs out a laugh and lifts his arm for you to cuddle in close. He wraps his arm around your shoulders, and you nuzzle against his bare chest before you settle.

It doesn’t take long for you to fall back asleep despite the storm picking up in intensity outside. Richie doesn’t fall back asleep at all, but he’s comfortable, relaxed. The rain lashes at the window of your bedroom, and thunder rumbles in the distance, but he feels cozy.

More than that, he feels hopeful. He’s had such a shitty run of it. The loss of Mikey, the loss of his marriage. His ex-wife may consider him Richie Bad News, but he’s been on the receiving end of plenty of shit too. He’s at the lowest he’s ever been in his life, but for the first time since everything went to hell, he finally feels a bit of hope.

It started with a bet that he won, and now he’s in your bed with you snoring lightly in his arms while you wear his stupid fucking “Berf” t-shirt.

What comes next? He has no idea, but he finally has hope that it might be something good.

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