#something something when babyboymunson said kissing without plot is this what was meant

[scoupsahoy]

take a hit, let it burn my lips

[crossposted to ao3]

“C’mon, man, this is a total waste of time,” Steve’s voice is a touch desperate. It's almost entertaining.

It’s nearly midnight in sweltering late-August at a party in Loch Nora and Eddie is being shoved into a closet. Go figures.

“I happen to think it’s hilarious.”

At least Robin Buckley happens to think it’s hilarious. Probably because she immediately made eye contact with the bandana in his back pocket when they first met. Her new friend Steve Harrington being pushed into a closet for seven minutes in heaven with someone she clocked ages ago would be hilarious to her, the bastard.

“You’re not helping, Robin,” Steve says, peeking out from the door getting closed in their faces.

Some other drunk voice is muffled against the door. “Don’t make a mess in there!”

It’s a pretty big closet, all things considered. It’s genuinely the size of his bathroom at home, and he knows it, which is pretty annoying. He’s well on his way to getting pissed off, and that’s not even taking into account that Steve Harrington is standing in here with him. Tall and handsome and frustrated, fingers pressed into his eyeballs like he’s trying to see spots.

Eddie won’t pretend that this isn’t a deep-seated fantasy of his, but he'll table it for later.

“Not enough hours in the day, Harrington?” He crosses his arms and slides down the opposite wall of the closet, so Steve has to look down at him. Maybe he’s a bit masochistic.

Steve opens his eyes, rubs at his temples a bit. There’s the ghost of a massive black eye he got during the mall fire somehow, a tea stain on his perfect face. He fiddles with his wristwatch. “Hm?”

“Can’t spare a few minutes alone with your old kingdom’s jester now that you’ve graduated to bigger and better things?”

“Graduated, maybe,” Steve sinks down to the closet floor, knees spread wide like he doesn’t even realize he’s been sent into this shoebox to make out with the freaky queer drug dealer. “Bigger and better things, I’m not so sure.”

“Well I’m on my third try. At least you have a bit of a head start on that future of yours,” he says.

Steve runs his tongue along his bottom lip like it’s fucking something to do. If the air weren't so still, Eddie would wonder what he tastes like.

“Shit’s kinda scary, man.”

“You’re telling me.” Eddie pauses, blinks at him. “Uh, you wanna talk about it?”

“That’s not exactly what we were sent in here to do, Munson,” he says, regaining his footing. Eddie’s being teased. That’s the last time he’s going to be nice to a fucking jock.

“Whatever, man. It’s not like we’re going to make out in here just because we got trapped in a game of spin the bottle.”

Steve’s grin grows wicked before he pinches it into a sarcastic pout. “You don’t wanna kiss me?”

Something slices quick through Eddie’s stupid, cold, dead heart. “I’m not a pervert,” he says. He hopes it drips with enough venom that Steve either leaves or shuts up.

Neither of those things happen, though. Steve’s look hardens and he gets quiet for a second long enough for Eddie to be almost worried that he’s going to be punched in the face.

“Don’t say that shit,” Steve ends up saying. “Being into kissing guys doesn’t make someone a pervert.”

The closet is quiet for a second. Eddie knows himself well enough to know how infrequently he’s been shocked into silence, but he can’t interrupt the heartbeat of it. It does something to his bones. “I know that.”

“Good,” Steve says, with this strict finality.

The light in here is kind of low, and the party bustles outside, and underneath it all Eddie knows that the drunk assholes who closed them in here have probably all forgotten about them. It’s not like they have their ears pressed against the cracks to catch the sound of heavy petting or whatever the hell they expect to happen in here. He could get away with pushing the boundaries a bit.

“For the record, I only meant that I wouldn’t just kiss someone if they weren’t into it.”

“This game isn’t exactly legally binding,” Steve says, only slightly more relaxed than a second ago. “If I was worried about being locked in a closet with you for seven minutes, I would have just left.”

“You’ve got experience kissing boys, then?” That would be rich.

“Do you?”

He lets that one roll off his back. He has traction now. “I asked first, Harrington.”

Steve has this square jaw and a look in his eyes that Eddie knows to mean he’s detached, too good for this shit. He’s just some beautiful rich kid who can’t back down from a challenge. Eddie wants to push him.

Once he’s sure he won’t get himself knocked out, he crawls forward, trying to look as enticing as possible. He knows his shirt is loose and dips low enough for Steve to see his tattoos, and his happy trail if he’s really looking.

This close, even in this lighting, Eddie swears Steve is blushing. Just a little. “I haven’t seen you at these parties in a while.”

“If you were that desperate to see me, you could have just asked. You know where my house is,” he says. Eddie ignores him.

“All of a sudden you’re showing up with Buckley, playing spin the bottle like you used to,” so what if Eddie used to pay attention to that kind of thing. Watching the classic Steve twist into something else entirely was fun, it was mysterious, Steve was gentle and determined and had such singular focus. It gave him something to do in between deals. “Thought you could get her to kiss you? Disappointed you landed on a boy?”

Steve rolls his eyes. His hands are clenched into fists, but they’re scraping at his jeans, and his cheeks get a little more red. Eddie presses forward.

“Maybe you wanted it to land on a boy. You’re just annoyed it had to land on the freak.”

“You think you know everything, huh?”

“I haven’t been proven wrong yet,” he says, shrugging. He likes this. Steve Harrington can apparently give as good as he can get.

But then he does get proven wrong.

Steve lurches forward, and for a second Eddie’s worried he finally learned how to throw a punch, but it doesn’t come. He wraps his hand around Eddie’s shirt and stops short in front of him and stares with his big brown eyes for just long enough for it to register that this isn’t one of those moments that happens without any forethought.

It isn’t spontaneous when Steve kisses him. He’s been kissed out of nowhere, before, but.

He’s letting out this shaky breath into Eddie’s mouth, hot and hesitant. His eyes are screwed closed, and his lips are so soft, but he’s kissing hard enough that it feels like a punch. Eddie wonders if it’ll leave a bruise. It takes a second to even respond to it. Steve has pitched up a tent on top of his senses: all he can hear and feel and taste and smell is Steve. A little grunt, and the slide of, fuck, lip gloss, maybe, bitter where it slips into his mouth and minty when he breathes in.

His mind only catches up when Steve’s hand relaxes on his shirt and he threatens to pull back. Eddie almost stops breathing, stops time, anything to hold onto it. He sucks Steve’s bottom lip into his mouth like that might keep him close, and he swears there’s a pretty little groan somewhere in the mess of their shuffling.

Steve is solid under his hands, and in return he grips tight onto his waist like he’s afraid Eddie’s going to float away. As if Eddie would stop kissing him for anything. As if Eddie knows which way is up right now. He’s half-convinced Steve is dragging him into an alternate dimension where popular graduates kiss gay burnouts in rich kids’ closets.

All things considered, Steve shouldn’t even be at this fucking party. He’s graduated and not all that popular anymore, and unless he’s trying to find Buckley a cheerleader girlfriend, it doesn’t even make sense that she tagged along, either.

And Eddie is only here to sell weed anyway. Selling at parties isn’t even all that great after the rich guys buy out all his pills in the first hour, because everyone’s too fucked up to remember he’s there at all.

It doesn’t make sense that either of them are still here, approaching midnight, sober enough that they still taste like toothpaste and pizza. It doesn’t make sense that Steve Harrington is the only person who’s given him a second glance after 10pm, or that he’s kissing Eddie like he’s wanted to for years.

Eddie wonders if the most recent concussion knocked a screw loose, or if maybe he misses the way Tommy Hagan used to look like he wanted to devour him at house parties, crawling at him on his knees the way Eddie did. Maybe almost a year of getting the shit kicked out of him by the Hargrove kid and exclusively hanging out with middle schoolers and lesbians made Steve miss the tender platonic touch of another man or whatever the fuck excuse he’ll give when he explains this kiss away to his therapist in twenty years.

He’s in an entirely different stratosphere altogether, though. He couldn't care less about why Steve is kissing him, just that he is. And a sick little part of Eddie has wanted him to for years. Just desperate to know what it was like. What kind of spell he would put these girls under to pull them into bathrooms and the back of his car and the privacy of his backyard with their toes dipping in the pool.

“You’re thinking really loudly,” Steve says into his mouth.

Eddie tries to respond, but it gets caught in his throat, and Steve dives in again, palm at the base of his neck to hold him in place. Eddie’s really starting to float now, and all he wants to do is ride it out. It’s like being kissed by a force of nature.

It takes another second for the words to come out. “Do I distract you?”

“All the time,” he says, and swallows the sound of it in another kiss. “Don’t pretend you’re not distracting on purpose.”

“I am. I just didn’t realize I caught your attention.”

Steve pushes, and Eddie falls onto his back. He’s going to get rug burn, and he’s going to stumble out of this closet (and probably other, more metaphorical closets if he’s not careful) looking properly debauched like a Victorian maiden, with bruised lips and messy hair and he should really be more careful. Except Steve is caged over him, panting heavy, hand in his hair to keep him from smacking onto the ground, and he looks just as bad.

He rolls down, and if Eddie wanted to he could blame it on adrenaline or something, but Steve is hard and pressing into the jut of his hip. And then the both of them are breathing heavy, hot breath passing between them. He wants to know if Steve is the type to moan when he feels good, and he wants to be the person to make him if he doesn’t already.

So Eddie doesn’t give a fuck about the game or the party or this town or the rest of the world, frankly. He cares about how Steve’s eyes are blown out wide when he says “you definitely caught my attention,” and the way it comes out rough and corny and extremely sexy.

Eddie focuses on how every few times he pulls back, Steve swoops back in with his teeth to drag across his lips.

He focuses on how, after just a bit of making out, Steve’s eyebrows are relaxed and his eyelashes are thick and cast shadows on his cheekbones. He focuses on how badly he wants to count them, if Steve will allow him another sick fantasy.

All of that is probably why he hears a bit of a whine get pulled from his throat when Steve pulls away for good. He’s almost confident that it gets lost in the sound of the alarm going off on Steve’s watch, but he looks too proud for Eddie to even fool himself.

“Fix your hair, man. We have about fifteen seconds.”

Eddie sits up, runs his hand over his face. He’s a shit liar and useless in a time-crunch, so he pulls his knees in and makes himself look as bored as he possibly can.

He can’t, though. He can’t take his eyes off of Steve.

Steve’s eyes narrow when Eddie puts his hair up.

“Alright, lovebirds,” Robin calls from the other side of the door. Eddie almost wonders when she got herself put in charge of gathering them, but the look she gives Steve is so heavy with about a hundred different conversations that it sort of makes sense. “Your seven minutes are up. What did you guys get up to?”

Eddie watches Steve take a deep breath and stand up, hands pushing into his knees. “Dumb shit. Told you this was a waste of time.”

“Wanna head out?” Robin’s eyes flicker over to Eddie, and he hardly notices. He waits for Steve to look his way.

“Yeah, I wanna be home by 12:30,” he says. Eddie gets a millisecond of eye contact. A signal if he’s ever seen one. “I’ll drop you off first.”

Steve and Robin walk out and leave Eddie sitting there. The other drunk teenagers obviously forget he was in there too, and probably forget that they were even playing a game to begin with.

So Eddie really has nothing to worry about.

He stares at his feet, and then he’s staring at the sky while he smokes a cigarette, and then he’s staring at Steve Harrington’s front door, wondering what happens if it opens.