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In early August, Loch Nora was mostly empty. Most of the neighborhood’s residents were off in the places where they spend their summer vacations: houses on the lake up north or in Florida down south, maybe Acapulco or Aruba if they were among the wealthier set. On that muggy late summer night, only one house seemed full of life. The Harrington house sat on the curve of the cul-de-sac with the living room lights shining bright as day, spilling out through the curtained windows and onto the manicured lawn. If anyone had been around to see it, they might have imagined the scene inside: the picture-perfect Harrington family enjoying their evening, Richard with a whiskey glass in hand, Stella in her name-brand dress mixing the next round, maybe their son Steve lounging about if he wasn’t out with one of his girlfriends or that Buckley girl he was always with.
What they would not have expected to see is what was actually transpiring. With Richard and Stella out of town, Steve Harrington sprawls out on the living room rug, laying next to none other than Eddie Munson. With the stereo cranked, Steve bobs his head to the music, feeling the buzz of a few beers and the jubilation of his parents finally out of his hair for a while.
As the song playing winds down and the next one picks up, Eddie rolls over onto his stomach.
“Would your dad care if I stole his booze?”
Steve, still laying on his back, looks at Eddie upside-down. He shrugs.
“Probably, but who gives a shit? They’re not back until September. He’s not gonna remember how much he had before he left.”
Eddie grins. “Sweet.”
As Eddie scrambles up with all the coordination of a newborn giraffe, Steve lets his head fall back into the plush carpet. Strains of guitar wash over him: the opening of the penultimate track on the album, a Queen record from a few years ago. As Steve and Eddie discovered early in their friendship, Queen is one of the musical interests they share. Across the room, Eddie’s pouring a few fingers of whiskey into Waterford glasses. Two glasses, one for each. Steve grins at the sight. He almost wishes his parents would forget their passports and have to come home from the airport tonight, if only to witness Eddie fucking Munson drinking top-shelf whiskey out of their fancy-ass cut crystal. He’d love to see the looks on their faces. Eddie deserves nice things more than they do, anyway.
“I propose a toast,” Eddie says.
He crosses the living room, his socks near-silent across the hardwood floor. Steve rolls onto his side and sits up.
“If you toast to Ronald Reagan again, Nancy is gonna appear out of nowhere and kick your ass.”
“That was sarcasm, Harrington. Haven’t heard of it?” Eddie plunks down on the coffee table, the chain linked to his belt loop clinking against the lacquered surface. He passes Steve a glass. “No, I toast to the man of the hour. The only queen I recognize. The gentleman presently serenading us so beautifully from your stereo.”
Steve grins. Through the speakers, “Hammer to Fall” is reaching its crescendo. It must be said: Eddie has impeccable timing, probably from all the time he spends dungeon mastering. Eddie raises his glass. Steve follows suit.
“To Freddie Mercury,” Eddie says, solemnly, his right hand over his heart.
He takes a sip.
“Amen,” Steve replies, and knocks back his drink.
Almost immediately, Eddie screws up his face and sets the glass down on the coffee table with a clack. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.
“God, that’s vile,” he rasps.
Steve snorts. “Didn’t you say you drank moonshine growing up?”
Eddie flops back down onto the rug. The Harrington living room is massive, large enough for two grown twenty-something men to sprawl out across it without even touching each other. Not that Steve is thinking about touching Eddie. Well, he’s thinking about it now, but he wasn’t before. He blames it on the booze.
Oh, right. Eddie is talking.
“Everyone knows moonshine tastes like rubbing alcohol, so you’re prepared for it. No one tells you rich-bitch whiskey tastes like shit. I wasn’t ready.”
“Rich-bitch whiskey,” Steve repeats, scoffing. “You calling me a rich bitch?”
“I’m calling your dad a rich bitch,” Eddie corrects.
“Oh, well, in that case,” Steve says, and downs the rest of his drink.
He sets the glass out of reach and lays back down. The whiskey burns down his throat, but it’s a good burn, the kind of burn that warms him from the inside out. The kind of burn that he feels when Eddie passes him a joint and he takes a drag, smoke filling his lungs. The kind of burn that he feels when they sit side-by-side on top of the trailer and share a cigarette, thighs touching, sharing body heat even through their jeans.
As Eddie joins him on the ground, the last song on the tape fades to an end. Steve rolls over onto his stomach and sits up. He glances over at Eddie, whose dark hair fans out across the white rug.
“What do you want to listen to?” he asks.
Eddie shrugs. “Whatever you want, man. It’s your house.”
Steve rolls his eyes. He knows full well that there’s a whole lot of music in his parents’ collection that Eddie won’t listen to. If he puts on his dad’s Sinatra records, Eddie will probably throw something at him. He wanders over to the stereo and presses the button to rewind the tape. While he waits for it to spool back, his eyes drift over the line of cassettes across the shelf. One catches his eye and he reaches for it, popping the tape out of the black-and-white plastic covering. There was a time he would’ve felt like an idiot playing it in front of Eddie—after all, he knows heartland rock isn’t exactly Eddie’s style—but he’s long since stopped feeling self-conscious in front of Eddie. After everything they’ve been through, it’s not like they’re going to have a falling out over music.
Mournful harmonica is already pouring out of the speakers by the time Steve rejoins Eddie on the floor. It doesn’t take long for him to register what Steve put on.
“Of course,” Eddie snorts.
“What?”
“Of course you put on Springsteen. I’ve never met anyone who loves him as much as you do, and that’s saying something in this red-blooded, all-American, God-fearin’ town.”
Steve rolls his eyes. Meanwhile, Eddie turns his head on the rug to look at him.
“What is it, anyway?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what is it about the Boss that you love so much?”
Steve frowns. He looks away from Eddie, focusing his gaze on the ceiling high above them. The chandelier stares impassively down at them. Like the glasses, it’s made of crystal, and he can imagine it falling down and stabbing viciously into the floor. Hell, that’s probably why his mom picked it out—to channel her rage at being trapped here with her philandering husband and loser of a son. Steve’s inclination is to shrug off the question, to say that he likes his lyrics or his voice or whatever, but he has three beers and a glass of whiskey in his system and Eddie’s dark eyes are still focused on him. It’s harder to lie in Eddie’s presence. He’s so honest all the time, so forthright with who he is and what he believes in, that it makes Steve want to be more open too.
“I dunno. It just makes sense to me, I guess.”
Steve can still feel Eddie’s gaze on him as the chorus kicks in: We gotta get out while we’re young, ‘cause tramps like us, baby, we were born to run. With it, a flood of memories come crashing over him. All he can do is to try not to get caught in the undertow.
“I like this song,” he hears himself saying. “I think it might be my favorite song, actually. I used to listen to it a lot in high school.”
“Like when you started fighting monsters?”
Steve shakes his head. “Nah. Earlier than that, actually. It sounds lame, but it was like… I dunno. Back then all I wanted to do was get out of Hawkins, but I couldn’t yet, so I’d just listen to this song and imagine what it would be like when I finally did.”
Eddie considers that for a moment. When he speaks again, his tone is curious. “Why’d you wanna get out? Before the monsters, I mean.”
“It’s stupid.”
“It’s probably not.”
“No, I mean—I don’t want to throw a pity party for myself, man. It’s not like I had real problems.”
When he glances over, Eddie is frowning.
“What do you mean, real problems?”
The back of Steve’s neck goes hot. He looks away from Eddie and shifts uncomfortably on the floor. “I don’t know. I mean, I sure as shit didn’t have to deal with the stuff you did back then.”
He’s thinking of everything Eddie told him about his life before he moved in with Wayne. His mom hooked on drugs, his dad in and out of his life. The purple bruises on his skin from when his dad was around and his mom dying before Eddie was old enough to ride a bike. The CPS workers dumping him on Wayne’s doorstep with his curls buzzed off by his dad and a duffel bag full of clothes. Steve’s own teenage angst seems ridiculous, almost self-indulgent, by comparison.
“It’s not a competition, dude,” Eddie says, wryly. “I’m asking ‘cause I want to know, not ‘cause I want to have a dick-measuring contest about who had a shittier childhood.”
“You have such a way with words,” Steve says, sounding like Robin.
When Eddie doesn’t respond, Steve sighs. The song is still going, reminding him of his first encounter with it, back when he had braces and hadn’t hit his growth spurt yet. His gaze unfocuses, the chandelier going blurry, and he lets himself talk.
“Yeah, okay. If you’re gonna twist my arm about it,” he starts. He takes in a deep breath, steeling himself, and lets it out slowly. “So, my parents started fighting a lot when I was thirteen. That’s when my mom realized my dad was sleeping around, I think. Maybe they’d been fighting earlier, I dunno, but that’s when I noticed it. Somebody tipped her off about the secretary, somebody at the firm, ‘cause she started drinking a lot and kind of… picking fights with him, I guess. She’d drop hints that she knew what was going on, stuff like that. I didn’t realize what she was saying at the time, but it makes sense looking back on it.”
The song ends, and jaunty piano announces the start of the second track. It’s too late to revive the mood, though.
“Anyway, it got ugly when I started high school. It’s not like I was helping. Did you know I almost failed eighth grade? Like, who fails eighth grade? Anyway, Mom was drinking a lot, but she insisted on going on business trips with Dad and they’d both come back pissed. Dad would be pissed because he couldn’t fool around with his secretary anymore, and Mom was pissed because she hadn’t found any actual proof that he was cheating on her yet, so they couldn’t get divorced. Not that they wanted to. They had an image to keep up. Anyway, then they’d come home and there’d be me, their dumbass kid who could barely pass his classes, and it was just—shitty, okay, yeah. It sucked.”
“Shit, Steve,” Eddie says, quietly.
Steve takes in a deep breath and lets it out all at once. “So I started playing sports. I’d always liked sports, being part of a team and shit, but I got really into it in high school. Like, if I really wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, then at least I could be good at sports. Plus, it got me out of the house more. If you swim, you gotta be at practice at, like, seven in the morning. If you play basketball, you’re at school until dinner at least. Kill two birds with one stone, you know? I thought maybe I’d earn a scholarship and get the fuck out of here at the same time.”
It doesn’t escape his notice that he failed to do all of the above. From the speakers, he hears the familiar strains of The Big Man on saxophone. Even now, with shitty memories swirling around him, it makes him smile. There’s just something in this music that saves him, makes him feel like the trials of the last few years were worth it somehow—like they fit into some epic story of his life that isn’t over yet.
“I used to run on the mornings that I didn’t have swim practice. I’d listen to music and run all around the neighborhood. It cleared my head. And… and I liked listening to this. Springsteen. Bon Jovi. Queen. Stuff like that. Other stuff, too, but mostly Springsteen. The tapes were my dad’s, but I never heard him listen to them. I found them on my own, just sitting on the shelf, and they just… I dunno. It felt like they were mine. Something I liked that I didn’t get from my parents.”
Eddie hums in understanding.
Steve closes his eyes. If he focuses, he can remember the days he’s describing: early mornings when the fog hadn’t quite dissipated yet, when he’d jog around the neighborhood in the half-light of dawn with rock music playing through his headphones until his shins hurt and his mouth tasted like copper.
“I listened to all kinds of stuff back then, but I liked this album the most. There was something about it. Like, if he’d gotten the fuck out of New Jersey with just a guitar on his back, then I could get the fuck out of Indiana. I’d started counting down the months until I graduated. Just three and a half years, then three, then two. Then the fucking monsters came and ate Barb Holland in my pool and it was like, okay, now I just have to survive the rest of high school, and then I can get the hell out of here.”
“But you didn’t,” Eddie says.
Steve looks over at him sharply. There’s a remark on his tongue, brittle and defensive, but it dissolves when he realizes that Eddie is looking at him with sympathy, not judgment.
“No, I didn’t.”
“But you could’ve.”
Steve lets out a huff of breath through his nose. “Yeah, right. Leave everybody behind with fucking B-roll horror movie monsters coming out of the walls? No way. Plus, where would I have gone? It turns out that being prom king and kinda good at swimming doesn’t mean shit in the real world. My grades sucked, I didn’t get a scholarship, and my dad made it pretty goddamn clear that he wasn’t going to pay for me to dick around at state school for four years.”
“Steve—” Eddie starts.
“No, man, you don’t have to try and make me feel better about it,” Steve says, cutting him off. “I was a loser, okay? Nance dumped me ‘cause I was a loser. I mean, shit, even my parents noticed. I remember this one time my parents were supposed to be at some charity function all night, so I went out with this girl from the cheerleading squad, and when I got home my mom was sitting at the kitchen table. It was like eleven o’clock or something and she was by herself—I guess my dad had called a car to take her home ‘cause she had too much to drink. Anyway, I come stumbling in after hooking up with this girl, and my mom looks me up and down, and she’s like, ‘You’re just like him, you know.’”
Steve aims for levity, telling the story like it’s funny, but when he looks over at Eddie, he’s looking at him in shock.
“Jesus Christ, Steve.”
“Oh, come on,” Steve scoffs. “It’s not that bad.”
“That’s pretty bad, dude.”
Steve frowns. “I didn’t mean to ruin the vibe.”
“No, no, I asked,” Eddie says. Then, thoughtfully, he asks, “So, what? That’s why you like Springsteen?”
“Well, that makes it sound pathological,” Steve says, channeling Robin again. “No, I mean… I dunno. He’s just a guy, you know? Just a guy who wanted to get the hell out of where he was from. I used to think that I could be like that, too.”
“You still can, you know.”
Steve sits up and reaches for his abandoned beer, now lukewarm and half-flat. “What are you, my shrink? I’ve harshed the vibe enough already. Put on something else, man. Pick anything you like.”
Eddie studies Steve for a long moment. Finally, he shrugs and pushes himself up off the rug. His backpack is sitting next to the sofa, right by his scuffed boots, and he crouches down to rummage through it. Eddie doesn’t go anywhere without music, so Steve isn’t surprised when he procures a handful of cassettes from an inner pocket.
“Hey, it’s your turn,” Steve says. “I bared my soul, now you go. Pick an album that means something.”
Glancing down at the tapes in his hand, Eddie drops all but one back into his backpack. He goes over to the sound system to switch it out. In the meantime, Steve takes a minute to gather up the trash around them—empty beer cans, a bag of chips with only dust left—and dump it in the trash can in the kitchen. When he comes back, Eddie is sitting with his legs crossed in front of the stereo.
“What’d you pick?” Steve says, flopping back onto the rug.
“Well, after that, it’s gonna sound corny.”
Steve shrugs. “Whatever. Tell me anyway.”
Eddie rolls his eyes, but he turns back to the console anyway. He presses on the fast-forward button for a while, eyebrows knitted in concentration, and stops when he’s pretty sure he’s there. After a few moments, he presses play and sits back on the rug, leaning back with his hands propped behind him.
A familiar guitar line spills out the speakers. Steve’s mouth quirks up into the start of a smile.
“I know this one,” he says.
“If you didn’t, I’d check your short-term memory,” Eddie quips.
Steve’s half-smile turns into a grin. He knows the song because this is one of Eddie’s favorite albums. Turbo. Judas Priest. It came out when he was still in a medically-induced coma in the Hawkins General Hospital with dozens of stitches holding his internal organs in place. When he woke up, it was one of the first things he asked to be brought to the hospital. Nancy had driven Mike and Dustin to a record store a few towns over to pick it up; she was the only one with both a driver’s license and clearance from the doctors for activity, and Dustin had a list of tapes he wanted to buy for Eddie. To cheer him up, Dustin had said. When Steve went in for all the follow-up appointments (for his surgery, and then his road rash, and then to have his stitches removed), he got used to dropping by Eddie’s room and finding him in his hospital gown, headphones on, bobbing his head to Turbo playing so loud that Steve could hear it from outside the door.
Anyone else would probably have put the album away for good after that, too poisoned by bad memories. But Eddie is sitting next to Steve’s stereo with his eyes half-shut and his hands on his shins, bobbing his head along to the music, just like he did at the hospital. Steve doesn’t know the name of the song, but he recognizes the chorus from the approximately one million times he’s heard Eddie play it in his van: We don’t need, no / No, no, no parental guidance here. It’s catchy as fuck.
Eddie looks so content just listening that Steve hates to interrupt, but he can’t keep in his curiosity for much longer.
“Okay, spill. What is it about this song? Why’s it your Thunder Road?”
Eddie opens his eyes, blinking as if he had forgotten, for a moment, where he was and why he was there. He picks up the empty case and looks down at it in his hands. It has a now-familiar image on the cover: a manicured hand wrapped around a gear shift, rendered with a retro-futuristic sheen. He sighs and slumps down onto the carpet, staring up at the ceiling like Steve had just minutes before.
“This is gonna sound ego-centric as fuck,” he says, “but I feel like this album was made for me.”
Steve lifts an eyebrow.
“You know where Parental Advisory stickers come from, right?”
Steve looks at Eddie, skepticism written across his face. Eddie tilts his head and glances over at him.
“Okay, fair,” Eddie snorts. “I dunno why I asked that. It’s a long story, but basically, some senator’s wife got her knickers in a twist after her daughter heard a song she didn’t like, so she started a whole fuckin’ investigation to look into porn rock.”
“Porn rock?” Steve repeats, incredulous.
“Porn rock,” Eddie confirms, solemnly. “I know, right? My two favorite things. Anyway, they made a whole committee about it and they dragged a bunch of musicians in front of Congress to answer for all the fucked-up stuff they were putting in their songs. An excellent use of taxpayer dollars. It wasn’t just metal, either. They tried to ban Cyndi Lauper. I mean, Cyndi fucking Lauper, dude.”
“Wow, Erica would have been devastated.”
Eddie laughs. “Yeah. Apparently Cyndi Lauper wrote a song about jerking off.”
“Sounds progressive,” Steve muses.
“Totally. A win for women’s lib, if you ask me. Anyway, they made a list of songs that were considered the worst of the worst, and Judas Priest made the list. ‘Eat Me Alive.’ You know it, I play it all the time.”
“Yeah, okay, rings a bell.”
“So all these senators’ wives are grilling metal musicians about trying to turn their kids into Satanists, Priest included, and then a year or two later they come out with this. ‘Parental Guidance.’ Basically a fuck-you to Congress, telling all those stuck-up senators and their wives where they can put their parental advisory stickers.”
“Wow,” Steve says. “Pretty metal.”
“Very metal.” Eddie agrees. “It rules. Like, imagine you get brought in front of the American government to explain yourself, then it turns out that it’s just a witch hunt and they want to dress you down in front of the country, but instead of backing down you do this. Stick it to the man and sell a million records in the process. It’s metal as fuck.”
Somewhere in the monologue, Eddie’s point finally clicks. Steve turns his head to look at him. There’s a grin on Eddie’s face and a sharp look in his eyes as he stares off into the middle distance, like he’s imagining something wonderful just within reach. The tape has moved on, cycling to the next track, but Steve gets it. He gets why this was the album Eddie played on repeat on those long, dull hours he sat in the Hawkins General Hospital, back when he was still cuffed to his cot with state troopers standing guard outside. He understands why this album became so special to him—why it wasn’t just an album that he wanted, but music that he needed when his life and his future hung in the balance.
“That’s gonna be you one day,” Steve says.
Eddie blinks. He jerks his head to the side, meeting Steve’s eye.
“What?”
“That’s gonna be you,” Steve repeats. “You’re gonna get out of here. If anyone can, it’s you. In ten years you’re gonna be the one flipping the bird to all of the losers back here.”
For once, Eddie seems not to have a response. His eyes flit around Steve’s face, as if he’s waiting for a punchline. Steve isn’t joking, and he isn’t lying, either. For as long as he’s known Eddie, he’s known this to be true. No one else has Eddie’s drive or talent or passion or sheer electricity . If anyone is getting the fuck out of Hawkins with just a guitar strapped to his back, it’s Eddie. It was never Steve who was going to get out like The Boss sings about in Thunder Road. That song is about Eddie, not him.
For a long moment, it looks like Eddie is trying to come up with some kind of response to lighten the moment and break the tension. In the end, he doesn’t. He just meets Steve’s eye and smiles softly.
“Thanks, Steve. I hope so.”
Steve smiles too, but it’s tinged with sadness. He can already see how it will happen. In ten years he’ll be thirty-something and washed-up, married to some girl who doesn’t really like him and selling used cars or whatever, and he’ll see a copy of Rolling Stone in the supermarket and Eddie will be on the cover. He’ll look good. Handsome. Healthy. Happy. It’ll hurt, seeing Eddie making a life for himself without Steve, but it will be a good hurt, because Eddie will be living the life he deserves to live. No Hawkins. No monsters. Just him and his guitar and his music.
“You gotta promise me something, though.”
Eddie’s gaze is level, locked on Steve’s. “Anything.”
“When you’re famous, you can’t forget me,” Steve says. His face heats and he rushes to correct himself. “Us, I mean. You can’t forget us. The party.”
“Steve,” Eddie says, his voice soft.
“Never mind. Forget I said anything.”
Steve looks away, cheeks burning. Silently, he curses Eddie and his stupid penchant for earnesty. He tricked Steve into being honest, too honest, and now Steve’s played his hand. Now Eddie knows why Steve is so clingy sometimes, why he spends so much time with Eddie—because he wants as much of Eddie as he can have until Eddie is gone for good.
“Steve,” Eddie repeats.
“Eddie,” Steve fires back, feeling petulant.
“Do you mean that?”
When Steve turns his head, Eddie has rolled onto his side and pushed himself up so he can look down at Steve. He’s backlit by the floor lamp behind him, turning his dark hair almost auburn. They’re so close to each other that Steve can make out all kinds of devastatingly intimate details: the shadow of stubble on Eddie’s upper lip, the scar on his left cheek, the divot in his earlobe where he got it pierced a year or so ago.
“Do I mean what?”
“Do you mean that you don’t want me to forget you?”
Steve digs his teeth into his lower lip. If anyone else were asking this question, he would figure out a way to dodge it or make it into a joke. But it’s Eddie looking at him, point-blank with those huge, dark eyes, and Steve couldn’t live with himself if he lied.
“Duh,” Steve says. “I’d be offended if you did.”
Eddie smiles, a crooked thing.
“As if I could ever forget you, Steve Harrington.”
The moment stretches between them—long seconds feeling even longer as Eddie looks down at Steve. Eddie starts drifting closer and Steve thinks, for a beat, that it’s an optical illusion. But it’s not. Eddie is leaning down towards Steve, so close that the ends of his hair brush Steve’s face. He smells like whiskey and leather and everything Steve has wanted for the last year but not been able to admit.
It’s Steve that closes the distance. He pushes himself up off the carpet, just enough to press his lips to Eddie’s. It’s fast. Clumsy. Maybe the worst kiss he’s given anyone since his first kiss when he was twelve. But it’s enough to make Eddie stop and stare down at Steve with wide eyes.
“Steve…”
“It’s okay,” Steve says, and flops back down onto the rug. He covers his face with his hand. “You don’t have to say anything. I just— I needed to know, okay.”
“Needed to know what?”
Steve groans. Eddie is like a damn dog with a bone sometimes: so persistent that he doesn’t realize when other people want him to drop it.
“We both know you’re gonna leave one day,” Steve says, still covering his face, “so I just needed to know. Before you’re gone.”
“Steve.”
Steve drags his hand down his face. Eddie is staring down at him, a slightly wild look in his eye.
“You wanted to know what it’s like to kiss me before I’m gone?” he asks, incredulous.
This is agonizing. Steve groans and tries to roll away from Eddie—maybe lie on his face and just die here—but Eddie grabs his arm and keeps him from squirming away.
“You wanted to kiss me?” he asks.
“No, that was a total accident,” Steve snipes. “Yeah, Eddie, okay. I’m sorry. I wanted to kiss you. You don’t have to stay if I made you uncomfortable.”
“No, I’m just making sure you did it on purpose.”
“What—?”
Before he can finish the question, Steve is cut off by the feeling of Eddie’s mouth pressed harshly against his. Eddie isn’t a very good kisser—at least, not now, when it feels like he’s kissing Steve to make a point. A surprised noise escapes the back of Steve’s throat. He reaches blindly for Eddie and lands a hand on his cheek, where he’s able to direct Eddie to tilt his face and soften the kiss by just a bit. He realizes then that Eddie’s hand is curled in the hair at the nape of his neck, holding on tight like he’s afraid that Steve will slip through his fingers.
“I’m not leaving you behind,” Eddie says into the scant space between them. “Fuck no. You’re coming with me.”
“I am?” Steve says, stupidly.
“Duh. I’d be out of my mind if I let you go.”
Steve’s chest seizes at that. He likes that image: he likes the idea of Eddie holding onto him as hard as he’d just been grabbing his hair. All his life Steve has grasped for the wrong straws, picked the wrong friends, clung onto people as they were already walking out the door. For so long he thought that it was his fault. It always seemed like he was the one holding on too tight—like he needed to learn how to cool down, back off, seem less desperate in his need for connection.
Maybe all he needed was someone who wanted to hold on to him just as tight.
“Cool,” Steve says.
The stereo starts playing a song about being young and reckless. Steve feels it then: the electric energy of the music that Eddie loves, pumping through his veins and making him feel like anything is possible. It buzzes under his skin, crackles in his fingertips like a static shock. They can talk about this later and figure out exactly what they mean. All that matters right now is making Eddie understand that he’s right there with him.
“Tell me where you wanna go, and I’m there.”
“Well, LA, eventually, but I’m pretty happy right here for now,” Eddie says.
Steve grins.
“Well, in that case,” he says, for the second time that night.
He pulls Eddie down to join him on his parents’ stupidly expensive carpet. If any of the neighbors peered in the windows right now, they would see the Harrington kid tangled up on the carpet with Eddie Munson and heavy metal music playing in the background. It would give Richard and Stella Harrington a coronary, but maybe that would teach them a lesson. If they don’t give him a reason to stay, then he’s gone—getting the hell out of town with somebody who actually cares about him.