Archive of Our Own

Halfway through dinner, Eddie excused himself from the table and took a suspiciously long time to reappear. Richie, observing this, waited three minutes before putting his napkin down and following him into the kitchen. "Spaghedward?" he said, knocking lightly on the door frame. "Babe? You okay?"

Eddie, who had the freezer open and his head inside of it, stepped back. He was sweating; Richie could tell, even across the kitchen. Unfortunately, the sweat had made his hair spring loose from its gel and curl softly around his ears. He looked cute as a button, despite the panic. "They hate me," he croaked.

"They don't."

"They fucking do. Richie, I'm gonna throw up," Eddie said. He fanned himself with his hand, throat clicking as he swallowed. "Your dad hasn't blinked in the last half hour, and your mom, is she eating the lasagna or trying to reduce it to atoms? They liked me fine when I was a kid!"

"They like you now, Eds," Richie soothed him. "If they didn't I'd tell them to fuck off, okay?"

"They're your parents."

"Well, I haven't consulted the org chart, but I'm pretty sure love of my life outranks parents."

Eddie laughed—a little. He was in a collared shirt and tie, because he was a lunatic who had dressed up for Richie's elderly parents. He had gone to work in a suit and then come home and changed into a different Oxford shirt and tie. He had also cooked them dinner. Richie, on the drive from LaGuardia, had listened to his parents go fifteen fucking rounds on what to order for dinner—Chinese or Indian, Italian or Mexican, oh honey shouldn't we get deep dish pizza since we are in New York—only to find the condo sparkling clean and a spinach lasagna cooking in the oven.

Poor Eddie was scared shitless of his nonthreatening, retiree parents. It was adorable.

Richie rubbed his arm through the thin cotton of his sleeve. "Eddie," he said gently. "They're just weird. They're unsocialized, and I've literally never brought someone home before, and it's you, my childhood best friend who I'm living with. Plus the gay thing. They're processing."

"Tell them to process faster."

Kissing Eddie on the cheek, Richie promised, "They'll go back to the hotel soon."

He dug out another bottle of red wine—Bill had sent them some from his private collection when they bought the place, but Richie rarely drank and Eddie only enjoyed the nauseatingly sweet stuff, so it had languished in the pantry for months—and brought it and Eddie back to the table. His parents were in the midst of some trivial argument. Went was squinting at his cell phone, ignoring his wife; his mom was mincing her lasagna into the smallest bites known to humankind to avoid eating it. They both wore heather gray sweatshirts, which they had always called "traveling clothes." When Richie led his poor, terrified boyfriend back to the table, they both looked up and smiled.

"Did you boys need any help?" said his mother, nibbling on her crumb of lasagna.

"Mom," Richie said, long-suffering, "I wish you wouldn't call me a boy. I'm in my forties. It makes me feel creepy."

"Well fine, but you shouldn't speak for Eddie. Maybe he doesn't mind!"

Eddie, who'd been opening the wine with the electric corkscrew, froze in his tracks. "Oh, I—"

"Mom. Don't tease him," Richie said, for the millionth time.

His mother smiled angelically. She and Went had the same sense of humor, wherein they annoyed everyone around them, constantly. For about three years in middle adolescence, Richie had driven them fucking bananas by being a moody, sarcastic, smart-mouthed teenager; then the balance of power had flipped back and they started irritating Richie to the back teeth once more. Their love of teasing was not the only reason he'd never brought someone home before, but it had definitely factored in.

Went finally put his phone down to ask, "How's work, Eddie? Richie says you're a financial analyst."

"Risk analyst," Eddie corrected. He looked over at Richie, who gave him a small, discreet thumb's up. "It's very boring. I would never subject you to stories about my job."

"No, I like people who have boring jobs," Went said. Richie's father had never gotten over Richie dropping out halfway through college. As the only child of two stone-cold weirdos who made everything on earth a bit, Richie had been compelled to act out his entire life; he was thus shocked his parents were shocked when he entered entertainment. They had seemed very pleased when Richie explained over the phone that Eddie had a sedate office job. The words good influence may have been said. Went continued, "It makes me feel very secure, knowing there are lots of people doing things I don't understand, keeping the world running."

"That would be Eddie," Richie said. "Without him pressing buttons, they couldn't keep the lights on in this fair city of ours."

Eddie, who researched financial transactions for an insurance company and did nothing whatsoever with the power grid, glared at him.

"Now, why are you allowed to tease Eddie," Maggie said, "But I'm not?"

"Because Eddie can tell me to fuck off," Richie said. "He's not going to tell you to fuck off."

Maggie hmmphed in her throat. "Eddie, please feel free to tell me to fuck off."

Shaking his head, Eddie stammered, "Oh, no, I'm—it's fine."

Across the table, his dad's mouth twitched. Richie took that as a good sign. When his parents suggested flying to New York to re-meet his boyfriend, Richie had been leery, especially after their awkward coming-out conversation; but when he brought it up to Eddie, Eddie had instantly gone so apeshit bananas about it that Richie felt permission to be calm. I can't handle parents, Eddie moaned, spread-eagle on the bed while Richie lay on his yoga mat, doing the exercises his new physical therapist had ordered him to complete. I'll tell them no then, Richie puffed, doing his goofy little knee bends. No! Eddie yelled, They're your parents. Over the next month or so, Eddie had gone back and forth on the issue a dozen times, but in the end he'd said yes. So long as they get a hotel, he said grumpily, as he made Richie and himself their morning coffees, I can't handle seeing your dad in a bathrobe.

This was going about as well as Richie could have hoped. Eddie was pale and rabbitty but hadn't bolted—good. His parents were being weird as fuck but no more than normal—good. Plus they hadn't asked about Eddie's arm—very good. Richie flipped shit when people were weird to Eddie about his amputated arm, so much so that Eddie had instructed him, in no uncertain terms, to chill out about it. You almost fucking died, Richie snapped, and Eddie had just said, Right, but I didn't? Plus it's not like asking insensitive questions is gonna make my other one fall off. Eddie was annoyingly calm about the whole thing. When Richie, irked, pointed this out to him, he had just shrugged. I do yoga.

"You know," said his dad, around a mouthful of salad, "I keep trying to get this right in my head but I don't think I have the details down. How did you two end up back in touch?"

Eddie looked at Richie, prompting him to answer. It was Richie's lie; he was in charge of keeping it straight. "Well, you remember Stan," Richie said.

"Oh, Andrea and Don's son," his mother said, nodding. "The polite one."

"Hell of an impacted wisdom tooth, back left." Went tapped the left side of his jaw, that familiar speculative look in his eye. "Growing in sideways."

Charming. Next time he spoke to Stan, he'd be sure to mention that his dad didn't remember him as Richie's best friend and neighbor or even as the kid who had accidentally demagnetized his VHS recordings of the 1985-1990 Super Bowls, but as the owner of a severely impacted tooth. "Right, so, Stan had an accident, and Mike—you remember Mike Hanlon—he thought it would be nice if he invited us all to visit Stan and cheer him up." Richie reached across the table and very gently offered Eddie his hand. "And that's how Eddie and I got to talking again."

After a moment's hesitation, Eddie took it. Eddie didn't give a shit about PDA—he had been remarkably blasé when a photo of them kissing in the arrivals terminal at JFK landed on the E! website barely two months into their relationship—but he was skittish about parents. It was a tiny victory that Eddie linked their hands together; Richie, grateful, squeezed his fingers.

Meanwhile, his parents weren't even paying attention. "I thought the Urises moved away," Went said, still tapping the hinge of his jaw, no doubt picturing Stan's fucked-up tooth. "Summer of '94, '95?"

His mother thought it was 1992—obviously not, Stan had graduated with him and Ben—but she admitted she might have been getting it mixed up with the summer Eddie left. "Oh, that was a terrible time for our Richie," she said, shaking her head til her reading glasses jingled on their chain around her neck. "Richie didn't get out of bed for a week. And when he did he disappeared for four days, I think you were sleeping in the woods with Stanley and that little round friend of yours, what was his name, Ben something—"

"Mom," Richie said, cutting her off before he died of shame. "Please."

"No, that's—that sounds nice," Eddie said. He shot the Toziers a small glance before moving his hand to grab Richie by the wrist, in the position Richie had affectionately christened gay elf hand-holding. Richie, smiling softly, mirrored him, holding Eddie by the wrist too. "I missed you too, Richie."

The moment would have been really perfect had not his mother followed it up with, "Eddie, does your mother live here in the city?"

Eddie coughed into his hand. Then he shot Richie a wry, disbelieving smile, before adopting the solemn expression a normal, untraumatized human being would wear when asked about their dead mother. "Actually, she passed about ten years ago."

Neither of his parents had known Sonia beyond occasionally speaking to her on the phone when she was looking for Eddie as a kid, so Richie hoped Eddie would not be offended that his father said, "Terrible, just terrible."

"I'm so sorry to hear that, Eddie," Maggie said, shaking her head again. "She raised a lovely son, though. I'm sure she was very proud of you."

Before Eddie had the chance to burst out laughing, Richie hastily snagged the wine bottle and brandished it at his parents. "More wine, anyone?"

Eddie hadn't made dessert; he was not a restaurant, after all. But when Richie's parents finished eating they looked, extremely expectantly, at Richie until Richie got up and dug through the kitchen for a sleeve of Oreos. He served the Oreos on one of their good china serving platters from Crate & Barrel, and then went back into the kitchen to brew them coffee. Eddie followed him in there. "Oreos?" he hissed.

"Oh, yeah," Richie said. He was wearing his own merch underneath his jacket, a pink t-shirt with the word TRASH emblazoned over his pectorals and then a photo of his own mouth curled into a lazy smile beneath it; the name of his talk show was written on the back. Eddie hated that Richie wore that shirt in public. It was an aesthetic nightmare, and also Eddie liked to wear it as a pajama shirt. "They like dessert. Sorry, if I'd known you were cooking I'd have warned you, they eat dessert with every meal."

"But he's a dentist," Eddie said; Richie just shrugged.

When Richie's parents had finished drinking their coffee and eating their Oreos, Eddie assumed they would leave. Which he was thrilled about—unlike some people, he'd worked all day, come home, cleaned the condo from ceiling to baseboards and then cooked. He was dying to be alone with Richie. Usually, when he got home, Richie was the one cooking, and he'd pour Eddie some sugary pink wine and listen to Eddie rant about whichever industry was on his shitlist today.

But it was not to be. Right as Eddie was itching to fetch their coats, Dr. Tozier carefully placed his coffee cup on his saucer and said, "Eddie. May I speak to you alone?"

In the chair beside him, Richie tensed. "Dad, no. I'm fucking middle-aged, don't do the boyfriend speech."

"Richie, if you didn't want me giving the boyfriend speech when you're forty-two, you should have brought home a boyfriend earlier," Dr. Tozier said. Richie turned pink—Eddie could guess what was going on his head, and it wasn't pretty. Richie had not been in the closet for most of his adult life because he thought it would be fun and zesty to come out in his forties. Being out publicly had been unpleasant for him, but Richie was particularly tender about his parents' reaction. They'd had a weird phone call just after the new year, after which Richie had laid on the floor for four hours. I told them, he said robotically, while Eddie sat next to him on the rug and gently stroked his back. It was... fine.

Richie's parents stressed Eddie the fuck out, but they couldn't hurt him the way they could Richie. So Eddie decided to take one for the team. "It's fine," he said, laying his hand on Richie's arm. "I could use some help carrying in the dishes anyway."

His bravery wore off somewhat between the dining table and the kitchen, though. By the time Eddie had dumped the dishes into the sink and started the hot water flowing, he was back to panicking. Dr. Tozier had been a good dentist and had tolerated Eddie ringing his doorbell a dozen times a day as a child, but Eddie hadn't been alone in his presence since his annual checkup in the eleventh grade. Plus, he wasn't his dentist now—he was his boyfriend's father. Eddie's track record with parents was abysmal. Myra's mother had sued him in small claims court, for God's sake.

"Eddie." Richie's father grinned at him. "You can relax, you know."

"I'm relaxed," Eddie lied.

Annoyingly, Richie looked very similar to his dad, only half a foot taller. His dad gave him a knowing look, eyes squinted, that meant Never kid a kidder when it was on Richie's face.

"So," Dr. Tozier said, "You're in love with my son."

"Yes," Eddie agreed.

"This is very concerning to me," Dr. Tozier said gravely, "If only because I seem to recall that you spent almost every weekend at our house during high school. And we had a very strict no-girlfriends policy, but it just didn't occur to me to make a no-boyfriends policy."

Eddie blinked, unsure if Dr. Tozier was implying what he thought he was. "I—we weren't—I didn't—"

"It's just that I hate to be a hypocrite. I really should have banned you at the front door," Dr. Tozier continued.

Well, this was going both worse and better than Eddie had hoped. On the one hand, Dr. Tozier was clearly making fun in a light-hearted way; he was grinning to himself with the kind of self-satisfied delight that he and Richie's mom always had. Richie had said long-sufferingly that there had never been two people more tickled by their own jokes—Eddie saw what he meant the minute the Toziers had swept into the condo. But Dr. Tozier seemed genuinely, without trace of artifice, fine with the whole situation. Based on the weird phone call and Richie's trepidation about their visit, Eddie had been expecting them to at least be cold, if not outright disapproving. Being teased was no tropical vacation, but it was better than that.

On the other hand, Richie's dad seemed convinced that Eddie and Richie had been secretly dating as teenagers. Nothing could be further from the truth—they had both been huge dweebs who had never noticed their crushes had been mutual. While Eddie had spent countless hours in Richie's bedroom during high school, that time had been spent doing calculus homework together, or playing Super MarioWorld on Richie's shitty black-and-white TV.

"That's not—I swear it wasn't an issue, " Eddie protested, his heartrate spiraling into tachycardia.

"Water under the bridge," Dr. Tozier said. "Mags and I are very happy for you both now, of course."

Eddie gave up. He was Richie's dad; Richie could explain it to him later. "Um. That's good."

Dr. Tozier offered Eddie his hand, and Eddie shook it. "Also," Dr. Tozier said, "If you hurt my son, I'll have you killed."

Eddie blinked, but Dr. Tozier didn't. He wasn't particularly intimidating, looking like a smaller, older version of Richie with a walrus mustache and a hearing aid, but Richie said he still golfed all eighteen holes down in Florida. Maybe he would sneak up behind Eddie and hit him with a golf club. Or feed him to an alligator. Eddie had lost an arm and nearly his life to an alien sewer monster; he didn't think he'd like to be eaten by an alligator. Luckily, he had zero plans to hurt Richie, beyond occasionally forcing him to get his moles checked, or yelling at him for losing another Metrocard.

"I will do my best not to," Eddie said, unfortunately conscious of how sweaty his palm was in Dr. Tozier's grip.

"Good to hear," Dr. Tozier said brightly, releasing Eddie's hand at last. "Now what do you say we go find our dates?"

With that, he swept from the room as fast as an elderly dentist possibly could. Eddie, deciding to count this conversation as a win, followed him.

He volunteered to escort the Toziers to the lobby and put them in a cab—Richie's leg seemed to be bothering him, and Eddie figured that, as far as mischief went, the Toziers would have a hard time topping a threat against his life—but Richie refused. He seemed eager to discuss the whole boyfriend-speech with his father. Eyes glinting, he grabbed his cane and shuffled his parents out into the hallway.

When Richie let himself back into the apartment, Eddie had thrown the dishes into the dishwasher, shed his tie and unfurled himself on the couch in front of MSNBC. Eddie hit pause when he heard Richie's key turning, but didn't get up; he was comfortable. "So?"

"He says he was nice," Richie said. He tossed his cane against the entertainment center. He had personally built that entertainment center, fighting with the plywood and the Allen wrenches while ignoring Eddie's offers of assistance; he claimed this gave him the right to prop his cane there. "Was he nice, Eds? If he wasn't, we can ditch them tomorrow and go to the Hamptons, just us. Bev's still in Mexico with Patty and the baby, we can crash at her place in Montauk."

"Well. He threatened to have me killed."

"Went? No way," Richie said, scoffing. "What's he gonna do, throw his dentures at you? Seriously. My seventy-one year old father threatened your life?"

When Richie joined him on the couch he did so very delicately, more out of deference to his own hip than to Eddie's comfort, but it was still nice of him. He also immediately put his ass on Eddie's crotch, because he was a horn-dog. Grinning, Eddie pulled him back into the optimal spooning position. "Really, he did."

"Yikes," Richie said. "Do you still love me, or did my psycho murder dad scare you off?"

"Would you fuck off? Obviously, yes," Eddie said, pinching Richie's earlobe. There were rules to the do-you-still-love-me game. Richie had driven Eddie crazy by asking him this question constantly after Eddie had first said I love you to him. Now he was allowed to ask once per day, but he had to mean it and he had to believe Eddie when he said he did. "Gonna take more than your would-be murderer dad to scare me off."

"He doesn't have what it takes. Speaking as the only killer in this apartment, he's just not up to it," Richie said.

That was a dark fucking joke, but Eddie laughed anyway. "Hey, I killed a clown, that counts, asshole. Besides—it was sweet. He said he'd kill me if I ever hurt you."

"Aww," Richie said. "I guess he does love me. When I came out, my mom made a big deal out of it, but Went was just—really silent? Which, since he never shuts up, I figured he wasn't down with it. But maybe the old man does have a heart."

Eddie had known Wentworth Tozier for three hours as an adult, and even he would have found it sinister if the man had suddenly clammed up. For Richie, it must have been hell. "For what it's worth," he said, combing Richie's hair back off his face, "He seems happy for us, Rich."

"Yeah." Richie exhaled like a popped balloon. "I know. I'm glad, but I'm also pissed, because I still had to tell them, you know? And then I get pissed at me because I know this is is a non-issue. Like, oh yeah, maybe your parents didn't notice you were gay your whole life, but at least they're fine with it, boo hoo for you."

Eddie ached for Richie. One of Richie's many problems was that he was meaner to himself than anyone—alien clown demons obviously excluded—had ever gotten the chance to be. It was just like Richie to beat himself up over his parents being nice to him after he came out. Eddie would have traded one of his remaining limbs for two living parents who loved him, rather than one dead abusive homophobe and one parent so long-dead he'd never known him—but as his psychiatrist had pointed out more than once, it wasn't productive to compare his and Richie's pain.

Still, he couldn't resist making a joke. Pressing a kiss into the join of Richie's neck, he said, "Wanna trade? I'll take Went, you can have Sonia."

Richie snorted. "Ridiculously easy set-up for a joke there, bub. I'm not into necrophilia."

"Am I fucking your dad in this scenario?" Eddie wondered, wrapping his hand around Richie's wrist in the move Richie annoyingly called gay elf hand-holding.

"Cucked by my own pops," Richie said sadly, clutching Eddie's wrist back. "Man. I knew you liked your men older, but c'mon, Eds, the man has two fake hips."

"You have a fake hip."

"Yes, and it's very sexy," Richie said. Eddie noticed with a little burst of pleasure that Richie's vocal mannerisms when he launched into his silly monologues were the same as his father's: they both flattened their vowels, drawling out the syllables. He loved learning new things about Richie, even after nearly two years together. "All the interns at work say to me, 'Oh, boss, we love your surgical scars and your fucked up hairline and your moderately critically acclaimed talk show.' I'm beating them off with my cane. Speaking of which, can we flip?"

Eddie had to worm his arm under his body to twist over onto his back. Being down a limb wasn't so bad, all things considered, but the amputation, plus the advancement of middle age, had made him pretty graceless. Not that he minded—Eddie liked being the little spoon. Plus, he was happy to do whatever to make Richie more comfortable.

Richie had complicated feelings about the cane and his leg more generally. Eddie liked Richie's cane—it helped him move around, which Eddie supported, and it made him look grizzled and sexy, like Dr. House—but Richie had been pretty torn up about it. His comeback show, the one that had landed him the talk show gig, had a long section devoted to shattering his hip via falling sixteen feet and becoming a forty year old with a mobility device. The jokes were blistering, raw, and heartbreaking—and very, very funny. After Mike and Bill caught Richie's tour in San Diego, Bill texted him, I have literally never written anything that good in my life. I'm so proud of you. Richie, overcome, had promptly taken to his bed for a week.

Happily, ever since his surgery, Richie was in a lot less pain, both mental and physical. Do you think Bev would paint flames on my cane? he asked Eddie once, getting underfoot while Eddie emailed invectives to Aetna about a denied physical therapy claim. Nah, Eddie replied, Tasteful racing stripes are in this season.

Once Eddie was settled facing the dark blue leather cushions, Richie wrapped his arms around Eddie's body, his strong forearms like a safety bar across Eddie's chest and waist. Eddie was so fucking smart for making the Toziers get a hotel room; he would die if Richie's weirdo parents walked in on them like this. Smugly, he reached back and patted Richie's ass. It was a good ass. Richie was fine as fuck and all his, and Eddie didn't have to share him with anyone, not even his parents.

Richie kissed the back of his neck, using just a hint of teeth. "You still love me, right?"

"Last I checked," Eddie said, eyes closed. Technically Richie had blown his shot at do-you-still-love-me for the day, but Richie's mouth was hot and wet; Eddie was much more forgiving when he was turned on. "What about you?"

"Yeah, I guess."

Eddie pinched him on the ass. "Piece of shit. I cooked your parents a fucking lasagna, and unlike you, I did eight hours of work today as well."

"Yes, but Eddie my love," Richie said teasingly, and he bit down on Eddie's neck hard enough that he squirmed, "You forgot the dessert."

Another one of Richie's problems was that he always overplayed his hand. Eddie hit him in the face with a throw pillow that said HOLLYWOOD on it; Richie, laughing, threw his arms up while Eddie whacked him a few more times for good measure. He made no move to stop him, which meant he was enjoying himself. God, the little shit. "Hope you enjoy that couch," Eddie said, crawling over him to freedom and stomping away, "Because you're sleeping on it tonight!"

Richie, the bastard, laughed so hard he rolled off the couch and onto the floor.

Eddie relented about letting him sleep in the bed. Richie knew he would; Eddie liked cuddling too much. Richie had never actually slept on the sofa. But Eddie had. They'd had an apocalyptic fight about Eddie's ex, right around Valentine's Day. Richie had yelled, Just admit you fucking hate her! and Eddie refused to do so, which was infuriating because Eddie did hate his ex-wife. Sorry that I had a fucking life before you, Eddie snarled back, and Richie said, Am I supposed to be impressed that you married some bitch to make your Mommy happy—

That had been the end of that conversation.

Overcome with guilt, Richie had crept into the living room in the middle of the night and curled up next to the couch in a nest of blankets on the floor. Eddie, lying awake on the couch above him, had sighed and said, Oh, this is fucking stupid, I can't believe I'm doing this for you, you bitch-lord asshole; then he'd crawled down to join Richie on the floor. They had both woken up with horrendous backaches, but they had traded apologies and then blowjobs right there on the floor, so overall, a good night.

Anyway. Richie never slept on the couch. Eddie just liked to threaten him with that sometimes, because he was a petty tyrant and Richie was thrilled to be his vassal and lackey. Instead, they stood side-by-side in the master bathroom, Eddie moisturizing his pretty face and Richie flossing.

"Can we please take them out for breakfast in the morning?" Eddie said as he slathered his face with gunk. "I'll trade getting photographed for not having your mom quiz me on the ingredients in a dish she won't even eat."

"She'll just quiz the waitress," Richie said, because he knew his mother. "But yeah. Bev's pancake place, or Ukrainian diner?"

"Do your elderly parents eat Ukrainian food?"

"My dad hasn't had a sense of taste or smell since the first Bush administration," Richie said. It was like father, like son when it came to smoking, although these days Richie was down to the occasional sneaky cigarette. "And my mom will just google 'how do you say trans fats in Ukrainian.' So it's up to you."

Eddie pursed his lips and considered that as he ran the tap and washed his hand, scrubbing the back of it against a washcloth he'd draped against the lip of the sink. "Which one will make them like me more?"

"Uh, Eddie, they love you," Richie said, slightly garbled as he flossed his back molars. "You have a job and all your teeth, and most importantly, you're one of ten people in the world who remember all our neighbors from Derry in the '80s. My mom's been waiting to tell somebody about her fucking vendetta against the Perelmans, my dad and I heard the story four billion times and we won't let her tell it anymore."

Flossing complete, Richie dropped the string into the trash can. Meanwhile, Eddie began flossing with one of the disposable plastic things Richie bought for him, the ones already strung with floss. "Really, they like me?"

"They told me so in the elevator." His mom had called Eddie a cutie pie, which made Richie die inside, and Went had pronounced him a fine young man. Maybe Went couldn't see the gray creeping along Eddie's temples then; more likely he'd said it to drive Richie nuts. "Also," Richie added. "I know my mom's table manners are fucking atrocious, but believe me, she was being polite. If she didn't like you, she'd have gone straight for the Oreos and told you to stick your lasagna where the sun don't shine."

Eddie made a contemplative noise as he squirted toothpaste onto his electric toothbrush. "I feel bad. There's zero chance my mom would have ever liked you."

It was deeply fucked up, but Richie was mildly envious of Eddie. Sonia had detested Richie and she would have foamed at the mouth if Eddie had ever come out to her, but she was irredeemably bad in every way, and dead besides. In contrast, Richie's parents were good, albeit weird, people and they loved him, but they had assumed he was something he wasn't for most of his life. They loved him without knowing a fundamental part of who he was. Like a coward, Richie sometimes wished he'd had the choice taken from him—that he'd never had to explain who he actually was to them. That he'd never had to choose a time to demarcate Before they knew, and After.

He'd told this to his therapist, who said it was fine to feel that way but probably not something to share with Eddie. So Richie just kissed Eddie's temple and said, "I consider it a badge of honor to be hated by Sonia."

"Consider yourself extremely honored, then."

Eddie started brushing in efficient circles while Richie waited for him to be done. Richie did not care that Eddie had one arm—he counted his blessings daily that Eddie was alive, in love with him and willing to tolerate him as a roommate—but sometimes, Eddie was doing something and Richie wanted to hold his hand. Like now, for instance. He was forced to stand there while Eddie brushed, waiting for his hand to become available.

When Eddie finally spat, Richie greedily took him by the wrist.

They had started holding hands like this after Richie had innocently put on Lord of the Rings in Eddie's presence. Unlike Richie, who reread the novels yearly, Eddie had no idea what was going on. At the pivotal moment in Return of the King, when Frodo nearly slipped into the volcano and Sam rescued him, Eddie had made his first comment in nearly an hour. That's smart, he said, nodding at the screen. That's the most secure way to hold hands, very low chance of letting go. Those gay elves know what they're doing.

They had never finished the movie. Richie had called Ben immediately to commiserate over dating a hot, illiterate jock, and Eddie had snippily gone on a run. You're proving my point, Richie said later, peeling Eddie's sweaty clothes off him, Hot jock. You can't read but damn it, you could bounce a quarter off these abs.

"What are you thinking about, Rich?" Eddie said, rubbing their faces together. He loved the feeling of Richie's scruff against his skin and thought he was very sneaky about it. Richie had figured it out pretty much immediately after their second kiss, merely five minutes after a freshly divorced Eddie stepped off the plane in Los Angeles; Eddie had mindlessly touched the sore underside of his lip for days.

"Can we get a cat?"

"What?" Eddie's reflection wrinkled his nose in the mirror. "Why a cat?"

"I figured you'd say no to a dog."

This made Eddie shake his head. Even after all this time together, Richie still had the exquisite pleasure of learning something new about Eddie. "I think I would rather have a dog than a cat. Why?"

"I have a sudden uncontrollable urge to permanently screw up another living thing," Richie said honestly, "And I don't think we have space for a kid."

Eddie laughed. The joke there was that Richie had once made the mistake of saying the condo was pretty small; Eddie, who had picked the place out while Richie was in L.A. packing up his shit, had defensively printed him out a ream of Zillow listings to prove that it was slightly on the larger side of average. Maybe it was, but they still had to rent a storage unit ten blocks away. But Richie had known when he moved to New York that he was saying goodbye to reasonable square footage and warm sunny winters and unbelievable produce. Who cared? Eddie was in New York, so that's where Richie wanted to be.

"Okay," Eddie said, "My preference goes dog, kid, cat. Kids go to college, Richie, and they need braces and shoes and, if we're their parents, probably a fuck-ton of therapy. Dogs just need, what, a leash? A bone?"

Humming contentedly, Richie said, "Let's table it til after my parents leave. Because if you even think the word 'grandchild' in their presence my mom will lose her entire fucking shit."

"I thought they already loved me, because of my thirty-two teeth and gainful employment. And, while we're on the subject, are you gonna explain who the fuck the Perelmans are, or am I supposed to know?"

Richie sighed. "Barb Perelman copied my mom's Fourth of July cake, ask her at breakfast about it, she'll be thrilled." He sniffed Eddie's hair. Eddie used the good shampoo that smelled like sandalwood; so did Richie, because Eddie threw out his bottles of Suave the very first night he slept over at Richie's place. "Also, thirty-two? That's way too many teeth."

"Is not," Eddie retorted.

"Which one of us would know." Richie had spent a non-trivial portion of childhood in his dad's waiting room, being haunted by posters of teeth. His hip was throbbing now, but Richie ignored it; he'd overexerted himself, taping all morning and then driving to LaGuardia and then landing on his ass on the floor. It wasn't that painful. He'd take some Advil and be fine.

"Richie, I don't know what to tell you, but I have thirty-two fucking teeth."

"No way," Richie said. "I'm gonna text my dad, that is too many."

Eddie had never been afraid to make a full-blown argument out of a simple disagreement. He had memorably ruined their six month anniversary, for example, by insisting a quail was bigger than a chicken; they had summarily been asked to leave the fancy restaurant and ended up eating Shake Shack in bed. Richie was therefore not surprised when Eddie yanked himself out of Richie's grasp and whirled around. "Put your finger in my mouth."

"Ooh, babe," Richie said.

Eddie glared at him. "I mean it," he said hotly, so Richie washed his hands, again, and then boosted Eddie up onto the vanity. This was pretty weird, but it was not at all the weirdest thing he'd done for Eddie. Or Eddie for him—Eddie had lovingly cleaned Richie's surgical incisions after his hip replacement and, humiliatingly, had even carried him to the toilet. Why are you doing this to me, Richie had moaned, because being cared for in his hour of need was one measly step above being eaten alive by a clown in his book. Because I'm in love with you, dumbass, Eddie said, unconcerned.

In contrast, letting Eddie grab him by the wrist and steer his fingers into his mouth was very tame. "Check it out," Eddie said, slightly mumbled, "Eight on each side."

Richie counted, touching each sloping tooth in Eddie's mouth. There were indeed eight on each side. "Gross! Oh my God, you're a specimen, Went's gonna lose his nut."

"You're gross," Eddie said fiercely but indistinctly, "I have perfect teeth, your dad's the one who told me so."

Richie nodded, only half paying attention to the conversation. Eddie's mouth was hot and silky-smooth inside, and when he spoke, Richie could feel his soft pink tongue moving. He traced Eddie's scar from the inside, dragging the pad of his finger against that slight change in texture, and he had to swallow hard against the sudden heat in his stomach. Eddie, noticing this, rolled his eyes. "Is this seriously turning you on?"

God, Eddie was so stupid. "My fingers are in your mouth, Eddie."

"So brush your teeth," Eddie said, removing Richie's hand and slithering off the vanity, "And come take me to bed."

Because Richie was incapable of knowing when to quit, he grinned and said, "You gonna put a baby in me, Eds?"

Eddie stopped moving. "Richie," he said, giving Richie a bone-chilling look of barely suppressed fury, "If you ever say that to me again, I will gut you like a fish."

"In a sexy way?"

"I'm leaving you," Eddie said, but as he exited the bathroom he also stripped off his undershirt, revealing his narrow, tanned back and the waistband of the novelty boxers Richie insisted on buying him. Apologies to Richie's father, but he did not last the ADA-recommended two minutes of toothbrushing; instead he did the absolute bare minimum, spat hastily into the sink and then followed Eddie to bed.

The next morning, while Richie was in the shower, Eddie went through their dirty laundry until he found the pink Trashmouth t-shirt. Folding it up, he placed it in his underwear drawer in his half of the bureau. As irritating as it was when Richie wore it out-and-about, the shirt could not reach its full potential as a pajama shirt until it smelled like Richie.

By the time Richie emerged from the bathroom, hair wet and face freshly shaven, Eddie had concealed all evidence of his crime. "Ready, Eddie my love?" Richie said, none the wiser.

They called a cab to the restaurant. Eddie was trying to wean Richie off ride-share apps—the employment policies these companies implemented were immoral—but Richie hated taking the subway with him. He didn't mind getting photographed alone but he was savagely protective of Eddie's privacy. Eddie didn't give a shit about his privacy. He was too good at his job to get fired for disappearing to Maine for a weekend and returning with one fewer limb; he was way too good to get fired for flipping off the fuck-heads who took sneaky photos of them. Besides, he wasn't on social media, although he occasionally logged onto Richie's so he could block trolls for him. But Richie liked to hold his hand without worrying who might upload the photo to Twitter, so Eddie carried cash around like a medieval peasant.

"Hey," he said, when the cab passed a library and a sudden thought occurred to him, "You should give your mom Mike's phone number."

Richie, staring out the opposite window, turned his head. "What the fuck, now you want to cuck my dad with Mike?"

"That's too many fucking uses of the word 'cuck' this weekend, Rich. No more," Eddie said, voice heated, trying not to notice the driver laughing at them behind the Plexiglass. "Anyway, Mike lived in Derry until two years ago, and you know he and Bill are still looking for primary sources for their book."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. That would be good, right? She'll probably have tons of stuff to talk about for the book. And Mike'll probably know the Perelmans, especially if they're still in town," Eddie said. Mike kept in touch with plenty of Derry people; when Eddie called him to catch up, Mike had the disconcerting habit of dropping gossip about Bill's A-list celebrity friends and Eddie's middle school classmates in the same conversation. So, I was talking to Brad, Mike might say, and it was even money whether he'd spoken to Brad Pitt on a red carpet or sent a happy birthday message to Brad Gaddis from Algebra class.

"She'd probably like it, but I don't think Mags is gonna be much of a primary source. I don't think she even remembers all the murders happening. You'd think we grew up in Mayberry, the way she talks about Derry. She still thinks my valedictorian speech is the greatest thing that ever happened there."

Eddie wondered if Dr. Tozier had videotaped Richie's valedictorian speech. Last summer when they were all together in the Keys, Stan had mentioned that Richie had snuck in at least six different dick jokes and cried during it. Eddie, horrified, had covered one of Rachel's ears. You can't swear in front of a baby, he said. Patty, who was drinking again for the first time since Rachel was born, burst into tipsy giggles. She doesn't understand English yet, Stan said, You fucking dumbass. Eddie had then chased him into the ocean; Patty had laughed until she cried.

If there was a lull in conversation—which seemed impossible, knowing the Toziers, but stranger things had happened—he could ask about the speech. Richie claimed no record of it existed, but his dad had been a VCR nut in the '90s, so there was at least a chance. Besides, Eddie bet the Toziers had lots of Richie's childhood things in their retirement village in St. Pete's. Whatever they would part with, Eddie wanted. Their condo was not large but he'd throw away his suits if it meant he could get his hands on Richie's old yearbooks and action figures and maybe—Eddie almost didn't dare hope—the tiny, precious baby clothes he must have worn once.

They didn't necessarily have to use them. He still wanted a dog more than a kid. But if there were tiny baby Richie socks floating around somewhere, Eddie wanted them.

"By the way, I can't believe you and Stan and Ben camped out in the Clubhouse after I moved away," he said. "That place was a fucking health hazard by then, you must have been really torn up if you stayed there willingly."

"Fuck you," Richie said. "I was more than torn up. I was fucking heartbroken, Eds."

Eddie squeezed his fingers. "I was too, you know."

Eddie had been distraught as they left Derry, sad when they reached Portland, and bored and unconcerned by the time they made it to New York. Richie had spent an extra year in Derry, miserably waiting for letters and phone calls that never came. Decades later, Mike had called and they'd both returned, Richie a depressed stand-up comedian and Eddie a hypochondriac shell of a person. They'd all returned, even Stan, although slightly late with bandages on his arms. Richie obliterated his leg and Eddie lost an arm, but they'd killed the clown and survived, and Eddie had kissed Richie in the hospital with the taste of greywater still in his bandaged mouth. A few months later, before the ink had even dried on his judgment of divorce, he called Richie from the the arrivals hall at LAX. Hey Rich, I'm in town, can I stay at your place? Two days later, Richie said, So like, are you moving here, or am I moving to New York? Because I don't think I can let you go again, Eds.

Richie, smiling sweetly, held him by the wrist, the securest possible way to hold hands, the one with the least chance of letting go. "Good thing we found each other again."

For a few blocks, they gazed, silently and tenderly, into each other's eyes. Eddie had long since memorized the planes and freckles and weird stray hairs of Richie's face, but he rarely passed up a chance to reacquaint himself. The breeze from the open car windows made Richie's hair ruffle around his face—it was getting long, Eddie thought. Richie's producers would be mad; Eddie made a note to schedule him a haircut.

"Oh," he said, as the cab rolled to a stop in front of the hole-in-the-wall Ukrainian diner. Thinking about Richie's hair had made him think about Richie's dad, how he looked like Richie but balder. "By the way, your dad thinks we were dating in high school."

"What?"

"Yeah," Eddie said, counting out bills and passing them to the driver. "Thanks, have a good one." He grabbed Richie's cane for him, shut the cab door and stepped up onto the curb. Richie, as was his habit, stayed on the asphalt. He did this under the mistaken belief that Eddie would kiss him more if their mouths were level. Eddie would kiss him anytime, anywhere, but he appreciated that Richie liked to make himself available and felt obligated to reward him. "He talked about it when he was threatening my life."

Richie kissed him again. Eddie missed his stubble; Eddie liked that little sting when it dragged against his bottom lip. "And that came up how?"

"He said he should have banned me from your bedroom. Apparently he thinks we were way cooler than we were."

"I wish we had been," Richie said mournfully. "Wish I could have known what it was like to hold your unblemished body."

Had they been at home, Eddie would have tugged Richie's hair, sharply redirecting Richie's head while his pupils blew wide, to make his point. Since Eddie didn't want to offer any would-be celebrity photographers insight into their sex life, he settled for punching Richie in the shoulder. "One arm is more than enough to bitch-slap with you with."

"Wow, I meant because we're old now, you bitch. Oh, hey!" Richie said, looking just past his shoulder. Eddie turned; down the street, an elderly couple in matching ORLANDO sweatshirts were getting out of an Uber. Ah, Jesus, Eddie was going to have to explain independent contractor law to the Toziers, too. Unnecessarily, Richie said, "There's my parents. Gee, I hope that's not an English-to-Ukrainian dictionary in Mom's hands."

The Toziers met them at the restaurant door. The redbud tree in front of the diner spilled petals all around them like pink snow. "Good morning boys," Mrs. Tozier said. "I'm excited to try Ukrainian food!"

"Dad," Richie said, turning to his father, "Tell Eddie his teeth are fucked up."

"No, he has very good teeth," Dr. Tozier said at once. "I probably x-rayed your head more than any other kid in Maine, and as I recall it you had nice alignment, good bite, always flossed well. Unlike you, kiddo."

"Ouch! Went gets off a good one."

Eddie, deeply smug, decided to be brave. "Thanks, Went."

"Oh, please, Eddie, call me Dad."

Freezing solid, Eddie shot Richie a terrified glance. He hadn't even called his own dad Dad; he was not about to call Dr. Tozier that. "I—"

"Oh my God!" Richie barked, throwing his hands up in the air. "Eddie, he's joking, don't call him Dad. Would you two please stop tormenting my fucking boyfriend."

"You should keep this one, Richie," Dr. Tozier said, grinning so hard his mustache twitched in glee. "Clearly panicking but he doesn't run. You need a man like that."

Eddie, heart still racing from adrenaline, then did something very stupid: he tried to make a joke. "Well, he's definitely keeping me. But it's because he likes my mouth."

All three Toziers turned and stared at him. The parents looked genteelly surprised, while Richie turned an interesting shade of puce and gripped his cane for dear life. Eddie, replaying what he had just said, felt his stomach drop sharply into his knees. "I mean—no, I mean my teeth!"

"Oh my God, Eddie," Richie said. Mrs. Tozier burst out into huge peals of laughter, so hard she had to bend over and slap her knees. Dr. Tozier put his hand on her upper back to steady her, beaming proudly at him.

"I swear I didn't mean it like that," Eddie protested.

"Richie," Mrs. Tozier said, standing slowly back up and wiping a tear from her eye, "I like this one, you should definitely keep him. Now, Eddie, do you know any Ukrainian yourself, because it really upsets my stomach if I eat anything with dill in it—is Kaspbrak Ukrainian? Should we get a table outside? Went?"

The two of them, hand in hand, trundled into the restaurant, but Richie waited with Eddie on the stoop and kissed him, a long, grateful kiss that Eddie melted into. "Do you still love me?" Richie said, half-joking and half-urgent, when they parted.

"Yes, even though your parents are fucking insane," Eddie said. "Do you still love me?"

"So fucking much," Richie said, kissing him again. There was a petal on his jacket; Eddie picked it off for him. "Thank you for putting up with them, and with me. When they leave, let's get a fucking puppy."

Eddie grinning, kissed him one more time. "We can talk about it later," he said, and smacked Richie on the ass. "Come on. I want syrniki, and we need to talk about what we're doing after breakfast, because I don't know how we're supposed to entertain your parents for the rest of the day."

"Eds, my love, my life, my sweet syrniki," Richie said, very seriously, "I'm telling you: ask her about Barb Perelman. Once you get her going about that stupid cake, she'll talk for hours. Thirty years from now, when we're old and gray and I'm bald as an egg and all your perfect teeth have fallen out, I'll still be in love you and my mom will still be bitching about Barb Perelman. Promise you."

"Sounds good to me," Eddie said, and he took Richie's hand in his.