Chapter Text
Stevie has only had one glass of punch. It’s sweet stuff, artificial and red and it tastes like pure sugar on her tongue. She’s not stupid enough to doubt how much it’s spiked just because she can hardly taste it. Parties at Carol’s always get messy fast - something to do with her mom being too drunk herself to ever lock up the liquor cabinet.
She probably wouldn’t have turned down games anyway, but with the boldness of sticky sweet punch in her veins, it takes only an excited Carol grabbing her hand and Tommy’s wheedling to have her quickly had her joining the assembling group. They’re all old enough that they might pretend they don’t care about dumb party games, but they all want to play them anyway.
Stevie’s first kiss was spin the bottle, sticky sweet and too eager - on Tommy’s part that is, and god he’s never stopped being that eager since, regardless of who the hell he’s dating. She thought, maybe , that dating Carol for the best part of two years might hold him down and make him stop looking at her like that, but it never has. Unfortunately. Parties like this mean she never quite forgets it, and maybe neither does he. The difference between them is Stevie moved the hell on.
Stevie claims the armchair, smug and comfortable as she sinks onto the plush floral cushion, and maybe she pretends not to notice the way Tommy watches when she crosses her legs and her pastel plaid skirt rides up high on her thighs. She feels his eyes though, heavy on her skin.
She can hear some boisterous laughter and chat as another person is jostled over to join the group, not initially even looking up from her examination of the chipped baby blue glitter polish on her nails.
“C’mon freak, might even get your first kiss,” one of them jeers, shoving the newcomer roughly and insistently into the group. Jason - because of course it’s Jason throwing his weight around trying to show he’s big enough and bad enough to play with the rest of them - pushes the shaggy-haired dark clad someone into the circle a little harder than could be considered friendly, his jeering surprisingly similar to the buzz of a fly. Annoying, constant, grating- but not devastating. A jangling accompaniment underpins Carver’s voice with the motion- keys or chains, something metallic with weight.
“Oh, Carver, you didn’t hear? Actually swapped spit with your mom behind the grocery store last year so I’ve got my first kiss covered. Tell her thank you. Sorry I didn’t call her.”
Stevie recognises the speaker, more than familiar with the way his voice carries across the busy school canteen on a regular basis - Eddie Munson. His comment actually gets a few laughs, which is probably what makes Jason’s eyes light up with unbridled rage. Eddie is shoved quite violently down onto the carpet, told to shut up and sit down, but he’s grinning like he knows he won. Stevie looks across the circle at Munson and amusement curls her lips up.
“Now we’re done recruiting, we’ll start.” She affects the kind of bored amusement that is appropriate for their boyish stupidity, then reaches down, the cut of her top showing just enough creamy smooth skin to draw eyes, a delicate golden chain and pendant a dangerously suggestive twinkle as it catches the light. She spins the bottle.
Eddie can feel Stevie look at him, appraising like a jaguar might size someone up, but he chooses to ignore it, focuses on the spinning glass refracting the dim lights across the floor.
Maybe he shouldn’t have focused on it so hard because it ends up pointing right at him, a spotlight he didn’t ask for. Shit.
He looks up, then, at Stevie perched on the armchair above all of her fucking peons, and raises his brows. Stevie clearly has all the fucking luck, but with the way she shifts a little forward in her seat, she’s apparently not backing down, not even now, with the bottle pointing at someone like him. Eddie supposes she’s kissed worse, considering he’s sure she’s made out with Hagan at a party or two if the rumor mill is to be believed. In the stretching silence, he starts the mental countdown - how long until Harrington wriggles out of this, makes someone else go in her place? Eddie has the peculiar sensation that he suddenly understands how Alice in Wonderland felt when she grew to outsize a house as the room seems to shrink tight around him. Hagan finally breaks the tension with a loud guffaw.
Eddie thinks he sounds like a fucking donkey, personally.
Stevie smiles serenely and gets to her feet. She’s not especially tall, not one of the tiny girls like Chrissy Cunningham or her like, but her stature still seems somehow Amazonian as she towers over the circle - maybe it’s how long her legs look in that stupidly short skirt. Tommy’s laughter stops on an abruptly choked noise when he realizes she apparently isn’t joking.
“Come on then, I’ll make this a seasonal act of charity.” Placing one hand on her hip, Stevie pauses and examines her nails, then looks up at Eddie.
“You’re actually gonna kiss him? Shit, Harrington, really slumming it tonight-” Hagan’s voice is a strangled sort of amusement that betrays more of his red-faced jealous desperation.
“It’s the name of the game isn’t it?” Stevie snarks back, rolling her eyes and heading towards the closet. An excitable Carol screeches something about being on a timer, waving around a wristwatch she’s thieved from Tommy’s wrist if his expression and the way he’s rubbing his arm are any indication. Eddie half wishes Stevie had spun Carol instead, if only so that he’d be spared hearing her voice for seven minutes.
Eddie offers up no retort to Stevie’s jab or the growing hysteria and whispers, just stands and dusts some carpet fibers off his ripped jeans - apparently Carol’s mom has redone the floors in here and he’s sure she’s gonna be pissed at the punch stains he’s already seen. He steps gingerly over a tipped-over and abandoned plastic cup as he makes his way across the room, feeling eyes all the way down his back. In some ways he’s used to that - but not tonight, not for something like this, where it wasn’t his choice to have commanded any attention from the masses. Stevie’s talking big in front of everyone, but Eddie already knows what’s going to happen when the door closes - nothing. Stevie brushes past him, momentarily filling his senses with the expensive sweetness of a perfume he cannot name, and he bows a little in her wake, sarcastic and over the top.
The closet is no cheap flimsy thing, a heavy paneled door with a brass handle that Eddie closes behind them with a weighty click. He immediately leans to one side, his back pressed up against someone’s forgotten letterman, jackets stacked up in bulging precarious shapes on the smattering of hooks. In the darkness it's easier to drop the pretense of not caring. Eddie keeps his voice low in case anyone particularly curious is standing near the door - he wouldn’t put it past Carol, honestly.
“Look, we don’t have to do anything. I know you said you would out there, but I’m not an idiot, so. Say whatever you want when we’re done as long as it’s not gonna get me beat up, and we can go our separate ways like this never happened.”
Stevie is ready to have Munson eager to kiss her - all of the boys are, even when they like to pretend otherwise. Some of them are so painfully obvious about it, the way they get up so close and touch her arms and her hair and stare at her glossy lips. She knows what people say about her, behind her back. They think she’s easy, that she’s spreading her legs for every boy who so much as takes an interest, that she’s a spoilt bitch and a slut. It’s only half true, the grains of truth in it are so small but enough to grind her down if she lets them. She tries not to. Stevie knows who she is better than anyone else and that has to matter.
Even so, she knows other people believe it, so Munson’s response is… jarring. Boys don’t do that. His words register and her nose wrinkles just a little.
“Why would I get you beat up?” Stevie pauses, perplexed, peering up at him in the dark, trying to parse out the unfamiliar features in the scant light that leaks through the gap between door and frame. “Are you saying you don’t want to kiss me?” Her perfectly shaped brows lift in surprise and her expression is clear disbelief.
Eddie blinks, she can tell that much, gives her a long stare.
“That’s what you got from that? You are really full of it, Jesus .” His tone is all laughing derision, unbothered by her indignation.
“Full of it?” Stevie laughs, a little furious irritation swelling up in her throat. It makes her itch to- to something . In her mind, her mom’s voice is crisp and derisive: Young ladies do not use violence to make a point, Stephanie. We use our words. Perhaps her mom was just resentful she’d never had the courage to slap her husband, even after some of the bullshit he’d pulled, after the secretaries and call girls he’d been caught with over and over. She thinks that her parents are under the blissfully stupid impression that she doesn’t know about the cheating. Stevie is not an idiot, or blind or deaf, thanks very much.
“Don’t be a pussy Munson. Are you scared? Is it actually your first kiss?” She can’t help the mean edge, the bitterness that creeps in, her voice taking on a mocking croon, at once sweet and unkind. “I won’t bite, just for you.”
“Would it make you feel special if it was?” Eddie sneers, prickling at her saccharine contempt, fingers busy picking at the frayed edge of his jacket. Stevie wants to slap his hands away from his own arms. “Hate to disappoint but no, it’s not. Tragic for you, I know.”
Eddie kicks off the wall to stand a little straighter, uncurls from the slouched way he’d been standing. He’s a lot taller than her than she realized, his frame suddenly making her feel boxed in.
“If you want me to kiss you, I will. I was trying to be fucking nice about it, give you an out or something-”
“I’m not backing down. I do what I say I’m going to do.” Stevie reaches for him, annoyance surging within her, fist curling in the collar of his tee to tug him down as she rises up on her toes. It brings them nose to nose, sharing breath. “So why don’t we get on with it.” She doesn’t know what drives her to do it, what stupid primal decision it is that makes her respond with fanged irritation - but she bites him, sinks her sharp white teeth into the softness of his lower lip. It’s- maybe she shouldn’t have? But she does. Up close, he smells of cigarettes and cheap soap and fading cologne and she’s not even all that offended by any of it.
The noise Eddie makes in response is surprised and indignant.
“You’re an ass .” Eddie hisses it against her mouth before he kisses her, hard and much less polite than most boys are when they finally work up to it. She’s not shocked at his response, instead vindictively pleased at the way he sounds when she presses her teeth into his bottom lip again. Stevie doesn’t even mind how hard he kisses her, her arms looping up around his neck to steady herself, sparkling nails biting into his shoulders in a way they don’t need to. It feels right to be a little mean about it, a bit of retribution for all his snideness, for his half-rejection.
God, she might have to take back the jokes, Munson kisses well. Surprisingly well- Stevie doesn’t know who the hell someone like Eddie’s been kissing, but he’s done it enough to know what to do, how to move against her. It has her pressing closer even as she hauls him in. She doesn’t intend to be quite so obvious about it, but finds she makes a faint sound of satisfaction at his efforts, muffled and soft against his hard mouth on hers. The biting kisses slow a little and she parts her lips curiously to brush her tongue to his lower lip, arches her body forward to press against him, wondering if he’ll do more than keep those big steady hands on her waist.
The thing is, Munson is apparently not expecting her to move closer, trying to adjust his footing but it’s too clumsy. Someone’s fallen jacket trips him up and he half stumbles until his back hits the wall. It presses Stevie up against him, chest to chest. His hands on her grip a little tighter but they don’t move, seemingly settled on her waist as he mimics the little flick of tongue, her parting lips.
Stevie can’t help the huffing breathless little laugh, tongue sliding against his between her smiles.
“Too scared to kiss me first and too scared to touch me? It’s not like you’ll get another chance,” she taunts him between their lips. “Why don’t you?”
Why doesn’t he. Eddie doesn’t know if he’s ever heard such a loaded question asked with such an air of complete and utter ignorance- like Stevie lives entirely above all the consequences that could spill out of this mess. And she does, doesn’t she? Asking if he’s scared of her, like she’s the hangup.
It’s nothing to do with wanting to kiss her, to touch her. Eddie’s not a saint, Jesus. He’s not prolific, has sort of limited experience, but he’s got some and enough imagination to spare, and Stevie is indisputably gorgeous even if her personality makes him grit his teeth. It’s the way Hagan’s going to try to cave his face in for daring to go along with this, the way the basketball team would be gleefully delighted by an excuse to forcibly remind him on exactly which rung of the social ladder he belongs - the one where Stevie Harrington is absolutely out of his grasp.
So it’s not touching a girl he’s worried about. Not even when it’s a pretty girl. Not even when it’s Stevie of all the fucking pretty girls for it to be. What he’s worried about is where the line is, of how to keep his balance on the knife’s edge of what she’s expecting of him and what’s going to get him hunted down like a dog come Monday.
Eddie scoffs, the breath huffed out against her lips as Stevie laughs quietly between them.
“You seem to be under the impression that I’m dying to sleep with you, Harrington, which is just a little bit delusional considering I can’t think of a single time you’ve ever been nice to me.”
“Oh babe, everybody wants to fuck me, pretending you don’t doesn’t make it any less true.”
“See? Completely full of it.”
She grabs his wrist and redirects his hand down to her thigh, pushing up under the hem of her short skirt.
“Here, since you’re gonna be a pussy about it.”
Annoyance seeps from Eddie’s shadowed features even as she guides his hand up under her skirt, even as he spreads his fingers out to get a good squeeze of her thigh. He’s weak for the fucking skirts, sue him. Stevie is fucking demanding in the way she directs his hands, and he’s not entirely sure if his stomach is flipping over with delight or fear. Because he wants this- wants to touch her, kiss her, whatever they can get away with under the shield of the closed door because when else is he ever going to get the chance? But it can’t be real , right? It’s a joke, or if it’s not now, it will be later. He’ll become something for Harrington and the rest of her brainless court to laugh about when she regrets having allowed this stupid game in the first place. The knowledge swims in the back of his mind, lurks like a shark in the water underneath his desire and stills his hand against her skin.
But she keeps pushing. Goading him. Calls him a pussy for giving her an out, an out that she’d be crazy not to take.
“M’not a pussy, Jesus Christ. Keep trying to be polite but maybe you don’t want that, huh?” Considering it a moment more, throwing caution to the wind in a fit of pique, he hikes her leg up against his hip since she’s given him such a convenient grip. He hears her short inhale, feels the rise and fall of her chest in the dark.
“What gave you the impression Seven Minutes was about being polite?” Stevie bites his lip again, her body pressing closer as he adjusts her thigh against him. The thought enters his head that she’s so close that if she wanted, she could grind onto his thigh - he’s not sure he’d know what to do if she did. She leans up a little, voice breathy and amused, “What gave you the impression I was polite?”
“What do you want me to say? Sorry for not being raised like a goddamn animal?” Eddie snipes before he’s leaning in again, swiping his tongue across her lip and then backing up before she can press closer.
Taking the risk to push a little further - might as well, he’s probably already more than fucked - he slides his hand around the back of her leg and rucks the ruffled layers of her skirt up more. Grabbing Stevie’s ass feels akin to being handed a clean sheet of white paper, inviting him to leave fingerprints all over it. Not in the way that it’s ruined, but in the way that he definitely should not be putting his hands there and incriminating himself. He feels the texture of lace and satin under grasping fingers, the soft give of her skin, pulling her flush against him and he’s got to distract himself with words before this gets out of hand because it feels good enough that it nearly makes him stop being so careful.
“Gonna grind on my leg, Stevie?” He drags her name out like a song on his tongue, too sickly-sweet to be anything other than teasing. “That’d be a story, huh.”
Stevie’s breath hitches sweetly at the pressure and her lashes flutter, giving Eddie a little rush of satisfaction that maybe, just maybe, he can rattle her too. That he’s not the only one catching his balance, stumbling in the dark. The press of his hand, tight and firm over lace and silk, does encourage her to grind just once, a delicious little pressure that makes his head swim. Did she really just…?
“Bolder now huh?” Her voice is far too breathy to hold the same bite as earlier, though it's clear she’s trying.
“I like to leave people satisfied. Even if they’re stuck up.” Eddie grumbles against her cheek, his own breath stuttering as her hand drops down, delicate fingers curling over him to grope between his legs.
Fuck, talk about bold.
He knows he’s not there yet, a stirring of heat in his belly and sinking lower, firm under her smaller hand on him. He’d have to be dead not to be getting there with her pressed close, touching him, grinding on him for fuck’s sake, he’s not made of stone, but right now he’s grateful that he has enough experience not to be pitching a pathetically eager tent. He’s pretty sure what Stevie’s managed to get going can still be hidden with a sly adjustment of his shirt once they’re done. Which is good, great even, because he’s sure they’ve used up at least five minutes by now and walking out with a hard-on in front of Hagan and his pack of feral hyenas is the last thing he needs.
Not that he’s ashamed of his dick or anything, but they don’t need to see it.
He rocks his leg under her, lips curling in a wicked smile as he feels her nails bite harder into his skin. “Felt that, sweetheart. Couldn’t help yourself?”
“It’ll do,” Stevie concedes, eyes shuttered and mouth amused as she tilts and drags her hips again. Her palm over him squeezes, just shy of rough, half a threat in its own right. Eddie fights back a noise, because he doesn’t want to give her the satisfaction. “But you can’t hide this either, Munson. I could grind on anyone’s thigh, but this is all for me, no matter what you pretend.” She smirks, then pulls back from him, wetting her lips and smoothing down her skirt.
Eddie only breathes when she steps back to fix her clothes, but he doesn’t let her get too far. Before the moment passes, he’s leaning in to grab her chin, to kiss her once in a way that might have be sweet if it wasn’t for the pointed sarcasm in the way he presses his lips to hers.
“You could grind on anyone, sure, but I’m the one that made you want to.” It’s hard to make out much in the dark, but her eyes snap to his and her lips part, no doubt for some scathing comment in return. Her almost mumbled little shut up, somehow seems lackluster, less of a denial than Eddie expected.
Muffled through the solid closet door, Carol’s screeching about the time is regrettably audible, cutting between the two of them with a sobering and frankly chilling reminder of reality. Eddie fixes his jeans and his shirt to hide his half-hard dick, no pretending as to what he’s doing. It’ll go away, especially if he keeps drinking. It doesn’t concern him as he motions to the door, knows it’s only likely to be an issue if Stevie chooses to bring attention to it, and he doesn’t think she will. It’s hard to say what makes him sure of that, maybe it’s a tiny grain of him that wants to believe people are better than they pretend, but he hopes it anyway.
“You first, princess.”
Stevie delves into her bra to find a chapstick which she reapplies, fluffing her hair a little and finger-combing it into place. Eddie can’t help the way his eyes snap to the movement, and he knows he’s been caught when she smirks at him a little, opening the door and striding confidently towards her seat.
He follows after her, hands in his pockets, belatedly wishing he’d been enough of an asshole to give her a hickey. Somewhere fucking visible, too- so that people would ask. So that they would know because they all saw him walk into the stupid closet right behind her. He doesn’t strut out into the living room like she does but he’s confident in his own way, unbothered, not giving much attention to everyone’s nervous glances and tightly held breath.
They all wait like Hawkins is about to be hit by a nuke, for fucks sake.
Eddie plops back down into his seat on the floor and lights a cigarette, not caring about the sneer he gets from the baseball player next to him. For good measure, he makes sure to exhale right into his space, make him cough even though it gets him a swift elbow to the ribs.
This time it’s Carol who breaks the nervous thrumming silence with an expectant ‘Well?’
“He’s been kissed now,” Stevie declares, primly crossing her legs.
Eddie’s gaze slides across the room, and he knows he shouldn’t. He really fucking shouldn’t. Carol Perkins. Tommy’s girlfriend, even though everyone knows he’s been mooning after Stevie since middle school. But maybe it’s the ghost of Stevie’s hands on him that makes him bold again.
“Curious? You want a go next? I’ll be nice, won’t even make you spin for it, Perkins.”
Tommy is absolutely going to bust his lip later but it’s worth it to make Carol sputter and shut up for ten blissful seconds. Stevie’s laugh breaks everyone else’s silence, a few people joining in with her once they’ve been given silent permission to. Eddie meets her gaze and sees the plain delight on her face, the way her smug amusement is for a moment in tune with his. He’s not sure if she finds him amusing, per se, or if she’s just happy to see Carol cut down in front of everyone. Either way, Eddie tallies it as a point scored in a game he doesn’t quite know the rules of.
“Carol. You spin next.” Stevie decrees, no room for argument, affecting a boredom that doesn’t mesh with the alertness of her gaze, the way she’s strung up so tight and poised. And that’s weird, because that’s not how the game works. It’s Eddie’s spin, he knows that, knows that’s how it’s always been played- and Carol seems equally as baffled as she reaches across to claim the bottle.
Carol’s spin does not land on him, as morbidly funny as that might have been, which is good for several reasons. Chief among them is that it means he stays in the circle and fades into the background, smoking idly and tracing his eyes up Stevie’s legs when no one is paying attention.
Goddamn short skirts. Fuck.