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metalhoops · 8 months

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O how he loves you, darling boy. Oh how, like always, he invents the monsters underneath the bed to get you to sleep next to him, chest to chest or chest to back, the covers drawn around you in an act of faith against the night. - Richard Siken

“There’s something outside my window.”

Eddie stood in the doorway, shoulders slump and slack from lack of sleep. Steve knew this routine. They’d fallen into it unexpectedly. After Eddie got out of the hospital, he’d come to stay with Steve until they could clear his name.

They’d hunkered down in his childhood home, the wooden walls of which Steve knew inspired wild imaginings. The shadows cast from the trees on the pool mixed with the silver moonlight and danced like the hair of a dead girl on the surface of the water. They were Steve’s demons. Eddie had brought his own to the Harrington’s house of horrors.

Steve knew paranoia. They were old partners. Paranoia crept into your bed in the dead of night, apologised for waking you, and kept you guessing with its cold feet and fitful tossing.

“Let me take a look,” Steve uttered, swinging his feet over the edge of the bed. They dangled inches from the floor but in the blackness, they might as well be hanging over the edge of a precipice.

He strode barefoot into the hallway, feeling the chill of death in the early April air. In the daylight, the hallway was metres. In the dead of night, it was miles. Eddie trailed after him, acting as a wave in the wake of a boat. In the night, anything could look like the black water of Lover’s Lake. Eddie’s breath on the nape of his neck was all Steve needed to remind himself he wasn’t drowning.

He surveyed Eddie’s room, switching on the lights, opening the windows, and pacing in strange circles as though mapping sigils in the floor. He checked the closet and behind the door, before he crawled under the bed and felt Eddie slide in beside him. The two were crushed together in the small space, staring at mattress slates.

There was an intimacy in the confined darkness and a strange, childlike comfort in hiding away from some unknown yet likely imaginary force. Steve felt the rise and fall of Eddie’s shoulders, signalling the slowing of his breath. There was nothing in the darkness, not yet, not anymore.

“Can you stay here tonight?” Eddie asked.

It wasn’t the first time he or Steve had posed the question but usually, there was more beating around the bush. They’d both grown tired of formalities. Steve had known the second Eddie showed up at his door that they’d end the night in the same bed. He liked it, more than he cared to admit, more than he should. Like many things in his life, Steve tried not to overthink it.

“Yeah, long as we’re sleeping on the bed, not under it.”

“I don’t know, man. You seen the view? That dust bunny? A must-see. That dead spider—.”

“The what?” Steve cursed, shifting closer to Eddie. He felt something crawl over his exposed ankles and kicked out against the blackness.

“Cool it, karate kid, that was a joke,” Eddie cackled as Steve continued to mutter profanities under his breath as he crawled from under the bed.

Eddie followed Steve’s awkward little army crawl, tugging at the boy’s ankle and dragging him backwards so he could take the lead.

“Breaker, breaker this is Eddie the Banished calling for Top Gun King, do you read me,” Eddie breathed into the palm of his hand. Reenacting some unseen scenario Steve couldn’t quite follow.

For a moment the boy wondered what his life would’ve been like, in another world where he and Eddie had grown up together, instead of himself and Tommy. He wondered if there would’ve been more years of strange yet striking whimsey, that Tommy and by default Steve, had grown out of at a startlingly young age.

Eddie feigned a strange and static crackle as he clambered into bed and crawled beneath the covers. Steve followed, sliding in beside Eddie. The boy nudged his side as though waiting for something.

“Rodger?” Steve attempted lamely.

He wished he knew how Eddie mustered up the sudden lightness. He wanted to be a part of the world the boy escaped to in the dead of night when all Steve was left with were monsters and memories.

“I’m sorry. I’m not good at this,” He apologised seeing Eddie’s wild eyes trained on him.

Whenever they were together, Steve couldn’t help but feel like Eddie was asking something of him without saying it. Steve wanted nothing more than to give it to him. If only he could work out what it was.

“It’s not hard once you’ve done it a few times. You’ve just gotta learn the magic of ‘yes, and.’ Let your hair down a little bit, boy wonder.”

“I hate to break it to you, but my hair is as down as it gets... Since, you know...” Steve gestured vaguely at himself.

Eddie’s eyes lingered on the hollow of his collarbones and the hint of chest hair, snaking like vines beneath his low-cut shirt. Steve noticed. He was good at noticing things. In the same way he knew Vicki liked women, he knew Eddie liked men. He was startlingly good at noticing that kind of thing.

“Don’t wear Farrah Fawcett hairspray to bed? Colour me surprised,” Eddie spoke reaching out as though to touch Steve’s hair, before letting his hand fall in the space between them, thinking better of it.

That was the thing between them. They could sleep together but they couldn’t touch each other in the way they wanted. That would be admitting to something Steve wasn’t ready to commit to. It was his own personal secret, not from Eddie but from himself. Eddie was just a bystander bearing witness to the civil war of Steve’s heart and his better judgment.

“Say your goodbyes to Henderson because next time I see him he’s dead,” Steve whispered.

Eddie shifted, settling down for sleep as they’d done other nights. They never talked for long. If they talked it would be an admission that the two of them sleeping together was as much for pleasure as it was for necessity. Steve lay beside Eddie feeling as though his body were a room he was outside of.

He tried to push the surge of emotions down, as he had all other nights. He felt as though he were holding his head underwater.

The past and the present tangled like fingers through unkempt hair. Unrelated guilts intertwined inextricably. Steve felt like he was drowning, laying beside the body of a boy he wanted to cling to like a life vest, while his eyes lay locked on the black shadow beyond the half-shut curtains. The swimming pool, where a girl had been dragged deep into the blackness. Steve was back at Lover’s Lake. He was in love and he was drowning.

“Steve, are you okay?” Eddie was on his side, looking at Steve’s profile.

His heart had circumnavigated his chest and worked its way up into his mouth, making it hard to breathe, hijacking his ears with the erratic beat.

He tried to use Eddie’s voice to centre himself, to detangle the threads of history from histrionics, so all that would remain was himself and a boy in a bed with hair like history repeating. Steve had hands that wanted to undo time.

He remembered years before when Nancy had been the one that’d made his heartbeat throb like an infected wound. He knew logically, the emotions were the same. He’d sunk into Nancy’s body as one wades into deep water. He wondered what it’d be like to do the same to Eddie. Moreover, what it’d be like to be the water. To be a geyser by the ocean both filling and full.

He couldn’t breathe.

“I think I’m dying,” Steve whispered, finding his voice fractured by the thrum of his heart. Eddie’s face shifted to a look of understanding.

Eddie’s hand was on his cheek, turning Steve to face him.

“Look at me. You’re not dying,’ Eddie’s voice was stern and self-assured.

Steve wanted to believe him. He couldn’t. Eddie’s fingers drew circles in his flesh.

“Can I show you something?” Eddie asked.

Steve’s throat was clogged shut, still holding his haemorrhaging heart. He nodded.

“You’ve got something behind your ear,” Eddie muttered, pulling his hand back from Steve’s face to reveal his guitar pick, held on a necklace string. A magic trick.

It shook something loose, deep inside him. He doubled over, buried his face in Eddie’s shoulder and laughed. He took gasping inhales of Eddie’s skin, breathing in cigarette ash and musky cologne.

“That was so lame,” Steve gasped when he found his voice.

“You loved it,” Eddie argued.

“I loved it and it was lame,” he confirmed shaking his head.

A hush fell over the boys. Not the quiet of sleep, but the stillness of contemplation.

“You want to tell me what that was all about?” Eddie spoke, leaving it for Steve to pick up or push away.

What was he supposed to say? ‘I want to kiss you and it scares me shitless.’

“I thought I saw something,” he replied lamely.

Eddie’s brows furrowed. They both knew nothing was out there but when you’d been through what they had, some days logic wasn’t enough. It was a lie almost big enough to cover the scope of the truth.

Eddie shifted, tucking his knee between Steve’s legs, pulling them together so the two were chest to chest, breath mingling.

“We’re fine,” Eddie said with conviction as though speaking the words could somehow make them true.

They were back to the same old routine.

The two boys lay crushed close together, leaving space in the sheets for all the things unspoken between them, all the vampiric night horrors that’d burn up come daylight.

What would remain of the feelings come morning, Steve didn’t know but with his eyelids heavy and Eddie’s hand feather-light on his hip he stopped struggling against the tide of weary want and worry. He closed his eyes, leaned into Eddie’s body and let the feelings crash over his head, a wilful sort of drowning.

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